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?

Orcas Tour: Doe Bay, Salmon and Oysters, Becoming an Infovore

After last night's tumultuous realizations, it's a blessing to wake up and feel the freshness of morning, with the crows loudly cawing to each other from the distant trees. I'm squeezing in an expedition around the Doe Bay area of the island with Chris, who rolls in at 9:00am just as I'm finishing my coffee. Because Chris lives in the area, which requires a good 20 minute drive from the Inn, he's the ideal guide to this part of the island, which includes the Doe Bay resort, the town of Olga, and a handful of very special farmers who provide ingredients to the Inn.

On the drive out to Doe Bay, we turn down a tiny gravel road and stop at the salmon hatchery.

I've always been a salmon eater, but I assumed that catching it was a fairly straightforward matter: go out into deep waters in the early morning, bait a line, possess never-ending patience. But Chris tells me that a salmon's life cycle is in fact much more similar to that of a human being. They start out as chum in freshwater lakes and ponds, then make their way into salt water to grow to their full size, then as adults swim back toward freshwater sources (some say the same sources that they were born in) to reproduce. It's a little bit like growing up in a small town, living a wild adulthood out in the wide world, then going back to suburbia to raise kids and grow old. Of course, returning to freshwater after a lifetime in salt water is a suicide mission, and the full-grown salmon often die soon after reproducing and laying their eggs. What threatens a salmon's life even more is fishermen scooping them up out of the ocean before they have a chance to go home and reproduce. Overfishing of salmon in saltwaters means that the salmon population gets depleted rapidly; hence, the growth in popularity of farmed salmon, in which fish live their entire lives in pens, given genetically-modified feed that make them grow faster and fatter, and growing under very controlled conditions. It's sustainable, but hardly the most natural way to live life as a salmon, when your nature is to travel and to return home when you're ready. And the fish is more commercial--each filet has the same thickness and color, like a prepackaged McDonald's hamburger.

Hatchery is a step towards a sustainable middle ground for fisheries--instead of trapping the salmon in pens until ready for harvesting, a hatchery nurtures the salmon's natural lifecycle, making sure that the fish get a full period of growing fresh, swimming to sea, and coming home again before being fished. It's a little like being a free-range chicken: the salmon are watched and nurtured, but never contained. Using the techniques first developed by the Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, hatcheries use man-made channels built into the natural landscape to easily funnel the fish to and from freshwater ponds. During the first part of their lives, in which they grow in freshwater, the hatchery workers clip the adipose fin (the little nubbin near the fish's tail, a vestigal fin that doesn't affect their swimming) to identify the future grown fish as wild hatchery fish.

When the fish are ready to go into saltwater, they swim down the manmade channels out into the sea, clearly marked so that fishermen know that they are not permissible for catching. Given a free pass from being fished, the salmon grow to full size, make their way back into the freshwater inlets...

And here's where things get really interesting. The hatchery workers pull the fish out of the water and lay them in long trays, where they scoop out the roe and semen. They put the fertilized eggs in trays and place them back in the freshwater pond (while keeping the caught fish they need to sell.)

This is not only a more humane way of catching and killing the fish (they die without being bruised by nets or mutilated by hooks), but it also guarantees that every fish that's caught still lives on with its eggs being hand-delivered back to freshwater. What you get in return is a sustainable salmon population, and a fish that looks, tastes, and behaves almost exactly like wild fish. The sign at the hatchery reads "Long Live the Kings,"--the hatchery is all about keeping the king (and sockeye) salmon alive and available for the future.

This is an INCREDIBLE amount of work, and it means a huge amount of dedication on the part of the people who work at the hatchery. They spend hours hunched over the chum with nail clippers cutting the adiposals, monitor their swimming paths and water and weather patterns, and sit poised ready to pull them in when they start to return home. Their channels make it possible for the salmon to grow up on top of the Island's naturally-occurring aquifers, layers of water-permeable rock, underground fountains whose water drips from melting glaciers, creating some of the purest and most mineral-rich water available anywhere.

"I've done some experiments with the aquifer water," Chris says," and used some of it in my garden. The plants that got aquifer water grew twice as big as the others." My mind is reeling at the potential in these hatcheries, where fish get the best water, the most nurturing, and the biggest chance at a sustainable future. If all restaurants were like the Inn at Ship Bay, all would carry this kind of protected, yet totally natural-tasting fish, and the flavor and dining experience would be exponentially richer.

Harvested but sustainable food is not an oxymoron--what it requires is a deliberate practice of living one's life in harmony with the natural rhythms of the world. As Chris explains to me over breakfast at Doe Bay, the resort on this end of the Island, living on Orcas often means being more in touch with your surroundings. I slurp up my breakfast (a ridiculously flavorful duck egg poached in olive oil, served over spicy greens, tomatoes, smoked mushrooms, and grits), and envy his early morning patterns: wake up, go for a walk, swim, sweat, eat a good breakfast, work on his garden and boat. All this before coming into work, where he crafts beautiful ingredients into gorgeous dishes for the community to enjoy. The last few years have been rough for Chris, with a series of personal setbacks, but he's actively pursuing a more balanced, happy life, and it shows in the way he carries himself in the kitchen. If someone has made something he loves, he'll bound over to them, eyes wide with glee, and say, "What's in this?" He brings energy and joy to his work, and it's not clear if that's a byproduct of the Island or just one of his natural traits.

It's something that's in full swing as we walk around the resort after breakfast--unlike the space at Rosario, replete with gorgeous architecture and luxurious amenities, Doe Bay is more like an adult summer camp (with more youth-friendly pricing). Cabins and yurts cover the property, which looks out over the gorgeous Otter Cove and a small private beach, and there are open-air hot tubs, saunas, and massage and yoga studios.

It's a lot more like a nature retreat than a hotel, but that makes it all the more appealing, especially once we get a look at the garden, which provides an enormous amount of the resort's produce and poultry. Young staffers are weeding and watering everywhere--many volunteers at Doe Bay, as well as at several other farms on the island, found these opportunities through the WWOOF program, which connects people to local farms for seasonal work. They receive a small stipend, room and board, and in return work in gardens and in the local community. It's a great educational experience, as well as great enthusiastic staff for the summer season.

Of course, Doe Bay's farm is designed to feed the Doe Bay community--it's a great farm, but fairly minimal compared to the sprawling fields of Orcas Farm, our major farm stop today.

Owned by George Orser, there are at least 50-60 beds of growing produce. If Jay-Z had a farm, this is basically what it would be. Chris basically wanders into the territory--when you've lived on the Island for over 15 years, you know your neighbors well enough to drop in unannounced. He points out the flowering arugula, growing in tall, spicy stalks.

He's growing things on this farm I've never seen before--on our right is a bed of what looks like four-leaf cloves, but will eventually grow into buckwheat.

On our left, beds of strawberries are nestled beneath white netting. A robin flaps wildly about underneath it, and eventually frees itself and flies away. When Chris picks off a few berries to taste, I can see why a bird would risk its life to get in: they're the sweetest, juiciest I've ever tasted.

But George, just like any other farmer on Orcas, is subject to the unpredictability of the season. When the rainy season lasted much longer than expected, he told Chris that he was sure his seedlings would be drowned. Looking at the cracked earth now, it's hard to believe that, but when Chris steps down on the still-slightly-squelchy ground, you start to wonder just how long it will take to see if George is correct.

Farming is quite different than cooking--when you're tasting a sauce, you can tell midway through its cooking process if it might need more salt, more spice, more butter. By contrast, farming is a lot more like baking--you can put all the required ingredients into the batter early on, but until you see it puffing up or lying flat in the oven, you can't know if it will turn out ok. The proof is in the final product.

George emerges from the trees and gives us a hearty hello on his way out to town. He points out his ducks as we make our way to the exit--it's a good thing he pointed, because otherwise I'd never have spotted them, perfectly camouflaged as they are against the tool shed...

We've got one more stop to make on our way back to the Inn: I've been craving a taste of fresh oysters for the last three weeks, but a 7-mile bike ride seems hardly the best way to get it. Chris makes up the difference, and we turn up the dusty road to Buck Bay, where we load up on oysters and manila clams, pulled fresh from the water...

The oysters are huge, as big as my hand--their rings can tell you how many years old they are (most are at least 3-4 years.) The manilas, Chris says, will be perfect for steamers, and we buy two pounds' worth. Surrounding our "catch" with ice will keep them fresh until we're ready to eat them. Chris hoists them high, a bounty of treats for our lunch.

Several other people are pulling into Buck Bay as we drive down to the shore. Chris shows me how to pick sea beans, which initially make me pucker up with saltiness but then turn crisp and flavorful. Foraging for ingredients seems, ultimately, about finding the right spots, and keeping your eyes open for that perfect patch of seaside vegetables.

When we get back to the Inn, Chris throws the sea beans and clams into a pot, dousing them with butter, white wine, and green garlic, and steaming them open. We slurp them up, with lots of bread to mop up the sauce. It's a true indulgence, a perfect treat in the hot afternoon sun.

As I'm wiping the plate with a hunk of bread, I start to wonder where my appreciation of this day comes from. I'm not a farmer. I'm not a fishermen. I have little to no success growing or catching my own ingredients. But visiting the hatchery, walking the rows of the farms I've visited, meeting the butchers and farmers as they deliver their goods to the Inn, has transformed the way I experience my food. Instead of solely tasting the butter and wine of the clams, I taste the limey acidity of the shore. When I slurp the oysters, they taste (as fresh fish should) exactly like the sea. The location of my food, and the people who brought it to me, have become as important as the food itself.

But I have my doubts: could this engagement with food's origin story continue to a more remote location? Would people really like to know where their food comes from, if they can't easily get to the farm, the fishery, the picked-over woods? Can you call yourself a locavore if your ingredients are local, but not your information? Surely thrilling at a flavorful seafood dish sits at one end of the foodie spectrum, and way at the other end is those who know all about the salmon's life cycle, from the freshwater krill to the saltwater growth to the suicidal mission towards reproduction. But I have to believe that being a foodie means, at least for a good chunk of those who would claim the title, having an investment in food's backstory, being interested in how dishes and culinary experiences come together over a long period of time. At tonight's pizza, which sold like crazy, a little boy was so fascinated by Annie's rolling out the dough and decorating the pizzas that he had to literally be dragged back to his parents' side to select his choice of soda. (He went with Jamaican Ginger Ale.) Another little girl said, when she approached the table with her parents, "I'm not hungry, so I don't want one," but came back with dustings of flour and tomato sauce on her face, saying "I'm still hungry--it was yummy!"

There are many stages to being a locavore: you can buy regionally, buy locally, buy neighborly. On an island like Orcas, much more so than an island like Manhattan, you can buy your greens from one farmer, your fruits from another, your eggs from your neighbor's coop, your fish from your local fishermen, and your oysters from the beach a mile away. If you go one step farther, where buying food is tantamount to buying information, you might as well be an "infovore" as well--someone whose experience of food comes from knowing it intimately. There's a reason New Englanders will pay $8 per person to go picking at the height of berry or apple season--they like the proximity to the experience of getting their food. They pay to know the heft of a bag of freshly picked apples, the finger pricks of a raspberry bush, the heatstroke of a day spent in fruit fields. They live vicariously through their food.

At your moment of deepest involvement and immersion, food transforms your state of mind--not just what you know, but how much you determine is worth knowing. There is a vast difference between picking over fillets of salmon at a good grocery store, and learning the science of how a fish should live and die. Knowing that tomatoes and strawberries withstand Bikram-level heat for months in a greenhouse makes you savor the ripe sweetness of the fruit even more. Munching on tonight's pizza--carrying the last seven oysters, a juicy, salty addition to the sweet tomato and herb crust--I know that my mind has been changed by what I've learned, what I've seen goes into the food I eat. A dish tastes richer because I know not only where its components have come from, but also what stories it contains.

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.

Wednesdays are for Self-Mutilation, or How Overconfidence Made Me Lose My Fingertip

I should've figured that coming off Tuesday's catered dinner on such a high note would leave me vulnerable in the kitchen. I was coasting on a sense of hard-won confidence and invincibility, and my first few hours of prep today were smooth-sailing. Annie puts me to work rolling out biscuits for cobbler, and I'm doing everything right--using the right measuring cups, folding the dough properly, cutting out rounds without any weird residue or flakiness.

 I know to get right in line when Geddes passes out slivers of his almost-ready house-made coppa, more original meat made from the Mangalitsas.

And I know to fill up my plate fast when family meal goes out and includes more of those delicious duck skin chicharones. 

(And for those of you debating the composition of our family meals, it isn't nearly as starch-heavy as you might expect...dinner's a little more so, since we go through the leftover potatoes and risotto from the night's service, but lunch is fairly light on the carbs and fats. Chris tells me Geddes almost never includes heavy-duty cheese use in the restaurant's menu, since it's high cost and often low-flavor. I'm grateful for this, since it cuts down on the unhealthiness of the staff meals, and because it leaves me to flavor my lunchtime taco with fresh salsa and avocado instead of sour cream and grated cheese.)

I know plenty of things by now—to know that we need to run off a new batch of rhubarb for cobbler, that we need fresh tarragon and borage and mint for dessert garnish, So given all the things I think I know, you’d think I’d know to pay attention when Wally asks me to run off a few golden beets on the mandoline for our special salad.

For those of you haven’t worked with a mandoline before, it’s an incredibly useful tool: it lets you shave ingredients into very thin slices, which often makes for a very thin wide cooking surface and for a beautiful appearance. With beets and raw vegetables like fennel and onion, they’re especially ideal, because it gives you a thin slice of flavor rather than a huge chunk of it. However, their blades—steel, porcelain, or otherwise—can be extremely sharp, and as you’re running your vegetable against the blade, it’s easy to slip and cut yourself. And before I know it, that’s exactly what I’ve done—sliced off a good one-square centimeter of my right index finger and fingernail.

I’m gushing blood and run to the first-aid station to wrap my hand in paper towels. It feel like a deep cut, my finger stinging and throbbing as I hold it tight to staunch the bleeding. I take one look at the cut and immediately have to look away—it’s like I’ve revealed a cross-section of a tree, as I can see the rings of meat under the tip of my finger. Wally follows behind me, and tells me to sit down and rest my hands on top of my head (to minimize blood flow through my body, and to keep the injury above heart level.) Angela and Chris soon wander over, as I’m sitting on a bucket of flour holding my hand in the air. “You know, if you want to stop the bleeding right away, put your finger in some lemon juice. Or bleach. Or vinegar.”

I give Chris a look. In his 42 years of cooking, he’s cut himself numerous times, and never once needed stitches. But that doesn’t mean I’ll take his word on first aid.

“I mean, it’ll hurt like hell, but it’ll stop the bleeding.”

I decide to continue holding my hand in the air. One of our servers for the night, Nate, stops by and takes a look. “Oh, that’s a good one!” he said. “Nice clean cut. You won’t need stitches, that’ll heal pretty nicely on its own. The dull cuts are the worst.” He turns to go back inside, then looks back. “Did you find the fingertip?”

It’s be funny if it wasn’t so embarrassing. It doesn’t hurt enough for me to cry, but it’s more than a little embarrassing to be holding my hand like a mortal wound when I’m surrounded by people who’ve done this to themselves countless times over their careers. Geddes tells me about the time he cut himself as he was preparing to plate a dinner for 300 people. “A diner drove me to the clinic, where I told them to stitch me up fast so I could go back to work. And I went back and did the dinner.” Another time he simply strapped on some Band-Aids and tied a rubber glove up at the wrist—only once he had a free moment could he open it up and pour out the accumulating blood. Such is life in a kitchen—you can’t take much time to recover when the tickets keep coming in. I sit down in the kitchen garden to rest, cursing not out of pain, but out of remorse that I’ve put myself out of commission.

As a sweet gesture to distract me, Luke has me walk out with him to the edge of the dining room lawn, where the land drops off to a cliff overlooking the ocean. He’s carrying a big plastic bucket of fish scraps—long strips of sturgeon skin, hunks of unusable halibut and salmon, full handfuls of bone and scales. He scoops some up in his hands, and flings it over the edge of the cliff. Before I can see where it’s disembarking from, an enormous bald eagle swoops down and snatches up the meat, carrying it back to its nest.

Turkey vultures and hawks start to circle in the air, watching as Luke throws each hunk of fish out to them. It’s an amazing sight, and a great show for the early-evening diners out on the patio. I almost forget about the throbbing of my finger.

Eventually the bleeding slows, and I come back inside where Wally helps me bandage it up properly (lots of Neosporin, two Band-Aids, and a bit of masking tape to hold it all together.) It makes sense that Wally would be the one to help me out—not only did he cut himself last week, but he’s also the one constantly showing me how to properly wrap up our station for clean-up. Good with plastic wrap, good with kitchen first-aid. And he shows me something Nate has written up in my absence.

And yes, that note at the bottom is for what to do with the “special” leftovers: “rolling into little piggy toe mousse; char-cut-erie plate.” For the first time in the night, I tear up. It’s such a hilarious, sweet gesture from my coworkers, who’ve all been here before, and I get weepy knowing at this sort-of rite of passage. Luke takes a look at the write-up. “$75.00? That’s far too cheap. I mean, you’ve got a limited supply.” “Yeah,” I say. “But who knows who else might be able to contribute ingredients?”

 I slip a rubber glove over my hand and go right back to the cold station, helping Wally assemble salads and desserts and keep up with the fairly busy night. Later in the night Geddes helps me swap out the bandage, and cuts the fingertips off a glove so I can have more use of my non-injured fingers. (When he first suggests it, I think he’s recommending I cut off the rest of my fingertips to make things easier. I blame this on the blood loss.)

As the night wraps up, I start to feel that big drop-off of energy, and one sip of Chris’s special wine for the night, an excellent 2006 Sauvignon Blanc, starts to leave me woozy. Thankfully I can load up on iron and carbohydrates at family dinner—a big pot of rice and beans, and a salad heavy with nuts and leftover crab. Wally wraps up my finger once more, and I stumble home, holding my hand aloft like a trophy. I down a few ibuprofen and collapse into bed.

Thursday: Sampling Lardo and Bacon Marmalade, and Hitting a Groove

Thursday night arrives like a blessing--another slow night, to learn as much as I can while the pressure's off. Thankfully there are 15 reservations on the books, which means at least a good number of orders to take and salads to finesse. We've got a wedding on Saturday that will require our full attention, and having no idea what that will demand of me, I'm happy that Wally's able to walk me through the steps of the kitchen today. He starts me on the big demand we'll have to fill during the wedding: for lots and lots of bread.

Wally walks me over to the giant mixer in the back room, where I load in 8 pounds of flour and 3 1/2 pounds of "starter"--a big batch of dough in which yeast is still reproducing. It's gloppy and smells powerfully sour, which makes for a great crusty loaf of sourdough bread. The recipe for the starter was passed down through Maryann's side of the family, carried with them all across their journey through the Willamette Valley over a century ago. "They used to sleep with the starter," Maryann tells me as we roll out loaves of dough for rising, "to keep it warm enough to keep growing." This starter makes the bread that's served every night in the restaurant, and every Sunday as pizza dough. It has had a permanent place at the Inn ever since it opened, and it's the perfect slice of table bread--a soft center and a crunchy crust. Wally's making 4 batches worth tonight, which should take us through the wedding and into pizza service the day after.

It's also a good night to take a closer look at the charcuterie--Geddes brings out a loaf of a thick marble-white substance. For a second I worry he wants to experiment with substituting Mangalitsa lard for table butter...not something that makes me too excited. But no, he wants to start including house-made lardo on the charcuterie plate. Wally slices off a piece, as thin and translucent as onion.

"Do you want a taste?" he asks, curling it off his knife. This is only the first in the many tasting moments I'll have all day, and I start to formulate a conspiracy: are these lovely island chefs plotting to fatten up the city girl before she returns home to the world where supermodels walk the streets and unrealistic expectations of beauty are endorsed everywhere? I consider the dangers of the kitchen diet--eating breakfast at 10 am, staff meal at 3:00pm, then family meal at 10pm. But then I also consider the daily walks I'm doing, the climbs to and from my bed, and the 8 hours of standing at attention behind the cold station. I place the slice of lardo on my tongue, and it melts instantly--buttery smooth and redolent of bacony goodness without any of the chewy burden. "It's delicious." I say, but I make Wally put it away before he can offer me another slice.

Still up for tasting, I let Chris beckon me over to take a taste of his Mangalitsa bacon marmalade, which will be coating the pork entree served on tonight's menu. He's cooked up the bacon until it's crisp, then sauteed onions in the bacon fat, and tossed both together with some red wine vinegar. One taste and I'm convinced that he could be selling this as a jarred commodity--it's perfect for spreading on thick slices of morning toast, gooey and delicious to eat with scrambled eggs.

As I'm tasting the marmalade, I start to think of all the individual items that would make great take-home items from the Inn's menu...including, perhaps, my own fixed-up version of the peanut butter cookies. Yesterday's lard-baking experiment didn't go so well, and I picked through various options for fixing the too-dry crumbly cookie dough. What did using lard take away that made the cookies so dry? I threw the question out to the audience at Foodpickle, and someone responded with this comment: "Lard is 100% fat while butter is 81% fat and 14-18% water. If the recipe you used called for butter, than you could try adding some moisture back into the recipe. I'd try adding some milk or water." I decide to try it, and drizzle a small portion of the dough with heavy cream. I work it into the dough and sample little bites until it tastes buttery enough, then scoop it out onto a Silpat sheet.

And it works--the cookies come out moist, buttery, and addictive. I'm practically crowing with pride. "I fixed the cookies, what what!" I say to Wally as I drop a plate of them on the station counter. Geddes grins with his first bite, and I'm dancing with self-satisfaction. Chris gets why I'm so excited. "You know you're becoming a chef not when you can make something, but when you can correct something." But the real validation is when he reaches for his third cookie.

I'm coasting on my triumph as Wally and I prepare family meal for the day--rolling out a few balls of pizza dough and topping them with the leftover bits from the kitchen.

Geddes decides to phase out the chicken pâté he's been serving all week so he can start on a fresh batch of duck pâté, and so we spread it out on one of the pizzas. I'm a huge fan of chicken liver, but a full slice of it on pizza, topped with diced cornichons and pickled onion, seems a little too much for me. But as with most staff meals, every slice is snapped up.

The dinner rush comes as predicted--the wedding couple has arrived, so we send especially pretty dishes their way--but remains relatively calm. Wally has enough time to make a face in his ball of dough.

I wash more greens in the middle of service, as we seem to be having a rush on salads tonight, and spot a little visitor on one of our leaves.

This is the price you pay for pulling ingredients direct from the garden...and even though we have to compensate with extra vigilance as we set up our station, it's nice to remember how closely we're sourcing things.

As the night wraps up, there seem to be few dark spots. The wide callus developing on my right index finger is a reminder that I've been chopping--correctly, it seems, for the first time--for almost three days straight. Holding the knife properly and preparing food for eight hours a day has left me sore, but more skillful than I've felt in a long time. And I'm emboldened by what I've done well: prepare salads, finish tickets on time, win invites from my coworkers for hikes and bike rides and tastings of great ingredients. I dig into my plate of tacos at staff meal with gusto--learning to get by in this kitchen tastes great.

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.