A Celebration of Chefs and Others

Spending 14-hour days in command of a restaurant kitchen can take a toll, both physically and emotionally. So when it’s time to move on, where do chefs go?

It turns out, not very far. In most cases, successful chefs do not retire in the traditional sense. Instead, they often begin a second act, where they re-invent themselves – in classrooms, lower-key kitchens, or at different kinds of food-industry jobs. Rarely does a dedicated chef completely shut the door on the culinary world.

“There’s definitely an addictive aspect to the restaurant business,” says Richard Hanna, an instructor at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Pasadena.

Hanna, 47, has been an executive chef for restaurants and owns Mission Bistro, a corporate food service company, but a high point of his second act is teaching. He finds students are eager to learn from an experienced chef, and “I’ve been doing this so long I have 3 different ways I can show them” any cooking challenge.

There is a difference between jam and preserves.  Jam is sweet fruit you spread on toast.  Preserves are a frozen moment in time—a piece of summer that you can carry with you the rest of the year:  high grass, long naps, warm evenings, your front porch… 

My neighbor Mary Wellington makes preserves.

Mary is a farmer.  And not only a single-family farmer--a single farmer.  She works three acres of very diverse orchards of Glenn Annie canyon all by herself, on which she grows over fifty varieties of fruit. 

Her preserves were so treasured and ubiquitous at local farmer’s markets that many people came to call her “The Jam Lady.” Her Blenheim Apricot jam is intoxicating.  Her Blood Orange marmalade is insane.  The red raspberry is well… indescribable.  But Mary Wellington preserves more than fruit.

If you wander up Glen Annie you will find a two story clapboard farmhouse peeking out from behind the persimmon tree.  Mary will greet you with her typical burst of enthusiasm and a clap of her hands.  She will launch into an impromptu tour of her orchard and its latest bounty:  You will flit from tree to tree sampling God’s offerings in a feast of the senses that is literally Edenic.  (I know I get religious about food—but I was raised that way.)   Taste the Santa Rosas… Smell the outside of this blood orange… Look at the color on these apricots... Oh don’t mind the bruise—just taste it.

In 1944, Ella Mae Morse had a hit single that began:

Milkman, keep those bottles quiet
Can’t use that jive on my milk diet

That was before my time, but in the ’50s and ’60s the milkman came to our house three times a week, leaving bottles of milk on the back stoop and taking away the empties. The glass bottles would clink in the milkman’s wire basket – a gentle sound I took as a music cue to start my homework.

I was with friends last night for an Italiam-themed potluck meal. My firend, Bobbie, brought a dessert she found in one of Michael Chiarello's cookbooks. Rosemary Sand Cake with Summer Berries is a light, lemony cake flecked with bits of fresh rosemary.

I used to watch Chiarello's Food Network show every Saturday. I love his casual style and his down-to-earth approach to food preparation and entertaining. And he just seems like such a nice guy.

He often made use of fresh herbs in the dishes he prepared on his show. For this cake, he chose rosemary.

The recipe calls for potato starch. It has a silky texture, similar to cornstarch and gives the cake a fine delicate texture. Bobbie found potato starch at our local natural food co-op, but I think many grocery stores carry it. It's probably on the shelf with other baking ingredients.