A little bivalve inspiration...

Recently received this as a gift, and I am so pleased with a ton of the material - and not just the delicious looking pictures or intricate recipes. There are hundreds of books out there that try to make the restaurant experience repeatable for the home kitchen. And to be frank, it's not and it won't ever be.

You can try to sous vide all you want in your homemade vacumn sealed ziploc bag in a warm water bath. But unless you have a cool machine, you'll either spend hours of time or kill yourself trying. It's the same reason you probably shouldn't have surgery done by your next door neighbor - even if they're REALLY REALLY good at sutures, and they've studied ALL the books. The last thing you need to be is Frankeneighbor. (just made that up, copyrighted 2012)

So I respect the fact that right at the front of the book, Christina Tosi has about 20 pages of honest, candid and a frank mix of hilarious/inspirational advice for using the Momfuku Milk Bar book. She also tells you how to really closely recreate the recipes using pretty commonly found items and unabashedly tells you to use amazon.com. How many hoity toity chefs are gonna tell you THAT secret up front? That some dude doesn't come to the Milk Bar back door with a box packed with rice and white truffles, but that you walk your ass down to the corner bodega and get you some butter when you are OUT of butter.

Tosi lays it out her book writing philosophy the best in her interview:

But writing in terms of the home cook is — when you work in the industry for a while — you sort of lose touch with what the home cook does or does not have, or what the right way to direct them is. We use a lot of weird, funny terms in our kitchen so I'd be writing recipes and think, "Nobody's going to know what that means." I think the recipe writing part of it was real challenging for me, which I really didn't think about how much work goes into the directional part of it. Not the recipe part of it, like this many grams of butter. But the directional part was the hardest part because, you know, it's meant to be a cookbook that you have at home that you bake from, so really making sure that it translates as that takes a lot of time.

SEGUE!

I've been thinking a lot about how to manage a team. Specifically, my team for this year in producing two musicals. About what I want and need to do better. How desperate (yes, I'm using the word desperate to describe myself, keep your panties on) I am to prove that I'm not a fluke. That I AM a leader. But by no means, should I ever think that I know what I'm doing. I keep thinking of all the people who came before me and how different as leaders they are. Tosi is a leader, but she didn't start that way. She's a savant, a maverick and a rebel - who was admired and championed by another rebel who knew that she would do her own thing build her own team and keep out of HIS way (David Chang).

Tosi says about building the kitchen at Milk Bar:

I certainly didn't plan on having my own kitchen. It sort of just happened. I do think that in working in a bunch of different kitchens, outside of the city and in the city, I always just tried to do enough reflection — not like "Dear Diary" reflection — but enough reflection on "What I really loved about working here was this" or "What I really love about working for this person was that." Or "The one thing I really didn't like was this."

I think when happenstance put me in a place where I had my own kitchen, it was like oh, PS, you get to hire people. You don't have to do it all yourself. You need help, it's time to hire people. I think I naturally tried to take my time in each kitchen and working for each chef and go, well, how did I grow the most there? How can I put that into my own terms and my own environment? Then it becomes, you know, I've never had a kitchen where this happened, or a kitchen where that happened.

It's incredible the people that you build around you when you're doing what you love. I think that's the real reason coaches and gurus tell you to do what you love. Because when you do what you love, you're the best version of yourself that you know how to be. And you naturally attract the people that are drawn to who you are. So why not attract the people who love you and connect to you at your best? Makes sense right?

Reading Tosi's book is one of those revelations you have. Where you realize, that it doesn't matter what ANYONE is talking about. If you can interpret people's experiences and apply them to yours - the world is yours. For the next week, I'll be featuring famous words from others and how to apply them to your oyster. (bivalves = oysters, get it?)