When people ask me what I do and I say I'm a pastry chef, they barely let me finish "...-ef," before asking, excitedly, "O Where?! Where do you work?"
It's taken me a long time to come up with something I can be proud of. A refrain, a response, an answer that satisfies them and me. To find it, I had to look under a lot of rocks.
"I'm 'At-Large.' Which is like being On The Lam, but different."
For some this means I am no one. For others, I am unemployed. Most people are just confused, or bemused. Some chefs are jealous, others feel sorry for me. Not having another name on my white jacket besides my own is, to other professional cooks, like having a sickness with few visible side affects. People want to walk away but they're not exactly sure why.
But at a certain time, whether it be age or one's own fork in road, a chef must reinvent. Butcher the rabbit differently so it comes out of the hat as fricassee maybe. Try something new. Do what one has always done, but with a slightly, or drastically, new perspective. One cannot make $12 an hour for the rest of one's life, especially not without health insurance.
As is the case with "cheating," many will argue the affair came before the break-up, but others will later admit the affair happened in order to induce a split.
What it means to be an independent contractor is not a definition I can write alone. Each person pieces together their living differently. Each person fashions a stage the way they envision themselves in their own play, or the way it happens naturally when they get hired here and there.
Who am I?
Yeah, I might be answering that for the rest of my long legged life.
But right now, all of a sudden, it's become interesting.
This past Saturday I woke up @ 7 am and sold veggies with one of my favorite farmers at the Berkeley Farmers' Market from 8:30 am-1:15 pm. At 1:45 I got on a shuttle that took a number of front and
back of house people to an event in Sonoma overlooking an expansive valley. I helped feed 300 people delicious food savoury and sweet, even getting my hands into the floury mess that is fritto misto fried to order. Mmmm squid tentacles and fennel! There were also warm canapes I "hot-boxed" in a rhythmic dance with 4 other cooks serving a total of @1800 tiny one bite tastes over the course of two hours.
I got home this morning just after midnight, went to sleep, or took a nap, depending on how you would view it, until 3:15 am and drove to SF alongside very few other vehicles, and helped make @ 600 yeasty donuts from 4:30 am until 9:30 this morning.
So you could say I was unemployed, if you still want to translate Pastry Chef Independent Contractor as such, but to me this is pretty busy, and using the word working as an action verb.
When it rains, it pours, and then floods.
It looks like I might be selling veggies, helping to feed thousands of people, and playing with Excel and
donuts for the next few weeks. Four to be exact, in fact. And then something happens.
Another giant fork, a la Woody Allen's Sleeper, will arrive, {hopefully tines down!}, from an expansive sky. Me and Wall-E will explore and see what it's all about.
I do miss having one kitchen be my home. *But,
Consulting expands my mind, taps all my experiences and let's me help others clarify their visions and businesses. Teaching has innumerable rewards and challenges great and small. Catering is a fantastic way to work with dozens of amazing chefs and cooks I would never know if I stayed in one station, under the roof of one house, day after day. And Writing? Well writing is just plain wonderful. Words are as delicious as desserts and sentences can be savored every day without overindulging. Adjectives are a reason for living and grammar need not be mere dusty libraries or cane-bearing authoritarians. Photography 
was my least expected renewed love. A suspect of digital, I have now been converted, although of course I miss film and its sensual subtleties. But not the chemicals, its toxicity to me and everything else, and the grand expense.
When a cook runs head first into that random utensil poking out of her/his path, said cook may choose to rub head, get a beer and sit a while, staring at the fork they are trying to ignore or get around.
Or,
Said cook can grab a beer and sit down and stare at that giant fork; and attempt to see what else that fork's reflection can do with his/her tool kit of well worn knives and mastered crafts.
I don't know about you but I want to keep learning. I'd rather stay clear of my comfort zone for a spell to see what I can learn in the risky, challenge strewn, messy heartbreaking gravity-less foreign land that is barbed and mined with fear, fright, I-don't-know, "I can't," and all those other embarrassing and awkward bewildering moments. 
O abyss of the unknown, take me unto you. I am yours. O Great Fork, please pick me up and pair me with the delicious next. I have salt in one pocket, and an open heart.
and p.s., I can trade you some hot and freshly glazed doughnuts.
{PPS: *Sometimes pastry chefs start their own sweet, and even savoury businesses too.} Just a few off the top of my head: Pierre Herme, Iacopo Falai, Claudia Fleming, Maury Rubin, Sara Spearin, Jacques Torres, Elizabeth Falkner, Pichet Ong, Rachel Leising, Sam Mason, Mary Canales, Chika Tillman, Heather Carlucci Rodriguez, Anne Walker, Francois Payard, Kelli Bernard... Who am I forgetting?
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