I worked at Julia's Kitchen today. It's hard work but there were four of us and a lot of food was generated for this weekend and events Julia is catering at the university. We also had to get the weekly meals prepared that she'll deliver tomorrow. I don't know why catered food is so exhausting to prepare. Hmmm, maybe it was the 700 pinwheel puff pastries I prepared for baking, or the 2 1/2 pounds of spicy/caramelized pecans I prepared, or hundreds of olives in marinade I prepared.

Sometimes the toughest part of a recipe is multipying its ingredients by 6 or 7 or 8 times. I have trouble even doubling a recipe. One has to determine which ingredients don't need to be increased exponentially - especially seasonings like salt. One recipe I had to increase 14x today. It called for 1 egg and that's all I needed because the egg was only used to seal the seam of the puff pastry. That was a pretty easy example, but the numbers sometimes swirl in my head.

After all that cooking, how ironic that I nuked my own dinner tonight. LOL.

I'm headed to the university to hear a presentation given by a couple who volunteer in Romania. I will gladly give them today's hard earned money for their cause: AA chapters in Romania.

Below is a bad tour of a great place. I return to help Julia on Wednesday, when I hope to get photos of the land around her. She lives in a commune off the domain in a land trust called The Farm. I have no clue what I just typed about. I don't know what a land trust is and I've worked for Julia for about a year. I'll ask this Wednesday.




The stoves when I arrived - I should have taken another photo as I left. We did a whole lot of cooking today




Reenie chopping





Gretchen doing God only knows




Julia, whom I adore




Julia’s daughter, Maya – it takes a village




Onions for Gretchen’s stews




Two of the four trays of spicy/caramelized pecans I made