Spring Flurries

While this may sounds like a weather report, it is not, and Chicago often has snow in Spring. What I am referring to is the storm of change and work tied into our programming during the Spring sessions. The last month or more has been fantastically busy and rewarding. My last session ended near the end of May and due to all the extra work needed, it became difficult to make all of the appointments.

Scholarship competitions, fundraisers, meetings, professional development, interviews for Summer term, planning, syllabus modification, more meetings, doctor appointments, medical issues, orchestra and band concerts, field trips, and the closing of my own kids schooling for the year. Phew.

Now things can slow down a bit and leave me to do some catching up. The first thing on my list was to catch up on some missed sleep. Recharging is essential. These last weeks proved to be telling me that I am a bit more fragile than I'd like to admit.

Some hard work comes with the satisfaction of knowing that you didn't let it beat you in the end. Some hard work comes with little visible evidence of success. And some hard work doesn't pay off right away, they are the long-term gains that manifest over lots of years. I have been asked if I thought that teaching culinary at this level was harder than working in the industry, quick and without hesitation, my answer was yes.

There isn't a single parent that hasn't questioned their skill based upon the child's advancement or success despite the fact that a lot of things that happen along a child's life, especially in teenage years that may have nothing to do with parental input. Years and years later, most of the successful adults, will say that their parental influence was positive and necessary, even when the adult may have dropped out of school or had a teenage pregnancy, or any other negative impact on life that we can all agree makes life much harder to be successful.

I count it all profitable to gain even the smallest shift in a students opinion, taste, or concept of the world at large. I dance when a kid goes from "that's nasty" to "wow, I like that".  The work can take a long time, can be hard to do, requires that I trust my kids in class and that they trust me. I have to position myself somewhere between a parental role, a type of friendship, a teacher, and a wise elder in order to do what I do successfully. This work is also about how the student sees themselves and their future.

I have always began each term with asking the kids to write about their life goals. Those kids who have been in my class in multiple times, have had the answers on the page turn from "I don't know" to "I'd like to become _____". I have heard, and witnessed, kids begin to take small steps to change what they eat, how they project themselves, how they see themselves, how they expect certain reactions from me and how we interact. To have a student start off with no idea who they want to be and have no care about what they eat, change towards a new image and shoot for much higher goals, it is all worth the effort.

I have set a personal goal with this blog and related podcast, having a regular scheduled time table, so when I have to miss days, I get a bit hard on myself, but I am working on letting go of negative self-talk.

Spring is all about new growth and return of better weather, a renewal. Rebirth. Imagine, as we all post pictures about graduations, proms, and Spring weddings, that we are all just Spring flowers nestled under the cold blankets of winter, just aching for Spring rains to melt off our heaviness and allow us to bloom.

Mother's Day

Every Spring we venture to celebrate our annual day to honor mom. This tradition has been dated back to the Roman eras, in one form or another. However, the American establishment of Mother's Day was created in the 1900's. Woodrow Wilson signed a measure to make Mother's Day a national holiday in 1914.

This traditional day of celebration of all the things our mother's strive so hard to provide their children quickly became commercialized. Businesses such as floral and candy confectioners saw a big boom even before the day was ratified as a holiday. A simple idea of thanks for the unsung role of mothering was tainted by profit.

The commercialization of the holiday eventually had the creator, Ana Jarvis, the advocate of the holiday renouncing it entirely before she died in 1948. Jarvis even lobbied for it to be removed for the American calendar. I know how she felt.

Commercialization of everything is the American agenda. You see it all the time, even if you are not aware of it. Christmas decorations go up each year before Thanksgiving dinner is served and right after a feast to celebrate our thankfulness, millions of Americans clobber each other to buy more stuff to take home during the Black Friday sales.

Holidays break up the dreary daily struggle. They add richness and can foster better relations with family and friends. Cheer up moms, your kids will be burning and torturing food to serve you breakfast in bed very soon. Cherish the macaroni art and the lanyard bracelets. You deserve them and much more. Your stretch marks, imperfect abs, along with the whole host of sacrifices of sleep, money, time, and headache make you the beautiful mom that you are everyday.

Happy Mother's Day Beautiful Ladies. The whole world owes you a debt that can never be repaid.

http://www.history.com/topics/holidays/mothers-day

45 and counting...

It took me 45 years of life, good and bad, great and sad, to get to this place. A destination, a fate, unseen and unknown. I had just a glimpse  that I wanted to teach, but not be a teacher in the traditional sense. I worked on myself and my skills, and now my days are dedicated to sharing what I know with the next generation.

I don't just want to take them down culinary road but also expand their thinking, increase their knowledge of themselves, improvements even more important than just being able to feed themselves. Understanding cooking is learning about self. How, what, when, what you like, what you don't, what you can, and what you can't do successfully.

Everyone needs a looking glass, a mirror, somewhere that they can clearly see their own reflection. We need to be able to see several views of oneself, how we think we look to others, how others see us, and lastly we need to see our true reflection, good, bad, or otherwise. Many activities that humans do regularly can be that mirror. Culinary is mine. It shows me my strengths and demands me to be patient, a hard issue for me most of the time. My creations often show me my moods, as they can fail when I am not at my best, and can be light and extraordinary when I am in a good space mentally.

No one is perfect, we all make mistakes, fail at attempts, and need to start over from time to time. When you find the place where you belong, your whole world can reflect your efforts and heart. Find your place. Find your talent. Find your heart.

Culinary and Chemistry

As I sit in the school library, it becomes painfully obvious that cooking and chemistry is one and the same.  Cooking is more applied science than others courses of study, add in a bit of alchemy and you are square in the middle of chef life.

 

The same skills of formulations, testing, observation, and trail and error, ever present in the kitchens all over the universe.  Even in cases where the chef or cook is cooking from a recipe, all of the steps apply, as good cooks never rely on an untested source when feeding their audience.  Some of us can review a written recipe and spot of it is accurate or not. Others must try it to discover the faults or the accuracy. In either case, mistakes can teach you more than your triumphs in the kitchen.   

The ability to test, modify, mix and remix, ingredients and turn the simple into the worthiest of dishes, let alone into art, is what chefs strive to achieve. Science and art culminate into a type of jazz, painting, sculpture, and architecture. The best of us climb to towering heights and can earn a type of immortality that gives lasting effects on the culinary world. Julia Child will always be with us through her teachings, books, and television broadcasts. The ladders she built will be scaled for generations to come.

We whisk up acids and bases, apply heat or cold, emulsify, extract, concentrate, dilute, expand, divide, and blend, all to achieve the awe inspiring creations. We live for the oohs and awwws that are created by our work. We lose sleep, forgo stopping to tend to our own needs, work odd hours, long hours, and miss out on the simple things, like events we are invited to attend, and even daylight. We arrive in the dark hours of the night and leave again after the sun has gone for the day. We talk more with our co-workers then our families and friends, some times. We can share our story with our loved ones but often they can't really understand who and what we have endured during our work. 

Sometimes I have encountered people who either don't understand what it is we do, or they act as if our work isn't important or not a profession like their's. The amounts of learning and training needed to work at my level can be greater than many other profession and less than others. It is often hard to adequately describe what we do, and how we do it, as many who cook think that they can do my job, or that it can't be that hard, or couldn't possibly take the amount of  hours that it really does. Sometimes my commitment to my work can require me to miss some events in my own children's life for the sake of other celebrations or needs. I don't like that aspect but my food magic show is what puts a roof over their heads.

Mixing magic with nutrition, art with taste, building constructs and designs for the eye, enticements for the nose, and specialties of taste can be very demanding. I love my work and I love teaching kids to think about and improve their options within the kitchen, that can improve their lives and the lives of others around them. 

Irish Food Traditions

It may come as a surprise to you that St. Patrick's day is not well celebrated in Ireland. This celebration and traditions are almost all American. The same can be said about many of the items on a Chinese restaurant's menu. You see, once the wave of immigrants disembarked upon our shores, those that were separated from their origin birthplace wanted a way to remember their traditions and honor their past.

Here in Chicago, the celebrations are very large, as we have a sizable population that have some Irish ancestors, and many more who don't but enjoy the ribaldry of the day. We have at least three very large parades to mark the event and tons of corned beef and cabbage with Irish soda bread consumed the whole week long. Tomorrow is the actual St. Pats day, but since it is in the middle of the week, last weekend was the parade day. The North-side, South-side, and Downtown  parades kicked off filled with floats, dancers, beauty queens, bag pipes, kilts, and lots of green beer. We dye the Chicago River green each year, pouring the dye from the backside of a Chicago Police boat.

Many of the early immigrants from Ireland found their way to Chicago and many of the men took up city jobs such as into service in the police and fire departments. In fact, the larger police units that are used to transport detainees were called 'Patty Wagons' due to have such large numbers of Irish policemen, "patty" being a derogatory slang for Irish men.

I have always liked the way this city celebrates this holiday, and having Irish ancestors doesn't hurt my love affair with the day. Most of the city dwellers that go out and celebrate the day with drunken bar crawls, lots of food, and corny green attire, are not in fact Irish at all, but Chicago always shows up to a party ready to go.

A good part of this holiday celebration is the fact that it happens in early Spring, often the parade is a cold and wet affair, so the drinking is often a tad too much. But when we have a bright sunny day, as it is today, the city is itching to get outdoors for any reason, and having a day where excessive drinking is expected makes it all the better.

Slán go fóill!

Elemental Fire

The campfire, the barbecue, the fireplace, the hearth, a tandoori oven, the wood burning stove, the gas light, all of which use the first gift from the gods, fire. The heaven rocked when the news got back that man knew fire. The chef, the pit master, the smokehouse, the luau, are all fire.

There is nothing more primal than fire. A gift and a curse, and a blessing and destroying all consuming elemental thing. Fire has a life of its own and the mastery of fire is a essential bit of what it is to be human. The link between food and nature, nutrition and humanity, simple yet powerful, basic and complex all at the same time.

Fire is transformitive, changing a raw meat into a new thing, charred and sweetened, concentrated rich and flavorful. The fire is the element that created cuisine out of simple items combining with the magic of flame and power. In this age of microwave options we are moving further and further away from nature. We are not spending time in the wilderness exploring, sleeping in tents, finding the unknown stream, hunting and gathering, or even studying about food. Americans spent more money in restaurants last year than in the grocery stores. What is amazing is that, for one thing, that has never happened before, and two it is putting even more distance between the diner and their food source.

As a chef instructor, I spend a good portion of my time familiarizing my students with information about nature and nutrition because they simply don't have any idea where the food comes from other than the grocery store. They are often amazed to learn where on a hog is the ham, that carrots are a root vegetable, that cheese is a fermented milk product, heck I am sure they couldn't tell me where the garbage dump is in their community.

I learned to cook, initially, in my grandmothers kitchen. I come from a long line of great female cooks in the family, both for the families needs and to serve others for a wage. A few of the men in the family could cook as well, but generally it was the mothers that did the majority of the chore. Unlike our white counterparts in America, the women in my family were working outside of the house well before the 1950's and 1960's so the revolution of the working woman was already our reality. Yet, the women in our lineage were cooking at home as well and maintaining the household chores. Food culture and recipe development has been co-opted by corporations.

World War II was the first time large numbers of women worked in factories to supply goods and munitions to our men overseas fighting. Once the men came home, a large number of women did not return to working just in home for the benefit of their families alone. My grandmother worked a full-time job at a discount department store less than 5 miles from our house. She would come home everyday for lunch and either start working on our dinner for the evening or check on what she had begun cooking that morning. She did all the grocery shopping and nearly all the house cleaning as well. She always had a backyard garden much like our neighbors and the family just to the West of our place would plan their garden with her so that we would plant some items and they planted other things so we could trade across the fence.

If you have ever planted vegetables you will find that in a good summer's growth, you will end up growing more than your family can consume so trading harvests was to the benefit of both our families. We probably were the only yard in our area that had corn and strawberries growing.

Weather or not you even roast something on a barbecue grill yourself, once the fire is lit, your nose instantly tells you that something special is happening. We first dine with our nose, then with our eyes and ears, then with our mouth, then lastly with our brain. Fire is the beginning of all of that. A grill, a stove, a smoker, a dehydrator, all started with fire.

Microwaving is something very different. Microwaves excite the molecules within the food starting at the middle of the item whereas fire begins to change the outer layers of the food then the heat is transformed toward the inner parts of the item, so in many ways microwaves are the exact opposite of the natural cooking experience of fire cooking. Microwaving food is creating yet another bit of distance between the food and the cook and dinner.

Food is life. Food gathering and hunting takes a life from an animal or plant that then gives life sustaining essence to those who eat it. It is the food chain, it is primal and essential. When you create barriers between yourself and your food, you leave yourself very vulnerable to a host of problems of health and spirit. Food is ritualistic. It has a rhythm, a constant, a variable, a language that is universally understood beyond any barrier of culture and geography. Welcoming guests into your home always has an offering of food from the host, this is a gift of life, a wish that you strive beyond the visit, an honoring the guest, and this is why it is often considered very rude to refuse the gift of food. The gift of food or drink has the element of careful preparation, expense, and culture transmission.

Fire can be essential to survival in the wilderness, it can warm you in times of cold weather, it can transform foods into cuisine, it's were we began to transmit history through storytelling, and it's where we gathered for safety. All of society began around a fire and continued to grow with cooking. Cooking is as human as language and protection of offspring. Without the skill of creating fires there would not be society, we would still be nomadic, we still be small groups of people, hunting and gathering. It is through fire and agriculture that society is formed. We are no longer a herd of humans but a society with universal truths, no matter the language spoken, mathematics and food need not be explained in order to be understood. Food can be simply about satisfying a need or it can be the catalysis for communion with others or elevated into art.

Food is medicine, food is art, food is humanity, food is society, and food is life giving need. I tell my students all the time that whenever you begin to rely upon a corporation to feed you, you are in trouble. The corporation is a faceless entity that haves laws that treat it like a type of person, but this pseudo 'person' only has one propose, to gain profit. Real people produce food for sustaining life, nourishing the body, transmitting emotions, warding off illness, creating links between generations, a ritual, a communion between people, a humility as all people need to eat, from kings to peasants, it levels all of us to the same place as we all eat.

Enjoy your meals instead of just consuming. Begin to gain understanding of what food really is to us humans and seek out how it can be transformed, into art, or into profit. When profit is the only purpose, when a corporation begins its life, the art isn't for the goodness of the corporation, it is solely for the benefit of humanity, therefore, I contend, that the corporations of food kill the art that is at the heart of the chef, turning them into scientists and machines of profit. Corporations have continuously made food changes to create more an more profit, more and more consumers, more and more addictive people hooked on their products, depended people upon purchasing their products, instead of creators of quality products. Industrialization of food has created many societal problems, illness, addiction. Like any created factory, once turned on, it wants to continue its work. A machine, when it stops, essentially dies once it is turned off, and death isn't preferred, by anyone or anything. Stop bowing to the gods of profit and seek the nutrients that will sustain and enrich your life.