A Funny Thing About Food

This weekend at Bullwinkle Ranch Resort was a busy one, with a wedding for a hundred-plus people, the restaurant completely booked every night and, perhaps most importantly, an intimate dinner for a dozen or so people in what I call the Hobbit Cellar... it’s a private dining room with a round wine barrel door frame right out of Hobbiton. The dinner was hosted by the owner of Bullwinkle Ranch. Yeah, the guy who signs our paychecks.

For the dinner, I trotted out my much-loved (by me, Chef and Delilah, anyway) fennel granita as an intermezzo. For the dessert, because the owner and others at the dinner are reportedly huge hockey fans, I created the Bullwinkle Ranch Hat Trick, with a "hockey puck" of layered chocolate-hazelnut sponge, soaked in Kahlua and layered with an espresso-chocolate ganache, dipped in pate a glacer (a chocolate product you can use for dipping or writing... I make it by melting one pound chocolate and stirring in two ounces canola oil), the size and shape of a hockey puck with the ranch’s "brand" piped on top. With it I made a pate a glacer hockey stick on each plate with caramel "action" lines to suggest movement and added a quenelle of vanilla ice cream.

And no, I didn’t have my camera around, but Chef said it was well-received. Actually, when I asked the following day about it, he gave a thumbs-up and then proceeded to recount in great detail how everyone reacted to the food he made. That's about the most feedback I get from him on my stuff (he is a chef, after all), so I won't complain. And he did have reason to brag.

For the main course, he created a rather delicious venison tenderloin-within-a marinated pork tenderloin with sweet potatoes and brussels sprouts that was so frickin’ tasty. I know because he set aside a portion for me, possibly after hearing me lament to Delilah, at 8 p.m., that I hadn’t had anything to eat since my breakfast of a large cameo apple more than 11 hours earlier.

In any case, before I got to taste this creation, I was at my station trying to plate my hockey pucks, finish the day’s to-do list and make some Lebkuchen* dough for a wedding next week that has a German theme.

*Lebkuchen is a German cakey spice cookie that the groom apparently is obsessed with, even if he doesn’t quite seem to know what it is... apparently every time he meets with the Food and Beverage staff he describes it differently, including "shortbread cookie covered in chocolate" and "spice cake." I’m making traditional German Lebkuchen and he can kiss my monkey if it’s not what he had in mind. Lebkuchen dough has to be made three or four days before you bake it, and then kept at room temperature for several more days, which is why I was rushing to make it a week ahead of time.

As I am making the Lebkuchen dough, aware that Chef has just sent the entree to the cellar, Delilah comes racing back to where I work, her face red and tears in her eyes.

I figured Chef had made one of his comments, or the guys on the line were giving her a hard time, but when I asked what was wrong, to my surprise she said "It’s so pretty!"

Uh...

"It’s so pretty! I’m sorry, I just get real emotional about food!" she added.

Turns out she was talking about having helped plate the venison and pork entree, and was overwhelmed by its visual beauty and gastronomic perfection.

"Do you ever get that way about food?" she asked, in full-on foodie freakout mode. "Am I crazy to feel that way? It’s just so pretty!"

I looked at her, bawling, nose red and running, completely beside herself. And I have to say, while I haven’t gotten misty-eyed about food, there have been things I’ve made (the Maelstrom cake, cardamom brown butter ice cream, Stilton and walnut scones with chive creme fraiche... hell, any scone I’ve made) where I sit back and look at it with tremendous pleasure and satisfaction and, beyond the product itself, a feeling of self-worth that I’ve only experienced elsewhere with my fiction writing, as if to say to myself "this proves you can contribute on a positive way to the universe, even if it involves obscene amounts of butterfat."

There's also a weird cheap thrill I get in the kitchen, almost a primordial high, thinking about the long line of people from the first hunter-gatherer to figure out if you smash certain seeds and mix them with water you could make a paste and bake it on a heated rock and have bread to people like Antoine Careme, the storied Renaissance pastry chef who made entire buildings out of sugar for royale fetes. It's hard to describe, but I feel like I've joined a long line of people capable of melding creativity and practical chemistry to take raw ingredients and turn them into a commodity that is both useful and artistic (well, maybe not the caveman bread, but you get my point).

I love to write, don't get me wrong, and I loved being a journalist, but I always felt that as a member of the media I was reacting to what other people were doing. Now I'm one of the doers, and I like it.

So no, I told Delilah. She wasn’t crazy to feel that intensely about food. Also, she was in the right profession.