Really? I didn’t know. I mean, I guess I should have, there was that one Cindy Sherman in the Modern Wing and has been there since it opened.

But today, I went by the Vernacular Photography exhibit at the Art Institute, and it just about hit me in the face. Cindy Sherman photograph about 50×40, so about big enough so that the Cindy Sherman in the photograph was bigger than life.

Vernacular photographs. Photographs you could have taken. If you were just better. No, I don’t take photographs that good (yet). Yes, this is an open invitation to talk about what gets to count as art.

A good proseist must be a master of paradox – more so than a good poet, even. For a proseist must tell it straight, and so may not rely on the sorts of sleight of word as a poet might.

Marcus Leshock apparently found the shop I work for from reading about in my blog. He’s a city features reporter for WGN News, and apparently, if he’s found my blog buried deep within the internet, he does his job very, very well.

You know who else is good at her job? Mary, the photographer who shot the segment. (Did I get the name right? if I didn’t, I’ll correct, and if I did, I’ll remove this parenthetical) As much as I hate being caught on video camera, she made it very, very easy. I’ve had bad experiences with TV camera personnel, where they get all in my space like they’re so much more important than you because they make the television. Hey, I’ve been on the other side of making TV too. And it was a breath of fresh air to deal with a photographer who knew what she was doing, who didn’t violate my personal space, and who politely said “excuse me” when there was even a doubt. Mary, I commend you. I’m still a nervous wreck on camera though. I belong on the other side of a lens.

I really, really hate being shot for television. As in I get all throwy-uppy when you point a video camera at me. It’s almost an allergic reaction (ask my ex-girlfriend Ruth, who has seen me turn into a nervous wreck when a TV camera crew even entered a room). And the professionalism on display made me not want to throw up at the end of it. So kudos.

Meister, one of my dear friends from NY is writing about learning to cook at home.

So here are some million dollar ideas for you.

1. Matzo ball soup in matzo. Simple, make chicken soup, but add gelatin and put into hemisphere molds. assemble hemispheres of chicken soup into spheres and wrap in matzo ball. simmer in chicken stock, and serve.

2. I tried to make French onion soup dumplings once. It failed because my refriged onion soup base (it tasted good cut 1-1 with water) refused to be wrapped in jiaozi dough. Freezing might have helped. So might have the gelatin idea. Doing this in potato chip form shouldn’t be that hard. It’s like deep frying any liquid, make sure the crust you encase it with doesn’t fall apart or leak. In this case, consider wrapping in mashed potatoes, and then wrapping again in feuille de brik.

3. Order pain de mie from your baker, but unsliced. (so just like wonder bread, but not sliced) and slice the long way as thin as you can. You may need a fancy knife or a deli slicer to accomplish this. Dollop on some PB&J and then carefully wrap in several layers, binding it together with an arrowroot slurry. Vacuum pack at “low”, and then cook en sous vide at 75 C just to set the slurry. Allow to cool to room temp, remove from bag, and serve. You’re right, though, I do wish I thought of it first. But here’s the execution.

And Meister, if you want to open a dumpling restaurant, I will move to NY to chef it until it takes off. But I’m putting a strict two-year time limit on my time commitment.

I mean, I expected to like it quite a bit. It would be a chance to get bagels from New York Bagel & Bialy without having to go up to Skokie. Plus I really like the idea of Stumptown being in Chicago. (Even though I threw a hissy fit when I heard Bagel would have Stumptown, and nobody from Stumptown would return my e-mails. I got over that. Really, I did.)

But what really got me is how good the sandwiches are. The Lox sandwich? Yum. Breakfast 1? It reminded me of everything I liked about growing up in the suburbs. Which was sitting and eating Bagels for breakfast before school. Something about an egg bagel, eggs, ham, American cheese, and yellow mustard really worked. That whole food and nostalgia thing which I think is a terrible way of writing about food? It happened to me, and I’m writing about it despite myself. That’s how much I liked it.

Ok. So. Bagel on Damen good. Writing about nostalgia in food writing bad. So more of the first, and less of the second. I’ll work on that.

:::UPDATE::: You can’t argue with the brilliance of eggs, bacon, avocado and cream cheese on an everything bagel.

Also. The Stumptown Coffee is available as whole bean or out of a Fetco brewer. Despite my coffee-by-the-cup fetishism, I really like coffee from Fetco brewers when it’s fresh. In fact, for a breakfast joint to use Fetcos is a step forward. When I lived in NY, and I went to 13th St Bagel, or H & H, or Esse, their coffee was putrid. The coffee at Bagel on Damen? It tastes good. And for the record, I don’t have a lot of experience with Stumptown, just a few shots here and here (mostly here at Buzz) so I shouldn’t be the one to say how well they do with their Stumptown beans. But I haven’t been disappointed once by the coffee at Bagel on Damen. Plus, didn’t you see the article in Time Out? Maggie McCoy is a bona fide coffee celebrity.

1/31 7p 1644 N Damen. $5 buy in, winner takes pot.

You know, to celebrate being open. Beer and baristas. Should be fun.

There is one book I know of that has more to teach about the idea of perfection than any other, and it is The French Laundry Cookbook. Really? A cookbook? Not, say, Plato’s Republic or Philebus? Of course. Because The French Laundry Cookbook makes clear that the whole point of perfection isn’t the unreachable standard by which we measure, but the striving for it. (Certain careful readers of Plato may insist here that I’m not too far from Plato here. Fair enough.)

What is clearer from The French Laundry Cookbook than in any other book is that the striving for perfection is a way of dealing with the fact of mortality. One important aspect of perfection is the avoidance of waste, and waste in The French Laundry Cookbook is always the waste of life. And the waste of life isn’t just the waste of the life of a rabbit (read the mini-essay on “The Importance of Rabbits”) but also the life of the farmer (not all at once) or the life of the cook, or the life of the diner in the dining room. Failing to strive for perfection is failing to pay due respect to life. It is giving in to death.

Once I explained that the old saw, “if it’s worth living for, it’s worth dying for” is tautological. Because living for something is dying for it, a l’il bit at a time. And great coffee is worth living for. I know because I learned it the hard way.

One of my most vivid memories in coffee was when Tony Dreyfus was giving his presentation about drip coffee at the 2008 Great Lakes Regional Barista Jam. He had all of us raise our right hands, and swear that we wouldn’t fuck up the coffee. As a barista, you’re the last pair of hands in a long chain to put hands on the coffee. You owe it to a lot of people not to fuck it up. And I carry it with me every day, the putting my hand in the air and promising. I won’t fuck up the coffee.

I miss you Liza. I really really miss you.

This has been a long time coming, but I didn’t really want to publicize it until I was altogether sure that it was going to happen. It’s happening, tomorrow, at 7 am at 1644 N Damen. I’m the barista trainer there, and the owners have basically empowered me to do whatever I want to do with the coffee and with the training. So the coffee is going to be as good as I want it to be. And I want really, really good coffee.

Yesterday and today, I had a little training minicamp, where we did the obvious taste everything on the menu, but I also led everyone through a tasting of citrus fruit (navel oranges, tangerines, clementines, mineolas, blood oranges, kumquats, and yuzu juice). With the basic navel orange, I went ahead and cut out some zest and then some pith along with. The exercise was to get everyone to take the taste less for granted, and to start focusing on descriptions. Plus citrus occurs in coffee over and over again, just like chocolate, which we also tasted through. I went through 4 kinds of Scharffen Berger, a 41, 62, 70, & 82 cacao content in order. Chocolate and citrus are nice things to say about how a coffee tastes, but I want the staff to be able to talk more specifically about it. Just when people thought I was being really overly nice to them for the tasting exercises, I made them all put a spoonful of cocoa powder in their mouths. Ew.

But it was worth it, because my trainees are becoming super adventurous about saying what they taste in the coffees, and they’re starting to trust their palettes. One thing that Rick Bayless once said which really stuck with me was that as a chef (or really even as a line cook) the basic function of your job is tasting things over and over again. The way you make sure your coffee (or even your hot potato/cold potato) tastes good is by tasting it. Gasp.

But that’s just it. I need the staff to be confident in their palates because I can’t be there every moment the shop is open. It’s really not hard, it’s just a matter of caring and paying attention. Really!

In the Atlantic Gus Rancatore declares Barismo in Harvard Square coffee worth traveling for. But this is obviously homerism from his perspective, I mean, how far does he have to go to get a cup of coffee there? The title of the article should really read, “A Great Coffeeshop in Boston, Even? Coffee no Longer Worth the Travel”. I mean, Boston is one of those cities with legendarily bad coffee. When I complained about the coffee in New York, people would tell me that at least it wasn’t the coffee in Boston.

But as much as the commenters on that article argue about which San Francisco coffeeshop is the best, I think they’re missing the real point. Great shops that pull excellent espresso, pour lovely art, and make slow coffee by the cup are springing up everywhere. Grand Rapids and Austin come to mind immediately. It’s not whether these shops are worth traveling to. It’s whether they’re worth a fifteen minute detour in your daily routine. I like to think it is.

Well, that was some kind of a year. For me, it was looking like it was quite eventful, but then it turned out that only one event really mattered. And really, it was turning out to be a really good year, too. And then Liza got killed. And it’s not as if it was just that it could have been any of us – it was in the middle of the day, the weather was clear, and she wore a helmet – but also that she was the best of us. She had that kind of talent and dedication that goes on to win barista championships. But it wasn’t Liza’s death that my year revolved around. It was meeting Liza at all. And so, yes, it was a very good year that I’ve had. And I go on to maintain that I’ve had a better, richer year for having met and lost her than never having met her at all. Liza just had that kind of effect on people, she understood everything you said, put a smile on your face, and made you demand better of yourself.

And so I demand better of myself. 2009 is the year I regained my wild perfectionist streak.