Monday Morning Re-cap. A Chance to Re-think, Re-group, and Level Up

Here’s an entry I hope will explain what I’m up to with this “Daily Cooking” blog.

Weekends. I do a big shopping trip on Friday morning, and kick off the weekend with a basic mental framework of the direction the weekend meals will take, leaving room for improvisation and innovation. And then I work hard, meal after meal, starting with Friday dinner straight through Sunday lunch.

One reason I love these weekends is that the longer days remind me of restaurant days: extremely busy and “in the flow.” In those days I worked, went home to sleep for five hours, and then went back to work. Nearly all my time was spent at work in the kitchen, and my brain operated in a strange mode, in which ideas and connections come quickly. My work as a private chef isn’t like that, but the weekends bear a slight similarity in that it’s a mix of ideas and heavy production.

When it’s all over, Monday morning typically finds me at home in Brooklyn with a surplus of these fresh, high-quality ingredients I didn’t use over the weekend. And I have an extremely well-appointed test kitchen in my home. Without the pressure of time or the distraction of other dishes, I use this time to take a favorite idea that didn’t get fully fleshed out and work on it in a vacuum. Sometimes I record this work on video. You can expect to see examples of these videos here on my site in the not-too-distant future, but my real motive is to finish and codify my ideas. I want the chance to tap back into my ideas and innovate and/or perfect the dishes a little more as time goes on.