Jennifer Jeffrey, Writer & Editor

Psst: The Middle Class is Sitting in the Comfy Chairs at Starbucks

Over tea a couple of weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing our mutual addiction to the New York Times online. "It's kind of embarrassing," my friend murmured, "how far short the Chronicle falls in comparison." We both sighed, and took another sip of tea.

I remembered our conversation this morning, when I clicked over to the Chronicle and saw not one but two intriguing headlines: "A Midwage Free Zone" and "Water Coolers for Freelancers." The first article claims that midrange jobs in the Silicon Valley (defined as a yearly wage between $30,000-80,000) went up in smoke - "vanished!"- over a four-year period. The second article talks about the hordes of independent professionals who haunt Starbucks and are now looking for co-work spaces.

What do these two topics have in common? Anyone?

One thing I love about the New York Times is that their writers often cross-reference each other's pieces, acknowledging and discussing the findings of their peers in their own work. This is smart for so many reasons: the site gets more page views because their writers are linking to each other, and the experience for readers is much richer and more rewarding.

It would have been so nice for someone at the Chronicle to take a moment to connect the dots between these two pieces, or at least for the writers of the pieces to reference each other. I don't believe that the middle class has "disappeared" in Silicon Valley, though the suggestion did provoke a number of hostile and prejudiced statements in the comment section that follows the article. I do know that the number of creative, independent professionals in the Bay Area is continuing to grow rapidly, as it has for years. This isn't news, but it directly affects the credibility of the first article.

Who, after all, is paying for the electricians and plumbers that the article lauds? The shrinking middle class is an intriguing topic - but in this case, I think the writer missed an opportunity to take a closer look at some additional dynamics that might be causing the "job" number to shrink.

If there is one thing that many bloggers know that some newspaper writers don't, it's this: cross-linking to thought-provoking ideas is a great habit to learn. It only takes a minute, but it makes your work so much more effective.

Perhaps the best part of the "Midwage..." article was the closing quote, offered by economist Doug Henton: "In a world where the company no longer takes care of you, you have to take care of yourself." Many of us already are, Doug - and you can read all about it in the "Water Cooler..." piece!

(I wanna be a) Paperback Writer

so grateful am i

The wine glasses have been polished and returned to their cabinet, and the leftover turkey has been tucked away in the refrigerator. Thanksgiving Weekend is nearly over.

I don’t want it to slip away without mentioning how grateful I am.

If you’ve read between the lines in my (scant) posts over the last few months, you know that it’s been a tough year for me on the personal front. There has been much sadness, and many tears, and more sleepless nights than I can count. My heart is still raw and punky and sore, and summoning my usual optimism has felt like a chore.

But that's not the whole story. Not by a long shot. I could easily stay stuck on the sad, discordant events of 2007, but the fact is that they’re only a small part of the rich narrative that has run through the year.

This weekend, I’ve taken some time to reflect on all that is good and precious and true in my life. There is so much – it makes me weak in the knees when I think of it.  I’m a blessed girl, truly I am.

Apples Don’t Pair So Well with Tea

Several weeks ago, staring at my 3-year-old Apple keyboard, I experienced a fit of shame: its formerly gleaming white QWERTY keys were stained by the grime hiding in the swirls that decorate my index and middle and forefinger, the digits that depress the keys hundreds of times each day. Worse, the clear plastic cover that looked so stylish when it was new was now marked with the mundane details of my life: cracker crumbs hiding between the keys, flakes of chocolate nestled down deep, a stray Petra hair – all impervious to the corner of a business card, or a Q-tip, or my fingernail.

This is the life of a writer: tap, tap, tap, translating thoughts into words, ideas into sentences, imagination into paragraphs, one letter at a time.

Dreams and dirt, residing together.

Then I came across this wonderful solution, and one afternoon, I gleefully removed all the keys with the blunt edge of a butter knife, stuck my soiled keyboard into the dishwasher and turned the cycle to ON.

Making It Up As I Go

Though I've never attended a TED conference, I've long been in love with the idea of an event at which visionaries from many different disciplines gather to exchange thoughts, dreams, travelogues and stories. When the TED crew began to post the conference talks online, I was beside myself with excitement. Since then, I've spent many enjoyable hours watching and listening to the talks.

This morning I discovered another gem: Maira Kalman. Maira is an incredibly talented illustrator and creative thinker who gives herself permission to be fully... herself. She makes up words, admits to numerous idiosyncrasies, doesn't have a specific narrative arc to her talk, seems totally at ease in her skin. She describes starting a company based on the premise of knowing nothing.

"Good things come out of incomprehension," she says, and I find myself wishing I could invite her to tea.

As a writer, I struggle to balance careful planning with letting go and allowing things to unfold around me. I realize that being open to life's serendipities requires a sense of trust that the ideas and projects and people I need will appear at exactly the right moment. Even knowing that, I often find it difficult to consciously release my expectations and open myself to the unknown. Watching people like Maira strengthens my sense that the effort to be effortless (does that make sense in some  kind of crazy way?) is worthwhile. 

"I daydreamed through my life," she says, with complete confidence.

I won't try to distill it further; you can watch it yourself:

One last thought on this topic: over the summer, I kept an audio CD set in my car of a talk given by Thich Nhat Hahn, in which he described a conversation with a friend about his poetry. The friend told him that she greatly admired his poetry, only there wasn't enough of it.

"If you would spend less time gardening," the friend said, "you could write more poems."

To which Thich Nhat Hahn replied: "The time I spend growing lettuce is indistinguishable from the time I spend writing poetry. You cannot have one without the other."

This is a loose paraphrase from memory, as I finally had to return the CD set to the library, but I'm still thinking about it, reminding myself that the time I spend aimlessly wandering or taking an afternoon nap  will in fact make my work better, that my conscious mind is but a small part of what I know, and that surrendering to the mystery is a form of intelligence.

Here's to dawdling and daydreaming and humming when you can't remember the words. Here's to not knowing what is going to happen in the end.

A Little Bit of This, A Little Bit of That

October. The crows circle the park where Petra and I walk, serenading us with hoarse, croaky verse. We step on the acorns scattered in our path, scattering leaves with our feet, walking fast to stave off the chill. I drink a whole pot of tea in the mornings, wrapping my hands around my cup, hoping that its warmth will penetrate my hands.

There is something magical about this time of year; something mysterious, mist-soaked and obscure. This is the season when we honor death, pausing to reflect on the inevitable ending of everything we hold dear, of the richness found in decay and detritus, the promise of newness contained in every fallen leaf and withered stem. I'm planning to make my way back to a little shop I found in Petaluma at this time last year, where they set up a display in their courtyard with the names and pictures of lost family and friends; melty candles flickered around the photos, and rocks and shells and bones clustered around the edges. It was lovely.

October doesn't have the breathless charm of spring, or the bright, blowsy, girl-next-door good looks of summer, but then I've always found beauty in strange places. Just look at the walls in my office, festooned with lithographs of fleas and spiders and a grim-faced eel, next to a set of rusty skeleton keys and a bat skull. No wonder I've  always loved this month...

Here's what else I'm noticing right now:

Purple vegetables. Everywhere I turn at the market, my eyes are falling on gorgeous vegetables in deep, bruised shades of aubergine and amethyst and violet, that shimmering intersection between crimson and blue ~ purple tomatillos, shiny eggplants, crackly-skinned onions, purple basil, cabbage. Full Belly Farms had purple Chinese long beans last Thursday, and I couldn't resist. I haven't cooked them yet; they're so pretty that I can't decide what to do with them. For a quick dinner last week, I made a sauté of purple cabbage, Italian sausage, purple onions and pine nuts, covered with a flurry of basil. Mmm.

Other purple things. Like this flickr shot.

My adventurous readers. Every now and then I get a note from someone who stumbled across my post on making yogurt in a Crock Pot, with a question or two. A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a reader who had the great idea of installing a router to act as a reostat on the Crock Pot instead of splitting the cord and patching in a dimmer switch, like I did.  Brilliant!

My gluten-free readers. I'm astounded by how many people find my blog because of my post on being occasionally gluten-free. If you're in the restaurant business, you might be amazed to discover how many people type in "gluten + free + restaurants + San Francisco".  Celiac disease doesn't appear to be going away, and I hope we'll see more  gluten-free options on menus in the future.

French fries. The crispy, salty French fries at Spruce just might be the best fries in the city.  They're so good that, in the hypothetical  instance that you and I went to Spruce together for a meal, you'd have to order your own, because I wouldn't want to share.

On the chalkboard of my mind today: "When you make that deep internal shift from your problem-solving mind to your truth-knowing mind, you don't need to search for the answers anymore. The search for answers is over and the process of more fully accepting and owning what you already know has begun. All that is not authentically "you" falls away, and you have a new center of being that allows you to see very clearly what is needed to affect changes in your life. You stop trying to fix yourself and start being yourself." - Baron Baptiste, from Journey Into Power.

Happy October.

Got Crab? (the cookbook is out!)

Guess what just hit the shelves? The CRAB cookbook!

CRAB: Buying, Cooking, Cracking was just released by Ten Speed Press. I'm delighted with the production quality - the photos are beautiful, and it contains just 35 recipes - enough to give you lots of options, not too many to make you feel overwhelmed.

I'm a huge crab fan, especially since Dungeness crab is sustainably harvested, and therefore doesn't provoke spasms of guilt upon consumption. Over the next few weeks, I'll post a few crab tips & recipes & a photo or two. In November, I'm going to sail out on the Bay on a crab boat to see how these rosy pink critters are hauled in and brought to shore.

In the meanwhile, I've got three CRAB cookbooks (signed by Andrea Froncillo and myself) to give away to the first three people who e-mail me with the name of your favorite crab dish. Go for it!

The Inside Scoop on San Francisco Chefs

Last night, I pressed the send key on the last write-up of the last chef I was assigned to cover for the upcoming issue of San Francisco Chefs. I felt a tinge of sadness hitting that key; the project was one of the highlights of my summer.

Last year, when I read about the publication on Catherine Nash’s blog, I asked for a copy, and eagerly read it from cover to cover. Due in no small part to Catherine’s sharp, witty writing, the pieces were engaging and distinct, a window into the life stories of our local chefs. Even better: the piece benefits St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, one of the finest institutions dedicated to helping children and their parents cope with life-threatening diseases.

I felt like a kid in a candy store when I got to be involved in the publication this year. Sit down with some of my favorite chefs and talk to them about the creative process? Twist my arm!

From Corey Lee at the French Laundry to Cal Stamenov at Marinus in the Bernardus Lodge in Carmel to Xavier Solomon at The Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, every single person I sat down with was gracious and engaging.

One of my favorite moments occurred when I was chatting with Ron Siegel at The Dining Room (you know how much I love TDR; big balloon hearts everywhere!), and I got to ask him about how they made my favorite amuse – a perfectly poached quail egg perched atop a glass dish of wood smoke and garnished with brioche croutons and caviar – and he animatedly described the whole process. It was far more involved than I had guessed, and now I’m an even bigger fan, if that is even possible.

You can have a complimentary copy of this year’s edition if you’d like – just send an e-mail to info@sf-chefs.com by October 5 with your name and full mailing address, and you’ll get to read about what inspires these men and women in the kitchen, and what they do when they’re not slaving over a hot stove.

Fear not: your name and address will not be given away, sold or shared. Not for any reason, ever.

If you need a bit more convincing, here’s the full list of chefs included in this year’s edition:

• Acquerello – Suzette Gresham
• Aqua – Laurent Manrique
• Auberge du Soleil – Robert Curry
• Bernardus Lodge – Cal Stamenov      
• Boulevard – Nancy Oakes/Pam Mazzola
• Dry Creek Kitchen – Charlie Palmer/Mike Ellis
• Manresa – David Kinch
• Michael Mina – Michael Mina
• Myth – Sean O’Brien
• Piperade – Gerald Hirigoyen
• Quince – Michael Tusk
• Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay – Xavier Salomon
• Silks Mandarin Oriental – Joel Huff
• The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton (SF) – Ron Siegel
• The French Laundry – Corey Lee

Go ahead, ask for your own copy... 'cause I'm not parting with mine!

Chocolate love on tuttiefoodie

If you arrived at my blog via the tuttiefoodie hot sheet, welcome!

If you haven't yet subscribed to tuttiefoodie, you might want to take a minute to check it out.  I always look forward to seeing it pop up in my Inbox; these twice-weekly e-mails always contain something delicious, from recipes to food-themed events to information about culinary destinations around the globe.

As if you needed further motivation, today's edition contains my recipe for Chocolate-Dipped Brownies Rolled in Chili-Cocoa Nib Crumbs! This is my go-to chocolate recipe for occasions of all kinds; I made them again a couple of weeks ago in preparation for the article, and suddenly had a surplus of these sumptuous treats on my kitchen counter, so I had to play chocolate fairy. To everyone who said: "I can't; I'm on a diet" - you missed out. Seriously. These are capital-A-mazing.

Tuttiefoodie is currently sponsoring a Chocolate Adventure Contest together with Scharffen Berger... what better excuse than to pull out your favorite chocolate and play?

P.S. I know it looks funny to have a fresh juice post next to a decadent chocolate post, but hey:  it's all about balance, people.

Hiatus

Days pass, and still I don't put up a new post.

I start them, but don't finish.

I ask myself: am I writing about things I'm truly excited about, or am I just posting for the sake of putting something out there?

Hmm. It's a question that I need to contemplate a bit, so I'm going to take a short break from blogging for the remainder of August.

I'll still be here ~ working, writing, gathering inspiration, gazing at the moon. Walking on the sand at Crissy Field; eating salt-flecked peanut butter bonbons; reading good books; taking Petra out for sniff adventures.

Until September...