Narmadhaa Sivaraja
How to Contain a Jam-Packed Kitchen Notebook
A loose-leaf notebook crammed with pages of recipes and
checklists with notes like bird tracks scrawled in the margins,
encased in sheet protectors, and filled with things that thrill and
try a pastry chef’s soul: How to make the puffiest mini-Pavlovas
ever, along with the instructions for dodging new road construction
on the way to the restaurant and avoiding another tire puncture
so you can arrive at the kitchen by 4am, being careful not to
wake the homeless man in the hall, in time to check in deliveries
the fourth (and final) recipe for key lime cheesecake on top of a
spicy graham crust. Pepper in crumb, is NEVER dumb. The
technique for making an occasional three-layer spice wedding
cake filled with apple compote and iced with cinnamon cream
cheese buttercream. Happy bride, mother cried. The directions
for keeping the insecure head chef off your back, head down
doesn’t work, although a chef-coat-of-invisibility is worth
researching. The guidelines for keeping one’s chin up around
the sous chef boys’ club. A list of other uses for French rolling
pins (see above) (see above the above) The recipe for lemon
bavarois from your Bavarian grandmother. Hints for ordering
(and hiding) ample heavy cream so said sous chef keeps his
hands off your stash. Notes on eating enough while being
surrounded by food. Logging family meals for the staff *Donuts
are always popular. How to keep cool when slow roasting
strawberries, figs, and apples. How to keep cool when the assistant
pastry chef thinks she knows better about everything. How to
make lists that act like sturdy footings in a building to hold up
your passion. An accounting of savings to buy own place with
glittery, bursting doodles of hope and confidence decorating the page.
Sandy Deutscher Green writes from her home in Virginia USA where her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and appeared in Bitter Oleander, Neologism, The Lake, and in her chapbooks, Pacing the Moon (Flutter Press, 2009) and Lot for Sale. No Pigs (BatCat Press, 2019). https://sandradgreen.webs.com/.
Narmadhaa Sivaraja is a nature and haiku fanatic who draws inspiration from photographs. See more of her work on The Chaos Within.