Working to Live

the bane of my existence 

I was standing in the sweltering kitchen at 3pm, holding a massive rolling pin and trying to wrangle buttery pie dough while simultaneously knowing it had no chance of working in this 90 degree kitchen when it occurred to me: I didn't care.

How liberating, how utterly freeing, that realization was. I had spent the last three nights literally losing sleep over something on the new menu. Either I fell into fitful bursts of sleep, haunted with restless dreams about crumbling pie dough, or I lay awake mentally calculating my to-do list that kept growing longer and longer. 

I would never put mini pies on a menu. Buttery dough in a 90 degree kitchen isn't easy to work with. Pie dough isn't the enemy, but mini fluted tarts? Those motherfuckers are. After agreeing to individual coconut cream pies, I was dealing with the execution of said pies and it was literally falling apart in my hands. Graham crusts were too delicate for the fluted edges, chocolate short dough was drooping in the heat, and my go-to pie dough, with all its buttery pockets, was betraying me. 

Standing in the kitchen, batting 0-3, instead of worrying about striking out with this dessert, I was mentally planning our Sunday plans. You know the scene in Good Will Hunting when Matt Damon and Robin Williams are sitting in the park and Robin Williams is about to deliver one of the best monologues in the history of movies? He prefaces it with something along the lines of, "I stayed up half the night thinking about it, then something occurred to me. I fell into a peaceful sleep and haven't thought about it since." 

I had a similar revelation at some point on Saturday, after worrying and testing and trying and failing to produce the vision I had in my head. This dessert isn't going to matter in five months, it isn't going to define my career and my work. And I don't care enough about it for it to consume any more of my non-work time. I don't live to work. 

As much as I enjoy what I do (for the most part), I'm wholeheartedly okay with being someone who works to live. Work can be fun, but not working is almost always fun. Life is for eating, traveling, laughing, dancing and a million other things. Desserts are a big part of my life, and I'd rather enjoy them then worry about them. You know who made the realization that stressed is desserts spelled backwards? A pastry chef in the middle of a restaurant week menu change.