If it were easy, everyone would do it

Being ambitious is a blessing and a curse.

I've pretty much always known I wanted to be a baker...well, let me rephrase that; I've always known I wanted to work with food. While it's very cliche, it's also true that my favorite thing to do when I was a kid was bake with my grandmas. At my Grandma Marcia's house, we would bake cookies and bars and bring them to the firemen. (Funny, I do that now, but for completley different reasons.) At Grandma Mary's, we baked bread. Perhaps this is why I have an equal love for baking and pastries. My dad is also an amazing cook. He's always had a garden and loves to cook with whatever he's growing at the time.

When I was in high school I couldn't fathom the idea of choosing what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, then going to school for four (4!) more years to learn how to do it. No thanks, not me. I knew I liked to cook, so I figured I'd go to culinary school (how fun!, everyone says) and graduate in only 2 years! I graduated from high school a semester early and got a job cooking full time at a restaurant called Loon Lake Lodge in Indianapolis. My dad had suggested that it might be better if I knew what I was getting myself into before I made the commitment to something so consuming (read:expensive) as culinary school. Loon Lake was my first taste of working in a real restaurant. I had been a hostess and a server before, but had never worked anywhere like this. We were extremely busy. In hindsight, the restaurant was huge. It probably sat around 200 people, and there were about a million people in the kitchen at any given time. The energy in the kitchen was through the roof. Cooks burning themselves, servers wanting to know where there food was, love triangles, and screaming chefs...I was in love. Yes dad, I'm sure, I want to go to culinary school.

Culinary school was fun, if you're a gluten for punishment. I'm kidding. It was actually the easiest of all of the stepping stones that have gotten me here today, but at the time, was not so glamorous. Most of the people that I graduated from the CIA with in 2001 aren't even cooking anymore. It's really no surprise though, because school and the real world of restaurants are like night and day. School is a very controlled enviroment, actual work can be ugly. 80 hour work weeks, scars that make you look like you cut yourself for fun, and spider veins from being on your feet so much. Sexy. Sign me up.

I cooked in a bunch of restaurants and worked as a private chef before I realized that my true love was actually baking. This came to me during a hiatus from cooking while living in New York for the second time. I was waiting tables at Gramercy Tavern. The staff at Gramercy is amazing. Everyone that works there actually loves their job. I'd never seen anything like it before, and it was really inspiring. I became good friends with the pastry girls and would go down into the basement bakeshop with them and watch them work when I was done with my shift. This was mostly because I wanted the recipe for the chocolate brownie cookies that I ate about 80 of every night. I found out later it was in Claudia Fleming's cookbook. However, I did pick up a few good tricks along the way.



It wasn’t long before I became completely obsessed and began reading every notable baking and pastry cookbook I could find. My afternoons were spent at Barnes and Noble in Union Square on the floor in the cookbook section. My nights...cuddled up with The Bread Bible. As you can probably imagine, it was incredibly romantic.

Eventually New York got the best of me and I moved back to San Diego. I was working at a very new Café Chloe downtown when I met Carrie, the then-baker. She was no doubt preternaturally talented. She made what was then, the best croissant I’d ever had…and she did it all by hand. I had to be her friend.

Carrie and I started a short-lived little company called Sugar Mamas (sound familiar?). She taught me how to make croissants and I immediately wanted more. I taught myself how to make other laminated doughs with lots of reading and lots of practice. Carrie and I eventually went our separate ways when we realized that perhaps we weren’t ready to be business owners at the tender age of 24. I had been offered a job at Carl Schroeder’s new restaurant, Market, as assistant pastry chef, with the opportunity to work with his long-time pastry chef, James Foran. Considering I had no real pastry experience other than what I had taught myself, this was a huge opportunity.

Working at Market was an experience like no other; one that deserves it’s very own blog. The important thing is that’s where I met Barry. We had been working together for about a year and a half when I left to do my own thing: The Flour Shoppe. Barry left Market about 6 months after I did to go on a road trip. She ended up in New York and had been there for about two months when I called her and asked her to come back to San Diego so we could really make this thing happen and here we are now.

It’s been almost a year and The Flour Shoppe is coming right along. We can be found at the La Jolla Farmer’s Market every Sunday, and beginning January 21st, at the O.B. market too , slangin’ pies, croissants and just about everything else your little heart may desire. It surely hasn’t been easy so far, and I can’t imagine it gets any easier from here, but we’re on our way… A wise man (Carl Schroeder) once said…this isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. He probably didn’t say it first, but somehow it sounds less cliché coming from him.