Making A Menu

April 20, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / 1 Comment

When you work in a restaurant with enough backing and fancy enough clientele (or minimal backing and working-class clientele, but you’re the chef-owner with a shtick), menu flips make the tedious bits of the job worth it. After making the same dishes over and over again for months, sometimes beyond the season it even makes sense to keep selling them, doing a little spring cleaning on the menu feels positively invigorating.

This years dessert menu is already selling well, but the core theme of the selection isn’t just “seasonality”. Pick a menu from any restaurant- from the neighborhood diner to the latest Michelin-starred hotspot- and what goes into the menu is just as much about convenience, defensibility, economics, and business sense as any high-minded philosophy about sustainability, slow food, or “decolonizing the diet.” That’s because we don’t just sell food- we sell a night out. We sell a fantasy. We sell pleasure– so we make sure there’s something we can sell to as many people as possible.

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The Big Sick

January 26, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

When it comes to human nature and the various manifestations of it, I have the same opinion that I do about aliens- namely, “It’s a big world/universe and anything’s possible.” My cordial introductions to abnormal psychology, through my own experience and in my college years, bear this out well. The idea that anyone could enjoy being sick makes a lot more sense once it’s dressed up in words like “Munchausen syndrome,””factitious disorder,” or “Ferris Beuller’s Day Off.”

Yes, some people can enjoy being sick- but I am avowedly not one of them.

I’m at my desk with some jazz playing, a candle burning, my slippers on, and I’m feeling just about human again at (hopefully) the tail end of the worst flu I’ve had in my life. This is the first time in five days that I’ve felt the capacity to work on or do anything besides sleep, cough up green gunk, hobble around and chug liquids. The coaster on my right which would normally have a nice beer or a little whiskey on it is currently occupied by a large, sea-foam green bottle of Gatorade. Hydrating has been the priority for the last few days, and when I’m finally well enough to rejoin the world, I think I’ll be ready to throw every sports drink bottle I see into the sun.

What is it about being sick I hate so much? More than just the actual symptoms- hacking up gunk, every hole in my body leaking assorted fluids, and the various aches and pains aren’t something I think even the most ardent sympathy seeker really enjoys. It’s the loss of focus, the loss of energy, and arguably the loss of agency for me that makes being sick so miserable. The inescapable feeling of being locked in your own body, and that body being out of order.

What do you want to do? What do you feel like doing? Doesn’t matter- you aren’t calling the shots. “Sorry boss, body’s out.”

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Writer Unplugged, Part 2: Living in Micro

January 14, 2025January 14, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“The harvest is passed, the summer is finished, yet we are not saved.”
– Jeremiah 8:20

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right/ here I am Stuck in the Middle with You.”
– Stealer’s Wheel

Surprising no one, when you make the call to leave extraneous noise behind, you are left with a lot of time alone with your thoughts. You get to piece together how and what you feel in the absence of others. You redefine who you are and who you want to be.

That redefinition happens in my rocking chair over some whiskey and a bit of knitting and a horror movie, in the car to or from work, or in my gym during cardio. More than meditation, those become my time for me. Without every randos bathroom thoughts on human rights and global macroeconomics corkscrewing their way into my brain, I come back to “What’s important to me,” “How do I feel about it,” and “What are my limits and boundaries of support for such things.”

I am, after all, a leftist Jew. If it isn’t folks in red hats hopped up on Great Replacement Theory that think making trouble for me and Emily will “make America great again,” it’s some mouthy white kids in keffiyehs who think pushing in my face will help “free Palestine.”

In about a week, though, 99% of the United States will wind up doing whatever comes next on Extra Hard Mode. Meditations and ruminations won’t be worth much. What’ll be worth more is actions on the micro-scale.

A frame of Treebeard the Ent from the movie “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” with the caption “I am on nobody’s side, because nobody is on my side.” — I invite you to ask questions of me personally before giving lectures and screeds in messages or the comments section. This is my neck of the woods, and I have a zero-tolerance policy for assholery.

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Writer Unplugged

January 6, 2025 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Several things can be true at once. In my case, all of the following are 100% accurate:
1. I “chose” to be a writer.
2. I gained some weight in the last few years that I’m working on losing.
3. I practice meditation daily.
and 4. I always have to be doing something.

Besides my baking and wannabe-writing careers, I’m a guy with a lot of little crafts and hobbies on the side. It’s always good to be multifaceted, and the majority of my hobbies veer toward the cozier parts of life. I homebrew, I knit, I play guitar and harmonica (not in any bands, and not especially well- just good enough to please myself and some friends,) I read and enjoy good whiskey.

Over the last year and change, however, you would be forgiven for thinking one of them was “Losing My Shit on the Internet for Hours of the Day.” In my end-of-the-year post, I talked about how 2024 was about “coming back to myself” and relearning who I am. Part of that process is also deciding who I am not, and what I don’t want to be. When you love something enough to make it an important part of your life, you need to treat it like it’s important– and get rid of the stuff you don’t want to be important.

I’m done with having social media be so important to me.

“I sit beside the fire and think
of all that I have seen
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;

Of yellow leaves and gossamer
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.

I sit beside the fire and think
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see.

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

I sit beside the fire and think
of people long ago
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.

But all the while I sit and think
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.“
– Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

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It’s Okay To Not Know

October 28, 2024 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

The rain is coming down in fits and starts outside. I’ve had to break out my Irish sweater and cloak for the first time this year, but the sky pivots between sunshine and downpour. As it is, I’ve settled for the moment with shedding my cloak, rolling up the sleeves of the sweater, and watching the weather through the window of Holmans. The young bartender calls me “hun” as she fixes up a martini (dirty, extra dry, Beefeater Gin because I’m not trying to be spendy. She tips some extra “Dirty Sue” in there, but I’m alright with it.)

Back to settling in. Back to winding down. Back to being inside, taking stock, and taking a breath.

How’d we manage the summer? How’d we manage the year? How’s it all going? What’s different? What needs to be different?

Sitting where I am, when I am, the confluence of an election in the US, the change of the seasons, the change of weather, and the (Jewish) first anniversary of October 7th isn’t lost on me.