happy halloween!

hey everybody! have yourselves a fantastic all hallow's eve. i'll be heading to take a bite out of the big apple and spend a few days of dining, drinking, and just wandering around the big city...you know, autumn in new york and all that jazz. anyway, i hope that this evening brings you either the tricks or the treats that you want. remember to have your parents check your candy before you eat it and stay away from that old house at the end of the street.

one last note of birthday thanks...

thanks to my years in college spent uselessly studying medieval history and literature so that i could become a cook, i have a pretty keen interest in any number of things from the era between the fall of the roman empire and the rise of the renaissance. to anticipate the first question that may have come to your mind, no, i'm not one of those people who dresses up in tights and pantaloons and runs around some field every summer. i do, though, have a healthy interest in medieval weaponry and warfare practices (as well as studying how the philosophies and beliefs of the medieval church profoundly effected the evolution of modern civilization). for pure excitement, nothing from the medieval arsenal beats the trebuchet. more refined and advanced than the catapault, a trebuchet uses ropes, pulleys, and counterweights to fling a projectile accurately over great distances. seige engines, such as the trebuchet, were used to batter down the walls of castles so invaders could directly attack a well-fortified enemy, rather than continuously having boiling oil, excrement, and goodness knows what else dropped over their heads from defenders atop the walls. where all of this is leading, though, is that last february i told the kitchen boys about my interest and enthusiasm for trebuchets and even milled over building one. today, pete gave me this small, fully-functioning model, which hurls grapes and small wooden balls a good 20+ feet. the things itself is super cool, but what's even better is that i have a friend who listened to me, remembered something that i liked, and took the time and trouble to get it for me. thank you, petey. by the way, this is the second trebuchet that pete bought for me. he memorably confessed to having broken the first one playing with it a few days before my birthday. ha!

thank you boys...

years back, i started the tradition of decorating the various kitchen boys' stations for their birthdays and giving them odd and/or fun gifts (legos, light sabers, etc.). i think that it's easy as we get older to stop thinking of our birthdays as fun and exciting, just as the joy and wonder that we held as children seems to dissipate in all of the other areas of our lives. i think this is sad. all too often, as adults, we focus so much of our time and energy on grown-up things that we tend to forget about how wonderful the world can really be. i've always tried very hard, with varying degrees of success, to put a little of that fun, wonder, joy, and even mischeif into the lives of the people that i love. this world is a beautiful place, but only if you choose to make it so. sometimes, i wish that more people would try harder to positively effect those around them...we each have the power to within us to shape our surroundings and either brighten or darken the days of those who we hold most dear. anyway, enough of my soap box, love is the answer rhetoric (even though i do think love is the answer). i can't begin to say how happy i was when i walked into work on my birthday and found my office decorated as seen here. i can say, though, how truly, deeply grateful i am to everyone who made my special day so much more so. by the way, the inflatable male "love doll" sitting in my chair is named bandit. he's been a fixture in the kitchen since he showed up at jason's birthday three years ago. although he's been in storage since receiving a puncture wound a few months back, i was especially glad to see him make a special birthday appearance for me. thanks again, everyone. "in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make." paul and john had it so right.

some of my favorite fall things...

october is one of my favorite months of the year...always has been. i suppose it started when i was a kid. my three favorite days of the year were christmas, my birthday, and halloween, pretty much like every other kid more or less.

lucky for me, though, two of those days fell in one beautiful fall month. in many ways, i haven't changed much since i was a lad. i still love fall, my birthday, halloween, and christmas and do everything that I can to celebrate them as enthusiastically as possible. these shots are from a fun day that i spent with friends and family walking through the cuyahoga valley metro parks and stopping at szalay's sweet corn farm to enjoy some roasted corn and general seasonal joy...though i couldn't muster enough enthusiasm among my compatriots to attempt the corn maze. boo! strangely, i also ran into dan gallo, his lovely wife, and their dog at szalay's. dan is one of the chefs at spice of life catering, our on-site chef at thorncreek winery in aurora, and probably one of the funniest people that i know. it seems everyone had the same fall fun on their mind that day. we ended the afternoon with a trip to sarah's vineyard in cuyahoga falls and sat outside in the warm late fall sun. somehow, i always feel like food and wine taste better outdoors and with winter coming soon, it's great to be able to get a few more chances to enjoy some alfresco dining and drinking. now if only i could finally get to see the great pumpkin...

that's a lot of lettuce!

i took this picture at a plated dinner last weekend. the event was for the golden barristers at cwru's law school over alumni weekend and went very well. anyway, the reason i took the picture was that it put me in mind of one of my favorite things. from the day i started in this business until now, i've had this really odd aesthetic fascination with the way it looks when you've got hundreds of identical plates all lined up and waiting to be served. somehow, the sight of this has always spoken to me and, i suppose, the fact that such a thing would somehow stir my soul is a good indicator that i was meant to be doing this for a living, instead of being a lawyer or professor as i'd initially planned. that's kind of one of the funny things about this business. i know and meet so many people who were on their way somewhere else in life and got side-tracked into a restaurant job, only to find that it was meant for them. obviously, these stories range from wonderful to wondefully depressing, but, i think especially for those of us in the kitchen, we each found a place in this world that made sense to us in a way that nothing else really did. my buddy mikey uses the catch-phrase "live to cook", which i believe is true. i think it is equally interesting, though, to realize how many of us were simply born to do so.