The first post

I had a blog before on a website of a very good restaurant I worked at in Westchester county, New York a few years back. I never felt like it was particularly well read, though I had no way of knowing for sure. The point of it was to explore how I felt about the experience I was having, preparing food for people I didn't know, and couldn't see their reactions while eating it. When in a situation like that, you tend to focus on any complaints you hear much more intensely. 99 people can come in a love what they are served, but a waiter will tell you about one person who didn't like it and not tell you about the other 99 and you think you did poorly. It's a trap. Now I work in a far more interesting environment. The home and kitchen of a lovely family with homes in Manhattan and Southampton New York. They like my food, they wouldn't have hired me if they didn't, and I get to serve it directly to them and their guests and instantly see the reaction. Since the reaction is almost always good, and criticisms are helpful and rare, I am once again connected with the true Joy of Cooking. This being the joy of preparing fresh healthy food for people you care about and watching them as they enjoy it. In summer we are in Southampton and I sleep in a room off the kitchen 5 days a week. The days are long and sometimes pretty hard but I always go to bed feeling like I did good. I can't say that about the restaurant years. The restaurant life is hard and while I was good at it, very good at it, I don't miss it at all. The summer day starts at 6 when I make the coffee, then go back to my room for about an hour of my own alone time. By 7:3o I am cutting fruit, making batters for the pancakes, waffles or French toasts the children are going to have and making plans for the menu of the coming day and evening. Once the breakfast dishes are cleared it's out to the organic vegetable garden (think small farm) to see what's ripe and ready and I can start building a menu around that. We had an amazing tomato harvest this year, from about 6o plants started in March from seeds in our greenhouse. There was lots of talk this year about a blight that was wiping out the crops of commercial local farmers but our garden is protected on all sides by large privet hedges and we escaped. The abundant harvest has proved it's own challenge but the fruit is delicious and we have so far about 25 quarts of sauce for the winter. Anyway, then it's off to do the shopping for the day and it's great fun because the Hamptons have some of the most wonderful and amazing food shops to be found anywhere. That combined with superb local farmstands makes the shopping part of the day lots of fun.