Testing

Just wanted to see if the blog is still functioning.

Carbonara Dreams

Seems I can’t get it together to do much blogging now that I’m back in the kitchen. Working nights means I have the luxury of sleeping in every morning, and I’ve been taking full advantage of it. Each night, while enjoying a cold hoppy beverage, I prepare dutiful lists of projects to accomplish the next morning, only to find myself waking up at noon and barely making it out the door with pants on. And the dreams – endless hours of making pasta while I sleep. The worst dream is the one where I show up at work late, don’t do any prep, and the orders start flying in. Only I have no mise en place! No tomatoes, no garlic, nothing. I run about madly while the tickets pile up and I contemplate just dashing out the door and never returning. I wake up in a cold sweat, locate my pants, and rush to work full of guilt for slacking off so badly in my sleep. Although my job is completely free of take-home stress I can’t seem to stop manufacturing my own.

Update on my left hand – still a claw, my ring finger now gets stuck in a bent position and I have to use my other hand to flip it back to straight. Ouch! The 22 year old guys I work with on the line don’t seem to have this problem. My only consolation is that based on our conversations I suspect I have a much richer inner life, and I don’t waste nearly as much time running out to the dining room to verify a rumor of “hot chick on table 8.”

Zing!

Dear Dunkin Donuts,

When I say DECAF, I mean it! I know it can be confusing to keep track of the myriad facets of my order, (large iced decaf with milk) but GET IT TOGETHER, PEOPLE, I am the only customer in the store. My arm hair is now standing on end (at least what little arm hair I have remaining, the rest having been singed off by close proximity to the flat top) and I’m racing around the apartment like a squirrel. I am going to appear to my coworkers like a cook with a nasty cocaine habit and my hands are shaking so much that I’m going to be dropping pans all afternoon.

DECAF!

Thank you,
Raisinhater

On another note – so far work is great. No crying, lots of tasty pastas to sample, left hand only partially stuck in claw-like formation.

Back on the Chain Gang

Today is my first day back at the restaurant. They’re promoting me to the dinner shift in the hot kitchen where I’ll be cooking pasta. I’m terrified. Pasta is the toughest spot on the line; there’s no time for mistakes and you must be tough as nails. And strong. Hella strong. Considering my arm hurts from yesterday’s tennis lesson I think I have some work to do.

Embarassingly, my other fear is that I’ll cry. Because that is what I do now, apparently, when something gets to be too much, or too stressful, or too hard. I cry like a kindergartener. And that’s NOT OKAY because there is NO CRYING in the kitchen. Not when you’re trying to prove yourself in front of a bunch of big strong men. (Didn’t you read Kitchen Confidential – imagine how much worse it would have been if he were a girl, and if he cried? Ouch.)

The title of this post refers to this song, which they used to play before the beginning of the night shift when I was first starting at Garde Manger because it was at the beginning of somebody’s iPod mix. You know how each baseball player has a song that they play when he approaches to bat? Maybe this is my song.

And hey, I just watched the youtube thing and you know who cries? Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie freaking Hynde cries in this video, while she’s singing. Probably because the song was written about the death of her lead guitarist (and boyfriend?) after his overdose. If Chrissie Hynde can cry at work maybe I can too.

France

We’re back from France and it was a lovely vacation. It was great just to spend time together and relax and laugh again – it felt like I hadn’t laughed in a month. A little time and distance didn’t make us forget what happened, but it provided a blanket to help us cover some of our rough spots.

I was a terrible food blogger because I took no photos of food, but I did write down nearly everything I put in my mouth. But since No One Cares What You Had For Lunch, I’ll just summarize:

Wine
Cheese
More wine
Pain au Chocolat
Just a bit more wine
Fois gras
One more glass
37 ducks
Butter
Cheese (for dessert!)

Maybe I’ll post more later about some of our meals, but here are a few of my brilliant observations about Paris:

1.) Everyone is a good driver. No, really. It’s not like Rome where you fear for your life every time you step off the curb.

2.) No one was rude. No one. No one giggled at my awful French accent, no one made snooty faces or laughed at my Old Navy fashions, no one looked at us askance as we sat sipping wine among beautiful tanned fit men at what was obviously a gay bar.

3.) People really do walk around carrying baguettes all the damn time.

4.) Meals take longer. This is a good thing. You sit for a while, you get some wine, you order, you eat a bit of this and a bit of that and drink some more wine, maybe you have a coffee or a smoke, you wander home, maybe stopping for a drink on the way. Dinner is an event.

5.) The adorable metro! Cute little green trains, only 5 or 6 cars long, and the stations don’t smell like pee (as much). The best part – there are little digital signs above the tracks telling you when the next train is coming, and they come every 6 minutes or so. No more standing on the platform waiting if perhaps the entire subway system shut down and no one bothered to mention it to you.

6.) Like any other big city, there are plenty of mediocre touristy restaurants. With just a little research you can avoid these spots and get some great food.

Thank You

I’ve been trying to figure out what to write here on the blog and I’m just not sure what to say except thank you all so much for the love and support through this difficult time. I just cant tell you how much it means to me to feel surrounded by such caring people and even though I haven’t been emailing I’ve read every one of your comments over and over again.

Juan and I are doing ok, he took a short leave of absence from work so that we could be together, and we’re planning a trip to France just to get away for a while. This experience is by far the most difficult one either of us has had to go through, and we’re muddling through the best we can. I think it’s going to help me to get back to some of my normal activities, so I’m going to try to return to posting regularly on the blog.

I just want to say thank you again to everyone out there commenting or emailing or just keeping us in your thoughts and prayers.

Beth

Lucas

Last Thursday, April 12, our baby Lucas was stillborn as a result of an umbilical cord accident. At birth, Lucas was 38 weeks old, weighed 7 pounds, was 20 inches long, and was a beautiful baby. We miss him very much.