resistance is fertile

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croissants. vegan croissants. perfect vegan croissants. perfect vegan croissants from scratch YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE! August 28, 2011

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),recipe! — lagusta @ 5:45 am

I originally published this last year, but now that I make it all the time, I’m republishing it with simplifications and slight modifications as I figure them out. I should be making the damn things as we speak, but my town currently has, I kid you not, a mandatory curfew (alcohol sales are banned!) because our local river is due to flood, oh, about 25 feet above usual tonight because of our lovely pal Hurricane Irene. So here I am, sitting at home like a chump, mentally calculating over and over the distance from the building (6-months-ours today!) to the river. I keep coming up with: not far enough.

Let’s talk about something else, shall we?

Croissants, maybe?
(September 2011 update: building was fine after Irene, hooray! Also please note THIS IMPORTANT UPDATE to this recipe, and also that the photos on this post are ATROCIOUS because the ‘ssaints look amazingly better these days. Poke around here or here for better photos.)

So here we go:

Learning to make croissants was supposed to be my birthday present to myself last year, but then my standing mixer broke…and then this and that happened, and I never got around to getting a new one, even though the void caused me pain at least once a week (& I burnt out two Salvation Army hand mixers in the interim). But now the birthday fairy stepped in, and voilà!

And let me say, friends, if you’re a serious cook, and especially if you’re a seitan-maker, don’t buy a KitchenAid mixer if you can avoid it. I know, I know, they are pretty–look at my old matchy-matchy yellow one! But there’s something screwy with them—I think the gears are plastic. They work just fine if you just make cookies and whatnot, but if you’re doing heavy duty stuff, of maybe just if you’re me, they burn out amazingly fast. Then your only solution is to replace the motor, which is damn near as pricey as buying a whole new machine. Ah, disposable economy.

Back to flaky pastry!

These didn’t come out perfectly. [update: they did on the second try [and third, fourth, etc. times]! The recipe below is the perfected ones.]

I’d say they are 80% perfect though, and I know what to do in the future: use a bit less oil, and a lot less flour. I used almost 2 cups more flour than I should have, because when converting a butter recipe to a coconut oil recipe, I didn’t account for how insanely much more rich coconut oil is than butter (butter has some milk solids, but coco oil is all fat), so I needed extra flour to compensate for the extra fat. Thus, my croissants didn’t rise as they should have and were a bit dense. The rule of thumb is to use 20% less coconut oil than butter, and I probably only did about 10%.

This isn’t a difficult recipe.

If you have no experience working with coconut oil or yeast doughs, however, I wouldn’t recommend it as your first foray. It is, however, crazy time-consuming, and requires paying serious attention to the process—no-knead bread it ain’t. But the croissants freeze great, and the pride you will feel when you serve them to your astonished pals is, not to be all cheesey or anything, SO worth it.

My recipe is based on Shirley Corriher’s wonderfully detailed one in BakeWise. I can’t recommend BakeWise highly enough—it’s one of those cookbooks you will read every word of, even for recipes you know you’ll never make, just because you know you’ll learn something. Wonderful. My mentors Selma and Noel gave it to me for my birthday two years ago, so see how it all ties together? Birthday present + birthday present = a third birthday present to and from myself.

More notes:

As you know, I hate Earth Balance, so I use coconut oil as my fat for baking. If you’re weirded out by coconut oil, get over it. Here’s my manifesto about it. It’ll help.

If you’re going to all the trouble of making these, might I suggest you spend $20 to buy a digital scale first? Not only because I only measured in grams and thus you’re going to have to convert if you want to make these, but because if you’re a serious baker (and, congratulations! You are, if you’re making croissants by hand from scratch!) you’ve got to become friendly with weighing and, particularly, with grams. God, I love grams. (No jokes about how it runs in my blood, please…) So precise!

One final note: if it’s a super hot and humid day, skip this recipe until a nice cool day comes along. Coconut oil is liquid in warm temperatures, so unless it’s a cool day you will be fighting with the dough to stay cold, which will mean you will be tempted to put it in the refrigerator when it starts to become a melty mess. Do not ever refrigerate this dough (except: if the finished, unbaked croissants seem very soft, you can refrigerate them for a while, or even overnight. At the shop I make a batch of 80 croissants a week and freeze them before baking, then bake a few a day.) It will become almost instantly rock-hard and you will have to work ridiculously hard to continue with the recipe, and you will risk coconut oil chunks that will never soften until in the oven, which will tear holes in your precious flaky dough.

OK.

Have you set aside 5 or so hours? Cool! Let’s go!

(more…)

 

August August 25, 2011

Filed under: i heart feminists,small (business) is all — lagusta @ 12:55 am

Thanks for all the great comments on the post below, pals. Really fascinating stuff from all you really fascinating minds. I continue to struggle with The Question, but am feeling my way around to better answers. One point that really stuck with me that someone said below is that it’s difficult to convey to people that it’s just as offensive to comment on a skinny person’s body as it would be if the person was larger. Yup.

These days I’m trying to make the conversation go like this:

Woman (always): “Why are you so skinny, being surrounded by all these chocolates??!! Do you ever EAT ANY? Is it TORTURE? YOU MUST HAVE SUCH AMAZING SELF-ESTEEM!”

Me, with a nice smile, eyes that strive to convey disappointment in the question itself, and polite and professional demeanor: “Ah, you know, all bodies are different. Now, which chocolates did you want in that assorted box?”

I’m not totally happy with it, but I’m happier with it than I am with “I never sit down” or “genetics,” both of which seem somehow, to me, to contribute to the very problem that makes me so crazy.

 

Anyway, let’s talk again soon around these parts, OK? How’s mid-September look for you?

I’m taking this week to force myself to set up better accounting practices–after using an Excel spreadsheet for my finances for years, I’m switching to something better. I tried Quickbooks and instantly hated it and don’t feel it’s right for my biz. What I want is a very very very simple accounting program that will provide me with lots of pretty color-coded charts and will only make me enter my incoming costs and my outgoing expenses. SIMPLE! None of this fancy crap with synching your bank account and invoices and fancy tax language and ahhhh shut the fuck up already, Quickbooks!

I’m thinking mint.com. Have any of you used it? Do you have other ideas? Is Quickbooks really as time-consuming and awful as the two hours I spent wrestling with it made it seem?

So then next week will be Chocolate of the Month week (spoiler alert: I’m working on something with eggplant!), then the week after that I’m going to be forcing myself to do serious publicity efforts like press releases and whatnot to drum up some Autumnal business for the shop.

I like the business level of the shop (=not overly crazy, thus allowing me to live a somewhat normal life!), but I suspect (and am counting on the new accounting program to confirm or, happily, tell me it ain’t so) that it needs to be busier in order to for me to pay down some bills faster and whatnot.

Overall though, things are pretty damn wonderful in my world and I adore the shop and my heart still pounds when I unlock the door every morning.

I also like this funny role I’ve fallen into of educating people about good food and chocolates and forcing them to pay more and think more about their food. I like taking the grubby packages of wild-foraged tea from Jason and repacking them in fancy bags and reselling them to hipsters. The tea is really great, too!

So let’s talk again when these few weeks of buckle-down work have calmed down.

 

 

the question August 11, 2011

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),i heart feminists,self-titled — lagusta @ 2:55 am

I want to post this sort of rough draft of a post I want to post over at the official Lagusta’s Luscious blog here.

So many people ask me the damn skinny question that I HAVE to discuss it, lest I explode (every time I get it I almost start frothing at the mouth, to the honest. I think I downplayed that in the post below), but I don’t want to alienate my customers or anything. And I think we can have a more productive discussion about this irksome thing over here, then I can take the insights I’ve learned to tighten up the post over there. Sound good?

Herewith, the ramble:

I’m skinny.

I have endless energy, almost no muscles, flabbiness galore, long limbs, wrists and hands that are so weird a friend calls them “elegant claws,” bad circulation that means I’m always cold, knobby knees, and, in general, 5 feet 8 inches and 106-110 lbs of fried-food-lovin’, protein-hatin’, salad-obsessed 18-years-vegan fierceness. Why do I have the body I have, this bundle of contradictions that carries me through my life? Who knows. My mom is skinny/I energetically move around for 8-15 hours a day/I’m vegan—pick one, or none. I suspect genetics most of all, and an absurdly high metabolism probably pays a part, too.

I’d like a firmer butt, plumper lips, and knees that aren’t weirdly sharp. I’d like muscles. I’d really, really like muscles.

But, for the most part, we get what we get.

And what I’ve got is people saying things like “how can you be a chocolatier and be so skinny?” at least once a week.

I really struggle with how to answer this seemingly cute question in a way that encapsulates my both feminist politics and business owner’s need to keep the conversation light. Let me ramble about it here and see if I can come up with anything.

I’m not especially healthy.

I mean, I am healthy, but it’s sort of a coincidence: as much as I love caramel, I love salad much more. I really am that vegan who just wants to eat salad all day long. On the other hand, I probably put twice as much dressing on my salad as the average salad-eater. I love greens, and I love oil. In cooking school I learned a bit about the Indian theory of Ayurveda, which divides people into types, called doshas. My dosha (vata pitta) specified that lots of healthy fats and oils are best to keep me running at top speed. I’d always felt guilty about my love of fat, but after Ayurveda class I made my salad dressings with a classically French 6:1 ratio of oil to vinegar, ate as many avocados as my food budget would allow, and generally just let go of the idea that fat is bad. I began to feel better and better. I had more energy, my skin looked better—I’d begun to learn how to eat.

I’m healthy because, after many years of trial-and-error eating, I’ve figured out what makes me feel good, and feeling good feels so good that I don’t want to eat crap that will make me feel like crap. You know? It’s the secret of everyone who’s stopped struggling with food: eating good feels good. It sometimes takes years of stripping away cultural biases against lettuce and beets and brussels sprouts to realize that chips and dip aren’t actually as tasty as, well, lettuce and beets and brussels sprouts.

I think I’m getting off track here.

I think, actually, I’m wandering into territory I don’t mean to cover at all, stuff that should maybe go into a different blog post.

First of all, I’m trying to say something so obvious: skinny does not equal healthy. I’ve always been skinny, but until I started training at a health-supportive cooking school I wasn’t really healthy—I didn’t know how to feed myself. And even today I would love to be stronger, to feel a power in my body that I suspect friends of mine who work out feel. But I’m doing OK. A few years ago, on a lark during a routine physical I decided to get everything checked out: protein, B12, iron, the whole thing. All my numbers were great–even the B12, even though I never take any supplements (don’t follow my example–take your flax seed oil and your B12, vegans!). (I suspect the B12 was because I eat so many fermented foods.)

I guess here’s what I’m trying to say: there have been times when I’ve been healthy, and times when I haven’t been—and my body has always looked the same. It seems like such an obvious point, but: someone’s weight is not a reliable indicator of their overall health.

But health is not what someone is talking about when they offhandedly say, “How can you be surrounded by chocolate all day, and be so skinny?”

They are saying a lot of things, and one of them is that old saying about never trusting a skinny chef. How can someone angular and vaguely sour (I’m afraid I’m a bit of both) create true indulgences? Being skinny is all about self-deprivation, right? And good food is all about indulgence?

I’d say no to both—good food is about nourishment, on shallow levels (it’s needed to stay alive) and deep levels (good food feeds the soul). A square of dark chocolate to round out a farm-fresh home-cooked meal, a caramel or two or fifteen after a stressful day—these are everyday treats that make life wonderful, not secret indulgences that we have to keep in check and make ourselves feel guilty about, lest we become gluttons.

But back to trust. There’s something about trust in the question, isn’t there?

I trust food.

We’ve gotten to such a sad place in our society that so many women, women chronically on diets, assume that to be around food means wanting to eat food. I don’t want to eat when I’m not hungry. In fact, it’s my least favorite activity. I love eating so much that eating when not hungry seems somehow treasonous, like getting a love letter and not even reading it.

But I understand the temptation to eat when food is there (an inclination I suspect may dieters have) because it’s an inclination I had for many years for the opposite reason: as a kid I really didn’t eat very much at all, because sometimes there just wasn’t that much to eat. We ate a lot when we had food, because we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. It took me years and years to realize that food insecurity is, hopefully, not coming back into my life any time soon. I don’t need to hoard food or eat like there’s no tomorrow. Food is safely here, and the food is a world of warm, sheltering arms holding me. Food has always been my friend.

Getting back to the question. I feel like I’m subtly trying to answer the question (I only eat when I’m hungry!) when the answer isn’t what matters (and that answer would be wrong anyway, since I suspect I’m just one of those people for whom what I eat and how I look are not too connected).

The question, and where the question comes from, is what I’m ramblingly trying to get to here.

It’s a cute, light-hearted question, but it always brings me down, as you can see.

And not just because I have a degree in Women’s Studies.

OK…maybe that’s partially why.

Maybe I’m rambling so much because I’m not really sure how to talk about this subject. I come to it with a lot of weird privilege. I’ve never known what it felt like to hate my body (though I certainly had my awkward years, like everyone else), and I know that for many, many people, that feeling is an everyday companion, and it saddens me so much I almost can’t stand it.

I don’t want my joyful little chocolates to make anyone feel bad about themselves, or guilty, or naughty (except in a kinky way.). I want my chocolates to be a celebration of life, of diversity, of happiness and wonder at what the earth can produce.

I don’t want my chocolates to have anything to do with patriarchy. The “why are you so skinny” thing is, at its root, about the commandment we all have in our society, women more than men, but men too, to be skinny at all costs. That old chestnut.

What I want to say is: hey, your question implies that skinny bodies are a superior standard, and I reject that assumption! Hooray for size diversity, for health and happiness in all forms! It’s a coincidence that I’m skinny, just as it’s a coincidence that other women aren’t, and we all deserve chocolate! Your question implies, also, that chocolate is a forbidden treat to be rationed out, and my dark chocolate, with its savory edges, with its stone-ground goodnesses and nibs and chilies and gingery bits and corn-on-the-cob-bar-nesses and all the rest, is more akin to ancient Aztec chocolates that were a savory part of a meal, rather than the gross sugar bombs that are mainstream contemporary American chocolate! Chocolate for all! Here’s to health and diversity and loving who we are! Here’s to self-love! Here’s to DESSERT!

So….how can I compress that into one sentence?

 

Things to do in New Paltz and environs, if you like the kind of things I like. August 8, 2011

Filed under: new paltz,Restaurant rants and raves,Upstate NY — lagusta @ 10:04 pm

Sometimes people come to the shop from other places and they want to do other things besides eat chocolate.

And it’s made me realize that all I ever do is work and I need to remember fun things to do so I can point people to these fun things and maybe even do them myself some day. So, locals, help me out here! Leave a comment with the hundreds of amazing places I’m leaving out!

In time I’ll add links and photos to this page, but as usual I need to get this one whipped out in minutes before I collapse from exhaustion, so let’s do this rough for now. It’s a work in progress.

FUN THINGS TO DO IN NEW PALTZ (and environs) APART FROM GOING TO LAGUSTA’S LUSCIOUS

IN NEW PALTZ:

  • Walk two minutes down the rail trail and get a smoothie or vegan BLT or Caesar salad at New Paltz’s only vegan restaurant, Karma Road. The owners are the nicest people on the planet, and we share a precious employee, Pippa, who we politely try to not to tear in half because we both love her so much.
  • Keep walking on the trail trail 20 minutes more or so for glorious quiet walking and amazing leaf peeping in the fall. Eventually (if you’re going south) you’ll come to the tableau pictured in this post. So pretty.
  • Rent (for free) one of the Bikes that Heal (don’t donate money to them—it goes to animal research) from one of the stands around town (you just give your credit card to the business whose ad is on the stand as collateral) and pedal around on the rail trail. Start at my shop and go north and in 15 minutes you’ll be at a gorgeous bridge over the Wallkill river. So awesome.
  • Read The Chronogram to see what’s happening around town. You can get it everywhere.
  • Prowl around the two indie record shops in town: Rhino and Jack’s Rhythms. I adore both their owners, and cannot play favorites.
  • There are lovely books at Jack’s and also at the great bookstore in town, Inquiring Minds. And also the great used bookshop across the street (Church Street), Barner Books! They are conveniently across the street (Church St) from each other.
  • You probably like yoga. Allllll my yoga friends go to  Ashtanga Yoga of New Paltz and all love it, as one friend said, “hands freaking down.” I’m pretty sure the owner is vegan. Just sayin.
  • Poke around the Team Love/Ravenhouse Gallery, two blocks from the shop. Say hello to Nelly if she’s there. She’s the tall sweetheart who runs the place. They have interesting exhibits, rare records from bands on Saddle Creek Records and Team Love Records, and cute onesies for your hip baby.
  • Walk to the community gardens from the shop: turn left out of the shop and walk 1 minute to Huguenot Street. Turn left and walk for 1 minute, then turn right at the next street, where you see the sign for the community gardens (I *think* there’s a sign…?). Walk another minute and you’re there. Very lovely.
  • Look for vintage clothes at the Salvation Army just north of my shop on Route 32, the Antiques Barn (I love the Antiques Barn!) and the other antiques store in Water Street Market, as well as Judy Go Vintage on Route 32 in Rosendale. (Rosendale is a cute town 15 minutes from The Paltz.)
  • Oh, my old and outdated NP dining guide is here.
  • Get cheap and good tacos and burritos at Mexicali Blue in New Paltz right downtown on Main Street. Or pretty good Japanese at Hokkaido, a minute from the shop on North Front and Church Street.
  • Poke around the awesome art store Manny’s on Main Street in New Paltz (next to Mexicali!)
  • Go to the Reuse Center and sift through the marvelous junk.
  • There are a million trillion wonderful hikes to do. I am partial to swimming at Split Rock, though it’s usually very busy, and the hikes near there. If you go to Split Rock, follow Clove Road for a few miles until you see the amazing tree root sculptures on the left side of the road (can’t miss ‘em).
  • There is also good blueberry picking all around the Ridge (The Ridge [aka the Shawangunk Mountains] is the mountain range you’re looking at when you come into New Paltz)–drive west on 299 until the road ends, then turn right onto 44/55. After the hairpin turn keep going for, oh, 6 miles or so. Park at the tiny (3 car) turnaround/illegal [you'll be fine] lookout spot by the rock wall. Cross the street cautiously and scramble up the flat-ish white rocks. If it’s July, there will probably be tiny blueberries all around. You can also hike to gorgeous rock gardens around here…but I still never have and will have to get the info on how to get there from pals. Google it!
  • There is a vegan B&B a couple hours away, near MA, run by sweet people. I have their card at the shop and will update this tomorrow. There is also a very pretty one in New Paltz, called Hungry Ghost Guest House. And my rad friend Megan runs a perfect B&B in Woodstock, called Retreat at Tree Gap. There are no good hotels in the area. There are not even any DECENT hotels. There is Mohonk, a breathtaking mountain resort where Alan Alda and Oprah et al stay, and scary places by the Thruway. And B&Bs.
  • If it’s a Sunday, either go to the New Paltz farmer’s market, or drive to Rhinebeck and go to their vastly superior farmer’s market. The falafel is all vegan (even all the condiments) and it’s the best falafel you’ve ever had, even if you, like, grew up in Israel or something.
  • If it’s the second or fourth Monday of the month, come say hello to me at the New Paltz Town Hall, where I’ll be at the Planning Board!
  • There are lots of pick-your-own berries type farms. Come to the shop and let’s talk about which ones use the least amount of pesticides and aren’t run by Republicans. My favorite is Jenkens-Lueken.
  • Take a walk on Plains Road and finish it up at the Taliaferro farm market. I think it’s only open on the weekends. Lovely times.
  • Take a walk on the Oldest Continually Inhabited Street in America, Huguenot Street. It’s steps from the shop and I highly recommend the tour of the historic houses. Crazy fascinating–slave quarters! In upstate NY!
  • Read the New Paltz Times letters section. The highlight of everyone’s week, for reals.
  • Tear some siding off the building the shop’s in? Pretty please? We still have SO much to do.
  • Coffeehouses: Slash Root is an anarchist pay-what-you-can techie cafe full of smart people who will fix your computer, give you some wild-foraged tea, and teach you how to garden. Mudd Puddle is a bit of a breeder hideout, but I like it because it can be quiet and is friendly and cozy and in the summertime you can hang out outside and people watch and drink expertly-made drinks. They make the best espresso drinks in town (all the Italian expats go there), and roast their own beans. After walking around the Antiques Barn, you can get a veganized Mudd Freeze there and you’ll be very happy indeed. And check the events schedule for WSM, there are great movies all the time shown outside.
  • The Village Tea Room is pretty and fun for tea.
  • Swimming at Lake Minnewaska! Hiking to waterfalls! Directions and info coming!
  • The deal with movies: New Paltz cinema is run by a Republican, but has $5 movies on Tuesdays. Try not to go to a quiet movie that is next to a loud movie, or you will hear the loud movie more than your movie. Upstate Films Theater is in Rhinebeck, a bit of a hike, but is awesome and they have nooch for popcorn. Rosendale Theatre is the bestest place ever, a collective, old-timey art house with, inexplicably, dill weed for popcorn instead of butter and Fanta to drink, which tastes exactly like orange Skittles. Hyde Park Drive-In is great, or so I hear. I have yet to go.
NEAR NEW PALTZ:
  • Go to Dia Beacon. While you’re in Beacon, get a popsicle at Zora Dora’s.
  • If you must drive to an NYC area airport, here’s my secret way. It takes longer, but it’s better.
  • Go visit Gnome Chomsky, the world’s largest garden gnome.
  • Go to Hudson and look at amazing antiques you will never be able to afford and marvel at the Chelsea of upstate! The hot cultured gay boys are as abundant as the mid-century modern bureaus. Also my BFF Veronica works at a GREAT vintage store there, Sideshow Clothing. (It’s about an hour from New Paltz though.)
  • A bunch of my friends love Pure City, a veggie restaurant in Pine Bush. I went there 5 years ago and hated it, but I really need to go back so I stop hating it, because I trust my friends.
  • The Walkway over the Hudson is definitely worth a visit.
  • See a show or a Tributon at Market Market (aka A Little Slice of Brooklyn) in Rosendale. While in Rosendale, go to Roos Arts, the great tiny gallery. Do not go to Rosendale Cafe for food, veggie though it may be. Going there to hear music is acceptable.
  • Splurge on a nice vegan dinner at Garden Cafe in Woodstock. If the key lime pie is on the menu, I order you to get a slice (or a pie) for me and bring it to the shop.
  • Liberty View Farm also offers lodging now as well as apple picking, and is run by the cutest, sweetest couple in the world, Billiam and Rene. Billiam is one of the main movers behind the famous gay marriages in February 2004 in New Paltz. He also doesn’t allow Republicans at the farm! And HE HAS BEEN ON MARTHA STEWART LIVING. I mean COME ON.
  • The Last Bite is lovely and has lots of veggie options, and is in High Falls, which is fun to poke around in. The High Falls food co-op is right there too, which is a tiny little organic food co-op with good local veggies.
  • Speaking of Veronica, she just had this to say about Saugerties, a town I’ve never really kicked around: “Saugerties is a good tourist-y town, too. I don’t really love it, but it’s worth a trip as a tourist [Veronique is, like me, a classic snob.]. The lighthouse has a bed and breakfast, there are a lot of boutiques on Partition street (I like this store called Rock Star Rodeo), and Love Bites has pretty good food (although the place is teeny and I always come out smelling like grease). There’s also an Inquiring Minds Bookstore/Muddy Cup (the coffee is disgusting, though), and another book store. Oh, and Mother Earth [health food store], of course.” Thanks, V!
  • The Falcon has good live music, good fries, and a good tempeh reuben.
  • I hear that the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary will soon be opening a B&B…
  • And the Catskill Animal Sanctuary is worth a visit, and donation, too.
  • While driving to the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary or to dinner at Garden Cafe, go the scenic route (which I’ll write down here when I get it from my boyfrien’) and visit the lovely Ashokan Reservoir on the way.
More soon! With pictures! And links!
Tell me what I’ve left out!
 

correction August 2, 2011

Filed under: self-titled — lagusta @ 7:20 pm

It has been pointed out to me that in my previous post my statement “Where have all the eyebrows gone? Mine appear to be fighting a losing battle. Also: pubes.”

might have made it appear that my eyebrows and also pubes are mysteriously disappearing.

I want to assure you this is not the case. I am as Eastern European Jewy hirsute as ever. I meant that as a society we seem to be losing our ladybrows and ladypubes.

 

Ok, I feel better now.

Back to toffizing!

 

sixteen things August 1, 2011

Filed under: cooking is vegan (of course),culture and its discontents,new paltz,self-titled,small (business) is all — lagusta @ 12:25 am
When I’m alone at work all I basically do is think too hard.
And then I post on Facebook funny/lovely/touching/outrageous stories about my customers and the outcomes of my too-hard thinkings.
When I think of too many things to post (I try to limit myself to 2 Facebookings a day. I go over that limit about 360 days out of the year) I put them in a little file because I am strange and 420 characters is the perfect amount to tell a nice little story and happens to work perfectly for my mind and I am sort of in love with the form and I love my tiny little intensely-curated (I recently unfriended 150 people and it was AMAZING) safe Facebook space.
But it’s also ridiculous and I worry I annoy all my friends and customers with my over Facebookiness.
So here are some status updates I have no reason to post. Maybe I’ll just keep writing them in a file and will post them here in batches, in order to take a little FB break. I’ve got to put them somewhere—god forbid a thought stay in my head—so here they go.
  • A few years ago I went to this restaurant that had something on the menu called “vegan french toast.” Jacob and I eagerly ordered it, and it turned out to be TOFU lightly battered and pan-fried like french toast. That kind of disregard for vegans’ taste buds still makes me so angry, years later, that I started shaking just thinking about it.
  • This lady came in the other day and said she used to make croissants from scratch for a bakery in the ’80s. “They had three turns,” she said, all proud. I tried not to be condescending when I said, “Hmm. Interesting. Mine have six.”  (Also—any time I do a house thing better than Jacob (almost never) I sing this song for the next 20 hours.)
  • I once went to a restaurant (Alinea) so pristine that the kitchen was covered in wall-to-wall light gray plush carpeting. THE KITCHEN. And they don’t have a cleaning crew—the kitchen staff ensures the kitchen is spotless every night. That’s the level of cleanliness I aspire to.
  • Where have all the eyebrows gone? Mine appear to be fighting a losing battle. Also: pubes.
  • The other day I overheard someone say “I never eat meat, but if it’s local, and humanely raised, I don’t see any reason not to.” And I was just knocked backwards. Wow. The elision the mind is capable of. This otherwise thinking, caring person’s mind just willfully skipped over that one, teeny tiny, non “humane” step. I bit my tongue until it was raw not to say, “You cannot possibly be that stupid, can you?”
  • ALL I WANTS IS SHIRTWAISTS.
  • I don’t understand vegan hot dogs. Like: the best thing about being vegan is that you don’t have to eat hot dogs.
  • I sort of feel this way about all protein except for tempeh bacon and beans. There is something wrong with me. I *literally* am a vegetarian. I do not eat anything but vegetables. And fruit. And croissants.
  • Totally just confused two customers. HOW MANY JESSICAS MUST I BE MADE TO REMEMBER?
  • Will I ever be comfortable around people who didn’t grow up poor and scared and ashamed of their insides? The minute I find out someone had a happy childhood, I get freaked out by them.
  • This is so odd, but: watching Reno 911 is the closest depiction of large swaths of my childhood experience I’ve ever experienced. Everyone happy in their mobile home, no one renovating their kitchen or going to college. All people wanted was beer and drugs and a busted lawn chair to sit in and watch their lives go by. Surrender was easiest.
  • Sometimes I amuse myself when I’m alone at work by thinking up mean little jokes about vegetarians. Is this awful? Like: “What’s worse than a vegetarian? Nothing!” and “What’s it like the have sex with a vegetarian? They only go halfway in.” and “Vegetarians do everything halfway because they are too stupid to understand the reality of the situation.” Ok maybe that last one isn’t too funny.
  • Pringles and pistachio praline, while beautifully alliterative, is perhaps not the best thing to have eaten all day.
  • For a while there, American Analog Set and Low was all I needed. Sometimes, at maybe 2 am when I’m pulling batch after batch of matzo toffee out of the oven and the world is shushed and serene, just the rhythm of measuring sugar and rotating pans, they still do just fine.
  • For better or worse, and I really really think it’s best, my addiction to rage and love for far-left politics (not to mention swear words) always trumps my also-pretty-awesome business acumen, thus nicely limiting my business and keeping it in check. It’s a perfect system, really.

 

 
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