by Jenna Weber
It was fall, and we were gearing up for Thanksgiving—the club’s biggest holiday, since it was smack-dab in the middle of prime tourist season in Vero Beach. Everything was pumpkin; we had pumpkin bread constantly in the oven, pumpkin crème brûlée on the dessert menu, and pumpkin cheesecake in the fridge. I had recently become fascinated with the concept of the Whoopee Pie—billowy buttercream frosting sandwiched in between two large soft cookies—and thanks to the freedom that Chef had given me to experiment, I developed a Pumpkin Whoopee Pie that went over well with him and our clientele. Even though the majority of our members were older, they actually loved the concept and welcomed Whoopee Pies as a change of pace from the chocolate and macadamia cookies that were always found on the dessert tray. For the big Thanksgiving Day buffet, I was in charge of baking the breads and making my Pumpkin Whoopee Pies.
I actually enjoyed getting to work early in the morning to start on the breads, when it was all quiet and dark outside and I could sip my coffee and sink my palms deep into the dough. Even though decorating wasn’t my favorite, I loved to watch Chef work on intricate wedding cakes and petits fours, amazed at the details his large hands could master, when my tiny hands couldn’t even make a proper chocolate garnish. He didn’t give up on me, though, and whenever it was slow after lunch, I would retreat to the back office with a piece of wax paper and a metal bowl full of perfectly tempered chocolate that I would pour into a parchment-paper cone and attempt to drizzle in little patterns.
It was also nice being back in Vero Beach. I found myself getting back into running in my extra time and enjoyed sunny jogs down by the bridge and near the Indian River, where I had spent countless sunny weekend afternoons water-skiing and boating. Also, I didn’t cut or burn myself nearly as much as I had while in school. I slowed myself down and was hell-bent on showing all the boys that they weren’t the only ones who could make it in the kitchen.
Time flew by that fall, and before I knew it, I was packing up yet again, but this time for a final destination: Tampa. My graduation would be held in early December. I was looking forward to being closer to my family and finally attempting a normal relationship with Rob, instead of dealing with the miles between us. Culinary school had seemed like a dream, hazy and sweet and over too soon. With my degree I now had the tools to take on any kitchen, any bakery; however, I wasn’t sure why I still felt so unsettled. I packed up all my tools and neatly folded my uniforms and drove west, away from my tiny hometown, feeling prepared to take on new experiences as a culinary school graduate. New Year’s Eve was spent at a bar in South Tampa, and I cheered and toasted with Rob and our friends to 2009, the last year in the decade and a year for new possibilities and growth. If I only knew then how much growth the year would really bring.
Pumpkin Whoopee Pies
Makes about 18 whoopee pies
These cookies are very rich, almost like a cupcake, so I suggest saving this recipe for a special occasion or a rainy afternoon. The cookies are best the day you bake them; if you keep them for too long they will become a bit gummy and soft. They would also be perfect with cream cheese frosting in the middle, or on their own, sprinkled with a dusting of powdered sugar.
For the buttercream filling
1 egg white
2 tablespoons milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups powdered sugar, divided
¾ cup shortening
For the cookies
2 cups brown sugar
1 cup canola oil
1½ cups canned pumpkin
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons cinnamon
½ teaspoon cardamom
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground white pepper
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
Make the filling: In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a whisk attachment, combine the egg white, milk, vanilla extract, and 1 cup of the powdered sugar, then mix on high speed until the mixture is creamy and light. Add shortening and remaining cup of sugar, and whip on high speed until very light, about 8 to 10 minutes. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 325°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Make the cookies: In a large bowl, blend together brown sugar and oil with a spoon until well combined. Add pumpkin, eggs, and vanilla and continue to stir until smooth.
Sift together flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and spices, and then add to the wet ingredients, stirring only until combined (be careful not to overmix).
For best results, spoon batter into a piping bag with a large tip and pipe mounds of batter (about 1 tablespoon each) of batter onto the lined sheet tray, about 3 inches apart. (If you don’t have a piping bag, use two large spoons and space the batter in the same way.)
Bake cookies for about 10–12 minutes, until they begin to turn golden. Let cool completely before sandwiching cookies together with the filling.
Cookie sandwiches will keep in a sealed plastic container at room temperature for a few days.
16
NIGHT AND DAY
Two months later
I AWOKE WITH A START AND SLAMMED MY HAND DOWN ON THE alarm clock by my bedside. I had been dreaming again of Paris, of making my way through the farmers’ markets and winding Latin Quarter streets. The red digital numbers read 3:01 a.m., and I had to be at work by four.
I stepped out of bed and made my way down the carpeted hallway to the bathroom, rubbing my eyes. I had these early mornings down to a science. I knew that it took exactly one minute to get from bed to bathroom, four minutes to quickly rinse off in the shower, five minutes to get dressed, and another six minutes to make a snack and coffee for the drive to work.
I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and checked my watch to make sure I was still going on time. Hot coffee with agave nectar and a little half-and-half was next, plus a hard-boiled egg and a piece of cheese to keep me going until around eight o’clock, when I could take my break to eat a full breakfast.
As usual, the store parking lot was dark, and I rang the bell at the side entrance to have my manager come let me in. When the sliding glass doors opened I was ushered into a whole new world. Stockers were already busy unloading boxes of cereal and crackers, and crates of produce were coming in through the back door. I quickly tied on my apron and got to work. All of the pastries had to be baked and shelved by the time the store opened at eight, and by that time all the bread had to be rising as well. Several buckets of sourdough starter had already been pulled out of the walk-in and were sitting on the wooden countertop, ready to be mixed with flour and water and shaped into artisanal breads. Here, I was a baker, and my main job was shaping dough into loaves and then firing them in five hundred–degree ovens. In the past couple of weeks, I had acquired some new scars on both forearms from wielding scalding-hot, industrial-size sheet pans.
Most mornings, there were two other people working in the bakery with me. We rarely spoke in the early hours as we piped commercially prepared raspberry and cherry fillings into puff pastry, pausing only to take long sips of steaming coffee. There were chocolate croissants to bake, as well as Danishes, bagels, muffins, and cookies. We didn’t actually make any of these breakfast pastries from scratch; they came into the store already frozen from a reputable distributor, and my only job was to pull them apart in their frozen state and bake them. Usually I would sneak a chocolate chip or two while I worked.
By the time the store opened and the first customers walked in, I had the first loaves of bread out of the oven and was up to my elbows in vegan buttercream frosting, a recipe I’d created and that seemed to be a huge hit. All of our bread was organic and baked from scratch using house-made starters (fermented mixtures of flour and water that act as a natural form of yeast). The only one we didn’t make by hand was the sourdough starter, an
d that was shipped in from San Francisco, where the tradition of sourdough began hundreds of years before. We made white, whole wheat, nine-grain, sourdough, and sunflower-flax breads, and wonderfully crusty French baguettes. My favorite of all the breads we made was the dense, dark sunflower-flax. It was smaller than the rest of the loaves because the organic whole-wheat flour that we used produced a denser final product. The bread was filled with seeds and sweetened with a little honey; it was perfect to dunk into a bowl of hot soup or cover with creamy goat cheese and juicy tomato slices.
The sourdough was great as well, but fickle as only sourdough bread can be. The starter needed a lot of love, and whether the bread turned out or not depended mainly on the weather outside and the time the dough spent in the industrial-size Kitchen Aid. When perfect conditions prevailed, the bread rose up tall and firm and had a rich, almost cheesy taste to it. When the Tampa mornings were warm and thick with tropical humidity, the rising dough would often crumple into itself, producing a final product that was dimpled and marked with imperfection. Sometimes, we would throw a handful of toasted walnuts or hazelnuts into the dough when it was being mixed to form a sandwich roll reminiscent of the little hazelnut rolls I’d loved so much while in France.
I’d taken this baking job at a local organic supermarket for many reasons. The economy was crashing and burning, my school loan payments were about to start coming due, and the idea of baking bread just seemed fun. I got hired after my first interview, and I was so thrilled by the fact that I had even gotten a job that I accepted it in a heartbeat, only half-listening when they told me about the early-morning hours. I told myself it wouldn’t be that big a deal, and that plenty of people worked early shifts. I still wanted to be a writer but figured I had to put in my time like everyone else before I could land my dream job at Bon Appétit or Gourmet. When I told my parents, they were happy that I’d gotten a job but worried about the low pay and my sleeping schedule. My dad hung blackout curtains in my bedroom and gave me a pep talk while my brother made bets on how long I would last.
On my first day of work, I arrived with an extra-large Thermos of black coffee, oatmeal in my lunchbox for my 8 a.m. “lunch break,” and dark circles under my eyes. I had only slept for four hours. I didn’t think about how difficult it would be to fall asleep while the sun was still in the sky and before a normal dinner time.
None of my friends could fathom why I had accepted a job working from 4 a.m. to noon every day for ten dollars an hour. I tried to reason with them, and with my family, who bore the brunt of my lack of sleep. I told everyone who asked that it was totally normal for a culinary school graduate to have a job at the low end of the totem pole and that baking bread from scratch was just soooo rewarding. Plus, it would give me a lot of time to work on my writing.
Compared to my externship in a somewhat high-stress kitchen, kneading bread in the middle of the night had sort of a romantic appeal to it. But in reality I ran around like a madwoman, wanting to do it all; after getting home from work at lunchtime I would hit the gym or the pool for a long swim or head out for a run before eating dinner at four and hitting the sack by seven. My goal was just to exhaust myself so much during the daytime that I couldn’t help but fall asleep early enough to get a reasonable seven hours of sleep before waking up, writing for a few hours, and going to work again.
Let’s just say that never happened. Not even close. What did happen was that I became painfully aware of what it feels like to have insomnia, to go to work feeling like a zombie all day with five hundred–degree air hitting me in the face. The upside to all this was the lack of need for makeup and hairstyling (hairnets took care of frizz and grease better than hairspray) and the plethora of delicious carbohydrates. Every afternoon I would come home with a new loaf of fresh-baked bread, my favorite being the potato bread, which had a texture so soft that it fell apart like cotton candy in your mouth and a flavor that just begged to be paired with crunchy almond butter and raspberry jam.
As the days wore on, however, I became more and more sleep deprived. My exhaustion made me less careful with scalding-hot sheet pans, and I acquired a new set of burns all over my arms. I had no motivation to exercise and made no progress on the writing front. Rob was increasingly perturbed because I never had the energy to go out with our friends anymore. I also started to have major issues falling asleep at night because I would just lie in bed and stare at the clock, fretting as I counted the dwindling hours until my alarm would ring. I had just begun and already knew something had to give.
One Friday evening, Rob and I were once again arguing over plans. In the whole three years that we had been dating, we’d never argued like this. A bunch of his friends were all going to a steakhouse in town, and he wanted us to go and then head downtown for drinks later. I had been up since three, and my eyelids had started to feel like they were being pulled together by magnets. All I wanted was a hot bubble bath and a good night’s sleep; the thought of going out and being social almost seemed like a death sentence. No amount of eye makeup could mask the shadows around my eyes, and I could feel the crankiness start to set in.
“Babe, we haven’t been out in over a month! I know you’re tired, but can’t we just compromise?” Rob asked.
I sighed. As much as I wanted to meet him halfway, I knew that once the cocktails started flowing there would be no going home early. Rob loved to have a good time, and even with the best intentions we would end up staying out until way past midnight. Then I would once again be the designated driver and responsible girlfriend.
“I honestly feel like I’ve been hit by a truck,” I said. “Work was insane this morning, and I hardly slept at all last night. You go without me; it’s not a big deal.”
Rob looked hurt. “I don’t want to go without you—you’re my girlfriend. Most of the time we act like we’re eighty years old and go to bed by ten. Can’t you take a nap or something?”
In the end, Rob ended up going out alone. I really had nothing in common with any of his friends, and even though I knew it upset him, sometimes I liked it when he went out alone. I liked my personal time, when I could just read and write, rather than making small talk with his friends’ wives, who already had kids and PTA meetings to deal with. Now, more than ever, I felt older than I really was, and I carried a sense of guilt because I knew I wasn’t being fair to Rob. He would bend over backward to please me, and I was simply too tired to give him the same in return.
Back at my parents’ house, I took a long bubble bath, then sank into my soft bed with a feeling of bliss that no steakhouse meal could ever have given me. All I wanted was to sleep before the cycle of early-morning alarm clocks, burning-hot ovens, and sweat began again.
Creamy Tomato Soup
Serves 4
My favorite way to enjoy a grilled cheese sandwich is to dunk it in this heavenly creamy soup. And, once you realize how easy it is to make, you’ll never buy the canned version again. Just be sure to buy good quality diced tomatoes—it makes all the difference.
2 tablespoons butter
¼ yellow onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups diced tomatoes (or chopped fresh tomatoes in the summer)
¾ teaspoon sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 cups whole milk
Heat the butter in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat, then add the onion and sauté until soft, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle the flour over the onion and toss well to combine. Cook for an additional 3 minutes, stirring often.
In a bowl combine the tomatoes with the sugar, salt, and baking soda and set aside.
Add the milk to the onion mixture, whisking, then whisk in tomato mixture. Bring to a simmer and continue to simmer for about 4 minutes (the soup will thicken up a little bit). Carefully pour the soup into a blender and blend until smooth, about 10 seconds.
Return soup to pot and keep warm over low heat until ready to serve.
17
&
nbsp; WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED
IT WAS THE END OF THE WEEK, AND ALL I COULD THINK ABOUT WAS getting my hair done. When it came to my appearance, I had pretty much stopped trying since I got the job at the bakery. In my oversized uniform without any makeup and my hair greased back into a hairnet-covered bun, I couldn’t even recognize myself in the mirror. I certainly bore no resemblance to the perky blonde college girl who went shopping at J. Crew and Nordstrom on the weekends and stayed out late chatting over cocktails with girlfriends. But today I had an appointment with my stylist, and I couldn’t wait to just sit back and let her work her magic on my overgrown roots and split ends. Since I had the weekend off, I was planning on meeting Rob and a couple friends for dinner later at a trendy new Mexican restaurant downtown.
I emerged from the salon feeling much more like my old self, and hurried home to change for the night.
“Helloooo?” I called out into my empty house, thinking maybe my brother was still upstairs where I’d left him a few hours before. I set my sunglasses and keys on the counter and swung the refrigerator door open to search for a late-afternoon snack, my freshly washed hair bouncing on my shoulders. I pulled out some leftover chicken to snack on before dinner. As I ate, my cell phone buzzed, and I answered it to chat with my mom, who had just landed in Albuquerque for work.
“Hang on, Mom,” I said as the call-waiting light flashed. “Oh, never mind. It’s just Dad calling on the other line. I’ll call him back later.”
We talked about weekend plans for a few seconds before my mom said, “Oh, that’s funny, now he’s calling me!”