The Bad, the Good, the Pretty

The bad news is that my mom is in the hospital. Bro called tonight to tell me that she was (as he so elegantly put it) crapping her brains out for two days, and, given her weakened kidneys--they function at about 15% of normal, and she's waiting for a transplant--her doctor thought that hospitalization was the safer move. It's not one of her "attacks," though. (She's been getting these attacks for, oh, ten years or so, where she suddenly feels bloated, then vomits a few times, then has diarrhea for awhile. Her doctors have never been able to diagnose it, but I'm pretty convinced it's a motility disorder. I think her stomach closes off at the bottom, which makes the food in her stomach start to ferment, basically. She's never been able to figure out what triggers the episodes; they show up pretty randomly, and she can go months and months without one.) Anyway, Bro said he'll call me tomorrow with any updates.

Now for the bitching and whining: Woody is getting on my last nerve. He's the one who used to work at the bakery years ago and is back again; he's young--23? 24?--and went to the same culinary school as our intern and Steve. He means well, but lordy he's a pain in the ass. Because Phil's not around this week, Woody is making a lot of the bread, and the intern is working with him--and he just lectures her constantly, droning on and on about how to do this, how to do that. Which would be okay, sort of, if he didn't fuck up stuff as often as he does. (His sourdough rolls today were a travesty, in my opinion.) And he was complaining about Bardo, the dishwasher, which will always piss me off. Yes, it's true, Bardo is not the sharpest tack in the box, but he tries very hard and he works like a dog, and I have found that, if you try to communicate what you want, he will do his best to do it for you.

The good news, though, is that I actually had the opportunity, yesterday AND today, to be a pastry chef, in that I made stuff other than croissants. I've been letting the new guy do the laminating, mostly so he can get comfortable with it and get good, consistent results. He's not all the way there yet, but I don't expect him to be--it'll take some practice, and he's only been doing it for a week or two. We work together in the afternoon to do the shaping, and having two pair of hands makes it go way more quickly. Plus, he's learning all my little systems (you don't make 4,000 croissants a week, nearly single-handedly, without a buttload of little systems).

So one of the things is this chocolate mousse fruit tart--the chocolate mousse came out beautifully, though I would not recommend it to everyone, given that it has raw eggs in it. I'm going to see if I can find a good alternative. The bakery has used that formula for decades, but I really don't think it's a good idea for people with compromised immune systems, say. I filled some pre-baked shells--full-size as well as 3-inch--with the mousse, then covered the tops with fresh fruit. For the large ones, I put blackberry in the center and around the edge, then filled in the rest with raspberries, and for the small ones, I used blueberries around the edge because they fit better; I used strawberries on one, which I think would fit better, flavor-wise, but which is more likely to fall apart or get knocked apart. (Woody felt compelled to opine that he didn't think blueberries were a good choice for the small ones, flavor-wise. Bossman and I ignored him. He was also about to give me shit for arguing against the raw eggs--"You're not going to eat raw eggs?"--and I said it wasn't me, it was that they're not a good idea for people with compromised immune systems. I should have said I don't like raw eggs so much, either, but I really didn't feel like stabbing him, so I chose the other route.)

The other thing uses a sable crust and a hazelnut frangipane (hazelnut flour, sugar, butter, eggs, lemon zest, a little flour). Fresh fruit (cherries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries) goes on top of the frangipane and basically sinks into it as it bakes. (Woody's clafouti, on the other hand, ended up with unbaked bottom crust the first time, and floating crust, because he prebaked it, the second time. Don't get me wrong--we all fuck stuff up, even Bossman. It's just that Woody presents himself as such an authority, and with so little reason.) Both these and the chocolate ones got glazed, and these also had a little mound of fresh raspberries and some sucre neige (powdered sugar that won't melt into what it's on) and a couple of chocolate curls.

Yesterday I made some joconde sheets for a batch of opera bars (someone else assembled it, which was fine with me; opera does nothing for me). I was a little worried about it, because when most people (coughcough Woody coughcough) make this formula, they get what one of the chefs at school called a cracker--a too-thin, uneven, crisp thing, rather than a thin sheet of a sponge cake. But Bossman complimented my mix several times, and, in fact, it came out quite nicely.

All in all, it was fun. And I think Bossman was pleased, too, and will let me do more. I'd occasionally ask a question about something--is this how this is supposed to look? what's the method for this?--but I really didn't feel like I was constantly running to him, and the things came out well. It was an interesting sensation, actually, in that I felt like I kinda knew what I was doing, and the questions were only coming out of not having done these things before. I'm sure I'll have bad days where I fuck up every last thing, but I'm just glad today wasn't one of them.