#thedecemberdiaries

[lagustasluscious]

We custom cut paper to line chocolate boxes because we don’t want to use those awful plastic trays to keep everything tidy. Those trays!! I can’t even. What I like about building your ethics right into your business is that those trays were never an option for us. OMG and the complaints we’d get from you folks about the waste—yeow. But cutting the paper takes so much time, so this fall our manager Jenn spent many hours researching companies to cut some paper for us. Projects always seem easy from the outside, but of course everything’s always a whole thing. For a second this shop became The Office, Jenn making calls about thickness and foldability. She finally found eco paper the perfect shade to match the boxes and during the busiest part of the day today it arrived on a pallet and the lift gate on the truck was broken so we all unloaded all this paper. Everyone outside with their coats on holding box cutters. Teamwork, dreamwork. The first time I got something on a pallet I felt overwhelmed with excitement at how big we were, but that was years ago and now it’s just stress about where to put it all. After work pretty much everyone went to @llcommissary to get #GRRamen. I hung out at the shop and rearranged things, I’d gotten ramen earlier, Maresa and I walked over. First #rammissary I haven’t made. Weird to eat it sitting down. Guest chefs G and Rachel invented vegan #narutomaki for it, knocked the whole thing out of the park. Sometimes things feel sort of alarmingly good around here. #thedecemberdiaries day 11 (at Lagusta's Luscious Commissary) https://www.instagram.com/p/BrRk6Bbj9Id/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zsumefos88e1

[lagustasluscious]

ThIrTEeN of us working today it’s December!!! Mike and Allison and the shipping crew are getting boxes out SO FAST. The packaging crew is whipping ribbons and compostable bags and boxes through the air, chocolatiers are producing product like wild, fudge is tempering on the marble slab caramels are being poured into molds Sam got the honeycomb done before anyone else got here so it can be enrobed ASAP Erika is finishing one more tray of turtle bodies ok ok yes #thedecemberdiaries (at Lagusta's Luscious) https://www.instagram.com/p/B55lSrcj50E/?igshid=97p0hxjvgpke

[lagustasluscious]

I’m zonked out of my mind from holiday chocolate madness but am so psyched to make you ramen tonight. I got this heirloom #candyroastersquash // so beautiful so elegant orange and of the earth //and put it in the broth puréed and cut some planks of it lightly roasted with butter for maximum squashiness. I’m workin on a shiitake jerky thing loosely ripped off from Mission Chinese but haven’t really started that yet so we’ll see. What else? Lightly smoky yuba. Purple shiso. Mandatory scallion. Ramp pickle which my December brain just spelled pinkle seven times in a row. The ramp pinkle is to remind us of SPRINGTIME ok!! —lagusta #thedecemberdiaries (at Lagusta's Luscious Commissary) https://www.instagram.com/p/B55kWjrA3_x/?igshid=d6sglq6tvuak

[lagustasluscious]

The Hazelnut Sugarplum Caramel Bar is back. It’s December. This one is in the cookbook and this is the photo I took of it for the book. I love the lack of textural contrast. I love how it looks like the bar is rising up out of the earth, that this is the most labor-intensive bar on earth and it’s sitting in a tree like it grew there. No one else likes this photo. My sweet / long-suffering #sweetxsaltybook editor made many wheels & deals to keep it out of the book. When I jauntily mentioned to the shop that at least I could repurpose my *favorite photo ever* on social media I was soundly roasted. But!!! over everyone’s pleading, here it is in all of its samey samey slightly green, kind of gross (?) glory. Hazelnut praline, hazelnut gianduja (like Nutella but not sugary and crappy), plum caramel fragrant with warming spices. We’ll have it until our stocks of local summertime plum purée run out, maybe Februaryish? But will anyone buy it with this photo that doesn’t showcase its assets with proper direct lighting?! Also this tree keeled over not weeks after this photo was taken. What does it MEAN. Also we’re closing at 3 today for the giant snowstorm. —lagusta #thedecemberdiaries? (at Lagusta's Luscious) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5ifsvSDFm_/?igshid=1da7uyptgayqt

[lagustasluscious]

BELL JAR OF FUDGE as Jenn called it. I believe I’ve gushed in this space about how amazing this walnut fudge is. Soon but not *that* soon it’ll be at Commissary!, at Confectionery!, and online. It takes us SO long to recover from #thedecemberdiaries holidays. It’s a little wild. We’d be faster at restocking if none of us took vacations, but eh. We’re getting there! In the meantime mosey on down to HQ for this creamy berserkness. (at New Paltz, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/BsyQTfFjP_-/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1v1asovft6g0c

[lagustasluscious]

If the joy of this time of year for a chocolate business is working yourself down to your bones with the happy side effect of letting go of the brain, it’s easy to forget that eventually the brain will come back. Roaring. You take a day off and the world is newborn, metaphors of springtime in your soul, all that, then it’s the next day and you are still a spondee: still spondaic, still two syllables both of them stressed and it’s suddenly a huge sprint to the end of the year and all you’ve been ignoring—other responsibilities, other businesses & if you’re lucky, neglected humans who still love you on the other side of whatever it was that just happened to you. You need a soft sandy runaway truck ramp, something to aim this self as arrow toward for a safe deceleration. Breakfast soup helps a lot. // Coupla prosaic notes while we’re re-finding our footing: @confectionerynyc and @llcommissary will be rather bare shelved for a while while we slow-foodishly make more of every single recipe we make. LL HQ will be closed Jan 1-7, so no orders will be going out then and we won’t be in production and restocking Commissary! and Confectionery!,those exclamation pointed shops of our heart until after then. Thanks for your patience. 🎉#thedecemberdiaries day 26 (at Lagusta's Luscious Commissary) https://www.instagram.com/p/Br2zIPxj8Lo/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=s2lesr6e1l20

[lagustasluscious]

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Another post about machines! Also, we’re open 12-4 today. Before Maresa was my co-owner in @confectionerynyc, she used to make chocolates. Veronica, our Confectionery! manager, helped out too. I hired employee #93 last month (cumulative, not concurrent—eek!) and I still work with those two, #1 and #2, every day. Maresa was famous for noticing an order that came in at 4:30 PM, dipping the turtles for it, rolling the truffles for it, boxing it up, shipping it out, and running it to the PO a two-minute sprint away. More than once she made them re-open when the gate was down and the lights were off (NP PO, Mark, Kate, Robin, all the rest, luv u xoxox 12561 4e). If you’re looking for a best friend or future business partner, might I suggest someone with a lifeforce so powerful they can use sheer willpower to nudge a governmental agency to stay open after 5 PM? When we were frantically throwing still-wet chocolates into boxes circa 2011, we’d always remark on how the packing tape roll would run out right when we most needed it. It was uncanny. One day Maresa quietly said, “It runs out then because ***that’s when we’re using it.***” I’m still laughing. It still feels like some really useful life rule? When the enrober kept acting up this holiday season Kate (LL employee #12) reminded me of the Packing Tape Rule. The whole place hinges on that little chocolate waterfall, and every time it’s acted up we’ve been able to fix it ourselves (see: yesterday). I used to call boys to help fix my machines. I still do if I’ll get electrocuted or if boys will know how to fix them so I can do things I like better like taking outfit selfies or running empires, but there are no chocolate machine fix-it humans around of any gender, so we’ve just had to learn. The other day I looked at the special little pokey prongy pliers* we use to get the seeger ring out of the holster thingie for the detail rod and thought maybe the most stereotypically femmey thought I’d ever had: “What would it be like to know the names of all the tools?” Machines are going to fall apart the more you use them. I’m learning the names of all the tools. #thedecemberdiaries *vice-grip convertible snap ring pliers! https://www.instagram.com/p/BrxgttAjRSl/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1x8gsgew8ydgf

[lagustasluscious]

So there are these waves. First wholesale orders (duck dive under, shoosh, made it) then shipping (in the pocket, stay out of the soup), then shops. We are at the crest of shipping, by the end of today we’ll be sliding down the backdoor, zipping with epic exhilaration out of the barrel, clean waves on all sides, I miss the ocean can you tell—and then the focus shifts to filling up the shop shelves. By the weekend, things should be pretty decent. In the meantime, come to the shop today, have a chocolate sample, take some of my sourdough starter, her name is Shirley. She’s real good. Make pancakes with her, make bread with her, dredge onion rings in her and then seasoned flour—coat anything you’d like to deep fry in her + seasoned flour. Dry her out to a powder, sprinkle her on things for a hit of sour. Anyone who charges you money for sourdough starter has problems. We can’t use this size jar for anything. Come in and take some starter. Shelves full of holiday chocolates by Saturday. #thedecemberdiaries day 20 (at Lagusta's Luscious) https://www.instagram.com/p/Brna-mPjDof/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=6tbf7gdsxbf3

[lagustasluscious]

Lagusta’s Luscious Commissary! is these days functioning completely owner-less since I’m in the wilds of the December chocolate craziness that is @lagustasluscious. I pop in to say hey and nab a #socialistslidingscalesoup and that’s it, but luckily we have the best crew ever and everyone is zipping right along. @lunalightportraits, our crackerjack customer service Ericka over in chocolate town, took amazing photos of us at our staff party this week and set up a selfie station, so the world now gets this gift of Lyndsey and Rachel and G (and Sanford’s hands) and their ode to the potato who arrived inexplicably in a box of raisins and has become our mascot and confidante. Oh and I hear tell there is butternut squash soup these days with the last of the @huguenot_street_farm squash. And our croissants are lighter and flakier than ever. And we’ll only have mashed potatoes until around January, so indulge until the menu changes. No #rammissary next week because it’s Christmas! What else? Check out #thedecemberdiaries for many more seasonal words. Xoxo —Lagusta (at Lagusta's Luscious Commissary) https://www.instagram.com/p/BrnJliKj7EU/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=10ywczl4kgqjp

[lagustasluscious]

Oddly, I’ve been thinking about veganism. I never do. For me it’s a non-issue. I don’t eat some things & I don’t judge people who do and that’s that. But I’ve been thinking of how I can use my practice of veganism, which, along with some vague Jewish-Buddhist stuff and a tru/deep love of the 👑earth👑, is the closest I come to practicing a religion, to manage stress. My veganism is grounded in radical compassion, and when I work myself down too far or feel wild inside my brain I try to root more deeply into it. It helps. Can my heart be as gentle as possible this holiday season, even when I feel pulled apart along the three business-owning seams and that the stakes are so high? Can I take a breath and not interrupt so dang much? It’s helpful to return to a stabilizing practice of softness, which is what choosing not to eat animals is for me. It’s the foundational belief through which my life and business decisions flow, or at least that’s the ideal. I don’t mean that my work exists only to convince people that veganism is a choice they should make. For some people that choice doesn’t work. Sure, one goal is to show the high highs + workaday quotidian utility food made without death can reach (anything you can do with something dead, I can do better with coconut oil and fermentation and nooch)—but mostly I mean this in a much more personal way: centering my life on nonviolence helps me remember the kind of person I want to be—when I can’t stop the dang interrupting, when I’m more harsh than I want to be, when the seasonal sugarstress piles on and I sing the body electric of exhaustion all down my bones. I have made this choice, (25 years ago, honestly)—a small trochaic unpretty word, I claimed it, it still nourishes me. #thedecemberdiaries day 19. https://www.instagram.com/p/BrmLYwIj3i4/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11bzbari2snad

[lagustasluscious]

I looked at the three dozen humans and two dogs at the staff holiday party tonight dancing and eating dumplings in their velvet and #CommProm (I’m starting this hashtag ahem) promy outfits (get it — @llcommissary prom? Prommissary?) and Ericka brought this super professional photo setup and Chloe brought a pink velvet backdrop and everyone passed around Karen’s brand new adopted dog for photos. Sometimes these places feel stuck together with 3/4” baby blue painters tape and sometimes it’s the tightest strongest toughest. I was in awe of everyone tonight, showing off their presents from each other from secret snowflake and their own actual soft, wild selves. Every year during the busiest weeks I take a few nights off and wrap staff presents. It used to take the length of a movie and now I bang out an entire season of something (Please Like Me! Get into it! On Hulu!). It’s a cheat way to not work in the shop all night long, and for an orphan atheist like me it’s a nice slide into a holiday feel. I really liked the present wall they all made at Commissary tonight. The days are long and full of challenges and that seems to me an optimal way to live. To have found people open to learning how to do whatever this is alongside me is the true joy of the work. #thedecemberdiaries day 17 https://www.instagram.com/p/BrhDg9WjoBE/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zzy5lre38y3s

[lagustasluscious]

#thedecemberdiaries guest written today by @guiltmtn: i have the cane syrup recipe memorized, it’s the sugar that we put in with the other sugar & it’s made of mostly sugar, much of the same, etc etc, crystals on crystals on glittery crystals. it goes into everything so it’s gotta be right, right? these past few days if i’m tired enough and someone asks me where i live i’ll say “inside a chocolate palace” and that’s what this place is and sometimes if the days i work aren’t longer they can feel like it because i’m working harder and i like that. stretching the body out in newer faster ways, all for the sake of sweetness, all because we need certain numbers of things to be shipped out into your mailboxes because you paid for it and also because we like you, we want you to have it. i count batch sizes as i go to bed and reckon with what must be done the next morning to produce what we need and i have to swat my mind away from it when i’m not on the clock and it’s a different sort of work to train the brain away, isn’t it? yesterday i started my day with cane syrup and then enrober grease and then a whole tray of turtle caramel shaped into new friends that we can’t quite keep stock of (sorry, sorry). today lagusta dipped them and i love the wild dance of them on a tray, their chocolate tails behind them, some facing each other, some in a line, sugar soldiers. today i put my energy into caramel, today i waved at @hannahgadsby and wished lagusta was there to wave too [ed note: you work 100000 days in a row and leave early ONE DAY w exhaustion and HANNAH GADSBY COMES IN 😞😞😞], today i looked at the number of things we have to make by monday morning shipping time and felt overwhelmed, today i sunk into my tasks and everyone around me and felt a safe and calming marvelous power. —kate https://www.instagram.com/p/Brbdr6AD12f/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=5oo6sl2i1nss

[lagustasluscious]

It never doesn’t feel like we’re pretending at having a shop. To me, anyway. We divvy up jobs & our little to do white board with the days divided just so, but it’s still a thing we made up inside our heads. The recipes, OK they’re classic confectionery technique because things work because they work but I didn’t go to the kind of culinary school where they teach you to set up a frame and table your ganache just so (mostly we focused on gomasio). Wheel reinvention, inefficiencies laminated right into the dough—thy name is Luscious. I’m guessing for some of this crew it doesn’t feel like we’re pretending. Consistency means codification so we do, we do. I think it’s probably hard when you start. A typical morning staff meeting: OK the toffee went to 322°F so that’s a use-up. Mike and Allison you’re on POP. Chocolatiers, use bad Selmi to fill up good Selmi and switch from enrobing to molding at 5. Trees need to be flocked, vulvas cupped then boxed (😇), swirlies made, hz bar and WitW finished, splatter maples and spheres, first layer tahinis, table fudge, mélange maple cream. Turtle bodies are a little small, be sure to get two good arm pieces, oh, and don’t forget all the imperfects in the case. // A nest of our own signifiers, all jobs have it, I just like ours. Specificity supreme, Laverne & Shirley theme song undergirding everything, loopy Ls and all. #thedecemberdiaries day 12 https://www.instagram.com/p/BrT9LxyDdT4/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1mhmf7wuex7us

[lagustasluscious]

The thing of #thedecemberdiaries is to drill down into what a life / business can be when stripped to its bones. Here’s what we do and a whole lot of it. Themes over the years are fixed: 1) Self as Arrow: self as endless to do list: what could we do if we pared away the distracting Self and laserbeamed in on our own great work? How deep can we get. December 8 is about when the wheels start coming off. Yesterday was most likely the busiest day we’ve ever had on a certain hard to spell website. Mike, our brilliant and gentle shipperman, is starting to show signs of wear and tear. I believe in him, his magic is real. 2) The Body Electric: mostly it comes down to this: here is this packet of skin and how hard can I push it. I think of our good crew and hope they go home at night and they have people in their lives who worship their good selves and those people give them foot massages. 3) Postmodern crap from college I can barely grip this slippery spreadsheetbrain onto most days but let’s try: there is the Lacanian concept of signifier vs signified. There are words and there are what they mean. In December and also always I want to fuse the two. You know that Sleater Kinney song that goes “I'm the water I'm the dishes I'm the suds”? How can we puncture the membrane between the thing we immerse in and our essential selves and probably also, doing so wouldn’t be what would be called healthy but when you own your own business what other option is there other than this wish. More and more I feel like a mother. I embrace it all. Day eight. —lagusta https://www.instagram.com/p/BrIQsExjLWN/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=13sh229jhrvgd

[lagustasluscious]

I admire the back room coven. Everyone does. Three wondrous wraiths: Chloe 〰️〰️Sam 〰️ Shelly. Others take the Selmis for a spin now and then, but they’re the beating wine-dark heart of the thing. It's kinda remarkable how good at their jobs they are. Sam and Chloe are quiet and Shelly isn’t as much. Sam started at Commissary! but sometimes poets have a hard time in that fast forwarded world and I’ve never read one poem Sam’s ever written but I call em like I see em, so she moved two blocks down the road and lived happily ever after. Shelly is something else, her open heart and dark wit and she’s the messiest choco-queen but she has dreams about tempering machines breaking down every night and offered to trade me writing a school paper for her about the Inferno (my true skillset) for doing paperwork (my enemy) and I’m awfully tempted. Chloe oh man I’ve written a lot of words about this soft but steely human, her brilliant eye and compositional sense that make her work untouchable. I’m in plain awe of them. They solve their own problems, they’re a self-contained unit: solid chocolate enters their area and flawless product comes out. They listen to different music than we do in the front and talk about wilder things: goth podcasts and artisanal burial movements and what Lana del Rey song you’d be today. I want their jobs (that job I used to have) and I want to be them, cool in flowy black layers with tattoos they’ve given each other and themselves and DIY haircuts that are stunning in ways only they can pull off and where are they getting these platform vegan-leather combat boots in 2018?? They're messier than I’d like back there and I’m always creeping around to take Chocolate! Being! Made! movies but it gets a little how-the-sausage’s made-y and maybe that’s OK, maybe their witchy ways don’t need to be Instagram-perfect. A good reminder. #thedecemberdiaries day 4 (at Lagusta's Luscious) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bq_Wu1mDluH/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=wb64syo098ic

[lagustasluscious]

Weird thing about right before Christmas in a chocolatier’s brain, you let up the pressure for a min & can’t get it back, you’re an air wiggler whose life-giving stream of forced air has been cruelly flipped off & everyone cooing at you, “just rest a lil, we all need to.” Everyone else is carrying on valiantly but I’m sorta Michael Scotting it up over here, not being at work not an option in the old noggin (a real option in actuality, they’ve got this, now, but I’m not there yet) so I’m listening to Lydia who’s from Missouri say “Oh, fiddle” when something gets weird and I’m thinking about what a good phrase it is (as I was writing this Lydia gave me an onion and a cheese pumpkin that she grew and now my heart is a liquid thing and F A R M E R S), I’m telling jokes that half the staff already knows (where does a mansplainer get his water, from a well, actually), I’m honestly annoying the f out of everyone, trying, basically, to find one of those RUNAWAY TRUCK RAMP TURN HERE things for my too-fast brain, give it some soft sand to squish into before it goes off a cliff. Moving so fast, you can’t just slow down. This is why chefs go to their chef bars after working on the line and drink their terrible beers, but for us it’s not a nighttime crush that bamboozles the brain, it’s all compressed into December, February, Easter & I’m supposed to go to a party tonight? A December chocolatier at a party ha ha I hope you like 🤪🌀🌀🌀🤪 #thedecemberdiaries day 23 (at Lagusta's Luscious)