I never thought any of this would be easy. But I never thought it would be this hard, either. Hard in ways that it didn’t need to be, which is probably the most frustrating type of hard there is.

I baked my last loaves of bread on Saturday… for now. Loaves that are sold to other people, I should clarify — the home baking will never stop. I woke up this morning, not at the usual 2am but at a reasonable 7am, and I was sad. It’s time to move on, I know that in my gut, but the closing of the metaphorical door is always hard no matter what the reason.

My bread partner-in-crime, aka Sugar Bottom, and I, aka Sassy Cat, had a good run. He taught me how to shape baguettes, mix dough to the perfect texture, and smile while I baked. On the days we didn’t work together, he’d leave me notes, always ending with the reminder that no matter what craziness might be in store that day, “it’s just bread.” I still need to learn how to not cut myself when changing the razor blade on a lame, how to stay within the lines when scoring baguettes, and how to be easier on myself. That last one is the hardest one.

My bread mentor reminds me often that when he wakes up in the morning, he loves going to work, and why should we accept anything less? He’s right. I loathed going to work. The 2am wake-up calls aside, I hated walking into the dark and lonely bakery by myself, wondering what chaos would be waiting inside for me. How long would it take me to find the pastry brush for egg-washing the croissants? Would there be any egg wash? Would there be any eggs? Would the scale work to weigh the eggs if we even had any? Hard and frustrating for the stupidest reasons. The owner and I got into a tiff on my way out the door on my last day at the bakery. I hate tiffs. I hate animosity. I hate unhappy endings. But as my dad always says, “No one said that life is easy, Muffet.” He’s right, too. It was during my tiff with the owner when I was speaking my mind that I realized how the bakery even stayed alive at all — a kick-ass team, who busted our dedicated and passionate asses despite the conditions in which we were asked to work. Sugar Bottom always smiled. Pastry Cat always meowed — and bought milk every time we ran out. The woman with the awesome pink hair who shaped croissants, shaped perfect croissants. The culinary team left me surprise hot breakfasts on my bread bench when they knew I was back in the bread cave for hours sweating my ass off. And that’s when I realized that starting every day there sucked, but ending it was awesome. My blood, sweat, tears and burns were shared with awesome people making awesome products every day. The people make or break a business. Although I’ve always known that in my other lives, it was never as lightbulb-moment clear as it was when I was closing the door on my first chapter of this one.

The other day I heard Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly on the radio. I haven’t heard that song in years, but man is it a good one. It struck a chord (literally and figuratively) and then things started to make more sense about where I am in my journey right now… lost but excited, scared but inspired.

“Well, some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown
So I’ve started out for God knows where
I guess I’ll know when I get there
I’m learning to fly but I ain’t got wings
Coming down is the hardest thing
I’m learning to fly around the clouds
But what goes up must come down”

I’ve been ensconced by dough lately. I start my days at 3am now, coffee mug in hand as I quickly and quietly descend the stairs in my building and into the UberX waiting for me outside, and head off to my new job at a French bakery. Without fail, the driver is surprised that I’m not drunk. (I like to think that I make their night shifts a little more humane by having a sober conversation as we drive down the big hill on the way to the bakery.) Once I get there and flip everything on — lights, ovens, fans — and I get down to business. I’ve worked out an almost militant-type order of doing things (thanks to the tutelage of my counterpart who mans the ship on the other days) that involves cookies, muffins, at least four types of croissants, kouign amann, and of course bread. Bread is why I’m there at 3am. Time to bake the bread. Time to see what we’ve created. Time to break open the bread and see what it looks like inside — poke it, squeeze it, analyze the crumb and the crust and how they live symbiotically together. Time to make people happy. My favorite part of the morning is around 6am when the baristas come in to start setting up. The music kicks on, pastry shelves start to fill up, and after three hours by myself I finally have some human contact. My favorite barista always asks me as soon as he gets in what I’d like to drink, and my answer is always: COFFEE! I have no idea what he puts in it but he makes it perfectly, it always comes to me with a heart in the foam (it’s the little things), and it can keep me going for another seven hours. God bless him. My days start this way now and usually end about 10 hours later, at which point I’m covered in a flour snowstorm and dough tornado. And I’m finally beginning to love it.

I just finished Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and no book has made me think, and question, as much as that one has in a long time. In the preface he says so accurately, “I’m asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it’s this: To be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one’s hands — using all one’s senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure.” He’s right. When people ask me how I’m not fat baking as much as I do, I say because I don’t bake for me, I bake for others, and I give it away. And I bake with kids because I love to see the joy in their faces when they finish icing a cupcake or putting sprinkles on a birthday cake. It is pure unadulterated joy. But then there are those other times.

My first few days of baking alone at the bakery would count under the umbrella of “those other times.” And follow suit with the rest of what Bourdain exposes in his expose about the culinary industry. It’s tough. It’s grueling. I burn myself. It can be thankless. It can get into your head and have you asking yourself why the F you are doing any of this in the first place. I asked myself that often during my first few days.

I had a great conversation with my bread mentor the other day about the passion of a baker. The real, gritty, animalistic, can’t-do-anything-else-but-this kind of passion. It was like he was personifying the pages Bourdain wrote. And I needed to hear it. Boy did I need to have that conversation, exactly at that time. And part of me thinks so did he, it’s always good to remember why we do any of this. I needed to remind myself that I have some of that in me. How much of it is yet to be determined, but at least I know that I have some of it in me. Enough of it to leave my old life behind and jump into this one. Any rational human being would shake his or her head at the idea of it all — no health insurance, practically no money, insane hours, intense physical labor, scars, etc. etc. etc. And perhaps this rational human being might shake his or her head directly at me, if I didn’t have some of a baker’s passion in me. But those who know me know better. And thank God for them. They keep me going.

So does the bread. Thank God for the bread. Because no matter how crazy an 11-hour day can get, how mad I can get at myself for not scoring one loaf deep enough or over-proofing another, I’m still making bread. I leave at the end of my shift and look up at the racks of bread and smile. I made those. “The instant gratification of making something good with one’s hands.” That’s exactly it. And that’s exactly what I was missing in my old life. Sitting at a desk, in the corner, without purpose. No one knew what to do with me, so there I sat. No more team, no more boss, no more support, no more purpose. I would venture to guess that it is probably one of the worst feelings in the world. At least it felt like that to me. Reading Bourdain’s book, I realize more clearly now that everyone questions the job and the industry they are in, at some point or another. Or at a lot of points. How could we not, we’re human. But what I think it all comes down to is the balance — how many days do we question it and how many days do we smile. Smiles of pure satisfaction. Smiles of unadulterated joy.

For me, it all goes back to breaking bread, the social sharing of food. And in its most simplistic form, that’s why I’m doing this. I love feeding people. So on the days when I feel like I’m breaking my back more than I’m breaking bread, I remember that. Every time I question why the F I’m doing any of this, I remember what my teacher Tracie said to me one day in the kitchen at school in Ireland, “You love food and food loves you.”

At the end of his book, Bourdain talks about how the food industry has changed since he first started in it. Still largely Latin in workforce, the great three-star kitchens are now “staffed by the itinerant sons and daughters of the middle class” bouncing around the world and often working for free. “People with perfectly good jobs as stockbrokers and attorneys chuck it all to attend culinary school — enamored by the perceived romanticism of a cooking life. Most of this latter group are, of course, soon ground beneath the wheel.” And that very well might be me one day. But not yet.

Last weekend I gave birth to my first two bread babies. Why such a strong analogy? Because it’s accurate. Starting on Friday night and ending on Sunday afternoon, I only left my apartment to eat (once) and go to a yoga class (once). Every other minute was spent making bread.

When friends ask me innocently, “How long did it take you to make this loaf of bread?” I think they expect the answer to be something along the lines of, “A few hours.” So when I say, “About two and a half days,” the looks I receive in response are awesome. Shock, awe, confusion — it’s brilliant. A few months ago, I wouldn’t have believed it either. I know very few people who bake real bread at home — there was the guy I had a crush on in London who did a bagel experiment with the water I brought him from NY (and then documented our adventure in his book, The Breakfast Bible); my friend Gail’s husband, whom I need to clone; and the guy I “dated” last fall, whom on our first date brought me a loaf of fresh sourdough he had just taken out of the oven (perhaps I fell in love with his bread more than him, in retrospect; darn bakers get me every time). But seeing as I can count them on one hand, I don’t have many bread makers in my life, so I was blissfully unaware of how much of a labor (arguably a labor of love, thankfully) it is to bake a loaf of bread.

So, cooking school was the first place where I really learned and understood how much is involved in making bread — and how a few simple ingredients (flour, water, salt, yeast) could require so much care and feeding, quite literally. But at cooking school, we did it together. As a team, as a supportive group, occasionally with some wine. Here at home, I’m all alone. I’ll admit that it took so long after getting back home (about a month) to start making bread here because I was scared. Scared that I wouldn’t remember how to do it. Scared that I would fuck it up. Scared that I would realize I couldn’t do it, and then what?

Eventually I got my ass off the couch and started to start a starter. I was insanely motivated, ready to jump out of the gate, ready to take on the world one bread at a time, until… I couldn’t find the right flour. Boom. Feelings of defeat as I walked from store to store to store (I tried five) to find whole wheat bread four. Nada. There was literally every other kind of flour available (especially in this hippie dippy city where gluten is often an enemy) except the kind that I needed. (Now I’ve come to learn that most, if not all, whole wheat flour is bread flour, unless it’s identified as whole wheat pastry flour. Phew.)

I gave in and called the big guns. My bread mentor. For whatever reason this person has come into my life (probably the universe’s doing, and sometimes I believe in that kind of stuff), I’m thankful for it.  I was panicked and deflated, searching for flour, the San Francisco May winds literally pushing me backwards on my journey from store to store. It sucked. I needed help. So, I gave in and asked for it. [Those who know me well know that I’m a classic Type A, overachieving perfectionist. As much as I hate to admit that and as long as it has taken me to admit that, it’s true. I’m fiercely independent and insist on doing things on my own whenever possible. It’s quite ironic, though, since I love being around people and too many hours spent alone make me very sad. But it is what it is and I am who I am. At least now I can recognize these traits and try to be self aware whenever possible.] In the baking aisle of Whole Foods on Franklin Street, after I had been staring at the endless bags of flour that were not the ones I wanted for what felt like hours (and must have looked like it to all the people walking by), I pulled out my phone. “Can I use regular whole wheat flour for my starter? –> Yes, of course.” Wow. It was that easy. And so it began, my weekend of bread love.

Starter aside, the process of making the dough takes hours. After you’ve mixed up the initial combination of flours, water, and levain (aka starter) based on whatever set of percentages you are following, you let it sit for 20 minutes. This is called auto lease. It’s French 🙂 I need to read more about the science behind it, but essentially this short resting period helps the bread start relaxing. We like it when bread is relaxed. After the auto lease, you sprinkle on the salt, add the second batch of water (referred to as the second hydration), and massage it all together. Bread likes to be relaxed and massaged. I can totally relate. Then patience needs to kick in. You fold the bread once every 30 minutes for three hours. Yes, three. It’s important to keep it warm during this phase, so that it can, you guessed it, relax. After those three hours of folding are up, you let it rest for another hour untouched. (Finally a break to fold laundry, go to the store, be a human.) Once it is sticky and stretchy and all around yummy, it’s ready for the first shaping.

The nuances of shaping are almost impossible to describe in words (even bread God Chad Robertson uses pictures in his book), but in essence you need to carefully, gently fold it into a beautiful ball. Again, all while keeping it relaxed. Then you wait. About 20 minutes should do the trick, but environmental factors definitely come into play here — warmth, cold, drafts, etc. So I’ve been instructed by my bread mentor and all others who have ever made bread that you just need to feel it and trust your gut. The more you do it, the smarter your gut will get.

Next comes the basket phase, another gentle mission that could fuck up your final product if you do it incorrectly. First you conduct the “final shaping” (again, too complicated for words) and then carefully, delicately but with assertion, but your dough baby into a basket lined with a tea towel covered in flour (rice flour is ideal because it’s slightly grainier than regular flour.) Then you let it rest. Again. For an hour. California is honestly the best place to make bread because all it wants to do is chill out.

After an hour, you can pop it into the fridge to retard (aka proof or rise slowly) overnight. And if you’re like me, you’ll peek at it constantly throughout the night like you would a sleeping child, just to make sure it’s OK. Holes and bubbles are good. In fact, they’re great. My bread mentor says you want a dough that’s full of air and full of life. (To be honest, at first I thought that was a bit corny and romanticized, but that was before I made the dough. So now I love my bubbly bits.) The next morning when you’re ready to bake, preheat the oven to the highest it will go. Yes, really. I set mine to 500F degrees and let it preheat for one hour. Ideally, you’d be baking it in a Dutch oven (aka cast iron casserole dish) turned upside down so that the lid is the base, and you’d be preheating this, too. If not, you’ll need a spray water bottle so you can mist inside the oven at least every 10 minutes to keep the moisture level up. Dough likes to be relaxed, massaged, and moist. And that’s all we’ll say about that.

When the oven and Dutch oven are hot and ready, you’re ready to roll. Do the following as quickly and as carefully as you can:

1. Find the most durable oven mits you own to remove the dish from the crazy heat

2. Invert the dough ball from its basket onto the lid of the dish (you’ll thank the rice flour at this stage) in one quick but controlled motion

3. Score the dough in a square pattern using a sharp razor blade; hold the blade at an angle and make quick but firm cuts — show the dough who’s boss

4. Pop the bad boy into the oven and lower the temp to 400F degrees

After 20 minutes, carefully remove the whole dish from the oven and slide her out, directly onto the oven rack. She’ll be pale and hopefully her square design will have popped up from the rest of the loaf. During this next baking phase, she’ll get golden brown and develop a crisp, thick crust. Arguably, this is probably when you should watch her the most because EVERY person I know who makes bread says there is no exact cooking time. You just have to know.

When she’s golden and crispy and sounds hollow when you flip her over and knock her bottom with your fist (yes, do this, really), she’s ready. My loaves took about 25 minutes more, but I prefer a darker color. I like to gently push the top of the loaf underneath the square design to check for the perfect balance of squishy soft inside and serious crust. You’ll know what I mean when you do it, if you ever do any of this, just push it like Salt-n-Peppa taught you. The rest of the crust should feel very crisp — the longer it’s in the oven, the thicker the crust, so bake it as you like it. There’s just as much to how a bread looks as how it tastes, so this is when you can really have fun geeking out about color and texture and crust and all that jazz.

But the true golden ticket lies inside. Inside is affectionately called the “crumb.” Will there be bubbles? Will they be big? Lots of bubbles mean you done good. The crumb on my second loaf was way better than on my first. I’m still trying to figure out why, but all of this is, after all, an experiment — and that’s half the fun.

To celebrate the end of my weekend of solitude, I invited some good friends over to eat my buns — hot from the oven, smothered in soft cheese, ridiculously ripe farm tomatoes and fresh basil. With wine. Lots of wine.

We might have fallen victim to some bread comas that night, but hell if it wasn’t worth it, I don’t know what is. If you don’t break bread with the ones you love, you’re missing out. Big time.

Somehow I seem to find myself in these Devil Wears Prada “a million girls would kill for this job” situations. My first job interview ever, for an assistant job in the fashion department at Marie Claire magazine, lasted a generous 90 seconds. But while my first career was quite literally in the throws of fashion magazine craziness not unlike the movie — Starbucks runs, racks and racks of clothes everywhere, late nights, early mornings, and hours spent at fax machines (yes, fax machines) — I’m so glad that my second career is starting out in the throws of flour and bread baskets and sourdough starters. And I’m very thankful that I know what it’s like to start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.

I love and appreciate that my close friends and family think that I can just walk into Tartine Bakery and get offered a job on the spot. “What? They’re not going to hire you?” But hiring me would entail that a) they actually have a job opening, and 2) that even if they did, hundreds of other (more qualified) people wouldn’t also want it. What they did offer me, however, was a two-day stage (that’s French for internship) in their world-renowned bakery under the tutelage of their amazing team. And those two days were nothing short of amazing.

Starting over isn’t easy, and never was that more apparent then when I was standing over a wooden work bench pitting about 8,000 cherries last Thursday — after I had just finished peeling two cases of oranges. I was essentially tasked with doing the filing equivalent of a corporate job, where the biggest challenge is not letting your mind wander too much into the dark side of “why am I doing this again?” My internship at InStyle magazine during the summer after I had just graduated college was in the research department. Although it may sound glamorous, I was tasked with reading through page proofs to make sure there were no typos, and then calling the stores listed on each page to make sure they sold X bag or Y shoes for the price listed on the page. Then I put my initials on the top of the page proof and handed it off to the next person. And waited for the next one.  Each page took about 30 minutes, tops. Sometimes I got one page a day. There are only so many times one can visit the supply closet looking for new highlighter colors, so I would sneak upstairs to the fashion department and ask if they needed help. Quite proud of my stealth, it took weeks before anyone in the research department knew I was moonlighting in the fashion department, and by the time they caught wind I had already been offered a full-time job somewhere else. But hey! If looking for typos and sorting clothes helped me get where I am today, then I can pit cherries with the best of them!

To be fair, I think my fruit-filled first morning was a way for the pastry team to gage my competence and willingness. I guess I passed muster because by the first afternoon, I was glazing cakes and shaping cookies. I completely forgot to drink any water in those eight hours, peed maybe once, and probably wouldn’t have eaten had they not invited me to family lunch (OMG, Arturo’s Mexican red chicken). I left the first day feeling OK, inspired and exhausted, knowing that I need to get faster but thankful that at least I’m a quick study. Then I went back for day two with the bread team…

The Head of Bread (can I just say I would kill for that title on a business card?) is like no one I have ever met before. When he called me to ask that I come in for a meeting, I could have chatted to him for hours — until that awkward point in the conversation when you both realize you actually haven’t met in person yet so it might be best to carry on face-to-face. Maybe it was the British accent, maybe it was the fact that we were talking about sourdough starters within the first minute, but I was smitten. (Not like that, although it should be noted that finding a job and dating online are not that dissimilar, for better or for worse I’m trying to hone my skills with both.) Our face-to-face meeting was surreal. Not only did Diana Kennedy (my idol of Mexican cuisine) happen to be in the bakery that day (a rare happenstance, as I hear that she rarely leaves her serene spot in the Mexican jungle), but Chad Robertson (Tartine’s owner, deemed “the baker of the world’s best and most imitated bread”) was also there. When we met, by the awe-inspiring bread oven overflowing with fresh loaves that had just finished baking, he said to me: You have a very impressive background. When they showed me your resume I said, ‘Yes, call her back!’ It took everything in my power not to faint right there in front of him, and topple over into the very very hot oven. This man is a bread-making messiah. I don’t think it will ever fully sink in that he thinks my background is impressive.

Fast forward to one week later, when I am standing at yet another wooden work bench shaping country loaves with the Head of Bread, when Chad walks in. Although I did a crap job of trying to hide my wobbly, misshapen loaf, he thankfully had a lot more important things to focus on at that moment. And whilst he was discussing said important bread business with the team, I finally stopped for a second to think about all I had done that day: Sprouted two giant containers of rye berries, learned how to make oat porridge bread, stacked and unstacked a lot of bread baskets, made and shaped their Danish-style ancient sprouted rye bread by myself, learned how to load a deck oven, shaped a few loaves of their famous country loaf, and practiced some Spanish. Not too shabby for a “green” baking stage just off the boat from cooking school.

So, Mom and Dad: I don’t have a job at one of the country’s best bakeries, yet. But I’m working on it. I got to geek out about bread for a day, meet some amazing and passionate people who were nothing short of inspiring, and got my hands dirty, quite literally, in how this all works. Feck, even just walking around the back of the bakery in an apron was magical. In the meantime, I’m going to keep practicing in my lab (aka San Francisco kitchen) and feeding as many friends as humanly possible while I figure out what’s next. It may take me a little bit of time to figure it out, but I will. I promise.

My hands were stained from the cherry juice for three days after I left the bakery and my shoes still have spots of crusted-over sourdough starter, but every time I look down at them, I smile. Let the new journey begin…

When I studied in Paris during college, I lived on a small, residential street in the 13th arrondissement, just off of the Place d’Italie metro stop. On the walk from my flat to the metro, there was one lone bakery, so small it was indistinguishable as a bakery. And it was never open. Puzzling to say the least, I never thought too much about it, except for the occasional sadness that it must have fallen on hard times and been forced to close. Until one day when I was walking home from the metro around 5pm (a rare occurrence, as we left the flat every morning at 9am and often didn’t return until 12 hours later), and to my shock, it was open. There was a queue out the door of people in their work clothes, laden with shopping bags on each arm and talking to each other at a bustling pace. They were all buying bread for dinner.

Not until I moved to San Francisco almost three years ago did I think about that bakery again. My good friend, Arif, knowing well of my baking escapades in my own kitchen, said that I MUST go to Tartine Bakery as soon as I moved to SF. (I did him one better and went during my initial visit to the city, and promptly decided that I could in fact move to SF, I wouldn’t be deprived of legit pastries and croissants upon leaving New York.) And on my visit I learned that they did this crazy thing — they baked bread in the afternoon so customers could have it fresh for dinner around 5pm.

All who know me know that I think about Paris often. Every day, probably. And on my yearly visits to the City of Lights, I pack as many pastries, croissants, baguettes and other warm, fresh, floury goodies into my purse as I possibly can. For my birthday last year, I even designed my itinerary around the five new bakeries garnering croissant acclaim across the city. For my trip this spring, I devised a part deux to my original croissant pilgrimage, with the help of my friend Seb’s croissant safari — although he and I respectfully disagree on which is the best in the city. So ending up at a cooking school in Ireland, not France, was enigmatic to many people. Sometimes even to myself. But now I can proudly say that it was in Ireland when I truly fell in love with bread.

It all starts with a starter. Still a novice to the craft, I won’t dare to explain all of the science behind the art (for that, you should read the first chapter of Chad Robertson’s Tartine Bread cookbook — 39 pages for one bread recipe). But essentially, a starter is where it all begins. A combination of flour, water, salt and yeast from the air (natural yeast) makes this bubbly, active, smelly, wonderful mixture that you use some of for each loaf of bread. At cooking school, we carried ours around in Kilner jars like babies — kind of like the hard-boiled eggs in a basket they give you in third grade to teach you what it’s like to be a parent. We labeled them, we named them, we fed them, we loved them. There were daily discussions about our starters like only a group of bread-obsessed culinary students could have. I started my starter from the school’s starter, which was seven years old. Yes, seven. There are different schools of thought around if you should keep a starter in the fridge or at room temperature, how often you should feed it, etc. etc. But we kept ours in the kitchen, not the fridge, and I fed mine weekly — the day before I wanted to start a sponge.

The sponge is the second part of the process — where you take a bit of your starter (about 100g) and add equal parts flour and water to it to bulk it up. Leave it overnight and do the same the next morning. By mid-day, you can take 340g of this new “sponge” and get going, adding various flours, more water, some salt and then set the dough up in the stand mixer to be kneaded with a dough hook. Once it pulls away cleanly from the side of the bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

The next day takes patience. For about one hour, you fold the dough every 20 minutes using a dough scraper in a very particular way. Then you wait another hour for it to rise. Then you can finally shape it into a ball, put it into a flour-lined basket and back into the fridge it goes, overnight.

 

Finally, the following day, you’re ready to bake your work of art. High heat and constant moisture are key, and about 45 minutes later your sourdough baby is born.

This may seem like a hell of a lot of work for one loaf of bread. And let’s be honest, it is. But after doing this weeks and weeks on end, I now understand that it’s a labor of love. It is the true merging of art and science in a way unlike any other I have known before. So many variables can affect the final product — temperature, temperature change, moisture, your hands, etc. It’s like a game that changes every time you play it, while you’re always striving for the same finish line.

 

If someone had told me five months ago that I would become obsessed with baking loaves of sourdough, I would have laughed. I’m obsessed with cakes, yes. And tarts, definitely. Cookies aren’t anything to sneeze at either. But this new love was of one of the seemingly most simple forms of baking, but through its complexity and through my patience came a deep connection and infatuation.

So yesterday when I ventured down to Tartine Bakery to meet with their head of bread and Chad Robertson and the team, I thought of that tiny bakery in Paris that I walked by every day 17 years ago. And I smiled when I thought about all that has happened in the 17 years since. And I smiled even bigger when I thought about next week — and how I would be baking Tartine bread, at Tartine Bakery, under the tutelage of the masters. Following my heart, and my new love.

Yesterday, as I sat in the Puerta Vallarta airport watching the glowing, happy, tan American touristos walk to their gates, I started to feel very thankful that a place like this exists. Where pale, over-worked, disgruntled Americans can go to find their happy. Whatever their particular happy might be.

My happy was living in a treehouse, in a jungle, on the ocean, in Mexico, doing yoga.

After three and a half months of living in Europe and stuffing my face with scones and soda bread and croissants and the like, I knew I would need a reboot afterwards. Actually, my yoga teacher knew. A friend and I affectionately call him “Our Lord” because he sees and knows all. Our Lord said to me last December, before I left San Francisco for my little eat, pray, love adventure, that I should go to do my cooking in Ireland and then meet him in Mexico in April. Then, and only then, would we would figure out my future. Until that time, I was instructed to just enjoy my trip, enjoy every day, and live in the present. So I did. And when the time came, I left Ireland headed back west by way of France, England, Italy and New York — and then into a plane, a car and a boat to the treehouse in the jungle in Mexico.

Our Lord was one of the reasons I moved to San Francisco, stumbling into his yoga class at Equinox on a Friday afternoon during my business trip assessing if the city could be my new home. I walked out dazed and confused — and happy. So, two and a half years later, in the city that did become my home, when I was anything but happy, I listened to him and decided to met him in Mexico to figure out my future. Our Lord has a powerful way of bringing kick-ass people together, but I honestly didn’t even think about that when I booked my plane ticket from my cottage in Ireland. I thought about sun, and sand, and warmth, and kick-ass guacamole — and the paradise that is this almost-untouched area of the western coast of Mexico. But it was this group of 15 kick-ass yogis who came to the jungle to find their own happy that helped me find mine.

Our Lord rarely calls students by their real names — sometimes I think this is because he forgets their real names and sometimes it’s just him being his quirky self. Although I must have seen some of these nicknamed faces before at yoga classes in SF, they were all strangers to me when we jumped off the boat (quite literally, as there was no dock for our private part of the jungle, and some of us were quite stellar at the technique of entering and exiting the boat without any spectacle). In a Breakfast Club end credits sort of way, we were all different, but in many ways we are all the same. There was “Mama” and “Joshua Tree” and “Teetee” and “The Bob and The Jennifer” and “The Womens” and all the rest of us… In love, healing from love, looking for love, it didn’t matter on the yoga mats in the tree house. And once again I found myself in a place of no judgment and no competition — just love, integrity and respect.

I listened to Our Lord and didn’t think about my plan for what’s next while I was cooking and eating my way around Europe. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it forever, though, and realized how inevitable it was when the customs control officer in Dublin said to me: “So you just learned to cook, now what?” in a surprisingly genuine tone. And I told him with the biggest smile and shrug I could muster after sleeping only two hours the night before (darn pub, darn Guinness), “I have no idea! So I’m going home to figure it out.”

It’s no secret that I love to bake cakes. And tarts. And now I can even get really into taking a giant saw to a lamb. But the future could entail many things… More writing, more baking, more hands-on work with kids. Not surprisingly, almost everyone in the jungle asked me what’s next. And as usual, I rattled off my list of options so far and crazy ideas and a million places I still want to travel to. But unlike the usual supportive nods and kind words and occasional “you must be fucking crazy” looks in response, this group was different.

The look on “Joshua Tree’s” face when I told him about my dream of starting a kids’ cooking school was like that of a child at an amusement park looking up at all the rides with awe. Coupled with an emphatic, “You HAVE to do this.” It made me smile to my core. “The Bob and The Jennifer” immediately started listing personal contacts in Mexico minutes after meeting me and telling them I want to learn to cook Mexican cuisine in territory. “Mama,” in her beautiful Australian accent, said to me at the water cooler after class one day, “I can’t wait to see what’s next for you, I know it’s going to be great.” And “Arturo My Man” came to my mat on the morning of our last class and looked sincerely into my eyes. He took my hand and said, “You have everything you need on your plate to be full. Your future will be wonderful.” (I quite appreciated the metaphor, even if unintentional.)

Among other famous phrases he has coined, Our Lord is known to say “Welcome Home” at least five times each class. Our mat is home. Yoga is home. And for someone who doesn’t really know where her home is these days (or more accurately, these past few years), it’s a pretty powerful sentiment. (His other favorite saying of mine is “oh my gawwwd” and one would be surprised at how much more enjoyable it is to say and to hear when you stretch out the word God to three syllables.) But perhaps the most appropriate Lordism is, “Courage is everything, man. Be brave, my friend, be brave.” Somehow on this trip I managed to be brave enough to chant by myself to the group, swim in my underwear in the ocean at night, and tell total strangers all about my hopes and dreams without blinking an eye.

No judgment
No competition
Just love, integrity and respect

So now what? I’m going to buy some brilliantly-red California strawberries at the farmer’s market and bake some crazy shit with them. I’m going to find my baking prodigy, Alice, and invite her over to make a giant cake covered in sprinkles with me. I’m going to read a lot of books that I never had time to read before. I’m going to study the map of Mexico. And I’m going to do a lot of yoga with Our Lord.

When the customs control officer in San Francisco said to me, “Welcome home,” I just smiled this time and simply said, “Thank you.” No shoulder shrugs, no ramblings, just happy. And a little bit of extra courage, too, thanks to my kick-ass new jungle yogis and their kick-ass hearts.

Namaste.

It’s been a week since we left the farm, and Alice’s video inspired me to put into words what has been going on in my head over the last nine days. Simply put, it’s a mess. How the feck did it all end so quickly? Just like that? One minute we were filling in a chart about e. coli 157 and the next minute it was all over. Just like that.

I had no idea what to expect when I arrived on the farm three+ months ago, leaving my old life behind to live in a cottage… on a farm… with total strangers… and some cows. And then some piglets and some baby chicks and a shit ton of kale. I had no idea what to expect, or what would happen, or if I would love it, or if I would hate it, or if I would just want to get on a plane and go back to the States and change my mind about it all. I’m so glad I didn’t get on a plane and go back. I think the scones on that first day helped keep me in my chef’s trousers and fugly protective shoes.

When I think about it now, I realize that a huge part of why I didn’t get on a plane and turn back were the people I spent almost every minute of every day of all 12 weeks with. And, I think the Blackbird helped. For a good part of my life, I’ve felt like many people don’t get me. They don’t know what to do with me. And they definitely don’t understand how I could talk about and read about and carry on incessantly about the texture of pastry cream, or if you should fold your shortcrust pastry inwards or outwards, or how to get the perfect thickness of a cream cheese buttercream frosting (even if they love eating all of those bits after I’ve spent hours talking about them to myself). And then I got to the farm. For the first time, in a very long time, there was no judgement. There was no misperception. There was no confusion. We were all there to cook, because we loved it. Because we loved it more than almost anything else, and we put that anything else on hold to do it, day in and day out for three months straight. With total strangers, in a cottage, on a farm, with some cows.

And on this farm we had some chickens… and we threw awesome parties (some of which got a little messy, some of which involved Billy in costume).. and we went to the pub in a mini van… and we plucked snipe… and we ate family breakfast on the weekends… and we went to fancy charity galas… and we wore safety jackets to walk to the Goalpost… and we danced with scallop shells… and talked about food incessantly… and we loved each other for all of it.

I’m finding it much harder to go back to “reality” than I thought it would be (even though I’m not exactly sure what my reality even is right now). I analyze every restaurant menu, I think about the food cost of everything, I can’t possibly understand why everyone I come in contact with doesn’t want to talk incessantly about every detail of every bite of food we’re eating and try to guess every herb and spice in it.

 

I desperately want to say “Mother Sauce” and have everyone around me understand what I mean without explanation (it loses so much in translation, I have to say). And when I say “good girrrrrrrl” to friends or strangers or people on the Tube, I desperately want them to know Florrie and understand what it’s like to be in kitchen 3. And when I hear the Wagon Wheel song, I just want everyone around me to get up and dance.

 

 

I knew the time would fly by. Deep down I think we all know that, especially about experiences that we don’t want to end. But now I just wish I could have it back. Just one more week. Just one more packet of recipes with our names on it. Just one more time hearing Rory say, “And straight to the table with that.” Just one more time hearing Rachel say, “Thanks a million, Tracie.” Just one more time seeing Darina in the red lobster broach. Just one more week. Or maybe two.

 

But Tim got me thinking one day towards the end of the course when he was driving me to the doctor (for my second sinus infection in two weeks), “Sometimes it’s best to be leaving somewhere when you still want to stay.” Maybe it is. Maybe if school went on forever we wouldn’t appreciate it as much. Maybe if we never had to leave each other, we wouldn’t have that whole “you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone” thing going on. But maybe I just miss everyone, and all the softly whipped cream. And all of the hugs, and the tears, and the unconditional love that I’m now convinced only three months on a farm with 64 strangers, and some cows and pigs and chickens and things, can bring you.

Some days I think I’m crazy for leaving my life and career back home to move to a farm in Ireland and cook. And some days I don’t. Today was one of the later.

Today we walked through the school gardens and ate things. In other words, we foraged. (One can make good money foraging for restaurants in London these days, we learned. But considering I don’t really like to pick things, for myself let alone other people, I’m not sure I’ll be signing up for that as my new career just yet.) And then we went for tea at Ballymaloe House — the bigger, older sister to my school, where this all started. While we’ve been learning about Ballymaloe House, and the restaurant, and the hotel, and the cafe, and the gift shop, and and and…. this whole time, it was somehow felt different to be sitting within the walls of the mansion on the farm, where Myrtle Allen started it all.

Mrs. Allen was a farmer’s wife, who got married at 19 and moved into an old house on a huge farm, installed some heating and got on with it. She wanted to start a restaurant and her husband said she could, but he wouldn’t buy her one. So, she started it in their house. She is credited with being the “renowned matriarch of modern Irish cuisine” — as important to her country’s cuisine as Alice Waters is to America’s. Mrs. Allen was having a wee sleep today when we came to visit, so we sadly did not get to say hello in person. At tea today, her son, Rory, described her passion and tenacity and the fact that she always just did the next logical thing, not thinking too much about it. He also said, “Food is in her.” And I can’t imagine a greater compliment.

On the first day of school, we watched this amazing documentary about her life — and the history of food in Ireland. I can think of a few inspiring women in my life who have something to do with me being here — my mom, my Godmother, Martha Stewart, to name a few — and when I watched that film I knew immediately that I would be adding Myrtle Allen to that list. I loved when she said, “I can’t think of anything so unique and precious that you shouldn’t write about it,” when describing the Ballymaloe Cookbook. And the next day, I started this blog.

For the last three months, I’ve been living in a cottage attached to Myrtle Allen’s son and daughter-in-law’s house. (They’re in the part attached to the gazebo, and I peek at them from my little window directly to the right of it.) Next Saturday, I have to move out and go back to the real world, where I won’t be waking up at 7am to milk cows in the dairy, pick herbs in the glasshouse (greenhouse to us Americans), bake brioche in the freezing cold morning kitchen or do yoga in my room looking out at the grand gazebo of Tim and Darina’s house.

Yesterday was St. Patrick’s Day, my first one spent in Ireland. Leprechauns everywhere, including James Joyce’s grandnephew, whom I met in the pub last night. Only in Ireland. I donned my green glitter shamrock earrings and orange, green and white boa at night, but during the day I took my patriotism into the kitchen and created a St. Patrick’s Day cupcake:  toasted coconut, lime curd, cream cheese frosting and dehydrated carrot. Considering I didn’t even know how to make lime curd or dehydrate carrot before I came here, I was pretty proud.

I will miss these days in the kitchen, where the world is my oyster and the only thing standing between me and my next creation is my imagination. It’s way more of an empowering feeling than I ever imagined it could be. Maybe because after these three months, I’m finally becoming more confident with my cooking and as the great Ms. Allen did 50+ years ago, I’m just getting on with it. At the end of last week, my teacher was recapping my efforts and progress and after her inspiring and humbling summary she said to me, “You love food and food loves you.” And I can’t imagine a greater compliment.

There is nowhere in the world where the grass is greener than it is here.

And it can’t help but make you think about the phrase that we throw around so casually, and so often. So the other day I actually asked myself, is the grass greener somewhere else? Is life on the farm life at its best?

Which in turn begs the question, am I a city mouse or a country mouse?

I can’t deny that life is amazing here. And I’ve fallen in love… with Peaches the cow.

Last weekend I went to the big city (aka Dublin) and was overwhelmed. Lots of buildings, lots of people, lots of things to buy that we really don’t need. And I will be forever grateful for the experience of living for all these months with just what I need, nothing more, nothing less. It’s amazing to now truly understand where food comes from, how to grow it, how to pick it, how to take care of it, and how to cook with it. Such a novelty today that was once everyone’s daily life. But the weekend away also make me homesick — for what exactly, I’m not sure I could put my finger on. More of a general feeling that deep down I am a city mouse, who thrives on culture and art and music and lots of people. Who loves beautiful bakeries and boutiques, modern museums and dive music bars, live theater and bustling restaurants and fast transportation and city parks that stretch for miles. But that all begs the big question of which city will be mine?

For the first time in a long time, I found myself missing San Francisco. I’m sure many of my SF friends will be SHOCKED to hear me say that, and quite honestly, I am as well. But last night when I met with the head of the school, Darina, about my future, she asked me, “Are you going back to San Francisco after this?” And without even a slight pause, she followed up by saying, “Well, of course you are, who wouldn’t?!” And, she was right. Instead of waxing poetic about the sunshine and strawberries and wine and rolling hills, I’ll say that this time away has helped me realize how much it has to offer. And that was definitely one of the reasons I knew I needed to leave it for awhile, to get perspective. To decide if I could go back there if I didn’t have to go back to a job that I hated (and as sad as it makes me to say that, in the end it truly became a job that I hated).  And I left it to explore my deepest passion, to see if there really is a “there there” as they say. As scary as it is for me to say it, I think there might be.

I cried today in the school reception area because I had missed almost a full week of cooking due to a nasty sinus infection that has now decided to spread to my eyes (this dracula look has to go). And of course Darina walked in right in the middle of my meltdown, as would be my luck. But she said so cheerfully and reassuringly, “Hey! A student who is crying for missing class! Now that’s a first!” And once again, she was right. There must be something driving me forward if I could be brought to tears over the fact that I wouldn’t be able to cook a vegetable curry with coconut rice this morning. Nevertheless, I got myself together and to the doctor (the one and only doctor — it was all a bit Doc Hollywood, I must say) and am finally on the mend.

So maybe it’s not a question of city mouse vs. country mouse but rather old life vs. new life. And at the end of the day, water makes me happier than most things and there is a beautiful ocean over here — and back home. Although I may have to get on the hunt for some cows, though…

In the past week, I have baked five tarts. Or tahhhts, as my friends from New England like to say. I love tahhhts. My Godmother, aka Aunt Judith, taught me how to bake her mother’s fruit tart (with wild Maine blueberries, of course) and it changed my life. I have literally been baking them every chance I get, ever since. I bake them for brunches, for parties, for stone fruit season — they even helped me ingratiate myself into an ex-boyfriend’s family (Finnerty tart of choice: blackberry). Aunt Judith’s mother uses a simple crust of flour, sugar, butter and vinegar, all mixed by hand with a fork and pressed into a tart tin. The fruit of choice (and there are infinite options — blueberries, blackberries, peaches, plums, nectarines, apples, pears, cherries; she told me once that when her son was living in India he even made one with kiwi fruit!) is then tossed in flour, sugar and cinnamon and either scattered across the pastry shell playfully or carefully placed into an organized pattern (the German side of me loves the organized pattern bit). It is my go to, and always will be.

But now I have more tahts to add to my arsenal.

Last week I learned “flaky pastry.” Essentially, it’s a pastry dough that’s rolled about three million times with butter in between each of the three million layers. And it takes two days to make. And it’s amazing. I have never been so thankful for my yoga arms in my entire life.

The Ballymaloe Apple Tart involves said flaky pastry, as well as shortcrust pastry, as well as a sh-t ton of apples, as well as patience. You need to rest the dough overnight and then roll it again some more the next day. The trick is to make sure the yellow bits of butter are all nice and evenly smoothed out between the layers of dough. Otherwise, bad things will happen. But it’s magically versatile — mile-high apple tart one day, apple tartlets or rustic pizza dough the next.

I also baked a Seville Orange Bakewell Tart, which made my teachers proud; and my first ever Tart Tatin, which made me proud.

All this to say, I realized today as the steam was flooding out of my Tart Tatin and the caramel sauce was trying to control itself from running all over the place (or maybe it secretly wanted to go rogue and escape from the plate) that I want to bake for real. Not just in my kitchen station at school or in my back-to-reality kitchen at home, but for realz. How I will do this, I have no idea. For now, it’s just a love that I’ll run with and hopefully it will not lead me astray.

But all roads lead back to Aunt Judith’s mother’s tart, and as they say, your first love is always your greatest.