The List

Just a heads up everyone. Vanilla Garlic is going to go to only being updated every Tuesday. Between work, my grad thesis, and all the extra food writing and recipe developing work I have taken on I feel that the posts here have lost some of their soul and character. Rather than bamming out a bunch of decent posts a few times a week I want to provide you with great ones that will give you more to read and, hopefully, more to laugh and reflect on.

Still, every so often there might be a special non-Tuesday post should something truly awesome occur. Sign up on the blog feed, google reader, twitter, or the Vanilla Garlic Facebook fan page to keep updated (all buttons are located at the top right of the page). Thanks, everyone, for your support!

-This is a slow day.-

Within the pastry department the to-do list is our lord and master. (I and the other assistants sometimes allow the chefs to think they are, but we all know what holds the real power here.) Each day the list, often 20+ items long, dictates what has to be prepped, frozen, baked, ordered, or signed for.

On my first day, the list noted that we had to prepare cookies for the cookie plate, develop a new recipe for those Concord grapes that should be rolling in (assuming the order was made), bake up flatbread for dinner service, whip up components for the brulée; OH! and by the way, there’s a last minute, thirty-person special event going on today so we’ll need to bam out some individual cheesecakes for that as well.

Just another day.

The list is formed by any number of things: the occupancy of the adjoining Citizen Hotel, the number of reservations on the book that night, what fruits need to be used up in the fridge, what produce is in season, what desserts on the menu are selling or not selling (the mission fig-añejo is epic, so why aren’t the servers pushing it harder?), and so on.

This list is varied and fickle, often changing without warning and we're constantly adding, removing and bumping things in order to meet the sweet tooth demands of staff and customers. This may sound like a complaint, but it’s not. The list’s shape-shifting tendencies are what keep the days so interesting and varied.

We wouldn’t want pastry to become predictable now, would we?