I’m cooking a lot now because I’m in culinary school, but what led me to finally make a real career choice and seek training in culinary arts was that after I stopped working, and left to my own devices, I failed to make any other choice, but found myself cooking on a daily basis.

What drove me to cook then, and the basis for choosing a life that will without question revolve around food, is a question with so many answers that I can hardly decide which one to describe first.

I started cooking after I left my job because I didn’t have any reason left not to.  I didn’t cook as much while I was working because I felt always rushed for time, and to satisfy the time vs. hunger balance I wound up making a lot of quick and easy meals  – from scratch as I was able.  Being a full time stay at home mom afforded me the time to plan and explore, which resulted in more elaborate food adventures and a constant expansion of my skills and knowledge.

I was motivated to cook once the time was available because I viewed it as my new job description – feeding my family well was part of what I understood to be my contribution to family life in lieu of money.  I wanted to eat well, and I wanted a kid who doesn’t throw a fit when you feed her something other than chicken tenders and PB&J.  While these are simple goals, they require a lot of food-focused effort.

My friend Elizabeth Willse recently posted a review of Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant.  This book of reflections from writers and foodies about what they eat when they’re alone is now on my plan-to-read list.  Her review got me thinking about the things I like to cook, and the completely separate category of what I like to eat when I have only myself to think of and/or don’t feel like cooking.  I eat more bread and Camembert or triple creme cheeses than any one person probably ought to, but then even the cheeses I choose often have identities defined by where they come from or what they are made of.

If it were just about the food, I wouldn’t have pursued a structured culinary education, and I wouldn’t be writing this post today.  By now my constant search for patterns and meaning is no secret to anyone who would be reading this entry.  A fellow student once asked me, “Can’t you just be cooking food?”  I can’t.  I cook and I eat not for the love of food alone, but because I became aware of the experience of food, beyond the flavor to the story that starts in the ground and ends on my plate, through eating; I’m here learning what I learn, doing what I do and planning my future moves because I want to be an active author in that story.

When is a carrot just a carrot?  It never is.  It’s always a note in a chord in a song, no matter how simple or complex a song, and it’s a note with context and history and endless lifetimes of associated meaning that is viewed from different angles when used in different ways.

I cook because when I do, I feel connected to what I eat, to the environment that produced it, to who I am and who I will be as a result of the eating and the cooking.

About five minutes on, I have come around enough to perform the four-minute manual labor of brewing a pot of coffee, for which I am thankful.

Before I even get the coffee, I’ll be running at nearly full steam, though my fingertips will still be a little bit dull and fumbling.

Which is why I hope that I will get the coffee *before* I’m quite awake enough to notice that I ran out of beans a scoop or two too early.

Nothing worse than a weak brew to get you off on the wrong foot.

Folks, I’m running on empty at the moment, enjoying a lot of my time and cursing the low moments of parenthood when I might otherwise be sleeping for the rest of the time. (Night time is the worst, longest part of potty training by far, I think.) Needless to say, I could stand to sleep a lot more than I have been lately, but the exhaustion is largely rewarding so I am merely stating the case, and not complaining.

I’ve made a lot of amazing things at school, and I’m surprised by how many skills I never thought much about but that once learned are immediately accessible to me at all times now. I haven’t cracked a cookbook at home in a while (save for homework), which is what allows me to continue enjoying cooking at home – I can be both unstructured and successful, and therefore also relax.

I have some upheaval that I am not inclined to write about at the moment, entirely separate from any practical career consideration. I suppose that emotional occupation is as much a factor on my full plate as any of my daily routines, obligations and responsibilities. This will likely have met resolution before I ever write about it here, though in the interest of being truly honest about why I don’t post often, I felt it needed to be mentioned.

In sum, I’m a student, a mom and human. I’m carrying a lot right now and it’s only going to get harder, although the balance will change. I haven’t been faithfully writing anything of interest here on the blog, but even that will change one day when I have more time on my hands. If you’re actually reading this, I thank you sincerely for that.

c/o www.urbandictionary.com

1. cheryl

A person of true beauty. A girl with such a kind personality that anyone will simply fall in love with. A Cheryl will help anyone out without hesitation. They have trusting blue eyes and large bussoms.
“That Cheryl just saved 100 children!”

2. cheryl

buy cheryl mugs, tshirts and magnets
a perfect girl, someone you can always rely on, kind caring, a great sense of humor, and just amazing
“Cheryl is amazing!!”

3. Cheryl

A compromise..
A girl with a kind personality who will poop on your windshield if you get on her bad side
“She seemed kind, but shes just a cheryl”

Synchronicity is how I’d describe how I’m feeling at the moment. Yesterday was my first day in the classroom for my culinary program, and due to a number of elements I just had the oddly resonant feeling of being in the right place at the right time.

Subconsciously, I’m not prepared for this feeling of active engagement on a positive path. I’m sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, because isn’t everything supposed to involve a little bit of suffering?

Perhaps I will sing a different tune when exams are looming.

In the meantime, I’m tethering my mind to the uplifting resonant feeling and pushing the mute button on the little voice that wants me to sabotage myself with doubt and embroil me in unproductive thoughts, like how to involve more stress in my life.

Let me not create stress where there is none, and enjoy the beginning of a new and positive path.

Welcome!

Originally uploaded by cinediva

This is a shot I took into the room next door while housekeeping was in there. I couldn’t resist the perfectly framed “Welcome!” chalkboard message.

This and a series of others are taken at The Kennedy School, a converted schoolhouse that is now a hotel containing a movie theatre, restaurant and a handful of bars. Each guest room is a converted classroom – we are staying in ‘Mrs. Francis Room’, which is one half of the classroom. The other half is that neighbor’s room, the ‘Cherry Tree Room,’ named for the art inside (not pictured.)

Other pictures include light fixtures, a phone, water fountain, and art from all around. I’ll try to take a picture of the front of the building before we check out tomorrow.

In other news, this morning we had waffles at the Waffle Window, the much-acclaimed tiny waffle vendor we found on Yelp. We were not disappointed by my Farm Fusion waffle – sauteed mushrooms, spinach and a lemon-thyme marinated chevre cheese over a sweet belgian waffle – nor by Sami’s pumpkin pie waffle (imagine a slice of pie on top of a waffle and you begin to get the drift. Yum), nor Ben’s bacon, brie and basil waffle, which looked great but I did not try.

Here’s a picture!

Yelp has been a phenomenal tour guide so far on this trip, thanks in no small part to my iPhone app. We highly recommend walking on the wild side and using the “nearby” function to scope out what’s good wherever you are.

Cheers!

You may have surmised, by now, or by reading my tweets, that I’m on vacation.

High time I posted a little something here, eh?

Well, here you go. We’re in Portland, OR, presently, having driven up the coast of California in the first week. Portland kind of rules, not least because of these tasty treats from Voodoo Donuts. (Yes, one has bacon. You best believe I didn’t eat that one. All other considerations aside, the bacon looked like cardboard!)

My Voodoo Doll donut was complete with a pretzel stick through the heart, and gooey jelly blood in the middle. I only ate the head and shoulders before I stopped, lest I risk sugar coma. I feel satisfied that my enemies have been duly decapitated.

Many more photos to come, so please enjoy my Flickr photostream. I’ll be home nigh Tuesday, ready to pick up normal life where I left off, and start school on Friday!

Cheers!

Took my poor, injured computer to the Apple Store without an appointment and actually managed to be seen within half an hour.  Had fun with Sami on the kiddie macs in the meantime, and we tested all of the headphones on display with the tester iPhones.  And I do mean all of those headphones.  Whenever Sami didn’t like whatever song I’d picked out, we’d move on to the next iPhone.

The Genius at the Genius Bar reset my hardware settings, which resulted in a return of full iSight camera functionality – yay!  What I have since learned is that now my wifi card also works more predictably AND the problems I was having with viewing my own website on Firefox have also been resolved.  Hooray for kicking the butt of the ghost in the machine!  Maybe Google could have saved me a trip to the Apple Store, but whatever.  It was a fun outing with Sami, and cost us absolutely nothing.

The crack along the side of my computer would actually not result in the battery falling out – the magnesium inner case wasn’t damaged in the trauma, so the crack is actually purely cosmetic.  Nothing a little duct tape or Krazy Glue couldn’t fix.

After all that excitement, I made a simple black beans with wild rice dish, which was loved by all – in the end.  Sami swore up and down that she doesn’t like beans (whatever.)  She wanted rice only.

Oh, this one was so well played, it gives me glee just thinking about it.

She demanded a bowl of “just rice.”  So I got her an empty bowl, put in about 2 tbsp of rice, and told her that if she wanted more, she had to then eat from the rice/beans bowl I originally had given to her.  Inevitably she wanted more, and upon realizing that my promises are fulfilled, promptly declared herself “ALL DONE.”  I negotiated her into three bites.  By the time she was on the third bite, she’d lost count, and kept saying, “Two more, two more,” and so I of course obliged her without correcting her math.

She ate about half the bowl, into which I’d truthfully put a little too much for her, and was spared the indignity of reversing her “dislike” statement of earlier in the meal.

Well played, momma.  Sometimes I surprise myself with parental strategy.

Nonetheless, I bought a ticket to see This Is It when they became available, and have been really looking forward to it.  As the movie was starting I had a little kick in the stomach from the realization that it would be over, the same way I do on birthday mornings and other big days – the anxiously anticipated magic has finally arrived, and every passing second brings the end of it a little closer!

Here’s the thing.

To see Michael Jackson in concert was on my short list of things to one day do, and even before he died I saw that likelihood as very small.  This movie is the closest I’d ever get to that.  I don’t imagine this is much like a typical concert experience.  Frankly it was eerie because of the finality of it, and how not final the show really was at the time of Michael’s death.  People were so grateful for their chance to be part of his show, and the unstated weight of the moment was that this great moment, the pinnacle of many lives, just never got to happen.

This film felt like something I shouldn’t get to see.  I’d almost certainly never have seen it if MJ were still alive.  It had the feeling of watching a magician perform his tricks in slow motion, somehow cheating and analyzing the sleight of hand.  And yet even viewing the rehearsals, the concert show as a work in progress, and getting a vague feel of just how it came to be that ideas were born in Michael Jackson’s head and were transformed into the huge strokes painted on a concert stage – even in the midst of this, the magic of Michael Jackson himself continued, strung between the moments, and never was trapped or explained.

I saw the magician practically dissecting his tricks, and while on one hand I feel I understand them better now, on the other hand I am certain that I completely don’t.  It’s the same way with understanding atoms.  Electrons rotate around the protons and neutrons.  This I understand.  WHY?  HOW?  No matter how minute the explanations get, there’s still a tiny jump you can’t explain – why are protons positive and electrons negative? HOW can subatomic particles have a charge? – something that boils down to, “Well, that’s just how it is.”  And it’s the foundation for everything that physically exists.

I think what astounded me most about this film is that MJ was an amazing performer, the culmination of an entire lifetime as a working performer; and while his talent was innate and based on intuition, there were several moments featured in the film that demonstrated he could also take that intuition and communicate it in practical terms who didn’t see or hear what he saw intuitively.  He understood his talent.  During an intro to “The Way You Make Me Feel,” he points out that a short silent break needs to be longer than a pause.  He doesn’t specify how long, but he explains that they need to leave the silence for a bit, “let it simmer” in his own words, and that the impact is greater when the music resumes afterward.  A second moment like this happens during “Earth Song” when a bulldozer rolls up onto the stage and clanks its blade down.  Michael instructs that, “it will have more value” if the bulldozer clomps to a rest, a pause intensifies the gravity of the statement of that noise, and the delicate piano ending picks up a few seconds later.  (Thanks, Jeffrey, for reminding me of that part.)

“Earth Song” actually was one moment whose enormity brought tears into my eyes was when a little girl about Sami’s age lays down to sleep (in a film projected during the rehearsal) in a rain forest filled with flowers and butterflies, and wakes up to find it destroyed, burning, a bulldozer about to run her and the last living plant down.  It asks, what are we leaving our children?  I cry because I see Sami in that child’s place, and I cry because that imagery was so succinct, so enormous, the finely honed point where music, film and ideas come together to be communicated.  The visual, communicative economy of that imagery was incredible – a craft combining message and media perfectly in a way that I have rarely seen.

Michael Jackson took these disparate media – dance, film, music – and used them to elevate pop music to something you had to pay attention to.  Well, probably created “pop” music out of a world where music was segregated by genre.  How can you not pay attention to the one thing that *everyone* is paying attention to?  He used those media to speak in a unique vocabulary.  This was apparent even in the original Thriller video – that’s what the big deal was in 1983, and that’s what the big deal was in This Is It.

He took a medium (dance) that isn’t popular in the mainstream way of popular music, and brought it into his music in a way that made it impossible to ignore.  An entire stage full of dancers, featured in the first few minutes of the film, who cite Michael Jackson as their inspiration for aspiring to express themselves through dance.  Imagine millions of people, across all ages, races, educational and cultural backgrounds, citing Mikhail Baryshnikov as the inspiration for their dreams; I find this laughable, a brilliant, improbable dream. His dance may be awesome, but his range of appeal is limited.  Of course, the comparison of classical and popular art is a topic for another day.  My point is that Michael Jackson made people care about dance, and made it an integral element of the “product” of Michael Jackson.

Talking about the film today briefly with my friend Jeffrey Paul Bobrick (you all should check him out – he’s a wonderful singer/songwriter based in NYC as well as my fellow MJ fan), he pointed out that if this film were about any other performer, it may well have been boring.  I truthfully can’t think of a performer with the reputation for perfectionism that MJ had, or the unquantifiable thing I described above.  I’m pretty sure this sort of film experience was uniquely positive because it was Michael Jackson.  Because he was both human and superhuman; he moved his arms just like all the other dancers did, and yet when he did it it had something extra.  But mostly I think that how MJ worked was a topic of intense fascination, as if, like above, we SHOULD have been able to identify what he did.  That’s why The Making of Thriller video was the bestselling home video release of all time.  It’s riveting not just to watch the end product of Michael Jackson – the work in progress is a spectacle all its own.

I was struck by how much, under stage lighting, you could see that his features, basic facial structure, were the same over the years.  So much is made of the plastic surgery, the results of which were not insignificant, but I think many reports were exaggerated, just based now on having seen real, recent moving pictures of Michael Jackson.  I was also struck by how human he was, under all the magic. He wasn’t shy about critiquing the work of others, but he wasn’t unkind.  He didn’t appear to be self-aggrandizing at all, seemed to consider himself an element in the production in the same way that he viewed the other dancers and singers (even as he sort of meta-processed it all, and offered tweaks to improve things from his creative perspective.)  He seemed to thoroughly enjoy the teamwork of it all, and the screen chemistry between MJ and any of the other players was intense; not just the women, as in “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” or “The Way You Make Me Feel,” but also the men as in “Beat It.”

Amid all this wonder about Jackson himself, I should leave out that what Kenny Ortega did in directing this film, constructed out of footage never shot nor intended for this purpose, is no small feat.  Having produced some visual media myself, I can personally appreciate how hard it is to construct a meaningful piece even with footage one shot purposefully.  How much harder must it be to go through some ungodly number of hours of tape looking for nothing specific – just stuff to use – cull it down and put it together to create a cohesive narrative?  Cheers to the creativity, eye for great moments, and the talent and skill to put it together well.

But the filmmaking wasn’t what the movie was about, which is why I didn’t spend this whole post critiquing it.  This Is It was a film about how the Michael Jackson operation was coming into focus.  It’s been widely reported that he undertook the tour to show his children what he did for a living, since they have now come to an age where they can appreciate it.  The film is a fortunate artifact of that undertaking, so that we unintended recipients can also understand “what he did” a little better.

I came out of the movie appreciating not only Michael Jackson’s work, but its relationship with the life he lived.  Growing up in show business is not typical, but then he didn’t grow up to be a “typical” performer.  It’s a very chicken-and-egg thing – he ended up in music and performance because he demonstrated talent early on, but then his talent was concentrated and developed by that lifetime spent rehearsing and learning from masters in the field, until he was one himself.

Ultimately I came out thinking, everyone has greatness in them.  MJ had the fortune of a family already exploring music which made his greatness apparent.  Many, many people don’t ever discover what it is about them that makes them truly shine.  I believe it has to be true, we all have something to give.

So, I’ll never be a rock star, household name and multimillionaire who supports numerous charities with my name, star power or money.  (Or maybe I could, but I’m not trying very hard.)  What am I bringing to the great potluck of life?  I think it would suffice to feed my family, raise a good kid and always know what to do with the leftovers, but I think I’m capable of more than that.  I still have time to find out, though truth be told, I feel like I’m getting a little old.

Still, a lot of what I post about here, bound up in the minutiae of parenthood and housekeeping, is starting with myself to make changes that I think will improve the world.  Starting with the “Man in the Mirror,” if you will.  If I’ve taken one thing home from This Is It, it’s that life is so short.  How will I spend my last day?  I – anyone – can all start now to make it count.