How Do You Know When It's Done?

Every time I put a tray of muffins or crackers or sliced bacon into the convection oven, I turn to the person I'm helping and ask "How long should I leave it in for?" Inevitably the response, whether it's coming from Annie with a beleagured grin or from Wally with a mischevious simplicity, is "Until it's done." I roll my eyes. "Okay, that's helpful..." If you grow up on recipes, which are essentially formulas, you almost always anticipate a clear sign of completion to a dish. The bread puffs up, the pot of cream erupts with small bubbles, the butter's milk solids and fats separate. And recipes promise times to go with those indicators--10 minutes, 15 minutes, 2 hours. Those times enable you to walk away, do something else, forget about it for a bit.

But in this kitchen, you have to be present. You know that the crackers will be done when they're crisp and just turning golden on the edges, but how exactly long that will take, you can't say. If you don't wear a watch in the kitchen (and many people don't), you clock the duration of time by how much you manage to get done while waiting for something else to finish. It takes me exactly the time of fetching the oysters, Littleneck clams, ice and bucket of tools for the crackers to finish.

The scheduling of flights back to New York have structured the ending of this project, but what really tips me off to my departure is the light bulb going out. In the track lighting above our station, one of the lights has gone dark--a bulb Wally replaced the week I arrived. "It's a sign!" I moan with sadness as we look up at it tonight.

"Maybe it's just not meant for that socket," Annie says, as she pulls together her garnishes.

"Is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?" I ask her, half-teasing, half-truly wondering what she means.

"Hah...no, not a metaphor. But hey, if that's how you want to read it..." she laughs.

How something's done may have everything to do with how much you enjoy it--and how ready you are to move on when it stops becoming enjoyable. The challenge is useful in continuing to see what you do as "important," so when it stops becoming a learning experience, it stops becoming fun or valuable. I've got so much more I could be learning, and ultimately what I've gained by being here has a lot more to do with soaking up community and atmosphere than actual skills. The attitude of a kitchen, the values of a community where everyone has a connection to what they eat, this is what I'll take away and think about most. But the timing is everything--as I get ready to pack up, the season is finally arriving. For tonight, in essence our July 4th dinner, everything is coming to a head--packed tables, extra supplies. I'm preshucking oysters to lay out on ice, to minimize the waiting time (a good thing too, since the first order in is for 18 of them.) It will be a crowded night, one that necessitates a lot of focus and patience. (I will most likely be standing back as Annie and Wally tackle the rush.)

"Yeah, you kinda picked the wrong time to come," Geddes says, as he slices into a massive piece of just-caught salmon for tonight's service. "I mean, every night in July will be like this, just packed."

"Well, I'm far from done learning," I say. "And it was good to come in a slower month, if only to have more time to take it in."

"Oh sure. And you never really stop learning. I've taken time over the years to do lots of 'remedial things.' You know, chopping garlic and onions, nothing else. Just working on my skills."

Knowing that even someone as Zen-ly creative and efficient as Geddes would take time off just to whip himself back into shape is a huge consolation. And it's a consolation, in general, to know that my learning wasn't at the expense of the kitchen's running smoothly. I can't do everything, but the little things I can do felt important and necessary.

"Yeah, Tuesday's gonna be...hectic," says Wally, raising himself up on the cold station so he keeps his newly twisted ankle off the ground. "I mean, you think of all the little things I forget. The garnishes, the oysters..."

"Well, all the stuff I know how to do," I retort.

"Yeah, but I'll have to remember them all again."

"Hah, that'll be a rude awakening."

And yet, as I'm watching them go through service, a night with busy patches despite long periods for talking and laughing it up, I realize that this kitchen will absolutely go on functioning after my departure. Angela will watch each ticket and methodically assemble her dishes, moving smoothly and deliberately between each stage of plating. Chris will zoom from steak to chicken to pork in the same of a nanosecond, and sear each dish to perfection. Wally will plate up elegant salads that look more like works of art than edible dishes, and though he won't have met to race against, he'll do just fine. And Annie will look at a long ticket with multiple modifications and tackle it with the grace of a figure skater, moving from freezer to plate to window without a single stumble.  I'm barely making anything tonight, minus a few orders of blue greens and ice creams, but it's a chance to take in what Osa asserted last night: "I've never worked anywhere else where people are so excited about what they're making." I've been an asset, but I'm also barely a blip--the kitchen will definitely keep functioning without me. All they need are customers to keep serving.

And all of this comes from, and maybe in spite of, a continued assessment and pursuit of "what works." After a Friday night filled with meat orders--nothing but chicken and steak all night, despite the newly opened salmon fishing season--Angela and Geddes agree to tweak the side dishes for the salmon to maximize its popularity. Instead of offering it with lentils and chopped olives as we had yesterday, tonight we swap it out for tiny roasted new potatoes, a shaved fennel salad with hints of basil, and an orange aioli. It's still a sophisticated dish, but more traditional than before, and it sells like gangbusters. "Sometimes you just hit the sweet spot with the customers," Angela says as she wipes down her station after family meal. "I used to work at this restaurant in Seattle--little neighborhood place. And we had this chicken dish--roast chicken, potatoes, garlic jus, nothing too complicated. But we would always sell tons and tons of chicken. And eventually the chef was like 'Sorry, guys, we're keeping it on the menu.' I mean, it's predictable, but people would come in every night just to have the kitchen. So if that's what people wanted, and liked, then that's what we'd give them."

Giving someone what they want--satisfying an unnameable hunger or craving--is maybe the best way to know that you've done your job. If a steak comes back underdone, or a runner comes back with a request for more sauce, more dressing, a second helping of strawberry shortcake, you start to get the sense that you and you alone can meet that need and fix that oversight. And when a server comes back with good news--a customer rhapsodizing, saying "The black cod was extraordinary"--it's enormously gratifying. "It puts the wind back in my sails," says Angela, "when I know that they like what I'm doing." The preparation is much more than just another task to complete--it becomes a real gesture of generosity towards another hungry person. They walk out full, drunk, and happy--this may well be the highlight of their week, the thing that made everything better in retrospect.

And feeling that sense of purpose on the prep end makes all the difference. As we wrap up the night, and as Chris pours me a glass of Tempranillo, he tells me that he's always felt a pull to this profession. "In 10th grade, they brought a career counselor to our school and asked, "who knows what they want to do for a living?' I was the only one that raised my hand...because I knew I wanted to be a chef. And that sent me on my way, into vocational training. And I've worked lots of other jobs, man...I've been a mechanic, a carpenter, a store clerk, a chimney sweep, a stone mason..."

"...And you just keep coming back to this."

"Well, yeah. It's what I'm good at. It's my passion. And all through school, we were getting this emphasis on learning computers, knowing computers so that we could get good jobs. But I know that this is something a computer can never really do."

"It's a much more organic process." I sip on my wine, which carries just enough bitterness for me to wonder if it's coming from the wine or from my sadness in departing. I envy Chris for having so much certainty in his day-to-day work. I'm jealous of Angela's sense of validation from how customers respond. I wish I could soak up this proximity to useful work, this immersion in a life of service, and bring it back with me to mix into my office job. Would my emails then carry the same feeling of necessity, of urgency, as my completion of a order ticket?

I snatch up a paper copy of tonight's menu and pass it around to the servers, collecting little tokens of their farewells like signatures in a yearbook. Their notes are teasing and sweet--Darlene calls me her "Greek Goddess," for my newly sun-soaked nut-brown skin. Our host Christopher teases me for sneaking into the back of the first week's wedding. Wally reminds me not to drop the nuts. Chris gives me a bear hug so big and warm I almost tear up with appreciation. If this were a comedy about a misfit sports' team, there'd be a lot of winks and begrudging smiles and probably a nuggie or two. But this may be what I miss the most--the people, the jokes, the chatting in between moments of frenzied preparation. I will miss the people that make it happen every night, with focus and humor and joy. Those are the ingredients I most wish I could take back with me...

It's the Ingredients, Stupid

Looking over my earlier posts over the past month, I see that my writing style has become less and less descriptive. I've done less "filling-in" of detail vis-a-vis what's going on in the kitchen, less elaboration on looks and asides and moments of panic. That's partly because there've been less of them--less moments that feel like emotional crossroads. I've adapted to the rhythm of the kitchen, and each morning as I get dressed, it starts to feel more like a job than an adventure. This, of course, in the context of it being one of the more adventurous things I've done in a long time.

But my slightly sparer prose is also a product of how I've come to see the people and processes in the kitchen...as Wally rolls out the doughs for today's pizza lunch, I gather up ingredients, including the leftovers of this morning's fruit plate. I've always liked the flavor combination of strawberries and goat cheese, and see including it on a pizza as a way to show off my sense of flavor pairings. (Drizzled with a little balsamic vinegar, strawberries as a savory ingredient can't be beat.) But when Geddes sees me with the strawberries, he wrinkles his nose.

"You don't want to go doing that," he said.

"Why not?" I ask. "I mean, of course I'll go with what you think works, but..."

"Well, these strawberries are just so juicy and ripe," he says, picking one up and squeezing it between his fingers, juice dribbling out and down his thumb. "You don't need to do much else to them to make them taste good. Better off to just stick with regular pizzas."

For a moment I'm miffed--these pizza lunches have been one of my favorite ways of seeing what flavors work well together. Blue cheese, beets, and roasted onions = good. Chicken livers and cornichons = not so good. But the way he says that we shouldn't do much "to them" gives me pause. These strawberries came from Orcas Farm, where they were so drenched with sunlight that they were warm even as you ate them. They're rich, sweet, and as juicy as you could ever imagine--they don't need to be messed with to yield a better flavor.

Some cooking processes are all about doing things "with" ingredients--making sauces, salads, layers of complex flavor. The nectarine napoleon on our menu is all about this--a layer of puff pastry, a layer of sliced nectarines poached in vanilla and white wine, a scoop of honey-vanilla frozen yogurt, another layer of pastry, and a layer of fresh nectarines, sprinkled with cinnamon-sugar and bruleed with the blowtorch until just sizzling and aromatic. This creates a laying of flavor and texture experiences--the ingredients work with each other to produce the final effect. But what we do "to" the ingredients is fairly minimal--the pastry is basic, the yogurt is straightforward (sweet but tart, with conventional flavors), the fruit raw on one side to show its natural sweetness, and poached on the other to provide a contrast in texture. The cinnamon-sugar complementary, the brulee for a final touch of warmth. We haven't made foams or vapors with anything, and the cooking we've done is mostly for ease of plating and presentation.

When you're working with ingredients you respect and want to show off, messing with them is the last thing you want to do. As we're sliding the pizzas (all savory, none fruity) into the oven, one of our suppliers stops by with several pounds of spot prawns. These are big pink shrimp, with veiny antennaed heads and plump bodies. Geddes comes out and immediately pulls the head off of one of them to suck out its juices. "Oh they're so good, and they're even better raw. Try it," he says, handing one to me. I hesitate, and he laughs, "I'm not pulling a fast one on you, just try it." I break a prawn open at the neck and suck hard. It's unusually sweet and juicy, more like a peach than a piece of seafood, and almost buttery on the tongue. I wonder if he'll want to add these to the bouillebaisse, one of our most popular dishes, but instead he asks Wally to scrap our plans for a crab salad and use these instead. "What do you think, Jess, serve them whole or as tails?"

I'm on the spot, and pressed for a second. Which seems more appropriate for an Inn dish, something I'd have on a date in a fine restaurant, or something I'd devour with relish at a seaside shrimp shack? "I love them whole, but diners won't necessarily want to get their hands into a salad plate," I say. "Maybe a few peeled tails, and then one whole one?" It works...the plates of shaved vegetables, dressed with a light citrus mignonette, pair perfectly with the chilled shrimp tails, and the whole prawn resting its head on the top of the salad is all the visual flourish you could ever need.

I've cut back on the ornamental writing because these are my ingredients--the juicy exchange of conversation, the hilarious debates over flavor pairings and cooking techniques. I don't have to elaborate on Luke's explanation of why he may not need a haircut--"my sister just got a new job, and I think my hair was responsible"--to give him flavor, nor could I capture Chris's quick-draw response as I'm singing along with The Beatles' "We Can Work It Out." "No," he says. "No, we can't. I'm sorry, it's just not going to work," then smirking and returning to the walk-in. I don't understand the impulse of some nonfiction writers to embellish with untruths, because just being present gives me more material than I could ever need. Even on slow nights like this, where a 7-person reservation is made, then cancelled within a 15-minute period, I don't need to invent things to keep me satisfied--I can just wander over and watch Chris plate a burger with homemade aioli, or watch Angela dress a piece of black cod with a nectarine puree.

There's a reason people choose to eat oysters raw--why mess with something when you already know it's good?

The Lightest Touch, and the Deepest Biases

Texture--the sense of touch, of thickness or thinness, of a substance's weight--is hugely important when it comes to how we experience food. Just as sipping a wine can feel like silk, velvet, or light cotton, a dish's buoyancy, the way it sits on your tongue, can tip you toward loving it or hating it. You can't know a bread's risen without gently prodding it for springiness, that a asparagus should be trimmed without first snapping it at its natural breaking point, or that a steak's done without pressing your finger into the center of the meat. Getting touchy with your food is precisely the point.

I'm starting to wonder, however, if some higher power wants to keep my hands off the food. On a run into Eastsound today, I slipped on a fresh batch of gravel, and ended up skinning my left hand against the road, along with shattering the glass on my iPhone. (Whether the addition of gravel to the Orcas landscape is a rustic touch, or one that heralds future paving, I'm not sure, but I was maybe 20 feet away from an SUV when it happened, so something tells me the change is not so ideal for crowded country roads and narrow pedestrian shoulders.) In the kitchen, this means that both my left and right hands bear enormous bandages, and that I'm constantly slipping in and out of rubber gloves to protect my cuts. Nothing is more uncomfortable than when I have to knead out the butter chunks in a streusel topping for tomorrow morning's muffins. I'm wincing with pain each time I roll the dough between my palms. And it feels like yet another setback--so much of successful cooking depends on your ability to roll the dough between your fingers, to hold the bread steady as you slice off croutons, and to maneuver the greens on your salad place for the best possible presentation. But the work requires I get my hands going again--juicing oranges, dressing pizzas for lunch, and, yes, shaving fennel on the mandoline. (Wally forces me to confront the damn machine again, and finally holding it at the right angle, with my fingers curled way back, produces a pile of clean vegetable shaves, fingertips not included.)

My challenges, however, are no match for Geddes's, who after lunch heads outside with a giant basin of spiky sea urchins.

My first meal at the Inn involved sea urchin--little hunks of buttery golden roe--in a seafood pappardelle, and my initiative to order it was because I'd never eaten it in a non-Japanese preparation before. It's also something I rarely get the chance to prepare myself, and so when Geddes was ready to extract it, I was more than ready to watch the process. He hoses off the needles of the urchin, which are still wiggling fairly vigorously, and its colors, red and deep purple, drain out into the water. He slices a knife in and around the mouth of the creature, and scoops out its digestive organs to expose the gonads, the creamy pockets we'll be serving up over the pasta.

Lots of water with undigested seaweed spills out--I imagine any creature with such a flavorful diet possesses a rich flavor by default. Geddes scoops out five little hunks of yellow roe...it seems like a lot of work to go through for so little cooking material, and apparently many restaurants end up using the exoskeleton of the urchin as the platter for the roe, filling it with ice the way we prepare our oyster platters. The spikes stop moving, and for a second I think about suggesting an appetizer prepared kebab-style. This idea doesn't last long, as Geddes moves onto the remaining five urchins still writhing in the bucket.

Lucky for Wally and I, our prep work today consists of whipping up a fresh batch of ice cream--the exact flavor of cheesecake, perfect for topping the rhubarb cobblers (two desserts in one!)--and preparing breakfast platters for the next morning. Our specials are the same as yesterday, which means that Wally will dominate when it comes to the salad station, and I'll set to work answering the dessert tickets. I'm finally getting the hang of preparing out frozen treats: dipping my spoon into a stream of hot water before each scoop, scraping the scoop up against the sides of the container, and pressing the tip of the scoop firmly into the bowl before squeezing and letting go. Instead of the mushy dollops I used to generate, they now come out clean and teardrop-shaped.

But texture comes back into play again: Annie introduced several new dishes to the dessert menu, one of which is "chocolate pâté", a fudgy ganache shaped like a loaf and served with slivers of strawberries, a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and a perfectly shaped dollop of creme fraiche. I know from my experiences of slicing the chocolate tart last week that thick desserts like this respond well to hot knives. However I still get the occasional slice that refuses to leave the blade, laying thick and heavy against the steel and impossible to plate. In order to manipulate the aspects of the dish--slicing off two thin pieces of chocolate, scooping the creme fraiche, and cutting strawberries on the diagonal to make a little fan--I need a dexterity and lightness of touch. With gloves on, I'm covered in melting chocolate almost right away, and dishes need to be wiped down for smudges before they can go out.

Will customers even notice? I wonder. The beauty of our plating is so beyond what someone might do in their home kitchen, I think, that to criticize it seems almost beside the point. For me, going to a restaurant means giving myself over to a thought process and attention to detail that I rarely commit to my home-cooked meals--at home, I rarely fan my vegetables out over my quenelle'd rice, or drizzle a sauce slightly over a piece of meat. And I certainly don't think about flowers or garnishes...maybe because they're rarely available, but also because it's so beside the point. In home cooking, even when it's the meditative end to a stressful day, I'm all about the speed of execution, and rarely about the presentation. I eat my rice, veggies, and minimal protein in cereal bowls, and a heavy squirt of Sriracha is my colorful "garnish" for most dishes.

But when I go to a restaurant, I want something that I can't achieve myself. Unless I've heard it's the restaurant's specialty, I almost never order chicken, simple pastas, or classic chocolate desserts. I lean toward the odder ingredients: the side order of farro, the plate of pickled nasturtium flowers, the whole trout for two. (It's the same reason I lung for the chicharonnes every time they appear--when will I next been deep-frying duck skin in my home kitchen?) When I first heard about the sea urchin on the menu two weeks ago, I immediately jumped at it--because when could I really do that for myself? And yet, as I watch the tickets come in, I see very few orders for the urchin special. Is it that the diners simply want other things? Or is it an inherently less adventurous crowd?

Yesterday, as I went back for my second helping of sweet Thai fried rice with vegetables, Angela was bemoaning the absence of good Thai food in her life. "It's my favorite thing to eat, and to make for myself," she says.

"Why not incorporate some Thai stuff on the menu?" I ask, loading up my plate.

"Well, we've tried it before--we did a few dumplings as special appetizers--but the customers didn't really go for it," she says.

"There's not much ethnic food on the Island," Chris says. "I love to cook with Indian spices, but it's too hard to get the ingredients, and too hard to sell, to be cooking like that all the time."

Tonight that idea of community expectations starts to come back to me as I slide up plate after plate of desserts into the window. So much of what we like to eat is about personal preference. I can never have too much pepper or spice in my food, but when I'm preparing croutons for 100 customers, I have to seriously cut back on my pepper distribution, barely dusting each slice of bread before toasting. Similarly, Chris has had to adjust his sense of what works to what the customers want--"I had to see how done they wanted their beans before I could know how long I had to cook them...we were told in culinary school that there's a 'window' of doneness for every food. Steak cooked medium rare is 145°F, not 150, not 140. You can't really deviate far beyond that window." I think about the techniques I've always used to see if a steak is done--i.e. cutting into it and seeing it's not too red for me to eat--and start to see the problem when cooking for other people. You may like your cannellini beans with a little toothiness, your greens slick with oil and pepper, your steaks juicy and just barely less than raw, but on the other side of that kitchen wall, there are customers with preferences that may be vastly different than yours. If I'm making a run at this as a real career, I have to learn to pull back as I drizzle that balsamic or scoop out that citrusy sauce--I have to imagine my hopes and expectations as a customer, what I may be anticipating, and adjust as best I can.

Last night Angela slipped us a few leftover bites of homemade goat cheese and chive gnocchi, and it practically floated, it was so light and airy. I could've eaten an entire hotel pan and still wanted more. But tonight, as I sliced yet another stubborn plate of chocolate pâté, I think of my gnocchi-loving friend, who craves weighty dumplings in thick sauces of cheese and butter, and wondered how she might react to these fluffy morsels. I slice one chunk of the dessert as thin as a cracker, but the second slice as thick as toast. It's the only compromise that makes sense to me--something for all kinds of tastes.

The Chemistry of Cooking: An Unscientific Approach

A Wednesday in the kitchen can play out relatively uneventfully, unless you set out early to learn a whole new language. At 9:30am today, I am already up, fed, and sitting at a bar with several wine glasses in hand.

Just as she did a week ago for her tutorial on white wines, wine guru Cindy Wulf is walking us through a workshop on the best reds on our restaurant's menu. This is part of Geddes's initiative to get the waitstaff--and his chefs--to understand the ways our wine menu pairs with our dishes, and to appreciate and promote the consumption of those wines. Cindy's right there with him when she says that when she sees "people eating their foods without a bottle of wine, I just want to walk over to them  and ask, 'Are you even tasting your food?'" The bleary-eyed lot of us laugh, but she's got a valuable scientific lesson to teach us: that when we take a sip of wine, the acids and tannins interacting on tongues scrape our palates clean, preparing us to experience all the subtle nuances in our carefully prepared food. I take copious notes.

She takes us through eleven different bottles (thankfully spit buckets are on hand), passing us glasses of their essential scents and undertones (cups of fruits, spices, and special notes like chocolate, mushroom, and coffee beans) and asking us what we can detect in our little sips.

We poke our noses like hummingbirds into our glasses, take deep inhales, and swish around little mouthfuls to see whether the wine feels heavy or light, velvety or silky on our tongues. I learn that I prefer the Willamette Valley pinot noir's earthy, spicy flavors, which make it ideal for our charcuterie plate, and that I go nuts over the buttery finish of the merlot from Sonoma County.

Cindy also exposes the great nerdy in-joke behind the celebration and condemnation of pinots and merlots in Alexander Payne's great wine comedy Sideways--the character played by Paul Giamatti says he adores Pinot Noirs above all other wines, in part because they're very difficult and finicky to coax into existence, but that they produce flavors of unparalleled complexity and beauty. He also utterly condemns Merlots, railing against them before his major dinner date, saying "If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fucking Merlot!" This did enormous damage to the Merlot market in the United States, but the great irony is that the character's favorite wine, the wine he resists opening until the end of the movie, is a 1961 Château Cheval Blanc, a blend of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. "The joke in this," Cindy explains, "is that Miles doesn't want to accept and appreciate his own qualities, because he's aspiring to be like this super-sensitive exclusively-available Pinot Noir...so it's basically a story about self-loathing, in the guise of a hugely nerdy wine joke."

The science of the wine tasting leaves me wildly excited about all the crazy things that can happen in the chemical interactions in the glass, on the plate, and in the mouth. Apparently a lower yield of grapes of the vine means a greater concentration of flavor in each grape; Cabernet Sauvignons are almost always blends with other varietals (because of their high tannins and acidity) except in the soil of the Napa Valley, and they taste more like citrus to women and more like vanilla and apple pie to men; Syrahs smell "like a pig on fire in a blackberry bush," carrying notes of bacon fat, berries, and spicy hot wood. One should never serve Cabernets with oysters, because the tannins of the wine will mix with the iodine salts of the seafood and make them taste metallic--apparently that rule about only serving white wine with seafood isn't just good behavior, it's also good chemical sense.

Good chemical sense becomes the modus operandi of the day. Our biggest project in the kitchen for tonight's dinner is to whip up two new batches of icy treats--a fresh batch of chocolate ice cream (to replace what we exhausted yesterday), and a new flavor of sorbet, kiwi, to replace the plum on our menu. Annie's recipe for chocolate ice cream will come with a few modifications--she wants to infuse the flavor of cardamom into the ice cream, and she strips the eggs from the recipe, to make it less of a custard. I've made ice cream before--in a tiny 2-person ice cream maker, with mixed to disappointing results--and I don't know what's been going wrong. But as Annie walks me through the process--first infusing the whole milk and sugar with the cardamom seeds and cocoa powder, and bringing the whole pot to a boil before pouring it over chunks of semisweet chocolate--I can see just what a difference it makes to know the interactions of temperature and texture when putting together a recipe.

I've never been much of a science geek. (Even now, I can picture Nick laughing at home, chemist that he is, saying "That's an understatement.) Any argument you can make to me about why technology is, or why a process has to go in a certain order, will be followed up by a bleary-eyed "Why?" and an argument about the need for highly specific rules. But cooking is the only kind of chemistry I've ever totally embraced--maybe it's because the results are so much more fun to observe, or maybe because I'm just that much more motivated to get the formulas right. (If only I'd graduated a year later from high school, there would've been a course called "Chemistry of Cooking" that could've filled my science requirement and set me on my culinary path much earlier.) Lately I've been pouring over the pages of Herve This's Kitchen Mysteries, a book Nick gave me as a Christmas present, for clues that will not just help me cook better, but also help me understand when things go wrong. I'm still perplexed when my cobbler biscuits puff up unevenly (with layers flaking and puffing up more on the right than the left), but learning that's a sign that butter hasn't been incorporated consistently through the dough (when baked, chunks of butter will produce pockets of air and moisture--great when you're making croissants, not so good when you're making pie or tart dough). When you squeeze lemon juice over a sliced avocado, the citric acid slows the breakdown of the enzyme that causes the fruit to turn brown. When you blend butter into the final minutes of a sauce, knowing as "mounting the sauce", you make sure that the presence of the glossy, shiny flavors of the fat and salt remain of the sauce's smell, taste, and mouthfeel.

Just as we have to combine bleach with cold water, rather than hot, to keep it as a sterilizing cleaning agent, so too do you need to structure your cooking process in the right way to keep it effective. Annie has to add the cardamom into the heating milk, rather than at the end of the process when she stirs in the cold cream, because the flavor will more easily infuse into a hot liquid than cold, and bind to the fat in the hot milk in a more pronounced way. And when she pours the prepared liquid into the ice cream machine, she has to be careful to watch both the icing and mixing functions, alternating "so it doesn't get too icy, and doesn't get too much air-whipped into it." If she lets the container get too cold, it may start to incorporate ice crystals; if she lets it whip too long, it may start to get chunky, like butter. It's all about keeping the liquid at the perfect temperature and aeration until it reaches a smooth, creamy consistency.

The same thing is true when we have to whip up the kiwi sorbet--instead of blending the sugar and water into a simple syrup (as people often do when making sorbets), she has Wally puree the fresh fruit, add sugar, and then slowly pour in water until it reaches the ideal level of sweetness. This, she says, "is to keep it from getting too sweet, so that what you taste is the freshness of the fruit, not the sugar." She also has him add just a touch of vodka to the mix, so that it doesn't produce too many ice crystals in the churning process--a genius touch, when you think about how many times your perfect container of sorbet might have huge chunks of ice crystals (i.e. the "protective ice") growing on top. (Annie also notes that this is a perfect way to make sure that frozen baked desserts don't freeze completely. For example, if you're slipping a piece of cake into the freezer that you'd like to enjoy later without defrosting, you can gently paint it with a water-and-vodka mixture. The vodka will keep it from freezing to the core.)

As we're cleaning up later in the night, I see Angela place an enormous pot of veal stock on the stove. This, she explains, will bubble all night, just barely simmering, so it can reduce to a demi-glace, a spoon-coating sauce infused with the thick, rich flavors of the veal but with the liquid content reduced by half. I imagine that there is a technical term for how high the heat needs to be to maintain this balance over the next 14 hours, i.e. a slow boil or a gentle simmer. "Just barely bubbling--farts in a bathtub," Angela says. I wonder if it was a master chef that coined this term, but when I take a look into the pot I see that, yes, this is exactly what she was describing.

Through the last three weeks I've been attempting to steep myself in a lifetime of cooking education: I'm trying to understand the physics of sawing a knife down the curves of a grapefruit, the reasons for tearing rather than slicing salad greens, and the difference that a soil based in clay versus limestone can make on the flavor of a fine wine. But even with all the chemical interactions in play, sometimes even the most sophisticated cooking methods can be described with bodily humor. No matter what the terms may be, understanding the reasoning behind the steps of a recipe are doing a lot more than just making me a better cookbook editor--they're making me a better, more deliberate, and far more informed cook.

As I sip my end-of-day glass of Chris's wine of the night--an excellent Côtes du Rhône from an area just near Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the best place for the wine in the Rhône wine region--I'm finding nuances in the flavor I never have before. I can detect the blackberry and the currants, the tangy acidity washing up the sides of my tongue, and the corduroy softness of the liquid on my palate. I'm also savoring it as a complement to my family meal salad, tangy with a few chunks of roasted hazelnuts and blue cheese. There's complexity here at the molecular level, and I can't decide whether I'm supposed to analyze it, articulate it, or just enjoy it.


P.S. One of the main ingredients of a great recipe is the diners, and those diners who rave about the meal afterwards are the best customers you could hope for. It's only though a community of supporters and readers that you can get as far as you have with telling a story...so not only do I have to thank you, the readers who are sticking with these reports from the front of the line, but also to @TKReviews, @mrsfridaynext, @FaithBlackGirl, @wathiranganga, and @fignaz for tweeting out links to this blog. Every day you entertain and enlighten me with your Tweets, and by sharing my stuff, you give me a chance to help out all of your super-enlightened followers as well. I'm lucky to have your support...

A Slow Night for Tossing Salads, Filling Sausage, and Assessing Futures

I enter the kitchen Wednesday with slightly more ease than I did my first day. I've completed my first night of fetching things from the walk-in, taking tickets, and following instructions, and the novice feeling has dissipated just enough. I'm excited about the night ahead, and as Wally walks me through the basic prep stuff--gathering herbs from the garden, loading up the prep station with our required ingredients, etc.--a little confident voice in my head is telling me, you're going to rock this house tonight.

And then...the restaurant is dead.

It's a nearly silent night. With only two reservations to start the evening, we have too much time between tickets. Even when I'm plating the special dessert--a baked Alaska-style meringue set atop a lemon poundcake, with stewed strawberries and blueberries, and garnished with borage flowers and a sprig of tarragon--I have more than enough time to get everything out onto the floor. Even shucking oysters has become a less-than-urgent task. We still sprinkle salt on the plated ice to stop it from melting, but it's unnecessary at the rate of these requests. We fill up pans with sweet hazelnuts, which look more like almonds to me, and roast them for future salad use.

It's become a night for side projects--Geddes greeted me when I first came in tonight with a proposition. "How would you feel about some cookie recipes?" It turns out that we're going to experiment with baking with lard--but not just any lard. After raising several of his own Mangalitsa pigs this past year, Geddes has been blessed with several buckets worth of creamy white pig fat--the best and purest lard you can find. Lard is often a substitute for butter in baking, so Geddes wants us to experiment with a few different cookies, and see how they come out. He leaves Wally and me with a request for "crinkle" cookies, peanut butter cookies, and chocolate chip cookies, and points us to the lard bucket.

Lard isn't the most appealing-looking or smelling of ingredients--as it appeared when I first fetched it from the cold room, it looks more like a bucket of pure fat than anything you'd want sandwiched between the layers of your croissant or biscuit. It also carries with it that vegetal smell that comes with corn oil--not sweet enough to seem like it would belong in any kind of dessert pastry. But that's our challenge: to find out what including it does to the batter, and finding ways to adjust it and make it better. I've never been much of a baker--it was only last month that I truly accepted the virtues of the homemade tart crust--but experimenting with a new ingredient has piqued my interest. And I'm endlessly fascinated with all the different ways the Mangalitsa pigs make their presence felt in the Inn's menu. There's pork belly and bacon in several dishes, but even those ingredients keep giving after they're cooked. I watch Wally collect the fat from a baking pan full of crisp bacon, and pass it to one of the entrée chefs, who can use it in lieu of butter to roast up some potatoes or vegetables.

I whip up the "crinkle" cookies--mixing the lard with melted chocolate and cocoa powder, brown sugar, vanilla, eggs, flour, and baking powder--and then roll the finished balls of dough first in powdered, then in granulated sugar. When they bake, the sugar coating on the cookies cracks and crinkles prettily over the top, exposing the chocolaty layer beneath. The peanut butter, meanwhile, is a little trickier. You're often relying on the combination of sweet butter and sweet commercial peanut butter (Jif, Skippy, anything where the ingredients aren't just "nuts" and "oil") to produce that irresistibly moist cookie experience. But all we have to work with is the lard and the natural peanut butter that we've purchased for savory cooking. It’s not ideal, but I figure we can try and doctor them with something if they’re not moist enough…

And tonight is a night where recipe testing is how you fill dead time. As I’m scooping out three test cookies onto a Silpat, and Wally is mixing up the last of the chocolate chip cookie version, I can already see it’s nearing 7:00. We’ve made two, maybe three salads the entire night, and perhaps one dessert. I was warned that the kitchen’s slowest nights were Wednesdays and Thursdays, and I was relishing the opportunity for downtime: there’s so much to learn, so many dishes I haven’t yet prepared, and I want a chance to interact with everyone in the kitchen. As I’m putting away the last of the flour, Chris, one of the entrée course cooks, rounds the corner. He’s got the warm, well-fed appearance that I associate with all good senior chefs from my time in waitressing—never trust a super-skinny chef. And he’s got a big prep bucket of carrots in his arms. “So, Jess,” he says, “do you know how to tournade vegetables?”

I scan through my flimsy dictionary of kitchen terminology. Tournade is to tournée, to whittle vegetables into well-angled, football-shaped chunks, ideal for roasting and more organic (and thus more pleasing) to the eye than straight cuts. I’d gone through this while under Geddes’s tutelage in New York—and from what I remember, I spent more time swearing at my unnecessarily deep cuts into the vegetable than actually trimming the things properly. But I’m willing to give it another go—I spend the next half hour tournee’ing vegetables with Chris. He’s spent his fair share of time in professional kitchens, and trained by way of classical French techniques, but we swap real grievances over his time as a chef at the Olive Garden. Apparently it’s nothing but opening pre-sealed, pre-portioned envelopes and throwing dishes together in highly regimented, vacuum-packed fashion. I tell him the story of my friend who waited tables at the Olive Garden in Times Square: in a city full of authentically great Italian restaurants, my friend found that he could never tell his customers where they really should be going for their “Italian” dinners. But Chris has spent his time on the line, and he gets the problems that lead to the pre-portioned solutions. Maybe this is the future of where cooking is headed—that procedure, rather than creativity, will be the best way to guarantee satisfied customers.

A few more tickets come in—I get to throw a blowtorch on my first solo slice of chocolate cashew tart—but for the most part things are too slow to worth worrying about. Wally and I are having fun at the cold station, and though we’ve only shucked about two dozen oysters tonight, I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it. Yet once we’ve baked our sample batches of the lard-based cookies, I’m a little disappointed. The crinkle cookies are OK, though not as moist as we’d hoped, but the peanut butter are undeniably dry. Once I get home, I look for solutions—should we add cream? More lard? More eggs?—and plan to suggest some bananas to the mix. Peanut butter and banana isn’t much of an ingenious solution, however, and even as we’re coasting through the evening service, I’m lusting after something more challenging.

I round a corner and find Geddes, home from his daughter’s theater performance, snaking ground meat into some sausage casings.  “Can I help?” I ask. “Sure,” he says, “come take the other end of this thing.” He’s filled his vintage-looking sausage machine with his special blend of Mangalitsa meat and spices, and attached to the other end is a pouch that looks, to my immediately flushing face, like an endless condom. “Sausage casing,” he says, “Pig intestine.” My job is to hold the filled casing straight as Geddes turns a crank and the meat pumps forward into the casing.

 I need to hold the newly filled casings straight so that we produce a smooth, lump-free sausage and minimize air bubbles along the links. It’s hard to keep up as he turns the crank—the sausages seem to shoot forth like toothpaste out of a tube—but we end up with a sheet pan of beautiful rounds. Geddes is planning to tie off these links into individual salamis and let them sit in the storeroom overnight. They’ll sit without refrigeration, which is necessary to jumpstart the culture that will cause the fermentation of the meat and the eventual drying process, and then will be hung up to complete their drying. Geddes shows me the non-functioning refrigerator that he uses as a meat locker—from his pigs he’s curing prosciutto, coppa, and several other cuts of meat that will be available for the restaurants use. It’s a long, arduous process, but he’s made every little bit of these animals last, and I’m in awe of it.

I’m even more impressed because the future of his business remains so uncertain. “This summer has been scary slow,” he says. “Is it any better than last year?” I ask. (I imagine the recession hasn’t been kind to the Orcas vacationer’s budget.)  “Well, last year wasn’t great, but this year isn’t good, either. It’s enough to keep me worrying,” he says. For the first time since I’ve seen him, he really is looking troubled. We can see it in the meal tickets—less people are ordering appetizers and desserts, more are airing toward the cheaper entrees, and all are definitely more aware of the cost of eating well. A regular patron complained that we were charging $5 for a side plate of seasonal vegetables. Chris finds this frustrating and hilarious. “I want to tell her, ‘Go out and look at the gas prices, lady! Almost $5 a gallon—that’s why your food’s so expensive! Tractor diesel isn’t cheap!’” he exclaims, as he flips a few burgers for the bar menu. And because of the unusually long cold and rainy season this and last year, those signature summer vegetables—corn, tomatoes, fresh basil—aren’t ready to be harvested and incorporated into menus. The tomato plants are still hanging out in the greenhouse, their stalks tied upward with string to encourage their growth, and sheltered from the unpredictable overnight frosts.

But Geddes says, as he ties off the long ropes of sausage into individual links, twisting each to tighten and seal the casing, he won't harvest any vegetables until they're really ready to go out. He’s committed to the quality of the ingredients, and not putting them out until they’re at their peak. His whole rationale for breeding the Mangalitsas, and now cross-breeding one of them with a boar on Lopez Island, is to explore “the genetics” behind what makes his food taste good. “Some of what we grow—like the sorrel we used tonight—is just plain good,” he says, “but then with stuff like our seafood, I find that where you get it really makes the difference, no matter how you cook it.” Angela, the other chef sharing entrée duties with Chris, completely backs this up. “The dishes here have a lot of elements to them, but we’re not really doing anything crazy to the food. It’s very simple preparation with very good ingredients.”

Her station proves how true this is: two tubs of compound butters (butters mixed with herbs or spices, then saved to be added just as a dish is nearly finished); containers of fresh fava beans and tarragon (and a few springs of those gorgeous chive blossoms); pour bottles of olive oil, white and red wine, and vinegars; and generous tubs of freshly ground pepper and sea salt. The elements of flavor, nothing that requires special chemical treatment or super-fancy equipment.

Ultimately, that’s what the Inn is providing—unpretentious, but highly sophisticated dishes made with superb ingredients. It costs a premium to buy it, and a premium to run a restaurant like this, but it’s one of the few places on the Islands that you can find such a meal. Over family meal, which is a bounty tonight—salmon necks, fresh ravioli with favas and asparagus, and salad—Geddes says that a woman tonight complained that there wasn’t enough seafood on the menu. “If you look at the menu tonight—a slow night—we’ve got at least four dishes with seafood in them available. No other restaurant on the Island can match that. But that’s not really what she wants.”

“She wants a fish and chips shack.” I said.

He smiled and grimaced. “And we could do fish and chips—but the locals wouldn’t support a business like that. There just isn’t the population to make it work.” It's true--the regulars coming to the Inn aren't looking for fish and chips. They want what it's known for--elegant, delicious food. When Geddes does seafood, as in tonight's special salad--slices of fresh salmon tossed with slivered vegetables and a bit of Mangalitsa bacon--it's a far cry from your local fried fish place.

“When you were growing up,” I tentatively ask, “Did you imagine yourself cooking stuff like this? Did you ever just want to…I dunno, open a family-style restaurant, like a diner or a breakfast place?”

Geddes shakes his head. “No. I wouldn’t have been happy with a diner. Growing up, my father cooked for us, and it was simple stuff, but then later I realized that he was braising, he was slow-cooking things. And he’s a professor, not a professional cook. I started cooking pretty late, but I’ve always wanted to cook something special.”

I think about those first complicated dishes I made. The first batch of homemade tomato sauce, made in a boyfriend’s kitchen, where he showed me how to slip off the skins after a few gentle scores. The Pad Thai made in a dorm kitchen, where guys nearby would flock to the smell of seared bean sprouts and hot chiles. The duck breast with the perfectly crispy skin, resting on a bed of pear and sweet potato hash. The first pot of boeuf bourguignon. These were all my signifiers of a budding talent, a passion that felt indulgent and ambitious all at once—something I could build a life on. But listening to Geddes talk, I realize almost all these dishes have been made to satisfy myself, or one or two of my closest friends. I’ve never had to cook for an audience I didn’t know, and never had to risk my livelihood on finding ways to satisfy them.

I return home wondering about how you find that balance in a kitchen’s lifetime, between what you want to cook, and what people want to eat. Angela says to me, “I hear that New York diners are very demanding,” and I agree with her. They can be very entitled, in part because, with so much food conversation in our daily lives, it’s easy to believe that you know everything about what’s going on in the kitchen. But when you start to dig into the motivations behind the making of the food, it’s a much more complicated portrait.