I baked a pie!

In the spirit of being productive even when you don't have any work, I've crossed another item off my 40 by 40 list!  

Last night I completed #2: Bake a pie from scratch. I realize this might not seem like much a feat, but it wasn't on the list because it was hard, it was on the list because it was something I'd never done and wanted to do. 

It was just a coincidence that I made the pie the same day that gay marriage was legalized in all 50 states, but I dedicated it to celebrating that amazing milestone anyway...and so I pronounce the following to be: The Equality is Sweet as Caramel and American as Apple Pie.

As I'm prone to do, I overcomplicated the whole thing by using one recipe for the crust and another for the filling...and then I improvised by pouring caramel over the apples before putting on the top crust and baking. 

And through the magic of baking, I turned this...

Into THIS!

It isn't perfect, of course. The filling to crust ratio is off and I accidentally put 1 Tbsp of salt into the crust rather than 1 tsp, but luckily, the caramel kind of balanced it out, so it tasted like a salted caramel apple pie.

Easy as pie is a real dumb idiom, because cake is way easier, BUT I'm calling #2 a success!

I'm in no way convinced that this was better than buying a pie, but I'm still glad I did it just because a person should know they can bake a pie. Words to live by.

#3, or Everything is better on a fuzzy purple couch

On June 12, I accomplished #3 on my 40 by 40 list...the Menu Degustation at Joel Robuchon in Las Vegas.

From Wikipedia:

1. Degustation is a culinary term meaning a careful, appreciative tasting of various foods and focusing on the gustatory system, the senses, high culinary art and good company. Dégustation is more likely to involve sampling small portions of all of a chef's signature dishes in one sitting.

They used to call this a 16-course tasting menu...now it's technically 9 courses with 17 plates, plus a candy cart...so really, if you count the candy cart, the bread cart the amuse bouche, you're talking about 20 plates.

Eating all of that food was intimidating to me. Without going into detail, let's just say that I've tried many tasting menus and 9 plates is the furthest I've ever made it before needing to rearrange my stomach contents.

This time I was determined to make it the end, so I read up on competitive eater training regimens. I don't have all that much willpower, so although I didn't follow the eating plan to a T, I did eat a giant meal 24 hours before the dinner to stretch my stomach out. My friends all think I'm crazy, but that's how much this meant to me.

Spoiler alert! I successfully tried every plate (except the bread) and my stomach participated happily. It's worth noting that I also limited my beverage consumption during the meal to a single glass of champagne. This definitely helped.

Ok, so let me just mention that the place is gorgeous and it's purple and I want my dining room to look like that.

But you want to see the food, right?

The famed bread cart. I did not partake, but my companions all did and raved. There was bacon bread.

Amuse bouche - all I can tell you is that it's quinoa and red pepper sauce and tasted better than those things sound.

Le Caviar - that's king crab under there and a seafood gelee. 

1er Service - (clockwise from bottom left) L'Asperge Verte, green asparagus with coriander guacamole and medley of vegetables; La Tomate, tomato candies invigorated with lemon virgin olive oil; Le Homard, Maine lobster in a thinly sliced daikon with sweet and sour dressing.

2eme Service - On the right is L'Oeuf de Poule. This was served with a fancy smoker dome over the top of the egg..the perfect soft-boiled egg. On the left is La Cuisse de Grenouille - frog leg fritters. Seriously good.

3eme Service - (from top left) La Langoustine, truffled langoustine ravioli with simmered green cabbage; Le Petit Pois, green pea and almond velouté, scallion jam and fresh mint; L'Oursin, uni atop of fennel purée with potatoes and citrus jus

4eme Service - (from top left) Le Black Cod, carmelized black cod in Malabar pepper sauce with mini bok choy (You have never tasted cod like this! Amazing!); La Langouste, spiny lobster grilled with a green curry jus and fresh coriander; Le Foie Gras de Canard, seared foie gras with sweet and sour cherries and fresh almonds. (See how cute it is with the carrot through the foie gras? That's a tomato and a rosemary sprig!) This was my favorite savory course.

Le Plat "Tradition" - L'Epaule d'Agneau, braised and roasted shoulder of lamb with southern flavors. The lamb was impressive, yes, but those potatoes sitting over there are the famous Joel Robuchon potatoes. They are like heaven and velvet and air and love.

Finally, dessert! The one on the left was their substitution because I'm allergic to raspberries. It tasted a lot like grass...fancy grass. The middle is Le Citron, buttermilk cream and lemon sorbet - refreshing and light and delicious. And on the right is the tiniest ode to strawberries and rhubarb. Also delicious.

This was my favorite! Just look at it! Every plate appeared to be custom for the course, but how precious is this?! It's a flower box! But it's really Le Chocolat Illanka! Imagine a log of chocolate mousse with jasmine cream, pomegranate gelee and edible flowers. It was almost too cute to eat, but eat it, I did.

And finally, Escortes de mignardies...or candy cart for the less civilized. 40+ tiny delicacies that they make in-house. They tell you what everything is and then you must choose. They cut me off at four. I'd never had a coconut eclair before. The whole thing was just as over-the-top as it should be. 

And believe it or not, we were all conscious and able to walk out of there, with our gift bag of lemon pound cake and souvenir menus. How great is that?!

If I eventually compile a top 5 list of things I'm so grateful I put on the 40 by 40 list, this will be on it. It was amazing. Not just the food, but the experience...the everything. I am smitten. Thank you, Joel Robuchon.

One Week

Poof! A week has passed. It's so weird how quickly that can happen.

I did not sulk today. I started the day with two promising connections thanks to my network that helps me even when I say I don't know what I want help with...and I felt even better about those connections because my resume got a makeover and is now a much better reflection of me. (If you don't possess visual design skills, I recommended marrying someone who does.)

I took my boys and our dog for a walk around the lake, followed by cheeseburgers and ice cream in the sun, and I got a little sunburn, and it made me so, so, so grateful for this time and for this life.

I still can't seem to sleep through the night, so visceral is the fear of not being able to provide for my family, it wakes my body before my brain even knows what's happening, but most of my daylight hours are optimistic, even sometimes enthusiastic, about what I could do next.

I'm still in love with the fantasy of freelancing, but the reality is that I haven't set myself up financially to do that. Building a freelance business takes more time than I have and when I weigh the flexible life of a freelancer against the kind of flexibility that a well-paying job can provide...well, it's almost certain that I will need to go back to work. In an office. And I can live with that. I just hope that I'll have the luxury of being choosy about which office that might be and what work I might be doing.

Ugh, again no funny stories. I guess a week still isn't quite long enough for me to have fully developed a sense of humor about all this. As with everything else, I'm sure I just need to give it time. In the meantime, I am going to write that post about my amazing meal, because I refuse to let the layoff tarnish that experience.

And speaking of 40 by 40, I've made a list of the things I can (mostly) easily do while I've got all this "free" time!

#2 Bake a pie from scratch (I saw this in the June issue of Bon Appetit and took it as a sign)
#24 Learn to play poker (My family has been playing Hold'em, but I'll consider it checked off when I go try it out in a real casino)
#35 Write each one of my friends a letter saying what they mean to me
#38 Learn to change a tire
#39 Cook a lobster (Bon Appetit also sent me a sign on this one)

Those are five things that will make me feel accomplished! I'm committing to get all of them checked off in the next month.

Let's hear it for having personal goals that have nothing to do with the way you happen to make a living!

Blank

It's been 4 days now. I'm feeling something bordering on excitement that I don't have to go to work tomorrow. Mondays are virtually meaningless for the time being...that's a perq of unemployment.

I'm clearly still spinning because although I've started manically reading job postings, I vacillate between wanting to do something in the same vein of what I was doing and doing something totally different. Do I want to be a freelance writer? Get my travel agent certification? Be an astronaut?

Did you know there's a job at a certain cake company called "Froster"? You literally frost cakes all day. If it weren't for needing to maintain a certain monthly income, I would have sent my resume in for that too, because hello, I could rock that job and I bet the application process is quite straightforward.

I'm surprised to say that I have not yet had a day where I just laid in bed. A week ago, I would have told you that having an excuse to collapse into a pile of mush and stare at the TV for 24 hours was my dream...now I don't really want to. Granted, I know that day may be on the horizon, and if it arrives, I will succumb...for a day...but at the moment I'm kind of distracted by figuring out wtf I'm going to do.

I'd like to insert a funny story or epiphany that I've had since being laid off, but I'm still suffering from a sort of blankness. Like my gears have to start turning in the opposite direction and they can't quite make that first rotation.

I will say that if I was keeping track of signs from the universe, the fact that I got Game Show Network back mere days before being laid off is comforting. Like the universe is saying, There, there. Match Game will heal you.

I don't know. I'm supposed to be giving myself time. I'm not sure what to do with that. Here's hoping my first full week of liberation offers something in the way of peace or clarity.

53 Hours Ago...

I was laid off.

When last we spoke I was preparing for my Vegas trip and my dream meal. I intended to come back here to post all the photos of the meal (#3 on my 40 by 40). I'm still going to do that (it was amazing)...it's just that I got derailed by the news that my job was eliminated on Wednesday. Like...53 hours ago.

I'm still in shock, which I hate because logically I knew this was a possibility. We all knew cuts were coming and I knew I could be at risk, but I also knew I was doing good work and I guess I let myself temporarily suspend my cynicism since the scenario in which I still had a job was a lot easier to swallow than the alternative.

Yet I feel like I knew it was coming. That incredible meal felt like the apex of something. Like things might never be this way again. And even that morning...54 hours ago...the Starbucks barista who comically never acknowledges that we've ever seen each other before despite the fact that I had been there almost daily for 2+ years...well, she noticed that my hair was different. The universe was trying to give me a heads up.

I get it, universe. I need to find a less soul-crushing way to make a living. For real this time.

I've been trying to find words for it. For what I feel. I'm surprisingly empty. I cried a lot on Wednesday, but even as the tears were flowing, I was telling myself that I wasn't sad about not working there. I wasn't sad that I didn't have to try to make sense of a totally fucked up environment.

I was sad to leave my team. My team that I fought for and truly care about. I was sad to have my last two and a half years of effort thanked with an incredibly unceremonious slam of the door. (P.S. Fuck you.)

I'm mad that I let myself care so much. I'm mad that I let myself believe I could make a difference in an institution so blatantly uninterested in being better. More profitable? Sure. But better? No thank you. Not if it means something would really have to change.

But I don't really want to be sad or mad about it. What I'm waiting for is the physical realization that all of that is behind me now. The wave of relief washing over me, reminding me that that's never who I really was, nor aspired to be. A sense of humor about how truly fucked up it really is. Excitement that this is my chance to do something else. Something better.

I'm not there yet, but I know I'm inching closer. Here's hoping it comes in the next 53 hours.

38 and 12

I am officially 38. And I have 12 year olds. Having concurrent birthdays really makes the whole passage of time thing feel like a hammer smashing down on your illusion of youth. But, we're all healthy and happy and life is good, so what does it matter how old we are?

Well, it does matter in the sense that I now also officially have less than 2 years left to complete my 40 by 40 list. I've got numbers 3, 13 and 20 all cued up, so that's good. But somehow I still have 18 things left!! Yikes.

In honor of my birthday - and as a distraction from thinking about the fact that my babies are 12 - I thought I should make a plan for which items I'm going to check off the list in the next 12 months....

Ok, so already planned:

#3 - Eat Joel Robuchon's 16-course tasting menu in Las Vegas - this is BOOKED for one week from today!!!!!

#13 See the glaciers in Alaska - this is BOOKED for August!

#20 Take a cruise - we are cruising to #13!

What else can I feasibly take on in the next 12 months?

#2 Bake a pie from scratch - yes, I can do this. It should be relatively easy now that I'm been to pastry bootcamp.

#17 Get another tattoo - yes, this is going to happen. I know what I want and I just need to have it drawn...and then inked. I can do that this year.

#24 Learn how to play poker - given how much I love the casino, it's stupid that I haven't learned this yet. I can do that this year.

#34 Read Don Quixote - everyone tells me I don't really want to do this, but it seems that I do, so this might as well be the year.

#35 Write each one of my friends a letter saying what they mean to me - yes, I can do this. I will do this. I need to start now and work through them over the year.

#38 Learn to change a tire - again, why haven't I just done this? I can do this. This summer even...Even if I never actually have to use this knowledge because I have a cell phone and AAA.

#39. Cook a lobster - sounds like a dinner party! Maybe I should combine this one with #2. Could be fun.

Ok, so that leaves a solid 11 things for my 39th year of life. At some point I will have to decide what qualifies as making exercise part of my life...and I may need to start entering contests. But at least I've got a plan...