Hello, good people,
Please permit me to indulge in a bit of cheesy cut-and-paste. I was having lunch with a friend, rabbitting on and on about a registration form I had received for the 15th Food Writers’ Symposium at the Greenbrier in West Virginia, and how it was really more money than I should be spending, particularly since I am not a food writer, I just write about food every once in a while. “What about that e-mail you sent me after pastry camp last spring?”, she said. Well, it doesn’t count, because again, it’s writing about food, not food writing. But her mention of that e, essentially a diary I kept while attending a week-long pastry intensive at the King Arthur Flour Baking Education Center, cheered me up because it was the last time I felt like a real baker, and I decided to shamelessly recycle it for PTMYB. I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. After tomorrow. 
Sunday, May 4. Am up surprisingly early for someone who walked up and down Central Park the previous day. Lloyd sees me off to the train. First half of train trip is glorious, comprised of eating cheese sandwiches, listening to music, reading my new Thai cookbook (Thai Food by David Thompson, brilliant book) and watching Connecticut and Massachusetts unfold around me. Unfortunately, the sunlight streaming through the trees creates a strobelight effect, and I develop a wicked migraine. Arrive in White River Junction, VT, seven hours after leaving NYC. The taxi driver misses my attempts to flag him down and I have to wait for an hour before another cab shows up. Get to hotel in Lebanon, NH, throw up on front lawn, recover well enough to check in without incident, enter room, order takeout from the local Dartmouth burger shack and pass out in front of The Simpsons. Awaken at midnight, pain-free and starving, so I reheat and devour my takeout. It can only get better from here, I think to myself as I watch Cartoon Network, and it turns out I’m right.
Monday, May 5. Awaken at 5:30. Decide that since I’m up, I’ll call for my 8 a.m. taxi. Taxi service informs me that they are booked solid between 6:30 and 9, ½ hour after my class starts. Uh oh. Call front desk, ask if hotel shuttle is available. It isn’t. I contemplate trying to call my friend Carla, but I don’t know if she’s awake, not to mention that I don’t want our first conversation to be “uh, hi, can you pick me up?” In the end, I lace up my black Skecher boots and walk the 4+ miles from the hotel to King Arthur. It takes me 1 ½ hours (this will be useful information later in the week) and by the time I get there, I am pink and sweaty and loaded with endorphins.
I get a hug hello from the chef, who was our chef-instructor in the October bread class, and who will be teaching this week’s class as well. I will admit that I have a crush on Chef, but it is not a love crush; rather, it is a teacher crush. Into everyone’s life comes a teacher who is so enthusiastic and sharp and just plain good that you want that teacher to like you, be impressed with you, find you worth the time and effort to teach, and he is mine. Carla arrives in class, and for all my pre-class agita, I have to admit that it is good to see her, and it is good to not have to face a class full of strangers. I meet the four other people taking class with us: a chef-instructor at Manchester (CT) Community College, a cook/baker at an upscale retirement community in New Hampshire, a doctor married to another doctor who took the bread class and left his medical practice to open a bread bakery, and a guy who works for Verizon but has taken pro-level continuing education classes, including the c.e. bread classes at CIA and San Francisco Baking Institute. From there, we launch into our mise en place for the week: starting our puff pastry; making pate brisee and pate sucree and pasta frolla; making cookie dough for zaletti (Italian cornmeal cookies) and almond horns and amaretti and a staggeringly stiff hazelnut dough, which we discover later was scaled down incorrectly from the master recipe, which explains why I was all but unable to pipe it. We make meringues, which will dry in the oven overnight and will be sandwiched with whipped cream the next day. We make some really amazing almond tuiles and set up a mini-production line to get them off the sheets while they are still malleable. I am exhausted but thrilled by the end of the day. I go home, kick off my shoes, and instantly get a call from Carla, who is livid because her husband just paid a bill for some lawn work that was not done to her liking, and over which she was fighting with the lawn guy. I agree to go out with her. We go to the Mexican restaurant in Hanover (home of Dartmouth), where everyone around us is drunk and happy for Cinco de Mayo. She rants. I nod sympathetically over my fish tacos.
Tuesday, May 6. The good news is that Carla picks me up, saving me another 1 ½-hour walk. The bad news is that in the less-than-10-minute trip, she nearly misses 3 turns; each time I say, “uh, Carla, this is our turn,” she is forced to cut across traffic, cutting other people off in her wake. While we travel, she tells me that she called her boss and left her a message giving her notice, saying that she will not, in fact, be returning from her leave of absence. She is fretting.
Today is cookie day, where we will be baking off our cookies, sandwiching our meringues with whipped cream, sandwiching our hazelnut cookies with ganache, dipping our almond horns in ganache, and, at the end of the day, tasting them to compare and contrast, as one says in academic circles. We also have more mise en place to do, including making pastry cream for our napoleons and cream horns and any other dessert that may require it. During a lull in class time, Carla goes outside to try to get her boss one more time. The conversation is not a good one, and she comes back in an even more fretful mood. Her concentration is broken, and she spends the rest of the class asking me how much of certain ingredients we are supposed to measure, and what exactly Chef meant when he gave us a certain direction. I hope that this is not a theme for the week. Then I remind myself that the past few months have been tough on Carla, and I should just cool my jets. I am a picture of zenlike calm as we taste and critique all of our cookies. Even though I only take small bites of everything, the amount of concentrated almond paste I ingest sends me into swoony paroxysms. I wrap up all of my cookies to take home for Lloyd, save for the meringues, which I take back to the desk crew at the Residence Inn, who fall all over them.
Wednesday, May 7. Carla picks me up and before saying good morning, says, “Go inside and ask them how to get to I-89. If we take I-89 to I-91, we can miss all of the traffic through Hanover.” This is like saying that the shortest distance between two points is an angle, but I tell her I’d be glad to try it tomorrow morning, i.e. not today, when we have five minutes to get to class. En route, she tells me that her boss is not taking her news well, and wants her to work for them for one more week. She doesn’t want to say no because she doesn’t want to burn any bridges, but she can’t, just can’t work with those people for even one second more, so what she has decided to do is tell them that she will be back next week, then the day before they’re expecting her, she’ll call and tell them that she has car trouble and is stranded in Vermont, with no way to get home. What do I think? You can probably guess.
Continuing in this space tomorrow...