Nourishing More Than Just the Body

There are lots of components to this realm of food. We point to Southern cooking as Soul Food, rightfully so. Food traditions all are about nourishing the body and the soul. Food gifts are all about wishing you a prolonged life. This is the tradition of offering guests something to eat or drink, a hospitality.

 

Dietary laws and alternative diets are formed by either the rejection of,  restriction of, protection of, or the embracing some food source or holy day. For example, many religions reject pork as a food source, many speculate that this law has roots back before safe cooking and storage of pork was possible. Outlawing the consumption of pork could easily had been as a protective measure to prevent illness among their tribes. 

Food, or more accurately, culinary is the art of food, the place where beauty meets nutrition. This special place touches so much of your life, from business to social, from medicine and health, from marking special events with color, life, beauty, warmth, and love, from the everyday need of fuel to the communal activities of everyone's life.

Every time we gather together we take a communion, small or large, ritualistic or not, that binds us all as one union. The history of food dates all the way back to the earliest of mankind. With out the changes from hunter-gather to agriculture, there would still be no society, no government, no libraries, and no localized written knowledge base. It wasn't until we began to farm for our food and work with animal care for livestock did we stay centralized and formed villages, towns, and cities. A vast amount of time was spent following and finding food stuffs before we learned to farm. Food has always been at the heart of our culture and cultures around the globe. 

All food is soul food essentially. We share and begin to understand aspects of other's daily lives by way of their food. The popular dishes of any country or city, tells the dinner a lot about the people who created it. What types of food are available in that region? If there is a lot of cows versus a lot of lamb can tell you is there are grasslands or rocky hills. How is the climate, hot or cold? Cold climates do not have any tropical fruits and hot peppers. Is there good farming land? If a region has abundance of vegetables types available then chances are that farming is important and available. Do their dishes take a long time to cook or a short time? Asian cultures learned to cook foods quickly because there are not a lot of trees like we have in America so things needed to be done with as little fire as possible.

All good food has one essential ingredient, shared by all sources, and implied by the givers, love. You do not feed an enemy with the hard labors that were spent to grow and cultivate your sources of food. I know that our society is becoming more and more distant from our food sources. We have generations of kids that only know that chicken comes from the grocery store, for example. I spend a good deal of my time educating the young about the real facts of food sources so that they may make food selections based upon reality, informed decisions, instead of marketing brainwashing on the televisions and mass media.   

Misery is Contagious

Everyone has known, and possibly loved, a miserable s.o.b. The tragedy of this is that they seldom do anything to change their outlook and prospects. The sorry sacks get addicted to complaining and having something to complain about, so their efforts are more in line with perpetuating the problems instead of fixing the issue.  They are the ones that will double down on their last bets knowing that they need to walk away before they lose the farm.Working, living, and being friends with these nabobs of negativity can really drain others around them. I had a relative who probably in this category, but I was rather young when they passed through the veil so my memory was small in comparison to the others around.

I do remember having some aversion to interacting with them because it was frustrating. I was told very divisive things and some very adult things that a child of that age should not have been told. I don't remember them having visitors or ever having pleasant conversation with anybody.

Later, as I aged, I meet others cut from this cloth and it reinforced my aversion to these attitudes. What you maybe wondering how my outlook on life is designed. I consider myself a realist, and hopefully anyone who writes about me see that to be true. I am not a Debbie Downer but I do not think that anything is going to be a 100% positive plan or experience. Having this outlook never leaves me total disappointed and when things actually work out as planned, I get left pleasantly surprised.

So, once again, I am headed to teach my class and interaction with this low functioning person, trying to not let them taint my performance.  Utilizing the same space with this individual is fought with pitfalls and sand traps. I had a good day yesterday and really want to turn it into a streak but I am not very hopeful.

These types of personality types are often most upset when you are not in the same sinking boat as they are. In other words, they want you to be just like them and when you don't act like they act, you piss them off the most, just by being true about who you are genuinely. How dare you not be upset as they are upset! Who are you to take a different outlook or hold on to your own beliefs?

Misery is contagious.  Better said, misery is forced onto others more often than happiness because a lot of the miserable go out of their way to get you on board with them so that you are just as bad off, if not worse. I am not saint but this isn't a part of my path. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if they are wrong. I will defend your right to your opinion, no matter what, but I will also defend my right to my position. The world is not black and white for me, nor is it adversarial at every turn. 

Peace be granted unto you, especially you miserable s.o.b.'s.

Politics

I don't typically share on social media my political stance as it isn't a political blog, it's a food blog. On top of that, I have met those who will hold your beliefs against you when doing business, as if it is a legitimate reason to select a vendor or not. Best price, best customer service, best products, ah.... but what was it that you said about the candidates in this year's election?

Finding out that Trump will be at UIC soon and Sanders will be at Argo High School has me feeling spurred to action.  My eldest child is a student at UIC and my middle child goes to Agro like my eldest did before her.

I'm a liberal and if this is problematic for you, then don't finish reading this post. I'll understand. I wish that my career, my business, my educational efforts, and my personal life were not impacted by politics, but food is highly political. I define myself as a liberal, not a democrat or a republican. I am not influenced easily by conspiracies, political propaganda, or other people's opinions. I have learned from many sources in all phases in my life and it is from those experiences and knowledge base that I come to my own conclusions.  

Food strikes at the core of what it is to be human. It touches every one every day. We feed each other and transmit culture and emotions through each bite. Food cooked with love does more for the heart of man than the nutritional input could ever offer. Don't think food is political?  Try living without access to quality food outlets for a month or live without adequate food intake for just a few days, you will have fresh eyes for the issues.

Political promises of a chicken in every pot, legislation imposed on small business, school lunch programs, proposed Chicago Teacher Union strike, and slashed funding for culinary education, culinary colleges closing, food deserts, charitable food assistance program, framer's markets, and even state supplemental food programs such as WIC and Link, are all political.

Some conservatives speak of reductions to vital programs that feed our most vulnerable members of our society and advocate for a vision of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But what if your deficiencies are the equivalent to not having feet to put boots on? The poor will always be with us, needs will always be present, but suffering malnutrition should not be so wide spread in a 1st world country.

My career as a chef has lead me to feed some well known political figures and for the most part it was an honor to do so, even when I didn't agree with their platform. Every plate filled and every month feed strengthens our society as a whole. A hungry man is a dangerous thing. That hunger will spur him to just about anything to cease the call for calories. 

I wish I could live in a world unaffected by politics, legislation that both aid one group of people while harming another, where profit isn't the sole function of a company or group of individuals. A world without the greed and adversarial warfare. I would like a Zen world where everyone only uses what they need and doesn't bother to take from the most vulnerable ones. A world where there is no issues of lack, ill educated, no sympathy for fellow man, or underpaid and overworked.

As I type this, I can see this topic is going to have to be revisited later on. There's my final thought on politics for the day. The issue of minimum wage. Too many people, that I have encountered, do not understand the legislation of a minimum wage law, why it was enacted, and why many are now advocating that the minimum needs to be raised.

The minimum wage laws were conceived and enacted to combat the injustice of  having a inadequately paid populous. When your working staff is paid too cheaply, the owners of the company earn a much larger portion of the profits than the workers. The resulting expenses of a poorly paid population effect the whole society as medical treatment can't be afforded by the individuals but then must be paid out of taxes raised by the state, the number of malnourished people increases which again effects the need for medical treatment, the children of the underpaid lots of times end up increasing the burdens of the state as the parents cannot afford the basic needs of the families to which they belong, birth control to prevent families from having too many children becomes out of reach, the education of the children of poorer families must rely upon the state to provide those kids an education, and the total health, education, and welfare of the state is greatly reduced. The legislation was written with this in mind, a family of 3 or 4 should be paid enough to be able to supply for the needs of its members; food, clothing, shelter, and education. Without this as a standard, you will increase the homeless population as they will not be paid adequately enough to be able to pay rent, you will have children unable to learn and grow adequately do to a lack of food, and you can eventually find that your society will be forced to commit crimes in order to supplement their needs. Under educated students will finish school without all the tools they need to have a proper sustainable income as adults.

Many people have expressed their negative emotions about raising the minimum wage with statements like "No one should earn that much working at the burger joint down the street, are you crazy?" "How will small business be able to hire employees at that rate of pay?" This issue isn't about the greed of the workers, to me, it is more reflective of the greed of the employers, big or small. If I can't afford to get back and forth to work, then I can't come in an toil for the betterment of your company. If I can't feed myself and my children then I will not be able to spent all my time an effort working for you because I will need to work two jobs to make ends meet. If a worker is under the stress of everyday living to an unreasonable amount, then they will not be a good worker, but rather more like an indentured servant relying upon their betters benevolence.

The trope that companies cannot afford to pay American workers at a minimum wage law of $15 an hour for 40 hours of work, or more a week, doesn't hold up as truth when you look outside of our boarders. Many well known companies have a world wide audience and a international workforce. Take a look at a company like McDonald's. They have presence in many companies and I would have been inclined to believe them when the rebuff proposed changes to the wage law if I had not looked up the rate of pay for this company in other nations and discovered that they are paying this wage, and much more, to their workers overseas. So you can see clearly that this is just propaganda at best. 

Protection of both the company and the workforce is absolutely needed as the company provides work but it is the worker that makes the company successful. When industries become unregulated in lots of different ways, then it isn't long before you start seeing natural disasters, workplace accidents, unfair worker pay issues, environmental violations that put people and wildlife in jeopardy. In my personal experiences, unions are not always successful and sometimes there is corruption within the union officials, however, without unions there would have been a much darker world that would have immersed.

Keep being informed about politics, as it only takes the righteous people to ignore corruption, and do nothing, for evil deeds to arise and flourish.

International Home and Housewares Show

Hey everybody.  This weekend was very busy and rewarding, and I hope that the days that I didn't post will be forgiven.  In conjunction with Harold Import Company (HIC), a major supporter of our Careers though Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP), we have been working very hard. The convention opened Saturday and runs until Tuesday. 

C-CAP staff, students, and alumni manned the HIC booth and provided food to all the visitors conducting business with HIC. The mornings, offered omelets, sweet treats, and coffee. In the afternoon, our stations offered up made-to-order stir-fry.

Friday night there was a great event of drinks and dinner at Bin 36 wine bar. Sunday night was the C-CAP fundraiser where we broke our previous record collecting nearly $42,000! The proceeds go to support our culinary student scholarship program. Super exciting.

I attempted to conduct two live broadcasts on my blogtalk radio channel but apparently doing it from my phone and maintaining a signal did not work out.   Both times I tried it sounded like we were good to go but it ended abruptly without me hearing it stop. Oh well, I deleted the messed up broadcasts.

The show was jammed packed with all the china, glass, knives, cutting boards, small appliances, laundry aids, baking and decorating products available. I love this show. I also try and get out each year to the National Restaurant Association show to see and sample all the newest innovations.

Working a convention is some of the hardest work I have done, and I have worked many. It's full of tons of moving parts, long hours, guest needs, being the most bright and shinny you can be, all the while standing on the concrete floors.  Phew. This show had me sporting my newest item from the Forrest Gump collection of knee braces. I was super styling and preventing some of the damage that the long hours on my feet could create.

Yesterday we wrapped up the event and packed everything away. Many of the vendors at the show often donate their goods to our staff and students along with other organizations within the city. We are always grateful for the shinny new tools. 

http://www.hickitchen.com/

http://www.ccapinc.org/

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/search?q=giant+fork+spoon
http://www.housewares.org/show/

Gadget, gadget. Go Go Inspector Gadget!

If you remember where that title comes from then you are true geeky person like me. Although, I won't call myself big fan of the show, I did watch it as a kid. Psst.... we are both showing our age. LOL

So on with my point... This weekend is the International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place and I am super excited to see all the new product offerings. I went/worked the show last year and had a ball. I like conventions when I am working more than when I am just attending. I don't really don't know why as it should be the opposite. Who knows?

https://www.housewares.org/show/future

This year will again be stocked to the gills with a ton of innovations and new ideas. While new kitchen gadgets and home products are cool to see before they come to the local stores for sale, I am always very skeptical to buy the next new thing on a whim. For me, since I have a limited budget for the next new thing, and since I don't like a lot of extra clutter, I am very selective about what I will and won't buy for my kitchen. My kitchen space is relatively small and it houses both my cake decoration tools and my regular kitchen tools, so it can get out of hand very quickly.

A kitchen gadget has to do two things for me to be really interest in buying: first it has to be useful for more than one task and secondly must make my work easier or uniquely. If the only thing that I can use the tool for is to peel and core an apple, it is three foot long and two foot wide, and hard to store then I will not be likely to buy it. I am well stocked with the essential items that any kitchen needs, and some more besides. Now if I find a new and improved version of something that is a nice improvement of the model I already have, then I may just trip over my own feet to purchase it. For example, no baker ever wants to be out of measuring cups and spoons. A couple of years ago, manufacturers began producing a lot of items in silicon since the improvement of silicon was put into use. The new material is heat and cold resistant and can be molded into a great many styles. So at first, we started seeing cake pans in silicon, then other items followed like a collapsible colander which is a huge space saver in a cabinet. But my favorite of them all are the collapsible measuring cups. The older metal style measures were too small to put in a cabinet but a bit too large for a drawer so you would end up with them wedged in a manner that would prevent the drawer from opening or the drawer would damage the cups. The silicone ones smash down to less than a third of the size of the same metal version. This made chef very happy. They are durable and versatile.

It is easy to get excited by the new and sometimes the improved, but I try and temper my need to procure them, so that I don't end up with a whole pile of things that I only use once or twice a year, and they sit and collect dust the rest of the time. Stay tuned... I will be featuring some of the new finds from the show. Wish me luck.

Like my blog? Please follow it, tweet about it, share it on Facebook.... and anyway else you wish to share it with new readers. Thanks.

I agree with Micheal Simon

On a aired episode of The Chew, 2/29/16, the topic of food destroyers and binge eating contest was brought up in the first segment. Chef Simon stated that he has never understood the phenomenon of eating more than a human can eat in a week choked down in a few minutes or the videos of people throwing or smashing food. I agree. I have never understood it either, add to that, the trend of folks making giant, over the top foods, from other foods, like taking 20 big macs and making a casserole from them. Yuck

This reminds me of the stories at the Romans before the fall of their society. We haven't yet began using vomitoriums but at this rate I would be surprised if it were to begin. This is the height of greed, excess and privilege. Only in a self centered community will you ever see such habits as their are too much famine in the world for this to make sense. Homelessness in America is the least talked about societal ill and with efforts, not to feed them and house them, but to install fixtures to detract homeless people from sleeping on bus stops and around buildings, I don't think it is at all reasonable to act in this manner. Yet, you can find many representations on social media depicting these acts.

In my opinion, the statement 'less is more' in this conversation is exactly right. We have so many people without and so many people with too much. Food waste is a big problem here. Every year we throw away an estimated 133 billion pounds of food. A lot of the waste happens in grocery retail outlets and in our own kitchens, as we may cook too much one day and not consume it before it spoils. Yet we have food stunts as I like to call them happening all the time. We have television series dedicated to this idea such as Man v. Food. Nothing succeeds like excess.

We humans think we are so clever and know so much but we are only gazing at the world through a peep hole wondering what it is we see. Hopefully the rise of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and the lot, will wake up our society to eating to live instead of eating to excess.

http://www.travelchannel.com/shows/man-v-food
http://endhunger.org/food-waste/

Finding Your Roots

If any of you actually know me in person, you may already know that I have somewhat of an obsession about genealogy. Tracing my origins back through time, generation after generation, isn't an easy task, and often the discoveries made lead to more questions than answers.

When I entered culinary training, a good amount of the work would follow along either a technique, building skills, or it would be a grouping of dishes from one country and then another. I was surprised to learn that several of the dishes I grew up eating were cultural invites into other worlds that my family were not apart of to my knowledge. I remember learning that the oxtails my Grandmother cooked were not like the ones other blacks cooked that had come to Chicago from the Southern states, but much more in the style of Italian migrants, for example. We ate smoked sausages with sauerkraut, and I haven't found much in the way of German ancestry. As neighbors tend to do, Grandmother shared recipes with neighbors and friends.

Sharing food culture with others and the history of foods, their origins, and development, became a fascination for me. I once took a class at Roosevelt University all about the history of food. In that exploration, we ventured back in time to the cavemen days, and viewed history and archaeology of food, how food procurement is at the very beginnings of civilization itself. Farming changed us from strictly hunter-gatherers of nomadic origins to settlers and villagers. Yogurt changed trade routes and therefore economy. I will share more of this in later posts.

Even before Henry Louis Gates Jr. began televising episodes of his award winning show, I had a curiosity for this type of exploration. My companion podcast is a type of this kind of exploration as they are conversations with people about their relationships with food and by extension culture.

Chefs, foodies, critics, writers, culinarians, educators, artist, and any sort of people who eat have some type of connection with food. I am loving talking with my guests about the subject. Just in the first few broadcast, we have seen how the conversations have taken us into conversations about social unrest, cultural and religious rebirths, and dietary changes for religious and health reasons. These are all just breadcrumbs along the pathways of creation and generational growth.

I have a small collection of older cookbooks because I like to compare what was popular 20,40,60 years ago to what is consumed now. The techniques used, the flavor pallet, the available food stuffs, and the changes in the social norms of dinning etiquette and social graces, all change and as they change so does the preferred foods. The modern mothers of today, often can't imagine hosting a dinner party that consist of 9 or 10 courses of foods, let alone design, produce, and prepare such an culinary experience but it isn't so unusual for the cultured society women of the turn of the century.

No matter the era of your birth, your place in society, your ethic makeup, for country of origin, your immigrated home, your racial background, your chosen profession, your political background, or any other thing in which we classify ourselves, we all eat and we all have a love/hate/health relationship with food.

If you are interested in taking part in our weekly discussions, please leave me a comment with your contact information, and I will love to schedule a broadcast to explore your food history.

Listen in to our discussions both live and archived: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon
If you like us, please Follow! I will be soon making this available on iTunes and other search engines such as IHeart Radio in short order.

Conversations About Food - Podcasts

As a companion piece to this blog, I have launched a podcast of the same name. There I will explore the roots of, the relationship of, and the changes of people's relationship with food. Everyone has a history of eating, cooking, loving, and hating some foods. There are all sorts of traditions, religious restrictions, feasts days, fasting days, dieting, likes and dislikes surrounding folks intimate connections with eating and cooking. It's aim will be to talk to professional chefs, homemakers, athletes, musicians, the whole gambit of professions and phases of life.

I will update this list as I post the broadcasts. Please subscribe and tune-in regularly: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon

Ep#1: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/giantforkandspoon/2016/01/18/conversation-with-chef-yehoshuah-yehudah

Back to the Celebrity Chefs issues.....

This may not be your issue and you may not agree with me, however, the concept of a celebrity chef is often a separate thing from being a A-list chef. Most world class chefs are virtually unknown to most of the American public.

This morning the nominees for the Oscar award were announced, most nominees were expected and some expectations were not met, as usual. Living in Chicago has always given chefs a great place to work and learn the craft but it is only recently that we have just been acknowledged as a world class culinary city. The James Beard award ceremony was held here and a Michelin Star was finally given here. It is my opinion that there are two classes of this type of publicity rich name dropping realm of the celebrity chef. The first, and often most important realm, is the realm of the hard-working award winning professional chef. These unsung brave knights of the kitchen are superstars and revered but aren't exactly household names. The other realm of celebrity chefs are those television culinary stars that some of us can name and watch often.

Among the television chefs are some well versed real trained chefs that got noticed because of their cookbooks, or from doing some local television segments, or former contestants on a cooking competition. Then there are some that sooo are NOT chefs in any way but have a cooking show due to their persona which was pitched and groomed for television. Once their show was accepted by the viewing audience then the cookbooks, product lines, and other offerings became popular at your local outlets.

I am not a fan of all food centered television and some of the most popular ones do not teach much in way of technique, food knowledge, or culinary exploration. The advent of the Food Network is both good and bad for my industry, for example, Duff Goldman's show Ace of Cakes, brought attention to sculpted fondant cake creations increasing the demand for these type of cakes. Awesome right? Well not completely, some customers who would inquire about getting one of these types of cakes often were victims of sticker shock. These types of cakes can take several days of designing, baking, ordering supplies and/or shopping, and then creating which is why some of these can cost $4 per person and upwards. What is astonishing, to some, is the amount of times spent on these projects because if they were a fan of the show, they saw these items get produced in a half hour or hour show not realizing that it was more than a week of taping that got edited. This would get customers to ask questions like "don't you just order this or that?" not realizing that what they have requested had to be handmade originals and therefore had to be reflected in the pricing.

Champagne dreams with Kool-aid money is an obstacle for some folks but as a well-versed pastry chef I have been able to share with those clients how they can afford to have the showpiece cake they are seeking at lesser pricing by downsizing the cake and adding matching cupcakes to have enough to feed the guest without braking the host bank.

If you are a avid watcher of the food porn now available on the Food Network, ABC, NBC, PBS and many more, just keep in mind that all of these shows have teams of chefs doing the research, prep, and hard work behind the scenes that you never ever see in order to produces these offerings for your viewing pleasure. Hopefully, whomever you watch on television is actually showing you things that you can take into your own kitchen. The fad nowadays is for every actress, actor, singer, dancer, or television personality to have a food line, kitchen equipment, and/or cookbook for sale at your local K-Mart.

Everyone has a relationship with food, if they are in fact a human, but not everyone has a good relationship with food or has had any significant lessons in the kitchen producing good food for others. The companion podcast of this blog, coming very soon, will be made of conversations with all sorts of people about their food relationships including my chef friends. Follow who you like, hopefully I am one that you will follow, but also find out if they actually know what they are doing on your screen or if they are a manufactured celebrity who knew a producer and where blessed to be given a show.

Enjoy  

Social Media and the Bakery

So.... today's twist and turns inspire me to talk about the computing age and the impacts to the food industry. When I first began working, right out of high school in the summer before I entered culinary school, no one knew or could predict the radical changes we would undergo to draw, attract, and maintain clients interest and loyalty.

Long gone are the days in which shoppers visited the 'neighborhood's' local bakery for their bread and sweets. The smaller bakeries first felt the squeeze on their ability to retain customer loyalty when the grocery chains incorporated a bakery department with in the stores. Opening the day before 6 am for business offering fresh baked bread, danish and donuts was usurped and firmly belongs to the chain outlets followed by a loss of the cake and cupcake business. Shoppers traded quality handmade products for the convenience of one-stop-shopping in an effort to save time and money, or at least that was the chant of the commercials we watched. Soon the family owned outlets with talented staff were hard pressed to price match the grocery stores therefore many sold or closed the businesses.

Those outlets that remained were ones that quickly adopted new styles and techniques, especially in the wedding cake, sculpted or carved cakes, and fondant enrobed cakes and other unique items. Bakeries could no longer only offer buttercream and whipped cream cakes which meant they were in need of hiring staff who could work with the new skills or retrain themselves to met client demands that the grocery stores did not offer. It should not surprise you that the chain stores added these offerings as well.

Now, any company that survived or was opened after Facebook became a household name with million of users, must use social media often in order to keep their business in viable competition in the marketplace. The showcase window, sign hanging, and a ad in the yellow pages can't keep you in the running to have a great wedding and holiday baking season. This monumental shift, while popular and accessible, brings negatives and positives.

So to the negatives, as I tend to like my bad news before the good news. Small business owners now have to either rely upon the tech savvy to make their online presence and maintain it, or learn new skills and keep in constant contact with their fans and customers. Knowing how to make a business Facebook page, using Instagram, Periscope, and maintaining a business web page, can take a significant amount of time especially when you aren't literate in the first place.

Success in this arena can attract new clients and concentrate your marketing funding to speak to those people in your most profitable demographic, but until the business can spend monies to have a marketing department or a dedicated staff member to handle these activities, the time that keeping up with social media marketing can be time consuming, especially as a new way to communicate are being developed every day.

The good news is that these activities are not expensive, especially if you do them yourself. Advertising your business no longer requires owners to hire publicity, advertising and marketing companies spending money on door tags, sale flyers, hand out brochures, print ads in newspapers, and issuing coupons. All the needs of small business owners to get the word out and keep the attention of customers can be done from your laptop while sitting on your favorite chair.

 I'm currently sitting in my recliner, reflecting on recent events, which prompted this conversation. My clients favorite way to reach out to me is on social media or email. This gives us the unique ability to talk with clients, decipher their requests, devise a design, and take a deposit all remotely. Keep in mind, that's when it all works, but when dealing with technology or learning new tech skills, we all have experiences where either the user or the program has failed to work effectively or not at all.

So over the weekend, I attempted my first podcast recording. I was excited as the conversation was quite interesting but, needless to say, something went wrong. Failing to create a usable recording made the effort as detectable as teardrops in rain. I am hoping that a second attempt to replace that interview will result in success but I know that the second attempt will not be exactly spoken as the first. I want all of the recordings to be very conversational, I do not feel the need to edit or sensor them, nor to have them sound as polished as a television episode.

Efforts to set a second appointment for a taping will have to wait. If it is not confirmed quickly, I will have to create another interview with someone else. C'est la Via, time waits for no one.

Welcome

This blog, and its companion podcast, is dedicated to the explorations of many things revolving around the food service industry. I have been a professional pastry chef in Chicago for over 24 years and I intend to have discussions about many related topics from the changing face of the industry, the pitfalls of business ownership, food trends, what it is like being a minority in this line of work, culinary schools, competition, and just about anything else.

Why did I pick this name for my page? Well, when I was a kid, it was trendy to have, hanging on your wall, the giant fork and spoon. These decorations were wooden or metal and often found in the dinning room or kitchens, as a kid I tried to imagine how big you must be to be able to use them at the dinner table. As I grew up, these wall hangings began to fall out of favor, considered passe, but my love of food, and creating food art, began in the shadow of these relics.

The chef life is never dull and hardly ever simple. Everyone in the industry needs to balance the business with artistry to meet the ever changing demands of the clientele, and that isn't easy. When I began my journey in this industry there was no such thing as a "celebrity chef", no television channels dedicated to our work, and very little that accurately depicted what the day-to-day was like in a professional kitchen. Julia Child lit the torch that peered behind the curtain the separated the front of the house from the back of the house. She was the pioneer that demystified fine dinning and culinary excellence both at food outlets and at home. Anthony Bourdain wrote a best selling book "Kitchen Confidential" that peeled back the facade and took a hard look at the life of the chef will all that it can be, both accelerating and dangerous.

I have come to the conclusion that even with all the media exposure and the developed thirst for all things "celebrity", the Rachel Raye's, the Mario Batalli's, and Guy Fieri's, there is still a lack of respect for what it is we do, and a lack of understanding about what it takes to get into this line of work, stay in the industry, open a profitable business, and have any measure of success. I often find, that when talking to other professionals in other industries, I feel the need to illustrate what it is we do and why we chefs are not to have a nose turned skyward from anyone. Chefs all over the world run businesses, just like any other business, with it's demands of profitability, while using applied chemistry techniques to food stuffs, and mixing in artistry to please a wide audience.Trends change rapidly, similar to the fashion industry, and keeping up with the dietary and taste request of customers keeps chefs consistently training and retraining their skills.

Hopefully, my experiences, and those of my colleagues, will widen your perspective and understanding of this chef life we live. My goal has always been to open my own outlet in Chicago, as for now, I am delving deeper into teaching the next generation of people with great cooking skills, and perhaps some will take their skills on to high heights within the industry. Everything has its pluses and minuses and here's where I intend to share them with you.