Good evening, friends and neighbors.
The last time I wrote a “Snapshots,” I was working the morning bake shift. Since then, I’ve taken over the completely opposite end of the day- evening pastry prep.
I’ve gone from managing the oven and getting the bakery off to a good start each day to watching it slowly empty out, till I shut everything down as the last man left.
If you’re wondering what a bakery looks like as the day dies down, here we go.
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not comfortable using the term “chef” for myself even as a joke, and that I tend to correct others when they address me by it.
It’s not because of modesty or humility- false or otherwise. It’s because, by my own criteria, I have not earned that title.
Roughly every couple of weeks, someone on an online cooking group will pipe up with:
“What makes a chef a CHEF?”
or some other navel-gazing, masturbatory variant- and the responses tend to vary from the crude to the judgemental/equally navel-gazy, to my personal reaction:
“Oh for f***’s sake, here we go…”
You see, the answer is in the name. “Chef” literally means “chief.” “Boss.” “Head of Operations.”
It means “LEADER.”
How you got about leading is the real discussion that should be going on, rather than faffing about over what’s stitched on your jacket.
Good evening, friends and neighbors.
It’s been a while since I was in the “park blocks” of SE Portland. The stretch of greenery in the Culture District is home to a number of museums and venues before it terminates at Portland State University (and, on Saturdays, the PSU Farmers Market.)
Wednesday evening, I was beating feet up the sidewalk, past fresh-air takers and statues in the park. Like a Saturday morning, I was making my way toward the food… a display of Oregon’s artisans, and the produce of this foodie wonderland.
Unlike those Saturday mornings though, I’m not dashing toward the market. I’m making my way toward a museum… and I’m eating to feed others.
Good afternoon, friends and neighbors.
I am a cook. More specifically, I am a baker- or pastry cook, as one of my previous job titles went.
I am also, by virtue of being born in the late 80s, a member of that currently-most-accursed of demographics… a millennial.
And things are getting real out here, folks.
“… Millennial!”
Good morning, friends and neighbors.
Since the first time I heard it in the retrospectively-awful-yet-beloved Rankin-Bass animation of The Hobbit, this has been one of my favorite quotes in all of literature.
As Thorin, the Dwarven King, lies dying of wounds he sustained in a battle started in part by his own greed and bitterness, he speaks his last words to Bilbo Baggins are:
“Child of the Kindly West… if more of us valued your ways- food and cheer and song above hoarded gold- it would be a merrier world. Sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell.”
Whenever things get a bit too dark and heavy in this world, I try to remember that, and I try to do whatever I can to hold back the darkness a little longer.
I write some nice stories. I bake some pastries, and make people smile… and I thank Heaven that there are people in this world with the means and desire to do more than that.
Today is about them.
The Black Hat Baker 