Food and Cheer and Song

Food and cheer and song. I don't think that anyone, even Webster himself, could come up with three better words to describe me. I AM those words. I live them everyday. Well, almost everyday. Sometimes you just have to take a step back and have a good cry-day (girls, you all know what I mean). For the most part, though, that's me. I spend my days cooking and singing and laughing. I can even do all three at once. I'm very talented. Yes, those words are me in a nut-shell. And speaking of nuts, that's why I'm here. Well, maybe not nuts, but nuts are food and food is the reason. Not just any kind of food, though. Sweet food. Desserts. Pastries. Mmmmmmm.

To fully understand my obsession with all things baked you'll need a little bit of history. My name is Melinda. Mindy, for short. I actually prefer Mindy, which is a recent development but that's another story. Sorry, tangents are a bad habit of mine. I'm 24 (at least until November when I hit the big 2-5, OMG!) and for the last six years I've lived in Austin and (semi)attended the University of Texas. I say semi because the truth is my heart was never in it. I started as a theater major. Acting was it for me. My first true love. But after a year and a half in UT's cut-throat department, along with a professor who (though he recognized my talent and love for the field) said I was way too "sweet" to really succeed (cue month-long depression) I decided that maybe the classroom was a better arena for me. So on to education I moved. I started taking all the classes and began working at a local preschool and tried, I mean really tried, to love what I was doing. I loved the kids, mostly. But classes became less and less important to me. Sure, I was paying for them. But for some reason that just wasn't enough to motivate me to actually attend. I was way too busy for class. I had friends to hang out with! My schedule was such that I was able to work Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and (supposedly) attend class Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. But like I said, friends were much more appealing. A mid-morning-target-run with one person would turn into a lunch date with another person would turn into an afternoon coffee with another person and so on and so forth. What can I say, I'm a people person. Looking back I recognize that I just wasn't happy with the direction my life was headed. I never really loved teaching. I knew I could make a living doing it, and I knew I would be good at it. But it was never a passion. It never excited me.

The time of year I really loved was finals time. Not because I loved studying or being stressed about exams (neither of those could really apply to me since more often than not I pretended like I didn't have final exams) but because that was the time of year when everyone around me was feeling anxious. And I quickly discovered that anxious people live for baked goods. I would hole up in my kitchen (or a friend's kitchen when I lived in the dorms) and bang out double and triple batches of cookies and brownies and cupcakes and pies for all the people in my life who really needed a good dose of yummy. I loved being able to provide some much needed happiness, loved the expressions on people's faces as they took a bite of something really delicious, loved how appreciative they were. There's just something undeniably special about gifts from the kitchen. I loved the process, the attention to detail, everything from the scaling of ingredients to the "please-let-everything-come-out-right" prayer that races through your mind as you slide a baking sheet into the oven to the rush of excitement and relief as you realize that it did, in fact, come out right. And, of course, the crowning glory when someone chows down and you hear that beautiful sigh of satisfaction. Music to my ears.

To make a long story short I finally had to stop and re-evaluate where I was headed. I packed up my whole life and moved back home to live with my parents (something I swore I'd never do). As I began to sort through all my emotional baggage, along with the mess I'd made of my college education, I turned once again to my tried and true stress-reliever: baking. I took a few ed. classes at the local community college and waited tables at Chili's and baked my little heart out. I began taking cookies to all my co-workers on their birthdays, but that wasn't enough for them. All of a sudden I was taking orders for a dozen oatmeal-pecan or two dozen snickerdoodles and people were actually paying me to do this! The holiday season came and every weekend I found myself baking and icing and decorating as many sugar cookies as I could to fill the orders I was getting. It was fabulous. And then the moment came that changed it all for me. One of my managers suggested I go to pastry school. It was an idea that had never occurred to me before then. I always had secret dreams of owning my own bakery someday, but a dream was all it really was. A pipe-dream that I had never even considered acting upon. But all of a sudden it just made sense. I loved baking. I was good at it. I needed a career. Why not make a career out of the hobby that I already adored? It just fit.

Fast forward seven months and here we are. I'm back in Austin and already three months into pastry school at Texas Culinary Academy/Le Cordon Bleu. And to top it all off, I've never been happier. I love it so much that I haven't missed one day of class (and if you know me at all you know just how much of a miracle that really is). I spend every night of the week in an enormous lab kitchen where my instructors teach me methods and ingredient functions and where we make the most delicious things I've ever eaten. Ever. And I want to share it with the whole world. I want everyone to be able to eat like this in their own homes. I want people to experience the joy that comes from taking a recipe and making it your own or from trying something you never thought you could do and realizing that it's not that difficult and even if it is, the results are SO worth it. What I post here during the week will be things I've done in class, but on the weekend is when I really have fun. I'll show you what I've experimented with and ask you for suggestions and give you pics and recipes and introduce you to all my fave food blogs. I'm pumped. I'm also new to the whole blogging thing, so be patient with me. I'm pretty sure I'm technologically inept so if I'm doing something wrong or you have a spectacular new idea for me just hit me up. Thanks for visiting, and I hope you have a wonderful day. Just to make sure you do, I suggest eating a whoopie pie. It's my newest discovery, and they're delicious. But more on that later.
XOXO,
Mindy