The pressure is on

 What happens after one writes an entry in a blog for 7 days in a row? The inclination is to pull over to the side of the road. To reflect. To analyze what just happened. But then I remember my thought process from 7 days ago. I was asking, why can’t I be more consistent in writing? It was then I knew pulling over was not the answer.  This thing has a second gear and it is time to use it. 

There is a bigger picture here too. Too many times when it comes to cooking I have done this symbolic pulling over to the side of the road. I will devalue my abilities before I move into the next gear because I get stuck in my own head and allow all of the obsolete traditional voices to beat me down into uncertainty.

I have learned some very interesting facts recently. Before COVID-19 began, 16% of all Chinese restaurants closed permanently. This was due mostly to the generation of people running these retiring with no one able to carry on the legacy. COVID-19 did far more damage. By mid-2020, according to CNN, America saw 59 percent of its Chinese restaurants shut down.  While some of these reopened, consider all those who were somewhat close to retiring, struggling with inflation, and the extreme loss in business volume in an industry in which profit margins are narrow.

This fact was recently discussed in a podcast examining what it takes to make Chinese food as available as it used to be. The answer is not good. This is the part I forget. Chinese, well, Asian food altogether, is not easy to make.  Yes, you can follow a recipe and make Asian food. But, it is really a state of mind. An Italian, French, Mexican, or American chef cannot just whip up Asian dishes, and be in the zone that defines it. You have to live it. 

If you put me on the TV show Chopped, no matter what is in the basket, I am going to honor Asian cuisine in some way. It is who I am. Sure, I love tacos too, but please I used to live on the South Texas Gulf Coast. It comes with the territory. My Asian experience came with over two decades of hard work, wins, and yes, failures. “Gotta pay your dues if you wanna sing the blues, and you know it doesn’t come easy” right?

All of that hard work has refined me. I am hard-pressed to find a dish out at the restaurants that I can’t make better. In fairness, I am not running a business. The economics of feeding the masses are not an issue for me at home so those ingredients that I can add more of to make my dishes robust are not practical when you are running a business. But it does tell me that culinarily, I can hang with these folks. With the massive losses to Asian food service, we need to carry on.

This means that I not only owe it to me to shift into the next gear, but I owe it to the industry. Things are different today.  The chefs without restaurants movement is getting bigger every day. I am good with this. Personally, I have been moving things around to prepare. There are great things coming and it has to be done my way. For writing, for cooking: stand by second gear.

Got to pay your dues if you’re gonna sing the blues and you know it don’t come easy....

Still really bombing on this blogging thing, and why? I kinda sort used to write, to quote Todd Rundgren, “so like the Naz used to do like heavy rock, then suddenly a light pretty ballad.” Yeah, so me and everyone else. Big deal right? So, yes, suffering complications, by which I mean I suck. Ok so getting over it here. Let’s use the blog for practical reasons, and then maybe, just maybe something really amazing might just happen.

So, what’s practical? How about the fact that I have now cooked so many spectacular dishes but have failed to properly catalogue them. After a while I forget that I did try something or maybe I remember  that I cooked it, but cannot remember how. It is time to show, explain and tell it’s story.  January charging at me with ferocious speed and power. Staring down the barrel of another
 winter, what else should I do, but make it memorable.

A bunch of random particles spinning in the void...

I do not feel that I have really blogged. If you want to be respected as a blogger YOU MUST EARN IT! So I have failed. I need some gravitational core to cause all of the bits of me to pull together into a cohesive ball of blog wielding excellence. So what is it that I do? I play guitar, I can write music and lyrics ( at least last time I checked I could). I can cook, make soap, perform nearly every mechanical task on an automobile, carpentry, propane work, painting,flooring, propane installation and service work, drive big trucks, write books, sing, glaze windows, sheet rock, fell trees, camp, fish, hike perform many tasks in the technology field. What does one write about, when these are the things you can do? I just want it all to make sense. Tormented by this knowing a little about a lot makes me feel aimless at times. I have this magnificent long term memory. I always say that I can remember anything that does not make me money. Do I like working on cars? Absolutely not! I do that to save the load of money it would cost otherwise. I have held colossal pieces of junk together with p!umbers strap, sheet rock screws and my bare hands. I do have stories, and just maybe I can capture the age. Mine and the age of the world at the time and MAKE you feel it like a summer downpour. My abilities and my memories float like on a Sunbeam together, not knowing their proper place. Can I liberate them and allow the stories to be heard and the ability to be shared? Days Of Future Passed, the Moody Blues album was released in 1967 two months after my 2nd birthday. My parents loved it (the 8 track) and played it allot. Every note and word is etched into the fabric of who I am, like tying a rope around a tree limb that absorbs the rope as it grows. Nights in White Satin,the more famous of the composition, ends with a poetic and futile rant about the manipulation of our perceptions when it comes to night. The poem at the end of NiWS, actually called Late Lament reads, "Breathe deep the gathering gloom, Watch lights fade from every room. Bedsitter people look back and lament, Another day's useless energy spent. Impassioned lovers wrestle as one, Lonely man cries for love and has none. New mother picks up and suckles her son, Senior citizens wish they were young. Cold hearted orb that rules the night, Removes the colours from our sight. Red is grey and yellow white. But we decide which is right. And which is an illusion?" Friday night was the harvest moon. My family and I just pulled into Winhall Brook in South Londonderry Vermont. After setting up, Noah and I took a walk in the (forgive me) serious moonlight. Winhall is in a severe valley. The moon light lit everything to be seen, but, spectacularly in black and white, Just like the poem says. Never have I seen it so vividly. I kept pointing it out to Noah, and although I think he gets it at ten, I am sure that during some harvest moon many years from now, he will suddenly feel close to me, even if I am gone for a long time when he really sees it again. Of all that I am I can only promise this, that the way my brain works will confuse you sometimes and you will wonder how one thing can possibly relate to the other in my head. Sometimes I will be nice and explain the connection. Other times I will not. Again, a kindness, the reality being just too boring. They may be random particles, but they somehow compose me. I may have the smallest of hopes tonight of a chance to be blog-worthy. I promise though not to get too over confident, there is a very long way to go.