It has been Thursday for the last three days, and the fact that it is actually Thursday today is somehow not doing anything to improve the situation. I’m feeling a bit unmoored from my schedule, which mostly means that I’m walking around with the looming dread that I’ve forgotten something terribly important. I’m trying not to think too hard about this.
Please tell me I’m not the only one this happens to.
It’s made worse by the fact that I’m going out of town next week and I have a commission due – and no matter how many times I check my schedule, I’m convinced one of those things is happening this week and that I’m horribly behind.
I am excited about the commission though. I get to make cake and play around with some fancy-pants pastry chef techniques (Entremet molds! Chocolate curls on acetate! Mirror glaze!) which I haven’t broken out since culinary school.
I Gotta admit I’m terrified of the mirror glaze. It’s the last thing that goes on the cake, it’s for a paying client, and the last time I tried to use it, it went…poorly. I never got the final temperature right and I somehow managed to both melt my cake and end up with a gloopy, too-thick final result. I am researching my butt off to make sure that doesn’t happen again, but introducing hot liquid to a frozen, mousse-covered cake will always feel a bit scary.
On the plus side, personal cooking is going fairly well this week. I’ve managed to actually look at my menu this week and knock out the prep work that would make spur-of-the-moment dinnertime impossible.
This means I soaked beans. I never soak beans. I think soaking beans is silly and mostly a waste of time – especially when canned beans are a thing that exists. I might be changing my tune, though, because this is the first pot of beans I’ve made in a long time that actually had flavor and didn’t end up with a few weird crunchy ones.
It’s also somehow super satisfying to have something simmering away in cast iron on the back of your stove. It’s feeding my pioneer grandma instincts and I am kind of living for it.
A culinary degree and two years of professional experience has not stopped Jessi from making stupid mistakes – she just makes them more efficiently. She habitually reads cookbooks before bed, loses track of time on Wikipedia, and yells at cooking shows like dads watching football. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Jackson, five plants, and more cookbooks than a 600 square foot studio should hold.
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