As I was scrolling through some old photos on my computer, I realized that I had taken a lot of documentary-style pictures of what my life was like in New York as a single and eager foodie except I didn’t post them up on my blog… because I didn’t have a blog back then…. but now I do!
As many of you may know, paying rent in New York City is NO joke. Oftentimes there are even 3 people sharing a one bedroom (which is what I did). For a while, the futon in the living room was my bed, desk and general personal space. When I quit my fashion job to attend culinary school, I knew I still had to work to survive, so I went to work at a bakery during the day and attended school at nights.
Our school emphasized that we MUST practice at home in order to hone our knife skills and remember recipes or techniques we learned in class. Whenever I had a free moment, I was practicing, like a good student. However, the problem was that my school taught us recipes with really expensive ingredients that I couldn’t afford so I just bought a big sack of potatoes and did what I could with that.
I couldn’t bear to waste any of those precious potato scraps so I came up with more and more ways to eat potatoes. Eventually I bought carrots and turnips too.
My knife skills drastically improved as a result of this. They even started to notice at the bakery when I’d slice the bananas at lightning speed.
Soon enough I discovered that although I was penny-pinching and opting to walk instead of taking the subway and doing other money-saving things, that the one benefit I had from working in food was all the leftovers!
I mean, who normally has stuff like duck confit lying around their house?
Sometimes I’d saunter into the pastry department and go to the bread making classes to ask if there was any fresh baked baguettes the students didn’t want. Most of the time, they were up to their ears in bread and kind of sick of it, so I’d easily nab some!
The same day I got my baguette, our class was assigned to make gravlax (kinda like smoked salmon). Needless to say, we all got to take these huge beautiful slices home.
I had me a nice summer time supper of fresh baguette with goat cheese, gravlax and sliced tomatoes.
The best day was when we made fruit tarts from scratch in teams, but my fireman partner didn’t want it because he didn’t like sweets. I got to take that huge tart home by myself! Although I got a huge pay cut switching from fashion to culinary, one thing was sure… I never became a starving artist. Thanks for walking down memory lane with me!
