Independence Day: Goodbye to All That

Monday's July 4th celebration comes with much fanfare, and sorrow. I spend the morning packing up my clothes, including the ones that somehow never got worn--the button-up white shirt, the black pants, the high heels. Melissa and I drive around a bit, running last minute errands. I drop off my bike--o loathsome, uncooperative vehicle of non-transportation--at Wildlife, and they hand me a check for $25 in return. Too much, I think, but I use the check as an excuse to buy some pretty earrings at Orcas Island Arts & Gifts. The store owner's daughter, a jewelry designer who plays with sea glass and all kinds of precious stones, talks me into a gorgeous pair of quartz earrings, golden citrine and blue-green chalcedony, translucent and smooth in my hand.

I look through the gem book behind the desk for the meaning of these stones--chalcedony is considered a powerful cameo; Greeks in the 3rd-4th century used to wear it to prevent drowning. Citrine, meanwhile, gets its name from its lemony color, and is meant to increase self-confidence, desire, and creativity--generally known as the wealth or abundance stone. I've picked stones that put me at a crossroads, between what has happened and what might be coming around the bend.

Melissa and I get a text from Annie--she and Ken have loaded their kayaks onto the truck, and will meet us down at Cascade Lake for a bit of summer sun before the barbecue tonight. We drive down to the lake, crowded with fishermen and families by the swimming area, and pull the long heavy boats down from the rigging. Melissa and I slide them into the water, which is much warmer and softer than expected, and paddle out into the lake. It only takes a few minutes to move away from the shore, the sound of laughing kids and sizzling barbecues dying off, and soon all I can hear is the ripple of the water, the low vibration of a dragonfly skimming the surface, the zip of fishing lines as they fly into the air and plop down toward their targets. We steer into an inlet where the water is much stiller and deeper--I can see the roots of water lilies snaking yards down into the darkness, their roots imperceptible but unshakable. Whole tree trunks have crashed down into the water, forming underwater bridges and walkways. The air is warm and sweet and redolent with clover and fir and madrone trees.

I lay back and pull my feet out of the boat, letting them rest on the hot plastic. I want to keep my mind this quiet, this still and appreciative, forever. The peace of just floating here, letting the gentle current carry me away from shore, needs to stay even after I board the last ferry tonight. But my mind is racing with ideas: could I open a restaurant? what would it be? what could I cook? The fact is that a career in cooking wouldn't mean this peace--it wouldn't necessarily mean peace at all. There is just as strong a chance of neurosis, anxiety, and disappointment in a kitchen as there is in an office. What I'm thriving from is the contrast...and, perhaps, the distance. The sky here is wide, open; the trees are taller than office buildings, but not nearly as foreboding. Even when I'm in shadow, I can feel the warmth of the sunlight on my skin, radiated back from the rich brown soil. Wrapped in the Island's embrace, I start to tear up, knowing that tonight, I'll have to leave it behind me.

Melissa and I paddle back to shore, where Annie, Ken, and Amanda are hanging out as little Ava are paddling in the swimming area. Annie wades in up to her knees, the hem of her cotton dress darkening with water. "Blow bubbles, Ava!" she says. "No!" says Ava, paddling away like a puppy, her head bobbing above the surface so her face doesn't have to get wet. A few seconds later, though, she's dipping her face in the water, shaking it off and rubbing her eyes like a damp kitten. But she doesn't shed a tear, or run to get out and dry off. She stays in the water, content as she is to paddle around.

We load the kayaks back onto the truck and bid them farewell until the BBQ tonight. Melissa and I return to the Inn, and as I walk around, taking my last batch of pictures for posterity, Melissa carves out a chunk of a straggling chive plant for me to take home. I wrap the tender roots in a damp paper towel, cover them with plastic wrap, and wrap the long stems in tinfoil. This will insulate it over the next 48 hours of travel--whether it will flourish on my window grate, I'm still unsure. But it's a small consolation to bring even a small piece of the Island back with me.

Melissa and I get dolled up--the first time on the Island I've worn more than a light coating of mascara and sunscreen. My skin has darkened considerably since I arrived a month ago--where I once resembled the creamy interior of an almond, now I look like its toasted skin. It'd be a Kardashian-esque tan if my nose didn't bear a bit of a burn from the morning's boating, proof that the color is hard-earned rather than store-bought. Despite putting on a few pounds from family-meal, I look healthy, athletic, adapted to the outdoors. I look nothing like myself. Or maybe exactly like myself.

We load my suitcases into the car. I give Wally a last hug before departing, telling him to check his low-boy for a last-minute present from me. (Wrapping up after clean-up from pizza, I slipped a bucket with his two oyster knives into his low-boy, one less thing for his daily prep work, with a handy piece of advice written inside: "Don't drop the nuts!"). We pull away from the Inn, the windows now, the breeze blowing hard and cool in my face. Amanda's house is already crawling with visitors by the time we arrive, so we slip off our sandals and sip cold beers in lawn chairs.

Annie enlists us in a game of badminton--my dress is too long to play, so I tie it up with a hair elastic way above my gym shorts, and dive for the birdie each time it comes close. We are embarassingly bad, but the workout we get from laughing at our own missed shots is more than enough exercise. We cool off in the shadow, nibble on crackers and cheese, and tickle Ava as she comes close.

"Ava," I ask. "Do you know how to play the hand-slap game?"

"No," she grins, and I show her how to rest her hands on mine, pulling them quickly away before I can flip them over and catch her with a playful slap. When it's my turn to get slapped, she simply grabs my fingers rather than flipping her hands over--I don't want to get into the actual rules of the game with her. It's too much fun to watch her squeal with delight as she gets me over and over again...and she gets the same glee out of Foot War. We sit on the ground and put our feet up against each other, her pushing her little heels against my bigger, until my legs drop to the ground, defeated. She feels like a champion, and that's what counts.

Everyone makes her feel like a champion--even in the midst of open bottles and half-filled Dixie cups, no one is too busy to play with her, or to interact with each other. Even though the grill is churning out sausages and hot dogs, people are slow to leave their chairs, or to leave the badminton racket. Ava wants to play everyone, and most are up to the challenge.

Everyone seems in a state of half-play--Angela and her boyfriend show up, nuzzling each other sweetly on a blanket. Justine from Coffelt Farms cracks open a beer with some of the guys, laughing and throwing in her own jibes with gusto. The Scot, who compliments me on my dress but remains a gentlemen throughout the night, is all buddy-buddy with Jay and the other guests.

Amanda and Annie, sisters but with dramatically different appearances, are all hugs and smiles with anyone they can get within arm's reach.

Ken grabs the camera from me for a minute and snaps a few candid shots of Annie. They're all shots I've seen in the kitchen--bemused, skeptical, joyous--and clearly looks he loves.

I make a wish for Annie and Ken to work out, to keep their rhythm and appreciation of each other for many years. I make a wish, in general, for Annie to get everything she wants, to feel contented in her life on Orcas, and wherever else it might take her. It seems cheesy to issue such a mental benediction, but I don't have any real way to repay her for her generosity, except to hope it all comes back to her ten-fold. That, and a "New York care package" for Ken. "Bagels, black-and-white cookies, whatever you've got," he says, smirking good-naturedly.

The sun starts to fade, and before I know it, the guests are packing it in for the fireworks. Melissa moves my bags from her car to Justine's, who's heading to the ferry to pick up some friends just arriving from the mainland. As one departs, another few arrive...I give Melissa a bear hug, whispering "Keep in touch." She smiles sweetly--she's started blogging this week, and I couldn't be more excited to read about her adventures after I depart. It's just one more way of staying close even as I have to go far away. The cars pull out, Annie nowhere in sight. Even as I feel like I've just arrived on her level, she's departed, off to see something new, notice something exciting. I leave her a teary message from Melissa's phone: "I didn't get to say goodbye...but keep in touch. Let's talk soon. And thank you, for everything."

Justine races me to the ferry, crossing through Eastsound, driving out of town, off to a loading dock with blinking lights. She helps me unload my bags just as her two friends come running up, all excited and sweatshirted. They speed off for the fireworks, and I plant myself on a nearby bench. Somewhere in the chilly waterside wind, I start to cry. The ferry pulls up, lowering its driveway, and I lumber onto the deck. Instead of sitting outside to watch the fireworks, I find a bench in the main galley and chat with an Anacortes man, who spends time on Orcas every chance he get. I don't remember the details of the conversation, partly because of the beers, partly because of the weird departing haze. But I remember thinking the whole time we were talking, "I will not get to have a conversation this spontanenous again for quite a while."

Outside, lights are shooting up into the air, spreading like lake ripples across the sky. The slow pop and boom of each explosion seeps through my teary daze, and even after I've made it to Anacortes, to the Inn where I will spend a restless night, their shimmery trickle will remain with me. Even without seeing the fireworks, I know they were exquisite.

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...

Rule #2: Don't Drop the Nuts--On Moving On from Your Mistakes

As I enter the kitchen this evening, tying my bandanna over my still-damp hair, it dawns on me that I only have five nights left in this kitchen. What makes this an even odder realization is that I can't immediately rattle off what I've learned: I know that it takes me less effort to wash a tub of greens, to scoop out a bowl of ice cream, to crush a tub of ice.  My knife skills are improved, my time-to-oyster-shucked ratio has dropped dramatically, and I'm starting to understand the idea of small, carefully utilized movements in the confined space of a kitchen. I call out "Corner" in a loud clear voice without near collisions, and cleaning my space has become an automatic part of the cooking process.

But I'm nowhere near as versed as I thought I'd be when I first set out on this adventure, and I'm certainly in no position to lead a kitchen. I lack the absolute certainty of where the basil flowers should go on a plate of lemon shaker tart, or how to keep that neat margin of white space on the plate. And I'm nowhere closer to making duck confit, portioning out a chicken, or searing a steak. My education has come more from the mistakes I've made than the new opportunities presented...

But that also seems to be the nature of a kitchen: that you only learn through errors, through the moments you failed to be completely present. While crushing a sheetpan worth of roasted hazelnuts, using a rolling pin to whack each one into submission, I skim through my emails and find a rejection from one of my favorite websites. I'd sent them my Saturday night post on "Where I'm Writing From," and they declined to run it on their site. It'd nothing so devastating or surprising--no literary site got a good reputation by being all-inclusive. But it leaves me unfocused enough that, when rounding a corner with the tub of crushed nuts, it slips out of my hands and pours all over the floor. Just like that, 3-4 cups of hazelnuts and 20 minutes of work, gone. Cursing under my breath, I slip on rubber gloves and salvage those nuts that haven't touched the floor, then sweep up the remains in a dustpan.

"That's nothing," Geddes says cheerfully, adjusting the sous vide machine. "We had a kitchen intern once who dropped an entire speed rack full of hors d'oeuvres for a part of 300 people."

"Oh wow...so then this is small potatoes compared to that! I mean," I say, trying not to look too casual about wasting a lot of expensive nuts, "at least me dropping nuts can be quickly fixed."

"Yeah, true. His mistake become everybody's problem," laughs Geddes.

In a kitchen, mistakes happen all the time. Ovens get turned too high when two people are sharing it, a sheet of croutons gets forgotten and overbrowned, a ticket gets misread and a dish goes out too early. Even if you've spent a lifetime in professional kitchens, the likelihood that you will be on the inciting end of a fuck-up is very, very high. When that happens, much like in an office environment, someone gets a talking-to. Tempers can run hot, and walk-in refrigerators becomes useful for post-rush cooldowns. But the crucial part is not to take it personally--your dropped pan of ingredients is not your loss of self-worth. You can only assess the problem, patch up for the remainder of service, and focus on the next dish to be made.

This ethos--of fucking up, acknowledging said fuck-up, and moving on--is useful in a career that is ultimately never about you, but about satisfying the person on the other side of the wall. As Annie shows me how to cleanly quenelle some frozen yogurt, she emphasizes not "overworking" the scoop. "It'll get too soft if you keep going back and trying to fix it, so just turn the tub around and try again," she says, turning our container of honeyed frozen yogurt around so I can dive my hot spoon into a fresh smooth ridge. By curling the tip of the spoon over the yogurt as I release it onto the dessert, I can leave it with a glossy point far better than before. Finishing with a flourish, ultimately, seems more important than self-flagellating over the scoop's shortcomings. There's no real moment of mastery, except the moment of moving on.

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...

Monday Farm Tour, Pt. 1: Black Dog Farm

Monday morning, Annie comes knocking on our door a full three hours earlier than we'd expected. I'm still lying in bed browsing through the day's news, but she's right to come early: when the day's agenda involves visiting five different working farms, you want to get there before the sun gets too hot. I jump in the shower, fill up a Mason jar with coffee, and Melissa and I pile into Annie's car to hit the road. She wants to introduce us to the places and people that provide the restaurant's ingredients...and at a restaurant where its central philosophy is that good ingredients are the basis of good food, I want to get the backstory behind what we're cooking.

Our first stop, as we sipped our coffees and munched on croissants, was Black Dog Farm, run by Rob and Brenda Harlow along with their son Ian and his family. Annie's known them for a very long time, and so Rob was more than happy to walk us around the property and look at his crops. They bought the farm over 20 years ago, and have kept some of the original buildings on the property. The vast space of the farm gives them more growing space, yet they can only plant as much as they can sell--to consumers, to restauranteurs, to individuals hoping to expand their home gardens. My own little window box could barely handle the size of these plants, which are available at the Saturday morning farmers' market in Eastsound.

 

The Inn at Ship Bay gets tons of vegetables from Black Dog, and every row of vegetables--flourishing patches of lettuce, greenhouses full of tomato plants, strawberries and peas just ripening on the vine--is enough to make my stomach growl with hunger.

Rob and Brenda are trying to grow a lot of different things, vegetables and fruits that haven't always grown well on the island. Her flower garden is lush with roses, some of which are snaking up the sides of the house, and lupines almost as tall as me.

Meanwhile Rob is still tinkering with what he can do on the farm, including shifting to a flock of free-range chickens. They're big beautiful birds, happy and clearly well-fed...

In the greenhouse, he's tinkering with growing eggplant (not easy to cultivate on Orcas), and he shows us the vines, male and female, of kiwi plants that will soon be delivering bushels of fruit.

Among the row of potted bushes and trees along the periphery of the property, Annie suddenly lunges at a plant with wide, flowery leaves. "Are these Garry Oaks?" she asks, rubbing a leaf between her fingers. Rob nods. She's giddy with enthusiasm--these trees, once widely found all over the San Juans, have been rapidly disappearing. Whether this is actually a product of sudden oak death, no one can say, but if Rob has them for purchase, that could very well mean reforestation is a possibility...

It seems like every word on a farm starts with "re-"--replanting, redeveloping, reusing. At his little farm stand out on Enchanted Forest Road, Rob's son Ian and his wife decorate the shed with old kitchen tools--though some are rusted out, they carry a gorgeous vintage patina that turns an old shed into something quite special.

Repurposing old material requires some knowledge, some ability to spot the gems in the trash heap, and sometimes just good timing. Rob managed to buy his recycled windmill from an older island farm--he showed up, piled the parts into his truck, and drove away.

As we exit the property, we stop by the farm stand, which provides fresh produce, flowers, and a few homemade goods to the community twice a week. "We're thinking about putting in a juice bar over in the corner," Rob says, and Annie immediately lights up. "You should do that! And in that giant freezer, you could keep extra stuff like pesto in your off-season." As Annie talks to Rob about maybe running off a batch to feature at the Sunday pizza special, I'm loving her enthusiasm for the possibilities that this farm presents. Her entrepreneurial side is firing when she visits these farmers, and not just because of what she could make with their produce--while I know she loves what she's doing in the kitchen, she has a big, broad vision for what she might be able to do for this island, and one of the things she's hoping for is to engage the island's entire economy in the promotion of her food. Good ingredients are part of any great dish, and what Black Dog's offering could prove essential to transforming the island...

On Rules and Regulations

From my post on Thursday, you may be thinking that everything that happens in a professional kitchen happens by approximation and assessment, that the check-up on a station and the assembly of a meal ticket is done partly by guessing. But there are times when, much like my occasionally maddening day job, it’s much more about the standardized rules.

Let’s talk about knife holding, for example. Since my finger debacle on Wednesday, I’ve been holding my knife more loosely, with less precision and control than I’m supposed to have, wrapping my index finger around the handle rather than pinching the blade in conjunction with my thumb. But when Annie sees me holding my knife this way, she asks “Are you comfortable holding the blade like that?”

“Comfortable” is a relative term. I’ve been holding a knife mostly incorrectly for the vast majority of my cooking life. I’ve also been gripping spoons and whisks incorrectly and using my flat fingers, rather than rounded fingertips, to hold food in place as I cut. This has, on occasion, resulted in nicked fingers and aching wrists, but the wrong way is what my muscle memory tells me to do. I’m suddenly jerked back to the days of childhood piano lessons, with my teachers telling me to keep my fingertips high, light and arched over the keys. I couldn’t quite understand how this would make me a better piano player, as I’d still keep producing noise no matter how my fingers were shaped.

And it takes me just as long to wrap my head around the rules of the kitchen—chopping knives need to be hand-washed (to keep the blades from dulling in the dishwasher); cutting butter into dough needs to happen quickly but incorporated slowly (so it doesn’t melt, but isn’t so lumpy it’ll create pockets of unwanted air); parchment paper needs to be secured to the sheet pan with cooking spray, but only when it will go in the convection oven (where hot air will be circulating around the pan, threatening to blow the sides of the paper up and onto the baking biscuits). It’s not so much that I’m doing things wrong by default, but rather that I’m doing them illogically—not considering the science and method that’s gone into finding the right way. As I’m sifting flour and sugar into a bowl, I don’t consider the size of the bowl in relation to the size of the sifter, and end up making a huge mess. Yes, I can clean it up later, and I do, but not thinking about the rational method of preparation beforehand costs me time and energy later.

It’s a crowded, busy kitchen tonight, and as Annie’s switched out the vast majority of the dessert menu for new items, there’s little I can do but watch and learn. There are so many little gestures on a plate, it’s hard to keep track of them—the thin dribble of sauce, the fanning of strawberry slices, the placement of borage flowers to fill in gaps. Some of these choices seem ornamental (though when every garnish on the plate is edible, and well-paired to the dish, nothing can be disregarded.) But the plates are undeniably beautiful—as Annie scoops out a quenelle of crème fraiche, I wonder if she’s this precise in her home kitchen. Does she slice her morning bagel with a carefully pinched knife blade? Is cream cheese spread with a perfectly even motion, ending in a tiny flourish? Or does she, like me, spread it thick and hasty, getting it all over her fingers in the process?

Many methods to preparing our desserts, ultimately, are in place precisely because they make things more beautiful, more appetizing to the eye. I’m set to cutting up fruit for a breakfast platter, and as I slice my knife through the white pith of the oranges and grapefruits, I’m frustrated by how much fruit I’m cutting away in the process. Instead of Annie’s long, clean slices of peel, leaving the fruit perfectly rounded but pith-free, I’m hacking off little chunks, leaving the fruit more oblong than cylindrical.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I say as I hack away at the grapefruit. “Keep track of so many rules for so many different things.”

“None of these rules are arbitrary,” Annie says, correcting my sliced strawberries so they all point in the same direction. “The way we’re doing things makes sense, even if it seems like more work.”

I start sawing my knife back and forth down the fruit, and the peels start coming off longer, the fruit becoming more rounded. There is, as it turns out, a method to this madness.

Friday: The Mad Rush

Morning hike into town, and I get just lost enough to work up a sweat. On the way, with no warning in sight, an enormous bald eagle swooped low over a nearby fence, carrying a whole fox in its talons. The animal snags on a fence, and the eagle loosens its grip. It's barely five feet away from me, but I'm frozen to the spot. The eagle doesn't go back to reclaim its breakfast, but instead circles back up into the air and flies off. I wait until it's out of sight (in case it decides to divebomb me), then peer in at the fox. It's clearly dead, but also cleanly dead--its belly fur remains snow white, its muzzle still wet with dew from the early-morning grass. I make far more mess with my breakfast than this eagle does, and I almost feel jealous at its efficiency. A few paces farther down the road, a few deer cross the street. A bicyclist crosses between each of them, but they don't go scampering back into the woods. Instead, they each pick their way steadily across the road, disappearing into a nearby meadow. They watch me as I pass them by, but there's nothing so threatening about me that would make them bolt.

I'm suddenly feeling very small and insignificant to the life going on around me. The animals are far more adjusted to Orcas than I am, and they've carved out routines that make sense to them. I am the intruder in this environment, not the eagles or the hawks or the deer on the highway.

And for the first time since I've been here, I feel like one when I get in the kitchen. Annie's back from her two days off, and already I can feel myself aiming for perfection in her presence. Maybe Wally expected very little of me--except, maybe, to keep up with him--but when Annie sets me to work on chopping rhubarb and strawberries, I'm a little disappointed. Shouldn't I be learning something new, showing her what I can do? I'm eager to demonstrate my skills, and probably a little overconfident, so when the dinner rush hits, I'm suddenly flustered and more than a little overwhelmed. The tickets start coming in at a rapid pace, and they're all long, complicated orders--3 plates of different combinations of ice cream, 6 different salads with different modifications, and a handful of oyster-shucking projects that leave my hands aching, even as I try to sweettalk the oysters, begging them to open. And I commit the following mistakes, in order:

1) In plating a slice of the chocolate cashew tart, I neglect to think about why the dish is positioned the way it is: instead of laying down sesame seeds as the bed for the ice cream scoop (so it doesn't wander all over the plate), I scatter them across the center. The ice cream slides everywhere, and I have to replate the whole thing.

2) I'm having a helluva time scooping ice cream--every spoonful seems to either mush into pure liquid or stick to the smooth and come off in big icy globs. Annie tells me to dip my scoop in water to make the scooping easier, but getting that perfect smooth ball is still a problem. When she scoops and plates ice cream, it could be a glamour shot in Gourmet. I toss the first plate and try again. Ice cream and sorbet, I decide, are my nemesis. They are impossible to scoop, and required on almost every dessert. Damn you, customers, who we must appease with frozen treats.

3) I'm hurrying to run a cobbler out of the convection oven, and accidentally smash the top of it with my oven mitt. I'm also putting the candied ginger into the crevices of the dish, rather than scattering it across the top, creating more problems for myself. We cover it up with ice cream and send it off. I spend the rest of the night handling the cobbler dishes with my bare hands, just to be sure nothing else gets crushed.

None of this is technically catastrophic--we still send the food out on time, and no customers send complaints back to the kitchen--but I'm hyper-aware of how many things Annie is correcting in what I do. The logic of the kitchen hasn't become intuitive to me yet: I don't immediately connect certain plates with certain dishes, or certain orders of preparation to final tasting experience. And because it isn't second nature to met yet, I start to wonder and question if all these steps are necessary. Why does it matter that I use a chilled plate for the blue greens and organic greens salads, but not the spinach salad? Why should it matter that I scoop a round ball of ice cream versus an oval one? But then a second wave of self-flagellation comes over me--why is it so hard for me to remember and repeat these steps? Do I assume that, because I've eaten in fancy big-city restaurants, each element on the plate should be second-nature to me? And what kind of a jerk would I be if I treated the deliberate choices of these chefs as ephemera to my own appreciation of the dish?

Disgust and defeat wash over me as I stand at the prep station, staying by the wall as Annie and Wally clean up the remaining big orders during the rush period. I feel like an intern again, and when I'm called upon to whip up a spinach salad (greens + roasted cipollini onions + mustard dressing/herbs/S&P, garnished with hardboiled egg and bacon), I'm floundering and swearing like a longshoreman. I try to pile my greens as Wally has told me--"criss-cross, like you're playing Jenga"--and they slide out of my constructed tower into a plate-spreading mess.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," I say, as I try to reassemble my tower while spooning on the chopped eggs. The greens collapse under the weight of the egg--it's now more like a trashpile than a tower. "Fuck you greens," I mutter, trying to fluff them up with my fingers. I fish the hot chunks of bacon out of the pan with my bare hands, swearing even more as the bacon grease stings my fingertips.

"You know," Wally says as he sidles up, "you can use the tongs to place those." He reassembles my salad and tops it with a nasturtium blossom. It looks perfect, effortless.

I guffaw a little--partly because he's right, and partly because I was too focused on doing things correctly to also do things logically. "No shit, Sherlock," I laugh. "I'm just doing things the hard way." I don't know how he moves the salad around so gently, but I wish I had his touch. He caresses the greens--I'm manhandling them.

"It'll get easier," says Wally as he loads up another bowl with greens.

Either that or I'll start doing things that make more sense, I think.

Even though I'm covering the non-rush orders fairly well, I'm still disappointed in myself enough to keep making mistakes. Fishing four hot cobblers out of the convection oven, I sear the top of my hand on the grill rack, leaving a tender pink welt. Annie watches me shake my head in shame as I run the burn under cold water.

"Anything I can do?" I ask her, as the sting starts to dissipate.

"Nope...Wally's prepping a fruit plate, and I'm taking care of wedding prep for tomorrow..." She watches me as I straighten up, my face blank with frustration, exhaustion, or both. "And, you know, we're just making food."

She's looking at me with a wry, weary smile, the kind that you only get once you start to see your job as a job. It's a smile I'm sure I've held many times in publishing--a smile that says, Yes, what I do is important, but it's not the end of the world. 

"Don't beat yourself up," she says softly. "This isn't New York--and I'm not saying that because we're less professional, or less ambitious or competitive. It's just that...you don't have to be stressed out here. You can move at a more normal pace. You have time to learn things. And we make mistakes all the time. The trick is learning how to get over those mistakes, how to keep them from affecting you."

"I know," I say. She's got a hardiness that I haven't yet mastered--in any jobs, friendships, or in really any aspect of my life. "I guess I just get bent out of shape when I want to do something well."

"That's cool," she said. "But just know that while you're getting stressed out, I'm never going to get stressed out. So I'll be here to help. You don't have to do everything right away."

I'm just like an intern again--out of my depth, for the first time in ages, and learning something new. Perhaps the adrenaline rush I'm experiencing is more about the novelty than about the nerves.

Sunday 6-5: Uphill Battles, Downhill Dumps, Pizza Picnics, Whiskey and Life Choices

I wake up Sunday morning with the odd realization that the ceiling is a mere foot away from my head. The thought suddenly occurs to me that having just one violent nightmare could send me into a midnight concussion without anyone being around to notice. Last night I'd fallen asleep too early to meet my housemate, Melissa, and I'm starting to feel like a jerk for not being more outgoing the night before. But I wasn't going to be a wallflower like I had been during my first day cooking in New York--I'm here for too little a time to risk being shy.

I tentatively ease my way down the loft stairs to find Melissa brewing a pot of water for tea. A slim, bright-eyed woman in her early 30s with an adorable pixie haircut, she was born and raised in Washington state, and earned her bachelor's degree in horticulture. After several years in a shift manager job at Starbucks, she packed up her things to seek out new work on local farms and agricultural communities. She discovered the Inn at Ship Bay, called about an internship, and has committed to staying on the site through the end of the summer season. She's sweet and laid back, even as I'm bashing about in the kitchen in search of coffee filters. She apologizes for not knowing where they are--"Ever since I quit my job, I've been laying off the coffee," she jokes. I munch on the last of my chocolate-covered coffee beans in sympathy. Even in this part of the country, Starbucks can still seem like the devil corporation. Melissa lends me her bike helmet so I can ride into town and pick up a few basic groceries. Though we'll be eating staff meals before the dining room hours, we still need some things to keep in our kitchen so we don't get too ravenous. I'm also concerned about getting my bearings on the bike and in the neighborhood before the full work week starts.

And it's a good thing I did, because the bike is FUCKED. I should've known that a quaint-looking vintage bike wouldn't have the gear settings--or any settings at all--to handle the Orcas terrain. The roads are paved just fine, but they're ridiculously hilly, and I'm only two minutes out of the Inn's driveway before I'm cursing and yelling at myself while heaving myself uphill. Either this bike isn't strong enough, or I'm not, I think as my legs start to burn in protest. I hop off and walk the bike up the big hills, swallowing hard and panting loudly. As I hop back on and take the bike downhill again, it starts to pick up until it reaches an unmanageable speed. I squeeze on the breaks, and it's like a screech owl is clinging to my back tires. EEEEEEEEEEHHHHHHH go the breaks as I try to slow down...and then I'm off the bike again, going back up another hill on foot. Fuck. This is going to be a very inefficient way to get around town.

An hour later, I'm back at the Inn. My legs feel like shredded brisket meat, but at least I have a few basics: bread, peanut butter, milk, and thank god, coffee grounds. Melissa sees me limping back onto the porch.

"How was the bike ride?"

"OK...but I think I have to take it into a shop," I say, still panting hard. "Either that or I am ridiculously out of shape."

"Were you able to adjust the gear settings?" She peeks outside at my bike parked on the porch.

"It doesn't have any."

"Oh, then it's definitely the bike, not you." 

$50 down the drain, I think. Leave it to a New Yorker to underestimate the necessary sophistication of an island bike.

Melissa, thankfully, has a car, and she suggests we take a ride to visit the Exchange, a kind of community flea market with a blissfully open-ended barter system. It's a wonder--clothes, junk parts, old appliances, pots and pans, hundreds of little items to look over from the community. Family photos, weathered by age, hang on a greeting board just outside the main entrance.

I pull all kinds of useful items from the shelves--two lightly used cutting boards for our kitchen, a bicycle helmet. I ruefully look over the bike materials, wondering if I could've cobbled something better than my lousy ferry-side exchange. As she tries on a discarded pair of Seven for All Mankind jeans, Melissa reassures me that there's an extra bike on our porch with more than enough gears to get me into the town on future rides. I make a note to make her dinner one of these nights.

It's a veritable forest of junk, but I'm loving it. And all kinds of people from the community have shown up to contribute their stuff. The clothes are worn but well-mended, the dishes are clean, the books are lovingly spine-broken but still readable. For a summer community of travelers, and a year-round community of craftspeople, this is a phenomenal resource. And when I step up to pay for my selections, I get to set the price: $7 for the haul.

Back at the Inn, Melissa and I are put to work setting up for Annie's wood-fired pizza oven. This is a new feature at the Inn: from 3-8pm you can buy three different types of pizza made in an outdoor oven, along with arugula salad and Marionberry cobbler, and set yourself up with beers and sodas on the lawn. (I chuckle quietly as I think of a dessert to honor a crack-smoking mayor, but keep this thought mostly to myself. I don't want to impugn the cobbler's reputation.)

 Melissa and I lug out the tables and spread the dingiest Inn quilts on the lawn--this is Annie's event, a real change in tone from the Inn's more elaborate, elegant set-up, so it's OK if there will be pizza stains on the blankets. We bring Mason jars out to the garden and fill them with stalks of flowering herbs--pungent yellow mustard, pale purple rosemary blossoms, and spiky clusters of chive blossoms. We shred some of the chive blossoms into a ramekin by the pizza station--with their pretty color and subtle onion flavor, they're perfect to sprinkle on the pizzas just before they go out.

 There's also plenty of basil in these pizzas, a planter of which goes right out front on the ordering table, along with a mason jar ready for tips. Customers over the next few hours will ask me many questions about the basil--how we got it to flower so early, whether we've transferred it to a ground garden yet--that I just can't answer. I don't have Melissa's green thumb, so I redirect them to her.

Melissa points out the borage she's collected from the garden as well, and tells me to taste one of its blue flowers, careful to mind the thorny stems. It's got the woody sweet taste of honeysuckle--I make a mental note to incorporate it into a later dessert. Maybe scattered over lemon sorbet, tossed with berries and caramelized rhubarb. And Melissa's a good resource for learning these plants--Annie sends her to the greenhouse in search of tarragon and fennel for the salad, and she returns with an armful in no time.

At 3:00pm, trucks start to pull into the parking lot--there've been signs up all over the island for this special feature, and as this is only the fourth week it's been open, the word of mouth has helped enormously. Annie and Jay (helping out in addition to securing the Inn produce from Maple Rock Farm) have spent the morning rolling out sheet pans full of dough into thin crusts.

Annie mans the pizza-making station, and Jay mans the "love oven." It's been heating up all day, and finally producing a wonderful smoky scent.

As customers to arrive, we quickly establish a rhythm--Melissa and I greet customers, take orders, and make change. We slip the incoming tickets under Annie's prep station, where she tosses salads and decorates the rounds of dough. We scrawl out the options on old Inn menus--#1 is a basic margherita pizza, #2 adds salami, and #3 is all Orcas Farms spinach, sweet herbs, green garlic, and mozzarella. This is by far the prettiest pizza, but all of the options seem to be popular. Geddes's son Avery stops by and asks for a pizza with cheese only. We oblige him. He looks like a little Ron Howard.

 Jay shovels the pizzas into the novel, waving them closer and closer to the flame until they get a nice blackened crust. We run them out, calling out names--"Diane!" "Richard!" "Buck!"--and people perk up and wave their arms in anticipation. And it's worth the anticipation--the pizza is great. We nibble on a few throwaway slices between taking orders.

But the rush starts becoming hectic--the slips piling up under Annie's prep board are at least 2 inches thick, and we have to start reusing order slips to keep up with the requests. I begin to unconsciously micromanage on the receiving end, asking Jay what's coming up instead of stepping back. It's been 6 years since I last waited tables, and my office impulses--to ask where something is when it doesn't immediately present itself--are asserting themselves. But Annie gives me a look, the look of all chefs who know what works in their kitchen, and I quickly step back into place. And it's a good thing too, because the customers are enjoying us more as pizza runners than as heads of the operation. As Melissa and I run salads, pizzas, and cobblers to the folks collected on the grass, I hear one or two older Orcas men mutter to Geddes, "You've got some cute girls here this summer." What might tick me off in Manhattan suddenly feels flattering. I make sure to book it back to the table in my shorts.

And in the meantime, people keep ordering beers, keep nibbling on pizza, and start to line up for cobbler. One of the locals brings his guitar, opens a fake book of classic folk songs, and starts to doodle away. A few families have young kids with them, and they spent their time running over the little creek bridge, looking into the water, sneaking a glimpse of Kartoffel, the Inn's remaining Mangalitsa pig. (The others are either being bred with local boar or being served in a multitude of delicious ways in the main dining room.) A couple sits on a blanket nearby--they've booked their wedding to be held at the Inn, and they come back for two more pizzas after they polish off the first one.

Though it means the rush lasts longer, I'm happy that people finally start lining up for dessert. The marionberry is a special blackberry that grows solely on Vashon Island (one of the other San Juans), and it's got a seed-filled, slightly tart taste. It's perfectly offset by the crumbly cornmeal-filled shortcakes, sweet and salty and not too hot for the blazing afternoon sun. Annie's 4-year-old niece Ava comes running up to us. Her face is painted with purple juice. "I'm done," she proclaims, and offers up the dish, covered with the telltale signs of fingers being run through the last bits of juice. I wish I'd taken a picture--her face says it all: happiness is an impending sugar rush after gorging on sunshine, thin-crust pizza, and fresh air for five hours straight.

The pizza pan is finally at rest, and the sun starts to go down. We took down the roadside sign as soon as we ran out of fresh dough, but customers have lingered long past the ordering point. They stop by to chat with us as we clean up around the oven, which is finally cooling down enough to be touched by a curious hand. "This was such a wonderful idea," they say,  and we redirect all the praise to Annie and Jay, who've been troopers, turning out almost 100 pizzas in the space of five hours. My shoulders and ears are sunburned, and there's cobbler juice down my arm, but even though I haven't cooked a bit, I'm feeling utterly satisfied with the work, and the decent tips to be split. We pack up the leftovers, quickly change into cleaner clothes, and head into town for a drink at the Outlook Inn with Annie and a few of her family friends. I sip whiskey and share some duck macaroni and cheese with Melissa--the first true meal we've had all day.

One of the middle-aged women with us, Maureen, asks me how I'm finding the kitchen work. "I love it," I gush. "I may have been brainwashed, because right now this is looking a lot better than a desk job."

Annie, who is savoring her hard-earned martini, doesn't want to dampen my enthusiasm, but she immediately chimes in. "You should know," she says, "that it doesn't pay. And it will be hard to see the people you love. And the hours suck."

"But it's not New York," I say. "And right now, I'm loving that."

She gets it--but Annie spent some of her formative cooking years in New York, and from the way she talks about the place, I can tell she's still a little bit in love with the city. "If you live in New York, you see life, all parts of life, everywhere," she says. "You see the guy dying in the street right next to the single mother who's screaming her head off, and next to them are the supermodels and the bankers on his cell phone. They may not always talk about it all, but you do get to see it all. That's life, right there in action."

I know it's not the martini that's generating this contradiction--Annie, who could take on any New York chef when it comes to sheer talent, was born and raised on Orcas, and has found her way back here. Isn't this a lot smaller, a lot less challenging, than what she might find if she stayed in the city?

"Wait, so I have a question...if you loved New York so much, then what was it that made you decide to move back here? I mean, you could definitely stay in that race, of making it as a cook in New York..."

"I could," she says, taking a pause before setting down her drink and picking up a french fry dusted with truffle oil and sea salt. "But I missed this place. When I used to hear an ambulance go by in the city, I knew something was happening somewhere. But here, when I see it go by, I know that that person I know intimately has just died. And it affects me--directly. I want to be affected by the people I live with--I want to know them, to feel that connection with them and with what I do. I am so satisfied when I cook for someone I love here, because I know that I'm giving them so much."

It's a bit crunchy, I think as I sip my whisky, but I get it. Earlier in the day Annie lent me her copy of Shopclass as Soul Craft, a book I've been after for some time. The message of the book, I've heard, is that we've lost the connection between what we do and what we produce. It's a little Marxian, to be sure, but the idea that we no longer feel value in our work because we can't see or hold the final product makes a lot of sense to me. Annie spent the entire day with her hands in dough, in tomato sauce, in berry juice. Even after she's cleaned up and put things away, her hands might still carry the aggressive smell of green garlic. The people she's fed will still go home nourished, their grumbling stomachs satiated. How often have I, at the end of a work day, generated something so definite that someone's life is truly different because of what I've done?

She's not sugarcoating the reality of the situation--chefs work late nights, long hours, and for little pay. They have a hard time seeing their families, their relationships suffer, their health and well-being takes a hit. But while Annie and Jay were splitting out the pizzas, and Melissa and I were running orders, I watched Geddes, MaryAnn, and their kids chatting with the patrons. Mary Ann said that Annie's pizza night was one of the great things that was enabling her family to get a solid night together at least once a week--and here they were, longing out on the lawn with customers who've known and loved them for years, and who will come back just to get another taste. That seems like a fair trade to me, even with all the hard labor.

And the community part means that you can talk about anything--which, as we all order our second rounds, means discussing the benefits of natural childbirth versus cesarean. Being unversed in the ways of child-producing and rearing, I stay mostly quiet, but hearing the women chatter around me, I suddenly realize how rare these kinds of conversations have been for me. This is a multi-generational conversation happening among women with wildly different backgrounds, all while slinging back drinks on a Sunday night in a town where we could walk home if necessary. It's a privilege to do this after a day of feeding people, and though I'm far from tipsy, the flush of happiness is high in my cheeks.