The Baker's Assistant

When I was a junior in high school, a fresh, young, semi-lazy 16-year-old, my parents decided it was time for me to get a part-time job.

Naturally, I was against the idea. School was keeping me excessively busy. But my parents insisted. It was time I learned a work ethic, they claimed. I didn't have to work a ton of hours, but it might do me some good.

I was stuck. So I consented, not sure what kind of work I'd want to do. It was my mom who suggested The Market at Styer Orchards, a farm market that sat about five minutes from my house. Styer's held fond memories for me--it was where my family and I would pick pumpkins and apples in the fall, get ice cream in the summer, and look for Christmas trees in the winter.

I guess I could work there, I thought. One informal interview later, I had a job. In the bakery. At $5.15 an hour. I thought I was so cool.

My dress code consisted of a black T-shirt underneath a smudged and filthy maroon apron and a truly horrific attractive matching visor. No matter how short my black hair was, they always insisted that I use a million bobby pins to keep it up and above the visor's back rim.

Nevermind that the owner's daughter was allowed to keep her honey blonde, waist-length hair curled softly on her shoulders, maroon visor be damned.

I should have taken this as a sign of things to come.

But regardless of how I may have ended up positively loathing this job, I got to do some pretty awesome stuff along the way. I grew really close to one baker, who let me help ice cakes, fill canolis, and make the famous pies. I probably gained 15 pounds during the year I worked behind the bakery counter. Each employee was entitled to one free apple cider donut (made fresh daily!) a shift, and since outside lunch wasn't allowed on breaks, delicious sandwiches from the deli were an almost-daily indulgence.

Plus, those sugar cookies were so small anyway. Who counted how many times their hand drifted into the case?

I loved scooping ice cream in the summer heat, but hated that no matter how hard the AC was blasting everywhere else in the store, the bakery always stayed roasty-toasty warm, thanks to the massive industrial ovens. I always volunteered to get supplies from the freezer and hang out in the sub-zero temperatures for a few minutes.

While I hated closing the bakery alone, scraping helplessly away at metal bowls the size of my head with day-old hardened plaster cake batter all around the inside, there was something sweet about the atmosphere (no pun intended). The holiday season saw more customers for Styer's famous pies than I'd ever seen in one area.

(That was before I worked Black Friday at the mall.)

I loved being in charge of all the baked goods, helping customers find the perfect dessert for that night, and assisting the bakers in the back with whipping up innumerable goodies. I eventually quit when a better-paying job came along, but there was always a soft spot in my heart for that bakery.

You wouldn't be able to pay me $5.15 an hour to go back, but I do occasionally pop in and say hello to the pies.

Culinary Collegiates

This is me.

This is my sophomore year roommate and good friend to this day.

Adrianna was a mutual friend, and in case you couldn't tell, it was her 20th birthday. It was April 2009, and our sophomore year was coming to a close. We decided to bake cupcakes for Adrianna's birthday, and because we doubled the recipe to make as many as possible, we had enough red velvet batter left over for a cake.

I learned three valuable lessons from my roommate Diana that day:
1. It's always okay to eat the batter as you go.
2. It's possible to bake with olive oil instead of canola oil, even if OCD-baker Andrea has a serious problem with it.
3. Always overfill the cupcakes. They're more fun when they're spilling over the cups. Also, don't skimp on the icing. The more icing, the better.

I refused to follow these three rules that day. I decided to bake my half of the cupcakes my way. But when Adrianna reached toward an obnoxiously fat, frosting-drowned cupcake for her first bite, I realized there might be something to these three golden rules. Especially when I ate one for myself.

That entire year was filled with culinary craziness. It was our first year away from a meal plan and faced with our own kitchen. We made a pact to eat dinner together and cook as much as possible. I was the pasta maker; Diana made a pineapple chicken that was unbelievable.

Those were the early days when we'd fight over who got to wash our little tie-dye Target plates. Yeah. That lasted maybe 2 weeks. And unfortunately, as the semester wore on, we cooked less and less. But we always made a point to sit down at our little kitchen table and have our separately-prepared dinners together. But my favorite memories are the ones where we attempted cooking together. We'd divvy up what needed to be done, and we'd attack it, aprons and all. It was a cooking adventure, sophomore year. And it brought two acquaintances to the brink of friendship. And we've been close ever since.

And yes, we still cook. We don't live together, but we still try to get together for lunch or dinner. I think my adventurous streak in the kitchen came from that year. I'd never cooked with anyone other than my mom before, and Diana and I, even though we both came from traditional Italian families, still had things to learn from each other.

But more than any of that, if was fun. Oh, was it fun.

We Give Thanks

Thanksgiving in the Modica household is nothing short of chaotic. My mother willingly volunteers to host the smorgasbord every year, mainly because my grandmother gets Christmas and my aunt's idea of Thanksgiving is a pre-cooked turkey from Boston Market. The rest of our family, who live in Boston, spend Thanksgiving up north, leaving the remaining 13 of us to break bread and eat cranberry sauce together. Like I said before, my mom loves Thanksgiving, loves cooking it, loves smelling it, and most importantly, loves having sole claim on the leftovers. But the morning of that fateful Thursday, you'd think she'd been forced to prepare this meal at gunpoint.

"Everybody OUT of my kitchen!" she'll bellow one minute.
"Why is nobody helping me?" she'll scream the next.
"Get OUT OUT OUT!" she'll yell at my dad.
He retreats to the basement, aimlessly cleaning it up.
"ANDRE!" she'll holler down to my father. "YOU'RE NOT HELPING ME!"
He looks at me, exasperated, as only a man who thought he was following orders can.

And so it goes.

She claims to love the holiday, but she turns into a raving madwoman in the process of creating the food. I try to help, but I usually find myself kicked out of the kitchen as well. Usually, my job is the table. Now, we're normally a family of six. Add seven extra relatives to the mix, and something needs to be done about our table.

Here's what it looks like regularly:

 It's my job to unearth the four extra pieces of the table to make it look like this:

After all the bellowing and hollering has ceased for a little while, my grandmother decides to show up an hour and a half early, while my mother is still not showered, so the bellowing and hollering not only continue, but reach new decibels. My dad and grandfather race for the basement, plopping in front of the flat screen to watch the football game. I'm left taking shouted orders from my toweled and wet-haired mother, who needs to remind me to take out the sweet potatoes as the buzzer is blaring.

I'm sure you want to be around my family when Christmas rolls around.

"Don't forget to MAKE THE PUNCH!" she yells from upstairs.

Ah yes, the punch. My specialty. It's a Modica family tradition. It makes an appearance at every birthday party, graduation party, anniversary, Thanksgiving and Christmas we host. It's the most simple, crowd-pleasing thing we've ever made (much to my mother's dismay). There will be plenty of turkey and stuffing left over by the end of the night, but the punch bowl will be dry.

MODICA FAMILY PUNCH

Ingredients
1 liter of Sprite or 7UP soda
1 container of Berry Juicy Juice
1 container of strawberry sorbet, thawed a bit

Fill the punch bowl with ice cubes. Then add the entire container of Berry Juice and Sprite/7UP. Make sure the sorbet is soft enough, then dump it upside-down into the punch, making sure it comes out in a perfect circle. The sorbet will melt down into a white, tasty film that floats on top of the punch all night. Enjoy!