PSA

There should be a post about foraging in North Georgia here, but it's not done yet. In the meantime, I'd like to make a humble suggestion to all recipe writers and publishers:
Stop writing recipes with volume measures for dry ingredients. Please. I've been making cookies weekly for work, and measuring cups and spoons are the single-biggest mess-maker in the whole process. Powdery ingredients like flour and cocoa spill easily, come in containers that can't accommodate measuring cups for scooping, and inevitably stick to said cups. Pouring ingredients like sugar is easier, but aiming to hit a small measuring cup is more of a challenge than a large mixing bowl on a scale, and sugar on the floor or counter is no fun. Converting from volume back to weight (how any recipe used by a professional kitchen/bakeshop measures ingredients) is imprecise. Scales are cheap. People learn. Measuring by volume inevitably looks like one of those "you're doing it wrong" infomercial segment, and I'm a professional.
Also: There are two types of cocoa powder, natural and dutched. One is acid, the other is alkaline, and they are used accordingly in recipes to maintain a certain acid/alkaline balance. Mix them up without making the proper pH adjustments, and your cake won't rise, or your brownies will taste funny. So could someone at Hershey's please explain to me the market for their new "premium" cocoa powder, "a select blend of natural and dutched cocoas?" No ratio given, some poor amateur baker, enthusiastic girlfriend--if I'm being sexist, the first man to email me about the cupcakes he made for his lady friend prior to this date wins a beer, courtesy of me--or excited child will grab this, see "dutched" go home, use it...and assume that baking is simply too hard, that it requires some deft, magic touch, special incantations, perhaps a conferring of the power from a high priest. Nope. Hershey's just wants you to buy more mixes.
Also: This is bullshit.Now to craft that into a well-thought-out, profanity-free letter to my councilperson.

Back.

Sometime in November, I officially dropped below the radar. As days shrink, people seem compelled to spend the lengthening nights in each others' company--attended of course by food, drink, entertainment and revelry. We give the darkest months of the year to excess, and emerge blinking in the sudden light of a world resurrecting itself, with the promise that the grey and dark could inexplicably be beautiful, and soon.
From about November to January, I had, it seemed, only time for work, sleep and laundry. What little time I got with friends is remembered through a film of fatigue.

The past weeks winter has finally ebbed, and I have given more of my time over to exercise and gardening. I'm trying to rebalance, to work with more speed and drive and focus, and to leave it at the door. I am working to be a better cook and a person who can be something else when she's not.
Because cooks, sometimes, are assholes. When one person on the line screws up, other cooks can be merciless. I have seen a cook jabbed repeatedly for an entire shift over one early mistake, miscalculation or oversight. I've seen people fired for ostensibly trivial offenses. I've also seen every cook on the line pull a single person out of the weeds long before there's a problem. We accept these extremes--they're as much a part of the business as the crushing boredom early on a slow night and the pounding, ceaseless rush that goes on for hours.
I've learned so much over the past 6 months, but I have not become a better friend, partner or human. I'm trying to get back to that. I'm also trying to get back to this blog as a space to think, to explore ideas, and, if there's still an audience out there after my long absence, to communicate. Look for more posts soon.