First Person Job Story
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What’s Your Backup Plan?
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Robert Caplin for The New York Times; Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times, right.
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Published: June 5, 2009
IN more than a few circles — publishing, finance,
automotive design — small talk at cocktail parties has shifted from
real estate (too depressing) to the Plan B career (a fatalistic, yet
somehow sunnier topic).
Robert Caplin for The New York Times
TRUFFLE THIS Rachel Zoe Insler of Bespoke Chocolates says to hold the chili.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
‘50 CHICKENS AN HOUR’ Richie Biezynski of Northwind Farms can quickly banish any “Green Acres” fantasy.
Robert Caplin for The New York Times
DOG ROMP Melissa Belkin, massage therapist at Paw Stop, with happy clients.
How about chocolatier? Organic farmer? Therapist?
Plan B typically offers less money and prestige than Plan A, but
promises a more hands-on, stress-free and fulfilling existence.
That’s the fantasy anyway. After a few days spent test-driving a few
new careers, however, I started to suspect that Plan B should really be
called Plan G.For grind. It Won’t Hurt, ReallyThe
economy had barely started to tank when hollow-eyed financial
executives started talking about dropping out to take up a second
career in the wellness field — acupuncture, massage, Reiki. It made
sense that stressed-out professionals would want to spend their second
act working toward a remedy, like asthma sufferers might volunteer for
their local Clean Air Coalition. I decided to try my hand at
massage therapy. But, really, who wants to caress freckled strangers
all day to a zither soundtrack? I decided to massage dogs instead. With
them, back hair is a good thing. Also, I, as a complete amateur, thought they would be less likely to call the state health authorities.
Daniel Rubenstein, an owner of the Paw Stop, a dog-training and pet day
care center in TriBeCa that offers pet-massage workshops, put me in
touch with the resident therapist, Melissa Belkin, for a lesson. Ms.
Belkin, 30 and tattooed, bounds up to you with the friendly enthusiasm
of a border terrier. She trained at the Swedish Institute, which is
interested only in humans, but has expanded her business to dogs in
recent years. Massaging dogs, she said, involves unique challenges. “With people, you don’t have to take them for a run for 20 minutes beforehand to settle them down,” she explained. She
led me downstairs, where a massage table sat covered in a white towel.
My first client was a chocolate Labrador retriever, Boomer. As Bach
wafted overhead and three tiny jasmine-scented aromatherapy candles
flickered nearby, I laid hands on. Or tried. As I
strained at Boomer’s collar and tried to pin his 60 muscular pounds to
the towel with one hand, I tried some effleurage (stroking) techniques,
down his spine, to the tip of the tail, as Ms. Belkin instructed. But
Boomer would not respect me as a therapist. I knew massage therapists
must deal with boundary issues — especially because their clients are
half-clothed. But how often do their clients lick them on the lips
during treatment? On second thought, don’t answer that.My next client, J. J., made me feel like a mere bellman cadging for tips at the Delano Hotel in South Beach. J. J. is a purebred Jack Russell. J. J. is owned by Mariah Carey. J. J. is working on his own TV pilot. J. J. was going to be a challenge. To
J .J., the massage table was a stage, and he used it to perform. He
spun, he bounded, he danced. He paused only long enough to cock his
head in pose (you could almost hear him yelling, “Makeup!”). I
tried to calm him with series of petrissage (kneading) strokes on the
scruff of the neck. To many dogs, this move is pure Vicodin. To J. J.,
it was Ritalin.
I could barely tame him, even when I pulled out every dog masseuse’s
secret weapon — a delicate, circular rubbing of the tips of his ears. But
J .J. was a model client next to Macy, a golden retriever. Macy was
sweet, but New York had gotten to her. At Ms. Belkin’s urging, I tried
tapotement (gentle tapping) on her chest to get her to settle in. She
writhed like a marlin caught on a line, then scooted backward on the
towel like a lobster. The session finally ended — with Macy in the corner of the room, her tail between her legs. But the experience was not a total failure. I
felt great. Multiple hours with my fingers in fur had resulted in some
unexpected therapy, and I felt at peace, ready for a bone and a late
afternoon nap. Green, Bloody AcresI
knew I wasn’t cut out for country life within 30 minutes of arriving at
Northwind Farms, a 197-acre poultry, pork and beef farm in picturesque
Tivoli, N.Y., about two hours up the Hudson River by car. On
the way to feed the hogs early in the morning, I paused and circled
back toward my rented Mini Cooper, Starbucks venti in hand. “Sun
block,” I said, pointing to the sun breaking through the clouds, and
reaching into the hatch to grab a tube of Aveeno SPF 55. Richie
Biezynski, who along with his wife, Jane, bailed out of Queens 30 years
ago to farm this land, looked at me as if I had said I just needed a
second to slip into my leotard.I’m not alone in idealizing the rural life. It’s become common to the point of cliché for harried New Yorkers, Michael Pollan
books in hand, to attempt their own “Green Acres” fantasy in this
region. The lush landscape seems safely distant from city pressures,
but is still dotted with enough antiques shops and stylish bistros so
that they don’t feel like, well, hicks. That vision ended for
me 30 minutes into my new agrarian life, with my right hand buried up
to the wrist in a still-warm chicken’s hind end. Mr. Biezynski, who looks like Old McDonald, but talks like Al Goldstein,
was teaching me to eviscerate chickens manually, because when you run a
boutique-size meat farm, that’s what you do. I thrust my fingertips
past the rib cage, past the heart, through seemingly yards of oozy
intestines, looking for the giblets. They are not, it turns out,
wrapped in paper. “You’re at four minutes,” Mr. Biezynski, said, scolding me. “A good farmer can do 50 chickens an hour.”The
task would have seemed easier if I didn’t feel directly responsible for
the chicken’s death. A few minutes earlier, in a nearby barn, I had
chased down this chicken and 69 others, grabbed them mercilessly by the
legs, and stuffed them, wings flapping plaintively, eight at a time
into orange plastic bins, which were then transported to the nearby
killing room. There, in a windowless cinderblock cell, a
skinny, bearded farmhand who looked like an Old World cobbler but
flashed the gap-toothed smile of a mid-70s Philadelphia Flyer,
dispatched them dispassionately with a clean knife cut to the neck. “That’s Billy the Bleeder,” Mr. Biezynski said, adding. “Before, I had Augie the Ice Pick.” Not
hoping to measure up, I decided to help out on a marginally less grisly
task, the castration of new calves. It’s not as bad as you think.
Castration involves no knives, no gore. You simply fasten a rubber band
around the calf’s testicles and wait for them to wither over the course
of two weeks (O.K., maybe it’s worse than you think). To
castrate a calf, you have to catch it. And calves, it turns out, can
move as fast as collies at a dog run. I gave a halfhearted chase to
two, then turned to a few more sedentary ones grazing in a nearby wood.
Once there, I paused at the sight of several low shrubs with eerily
shiny leaves, three on a branch. Mr. Biezynski, standing knee deep in
the patch, could not sympathize. “Billy eats poison ivy,” he said. Over
a lunch of fresh pork sausage, Mr. Biezynski told me that he never
looked back once he left the city, but that city dilettantes wandering
upstate often don’t know what they’re in for. Want to grow
corn? You’re up against the industrial farms. Open a dairy? Nowadays,
you need $500,000 in startup capital, just for the equipment. Raise a
few pigs? The margins are thin. “Feed is expensive, livestock gets sick,” he said. “The farmer eats well,” he added. “That’s about it.” My Sure-Hit Chocolate RecipeI like chocolate and chili peppers. I like tequila and potato chips.Why not put them together — in one very special truffle? My
chocolate tutor, Rachel Zoe Insler, was not so sure. In February, Ms.
Insler opened Bespoke Chocolates, a high-end chocolate shop in the East
Village. Ms. Insler had bailed out of a doctoral program in cognitive
neuroscience at Columbia to pursue her own Plan B fantasy. After
training at the French Culinary Institute, she nudged the truffle
toward the avant-garde. Some contained rosemary, others balsamic
vinegar. To make my own mark, I figured I would have to push
the envelope a little further. I showed up for a day of work carrying a
backpack full of ingredients culled from my kitchen cabinets. As I
produced each one — Parmesan, panko, Grape-Nuts — Ms. Insler gave me
the look of a child who unwraps her birthday presents to find socks and
toothbrushes. She seemed appalled but intrigued by my idea for
a truffle I christened the Tijuana Bender, blending tequila, red chili
flakes and Lay’s potato chips. Combining the chili pepper and
chocolate was reasonable, she said. “That’s a classic combination,” she
said. “The Aztecs used to make spicy chocolate with cinnamon.” But that
was a bit staid, no? No bender is complete without a potato chip
chaser, so I suggested we add the Lay’s. “Maybe we could crush them up
and use them for texture,” she said, feigning enthusiasm. It’s not that hard, I learned, to make truffles. It’s just hard to make them well. After
settling on a 70 percent cocoa Colombian Santander to use as a base
(it’s terroir seemed to match the tequila), I started a recipe Ms.
Insler provided. First, I created an infusion from the chili flakes by
dumping two tablespoons into a pan of heavy cream simmering on the
stove. After straining out the flakes, I added 200 grams of chocolate
wafers — or coins. As they melted, I whisked the concoction into a
ganache. We took a short break to let the mixture cool and hoped for
the best.During that time, Ms. Insler talked about the
challenges of changing careers. By combining food and retail, she
managed to find the human interaction she never found in neuroscience. “I
love making chocolate,” she said. “For me, the hardest part is
everything else.” Negotiating with the landlord, bookkeeping and
meeting city codes can keep you at the store from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.After
the ganache had finally solidified into a thick paste, we scooped small
globs of the gooey mixture and then rubbed it between our palms into
truffle-size balls. Ms. Insler’s model truffle was smooth and
spherical, like a pinball. I missed spherical, and felt lucky to
achieve elliptical. On the cookie sheet, they looked like the droppings
of a large forest animal.We each took tentative bites. The
potato chips had been a misfire. They were too oily and had congealed
into gummy lumps. But the overall flavor, with its pleasing sizzle on
the back of the tongue, was promising. We nodded approvingly. Then,
our smiles evaporated. The sizzle was growing into a conflagration.
When mixing in the chili flakes, Ms. Insler had let me season to taste.
I apparently had seasoned to injure.“If I took a week to work on
the proportions, it could be delicious,” Ms. Insler said. “But nobody
is going to spend $2.25 for that.” My efforts as a chocolatier
resulted in another failure, but at least an informative one. I had
learned to temper chocolate. I had learned a bit of retail.But I also learned, once again, why most of us work in cubicles.<nyt_update_bottom>
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