“Jobs must be our focus in 2010,” President Obama said last night to thunderous applause during his State of the Union address. “We can put Americans to work today to build the America of tomorrow.”

Hope oozed out of his eloquent speech. But I had spent my morning at the local Unemployment Office in the office of a pasty Career Counselor whose doughy hands gripped my resume. “So what do you do?” With ten years' worth of work experience, I’ve run successful political campaigns, helped get innocent people out of prison, helped stop gun traffickers and written scathing white papers on the pharmaceutical industry. Yet right before Rosh Hashanah, after winning a successful campaign helping people who were injured by defective products, I came into work to find my office cleaned out and a “I’m sorry, we have no more money to pay you” speech. My office had been near Wall Street so after all the months of seeing the six-figure investment bankers doing the walk of shame with their boxes filled with their personal items after being handed their walking papers, I was the one going home at 10:00am with a tiny severance package and my personal effects in a box of my own.

“People are out of work and they are hurting. I want a jobs bill on my desk right away.”

I spent the afternoon job hunting. I sent out my resume to job postings, emailed friends and acquaintances asking them for their help. And then I waited. Waited for the phone call, that interview, that job offer. But the later did not come, and still I waited. I networked. I hoped.

At least I try. But looking for a job is a vicious cycle. You have to constantly be at your best, but you get rejection at every turn. That job you would be perfect for, that you’ve labored over the cover letter, contacted everyone you know who knows people who can help you get that job, and maybe you even had an interview. But the job goes to someone else. I am one of 25 interviewees out of a pool of 250 candidates, but someone else will start working and I will be back to sending out resumes. It starts to wear you down, all that rejection, the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.

When you are job-hunting people ask you, “What do you want to do? What are your dreams?” I don’t know. My dream job would be to cook for people. Shop at the farmer’s market, bring home the freshest and best produce and cook up healthy and delicious meals for someone who will pay me a living wage and give me health care. But who is going to hire me as their personal chef? I may love cooking, but I never went to culinary school and people with the money to hire chefs probably want more credentials. And my credentials say that I should be a community organizer, an advocate for good causes, someone fighting for tikkun olam.

A couple of years ago when I was employed, I had decided I wanted to advance my career (the organization I was working for did not have any room for advancement). I decided that I wanted to be a Jewish professional, in part because I saw some really great organizations doing amazing social justice work. But I didn’t grow up Jewish, so I didn’t have the summer camp connections or the Hillel friends to network with. So I started getting involved, volunteering and through grit and determination my resume began to fill up with things that said, “she’s really involved with the Jewish community.” But the economy tanked, and the non-profit world didn’t have a lot of room for career moves. I would get interviews, but the people they were hiring had a lot more experience than I did. Then my job disappeared and the hope I was feeling that I was making my career going somewhere faded.

The civil servant assigned by the Department of Labor to give me career advice continued to be baffled by my resume. “How did you get these jobs before?” I smiled. Dumb luck really. A friend of mine ran into an old friend of his on a subway platform. While catching up the old acquaintance talked about his new job and my friend said, “I’ve got the perfect girl for you, she just finished winning a campaign and is looking for work.” Another time a friend of mine asked me, “Have you ever considered being a private investigator?” Yes, I know how I got those jobs, being at the right place at the right time. It wasn’t a great epiphany that I needed to network myself into the right situation.

That is where job hunting is so much like dating. You might be the prettiest girl with the most charming stories, but the guy sitting across the table from you is looking to settle down with a girl who reminds him of his mother and have a lot of babies. You might both be terrific people, but just looking for different things. I had a phone interview for a job I was completely perfect for the other day. But the Executive Director on the other side of the line, who clearly didn’t have the time to be doing interviews asked me, “so what is organizing exactly?” I tried my best to explain what I do and how great I would be for his organization, but I didn’t get a call back. I didn’t give him the answers he was looking for, even though I know I would have done a really kick-ass job at their organization.

So I wait for my phone to ring. I jump on every opportunity I can find even when it annoys friends and acquaintances. On Martin Luther King Day I was in the bodega near my house. I overheard a delivery guy saying to the clerk, "MLK? Only people that get today off are white. I've still got to work." Looking around the tiny shop at who was shopping and who was working he might have had a point, but I wanted to turn to him and say, "but at least you have a job!" Some days I don’t want to get out of bed and spend the day in duckie pajamas watching Hulu overcome with depression and embarrassment that I still don’t have a job. Obama’s speech last night didn’t give me a lot of hope. It might be said to a room full of applause that jobs are a high priority, but my email box is still empty, my phone isn’t ringing and my only hope from Congress is that they will extend my Unemployment benefits to give me more time to keep looking, keep hoping someone will realize that out of the pool of candidates they have in front of them, I am the best and that they should hire me.

The first time I tried it, I was in a group.  The second time, it was with a married man.  The last time, I was alone and loved every minute of it.  It had started while I was doing my shift at my local food co-op when the seasoned staffer asked for a volunteer to stock the meat cooler.  I figured I could handle meat, so I jumped right in.  As the burly bearded man told me what we had to put out, he got an excited twinkle in his when he breathed, “oh, and we have duck bacon today.”

Sure, I had heard of turkey bacon, beef bacon, and even lamb bacon but never duck bacon.  “Is it any good?”  I asked my curiosity piqued by his tone while the slim rectangular packages were placed into the cooler.  After my shift was over I did a little shopping and found myself back at the meat cooler.  I thought of a friend who loves duck, so why not try this?

So we arranged a brunch.  A few friends over on a sunny winter weekend to sample a tasty new treat.  We cooked up a batch of the duck bacon and placed tiny pieces on crackers.  I had even bought a duck liver pate (pork-free) that we smeared on tiny wedges of toast.  There were many other delicacies that afternoon, but for the meat eaters of the group all anyone remembers was that taste.  Squares of thin sliced smoked duck meat fried in duck fat – all that salty, smoky soaked in silky tender duck fat.  What flavor!  Bursting from each cracker.  Why aren’t more things cooked in duck fat?

A few days after the brunch, a friend was home sick with a cold.  And what’s that saying? “Feed a cold, starve a fever.”  And what clears a stuffy head better than duck?  There was some left over after the brunch.  I brought a loaf of fresh bread and we soaked up the duck fat and sprinkled the bread with garlic powder.  And to make things even more treyf my friend had some leftover macaroni and cheese.  It was the most decadent meal I think I have ever cooked.

By the end of the week, I was hungry and alone.  My boyfriend was at work and there was little in the house to eat.  A few potatoes, onions and the rest of the duck bacon.  I didn’t know if could top the ecstasy of the last time I had eaten the duck, but I roasted the potatoes and cooked the onions in with the bacon and tossed in the potatoes until they were coasted in the silky duck.  I was glad I was alone, because sometimes it's just better when you are alone with duck juices dribbling down your chin.

I don’t know if there is a food more naughty to kosher keeping Jews than pork – although technically it is no more a sin than any other prohibited food.  Yet, bacon gets many Jews really riled up (read the comments).  So all this talk of bacon feels a little scandalous even if duck bacon can be kosher (okay, not eaten with mac n’ cheese).  But the really naughty here is how amazing duck bacon really is.  To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Was that bacon, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”

Oh yes, I will be looking for duck bacon again.

Barely before the Thanksgiving leftovers are in the fridge and that last dish is washed, Christmas invades the New York City like the traditional consumerism orgy that it has become.  Stores decorate garishly in glitter, tinsel and twinkly lights, people begging for money on the trains deliberately remind you “it's the season for giving,” and various street corners become miniature pine forests populated by burley Canadians with their fragrant evergreens available for ready money.

If you’ve ever been to New York in December, you’ve probably walked through one of these random street corners lined with trees wrapped in large hair nets and strings of bulbish lights precariously dangling from red wooden stakes.  Tucked within the trees is almost always a shabby little shack cobbled out of bits and pieces with perhaps a bit of heat to protect and provide comfort from the elements to these sentinel street vendors who indefatigably hock their wares.

Walking through these temporary showrooms can be a briefly transformative experience.  The street noise dampens slightly, the scent of pine sap gently assails your nostrils, and for a moment you don’t feel you are in a loud bustling city of eight million people.  Perhaps it was this feeling that sparked the romance.

Several years ago I had an ecologically conscientious roommate.   She cared about the environment so much that she never flushed the toilet.  Purportedly this omission of common courtesy was an effort to save water, but it only really resulted in pissing off her roommate who - with my own standards of sanitation - would flush twice.  That and her other earth-saving tricks made me conclude that she really would be much happier in life living in a cabin in the woods.  This conclusion was reinforced by her December fling – our Christmas Tree Guy.

Our neighborhood Christmas tree stand was only about a hundred yards from our apartment and directly in the path to our closest subway stop.  So it wasn’t uncommon to walk through the trees several times a day.  First it was, “oh, I’m just bringing the Christmas Tree Guy some coffee,” she’d giggle as she ran out the door with a travel mug in hand.  Then there was a dinner date.  Not too long after came the late night moans and the ecstatic rhythmic thuds of Christmas Tree Guy sex.

The next morning my walk to the subway was a vicarious walk of shame.  “Oh hi,” I bashfully managed, “you know, the walls in our apartment are really thin.”  But the Christmas Tree Guy turned out to be very sweet.  He was a forest ranger by trade, but during the winter makes good money by selling Christmas trees.  When we wasn’t on duty, he shared a tiny apartment with about 15 other guys.  He said people were generally friendly and welcoming, bringing him coffee and snacks, but even so I suspected my roommate was the only one providing carnal comforts.  The local street gang had dubbed him “Tree Guy” and helped protect his trees from petty theft.  The only trouble he said that he was having was with the bank at the street corner where his trees were set up.  They would argue about where he could place his wares and hassled the vendors until the Christmas Tree Guy posted a sign that said “***** Bank Hates Christmas.”  Christmas eventually won.

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I love cooking big dinners, especially when they come with interesting dishes or new culinary challenges.  Thanksgiving has been a favorite of mine for a long time, since I have in part not been celebrating the Jewish holidays for all that long.   Even when I was college, I was whipping up elaborate meals despite limitations on space (one year it was a dormitory kitchen in the basement of the building) or even supplies (I forgot to buy aluminum foil so I improvised by covering my chicken, not a turkey, in applesauce, which by the way kept the meat moist and gave it a slightly sweet flavor).

Living in New York City poses its own set of challenges and provides a certain range of advantages.  I mean in New York, you can get anything and usually get it delivered (at least in Manhattan).  I’ve found that mostly to be true – that is, until I tried to serve venison for Thanksgiving.

A couple of years ago I decided that Thanksgiving was all about traditions.  Whether or not the legends of Pilgrims and Indians were anything like what we used to represent out of construction paper, glue and paper bags, my Thanksgiving table was going to be full of indigenous and local produce.  That was remarkably easy to procure in New York City.  I ordered my Heritage Turkey at The City Bakery and gathered my veggies at farmer’s markets.  But venison is hard to find in NYC, and the clock is always ticking.

Perhaps here is where I should point out that I start planning for this holiday weeks in advance.  I am totally a list maker and once the menu is set, I plot and plan on where and when I will procure what is required.  I dash around the City often picking up specialty items from various locations.  My grocery list is set by date and location.  But, even with the best of planning, there are always obstacles.

I had previously found venison at the 125th Street Fairway market, but around Thanksgiving they don’t restock specialty meats (like game) to make room for more turkeys.  This year, I played phone tag with “Raymond”, the Meat Department's manager, for a week until he rudely told me no, they didn’t carry venison and would not special order for me despite previously telling me that he would do so if I would only call back later.  Apparently, this is a stressful time of the year for Meat Department managers.

Not having much luck with any other grocery store I called, I made my case to the next obvious choice – Facebook.  “Mia Rut still needs venison. Fairway has been giving me the run around for a week only to hang up on me now. Very annoyed,” said my status update.  Remarkably there were some good suggestions, including one from my uncle the hunter, who kept a bunch of venison tucked away in his freezer.  Too bad he didn't live any closer.

So the search continues.  Time is running short, my money is running out and I think that our menu may have to be adjusted.  However, despite the lack of deer meat on our table, we have a slight variation to our theme this year.  We typically host a Thanksgiving Shabbat dinner, foregoing a big meal on Thursday in favor of a more communal Friday night (friends often share Thanksgiving with family, but will come over for Shabbat dinner the next night).

This year we are shaking things up by using traditional Thanksgiving ingredients placed into a traditional Ashkenazi Shabbat dinner - traditional flavors presented in surprising ways.  So instead of matzo ball soup and gefilte fish we are starting out with fish consume.  I even started testing out the more experimental dishes, and thus far they have had rave reviews.  Everything is homemade, even the cranberry pasta for the kugel (use cranberry juice concentrate instead of water) which was another feat of scouring the city for a pasta machine (that didn’t cost an arm and a leg). But feel free to weigh in how this menu sounds:

Corn Bread Challah
Fish Consume
Cornish Hens Roasted in Acorn Squash
Butternut Squash Gravy
Seared Venison Sashimi
Cranberry Sauce Kugel
Chestnut and Sage Stuffing in Baked Apples
Roasted Pumpkin in Soy and Crushed Sesame
Green Bean Gelee
Mashed Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Kimchi
Tzimmis Sorbet
Shoo-Fly Pie
Chocolate Cake

It all started with an excessive amount of cabbage. One of my housemates wanted to make a pretty and delicious green and purple cabbage salad for a dinner party she was attending. “Why are your cabbages so big in this country? In South Africa we have little cabbages!” True, even after making her salad a few times we still had a lot of cabbage left over.

Then I got cabbage in my CSA share – two heads of it. “How do you feel about sauerkraut?” I suggested, thinking about my own German heritage. “Or kimchi?” was her suggestion. Now we started getting excited. She pulled out her Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving, which was a rather comprehensive collection of pickles (although no kimchi). So several kimchi recipes were consulted online and we got to work.

Big canning jars were purchased along with some chili paste, fresh ginger, scallions and lots of salt. The cabbage was washed, sliced and ready to wilt. “It says to let the salted cabbage to sit for several minutes to let it wilt, but it’s been twenty minutes and it’s not wilting.” This was us looking at our bowl of crisp and fresh purple cabbage sparkling with salt. About an hour later the outer edges appeared slightly limp. The cabbage was then firmly packed down into the jar it’s salty cabbage juices covering the leaves. We jerry-rigged a cover and some weight to press the cabbage down firmly into its own brine. “Fermentation is usually complete in three to six weeks,” she read. “Weeks?” Oy this was a lot of work for a little sauerkraut. And neither of us knew how the purple cabbage was going to work – especially since it had been so reluctant to initially to wilt.

The kimchi, on the other hand was remarkably easy. Let the cabbage soak overnight in a water and salt mix. Rinse then mix in a blend of chili powder (although I used paste) salt, sugar, ginger and scallions. Instead of chopping I simply threw the spice mixture in my food processor making a nice even and smooth paste I massaged into the dry cabbage leaves (using a glove since the chili can burn your skin). I packed the kimchi into jars and let it sit on our kitchen counter.

And a few days later, bright and shiny with flecks of red in a hot and tangy liquid, the kimchi was ready and remarkably delicious and was quickly eaten. The purple sauerkraut continued to sit on the counter. It smelled bad (as sauerkraut does) and overflowed its jar a few times (making a big purple mess). Occasionally we could see some bubbles from the fermenting process, but other than that there was great skepticism in the house whether or not this was going to be successful.

More kimchi was made with the next week’s CSA cabbage. While picking up that week’s share I traded some other veggies for more cabbage. “What do you do with all that cabbage?” I was asked. Good question, what does one do with lots of kimchi? We brought out the bamboo steamers and made dumplings. We made sushi. Not authentic Korean foods, but delectable. And there was more cabbage. And beets. I forgot to mention the beets. There were also lots and lots of beets. Pickling spices simmered on the stove with a stick of cinnamon in apple cider vinegar. Cooked beets and this tangy brine were poured into more jars. The fridge was starting to get full.

Shabbat dinners began featuring our pickled goods. Kimchi on a Shabbat table? Why not. We brought jars of beets as gifts to dinner parties. Then the sauerkraut was ready. It didn’t taste anything like the mushy stuff that my mom would cook on New Year’s Day with pork loin. I never liked sauerkraut. It was offensive I couldn’t imagine putting it in my mouth and dripped its rancid liquid everywhere. But our purple sauerkraut was still crisp, had very little liquid and very little smell. It gleamed like strips of scarlet silk on our Shabbat table. The beets were like deep rubies and the kimchi was just fun and exotic.

I love cooking. I love cooking for other people. Being unemployed gives more time than I would have if I were working. So I feel like I can try new things. Although pickling is a way of preserving fresh foods, it has also been preserving my sanity as I have tried to find a new job.