Apple pies and kettle corn

We are racing into the holiday season with great enthusiasm: I've already taught my first Practice Thanksgiving class and two Holiday Pie classes, and today I tested several types of apples to determine the best combination for our apple pies (order yours now--Thanksgiving orders must be received by this Thursday!). We only use local apples in our pies (and homemade butter in the crusts, of course), and each year the crops are a bit different, so I bought a bunch of different types and tested them all. Thank goodness we have an AppleMaster, a fun gadget that peels, cores, and slices apples, which is the only as-seen-on-TV gadget that I can wholeheartedly recommend. Here is the pile of peels and cores that were left after today's tests (with the last apple on the AppleMaster in the background):

A few days ago I was visited by the Gingerbread House Muse and inspired to begin a gingerbread creation in the spirit of my award-winning Gingerbread Cathedral of Sienna. The Muse told me that I've been resting on those laurels for too long, and it's time to design something a little more local. Stay tuned for the results!

Since it's cold and snowy out, I decided tonight was the perfect night for some homemade kettle corn. Actually, every night is the perfect night for kettle corn! It's my favorite quick treat. I have been honing the recipe for months now (not so hard when there are only four ingredients), and I present you with this perfect version:

Homemade Kettle Corn

• 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1/2 cup fresh popcorn kernels (they do get stale, so buy a new container if your current one is from the twentieth century)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Put the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot and place over high heat for 1 minute. Add 1 popcorn kernel and put the lid on. Wait for the kernel to pop (while you're waiting, measure the other ingredients into a bowl so you can pour them in all at once).
2. When the kernel pops, quickly pour in all the other ingredients, put the lid back on, and shake the pan vigorously. Reduce the heat to medium-high and shake often, cracking the lid every ten seconds or so to let steam escape.
3. When the popping slows to one per second, take the pan off the heat and leave the lid slightly ajar until the popping stops. Take the lid off carefully (it may have a lot of condensation on the underside) and pour the kettle corn into a bowl.

Generous Servings in the national press!

Well, the secret is out: Generous Servings has been featured in a national publication. Well, you might consider it a former national publication. And we weren't exactly featured. And we have no idea why we were in it. Let me explain.

Several months ago a reporter and photographer from Cookie ("a lifestyle magazine for the modern mother") stopped by Generous Servings, apparently wanting to take a picture of one of our croissants for the magazine. I wasn't there, and when I arrived, I got a hopelessly jumbled message about who these people were and what they wanted--did they want a picture of us baking a croissant, or someone eating it? (This was made more confusing by the fact that everyone told me that a reporter from Cooking magazine had come by, and I know there is no such thing as Cooking magazine because I subscribe to every cooking magazine on the planet). We didn't have any croissants that day (we sell them only on Saturdays), but Travis was in the process of making some croissant dough, and he had told the reporter to come back in the afternoon and maybe we could bake one croissant for them to photograph.

We were really busy in the kitchen that day, so baking a sample croissant for some random reporter who really wanted a picture of a croissant but didn't bother to call ahead to find out what day we had them was not a priority. They did come back, and we didn't have a croissant baked yet, so they waited for a long time, eating some soup and making us feel awkward. We finally baked a single croissant and it came out kind of ugly, but we gave it to them anyway and hoped they would leave. Apparently they decided against an action shot, and they wanted to use one of our plates (and did we have anything a little more attractive than our plain white plates), and our table, and an extension cord for their lights, and then they decided it needed more color so they wanted some jam, and a little knife, and this went on forever. Finally they said they were done, and they tried to give back the croissant (torn in pieces by this time), but we said they could eat it. They looked skeptical and took a tiny little piece that they wouldn't even be able to taste, and then said, "Mmmmm...." like it was actually disgusting and they were just being polite. Travis and I were extremely offended, because a whole croissant just went to waste, pearls before swine.

In all the confusion, no one thought to ask them why they specifically wanted a picture of our croissants, but at least I remembered to find out what magazine they worked for and when the picture was supposed to run. Turns out it was the November issue of Cookie magazine, which was doing a story on fun places to go in Denver, so we've been keeping our eyes open for that issue. In the meantime I heard that Cookie was one of the magazines that Conde Nast was closing (along with the indispensible Elegant Bride, and Gourmet, which I do feel a little sad about), so the November issue was the last one published. Travis got his hands on it, and here we are:

You can see our croissant (the middle of the three little pictures), with the heretical jam (I feel that our croissants do not require embellishment, unless it's chocolate). And how nice of them to compliment the soup that they ate while waiting for us to have the croissant ready. The whole thing is still a mystery to me--why put a picture of a croissant in a parenting magazine? Especially a croissant you haven't even tasted?

Until we hire out our full-time media liaison, if you would like a picture of a specific pastry, you might want to call ahead.

O fleeting days of harvest

I feel I should write an ode to the produce that's finally bursting out of the gardens around here. Lucky for you I don't write poetry, so we can all be spared that exercise. We have tomatoes galore from our hell strip garden, and it's so much fun to be able to serve our own cherry tomatoes on salads instead of having to buy them. Every time I walk by the tomato display at Sunflower I feel superior.

Last year I felt that I missed many opportunities to eat local produce when it was in season, and to preserve it for the winter, so I vowed to do better this year. I have done pretty well at the eating part, but I really haven't learned anything about preserving. My only serious attempt so far has been to buy a box of peaches a few weeks ago to freeze. I spent a couple of hours blanching, peeling, slicing, and bagging all 20 pounds of peaches, and then I put the whole cache in my freezer. The next day, I decided to thaw out a bag to see how they were. Turns out they are great! The next week I thawed another bag, and I am currently finishing off my third bag, which means that I have eaten one-third of my entire winter's store of peaches within three weeks of freezing them. I'm not sure how this food preservation thing is going to work for me, since once all the hard work is done, it seems irresistable to eat the products immediately!

We had our first cold, rainy autumn day last week--it didn't get above 55 degrees all day--and as soon as I woke up I was thinking about making soups, stews, pot roast, stuffing, etc. Finally I'm feeling like fall food, although not without some preemptive nostalgia for summer. I taught a Farmers' Market class last week where we cooked with butternut squash, potatoes, and beets, and the meal tasted like fall on a plate.

I have also discovered Tuscan kale, aka dino or lacinato kale. Summer, one of our cooking instructors, introduced me to it in her Tuscan cooking class, and it is my new favorite vegetable. If you haven't tried it, keep your eyes open--it has dark green leaves with a bumpy texture like alligator (or dinosaur) skin. It's really tasty, and I'm looking forward to cooking some soups with it this winter.

Recap of summer

Despite my lack of blog updates, if you've been around Generous Servings you know it's been a busy summer. Hey, if you want blog updates, feel free to write me encouraging comments on my posts. Otherwise it's kind of like writing a diary that you pretend other people want to read, which is pretty lame.

I just finished my last of four Culinary Camps for Teens, and that is a great feeling. Not that I don't like teaching the kids, but it's a lot of work, and I am more than happy to hand them over to their school teachers. As a public service, I would like to inform those teachers and parents that they are not doing a great job of alcohol education. During my last camp I was talking to the kids about yeast, and I asked them what foods other than bread were made with yeast. They came up with beer, and I confirmed that yeast eat the sugars in grains and produce alcohol. Then one of them said, "So why is alcohol poisonous?" The question was a non sequitur, which confused me, but I said, "Well, what do you mean by poisonous?" The kids looked at me like I was trying to trick them and one girl said, "It's illegal for a REASON. It's poisonous." These fourteen-year-olds think you shouldn't get drunk because you will immediately die of alcohol poisoning. And when they find out that isn't true, what are they going to think?

At the beginning of the summer we had our second Cook for a Cause event, which was a ton of fun. Plus, we made a ton of food to donate to The Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. We prepared mountains of squash and tomatillos for squash enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, and we made meat lasagna.

We conscientiously tasted everything, and it was good.

We also survived our second Highland Street Fair, which is a madhouse. We sold out of ice cream sandwiches by the early afternoon of last year, so this year we decided we would make twice as many. We had ice cream sandwich-making marathons during the week leading up to the Street Fair, and we made 300 of them, which nearly killed us. Then the weather on the big day turned out to be cold and rainy, so we only sold 25 ice cream sandwiches, which was not beneficial to morale.

I've just finished posting the schedule for our October and November classes, which means I've been trying to remember what it's like to want to eat turkey and decorate holiday cookies, while still teaching classes on farmers' market recipes. This would be more pleasant if I were looking forward to winter, but since I dread winter for the entire year, it's painful to dwell on the prospect for any amount of time in the summer. So now I am promptly forgetting all about winter for the next two months!

My beer-drinking secret

When Jill and I started thinking about adding soups and salads to our menu, one of our criteria for doing so was that we would have to find a way to make our own bread. We don't like buying things that we can make, because the quality suffers so much when baked goods are not fresh. However, baking great artisan bread in relatively large quantities usually requires a different set of equipment and even different ovens than we have, so it took us a while to figure out how to do it. We eventually developed a recipe based on Cook's Illustrated's "no-knead bread", which has a unique mixing and baking technique that results in great flavor and crust development. One of the unusual things about the recipe is that you mix the dough the night before baking the bread, and the dough includes beer to impart a nice fermented flavor. The best beer to use is a light American-style lager, which doesn't make the bread taste too beery, so I buy 24-packs of whatever cruddy beer is on sale at the liquor store. I make the dough on Sunday night, and Travis comes in early on Monday morning to shape and bake the loaves.

This process has been working well for us for months. A few weeks ago I took a Sunday off, so I asked Travis to mix the dough himself. The next day when I got to work, Travis said that he was so relieved about something that had been bothering him for a long time. Every Monday he would find empty beer cans in the recycling bin, and he didn't realize that I was using the beer for the bread dough. He thought I just hung out by myself late at night at Generous Servings and drank really bad beer. He was less concerned about my drinking habit than my poor taste in beer. When he told me this I laughed so hard that I strained a muscle in my side.

Have you made it to the Highland Micro-Market yet? We had a great turnout on our first market day. The second week was much slower because the weather was bad, and this past Thursday was steady but not super-busy. It's always nervewracking to start something like this, because the beginning is so uneven, and you're never sure if it's going to work out. Of course all the vendors need to make a certain amount of money for it to be worth their time, although no one is trying to get rich from selling stuff at a farmers' market. God bless those of you who have come to the MiMa several times already--you're the greatest!

I got my first CSA box from Heirloom Gardens (one of the farmers at the MiMa), and it was full of great greens. There was some cress in there that was incredibly fresh and spicy--I've never had such fresh cress before, and the intensity of flavor is amazing. I am looking forward so much to tomatoes and peas and such.

Mitch (The Green Fooder) is offering Ela Family Farms' fruit shares through the MiMa, and I would trade my kingdom for a peach right now. Colorado peaches don't show up until August, so when they do, make sure you've got a guaranteed supply and eat as many as you possibly can. I was in California last weekend and bought some cherries at a farm stand, and they were so good I realized that I had forgotten what in-season cherries taste like. Local fruit, picked ripe, is so much better than the year-round stuff from the grocery store, so sign up for a fruit share this year and revel in the best, freshest fruit around. If you end up with too much to eat (which doesn't seem likely), come to my Summer Pies and Tarts class and I'll show you how to make a great pie with it.

Je suis une snob

I know this is totally impolitic, but I have a funny story to tell about one of our recent class participants. First, a little background. Ever since we opened, I have been resisting teaching a French cooking class, because I thought it would lend itself to cooking snobbery, and I can't stand that. However, people kept asking and asking for French cooking. I told them that American cooking IS French cooking, and there's really no reason to learn to make pâté or the other iconic French dishes. We just don't eat those things, despite Julia Child's best efforts. However, a couple months ago Krista volunteered to teach a French cooking class, so I gave in and put it on the schedule.

A few weeks ago, Krista sent me her recipes for the upcoming French class. While I was editing them, I was thinking how fussy French cooking is. French recipes start with instructions like, "Take a very fresh chicken..." Here in the land of the free, we take whatever chicken we get at the store. Plus I was all grumpy about having to look up where to put the accent marks: I know enough French to be annoyed when people get their accents wrong, but not enough to be totally sure of them myself.

As I was helping Krista set up for the class, I was complaining about prissy French cooking, and I snidely speculated that the people who choose to take a French cooking class might not be my favorite bunch. Right at that moment (I'm finally getting to the point of the story here), the first class participant arrived...wearing chef's whites and a beret. I had to leave the room to avoid an embarrassing fit of laughter. Luckily Krista was much more gracious and mature.

However, everyone else got the last laugh, because the class turned out to be totally fun (and the beret guy wasn't snobby at all), and I realized during the class that it is really true that many of the basic techniques of American cooking are embedded in the French culinary tradition. Even if you never make a classic "French" dish at home, learning those recipes will make you a better cook. So the French cooking class is here to stay, and if it makes you have a better time, you are welcome to wear a beret.

Butter butter butter butter butter

Butter is my new favorite food. Not ingredient, food. Generous Servings now uses only homemade butter in all our cooking, which gives you another reason to have one of our croissants or scones--they are more homemade than almost anything you'll ever eat.

It is very fun to have a bowl full of ten pounds of butter, as you can see:



And it is very good for moisturizing one's hands. This is not to say that my butter recipe development has been without frustrations. There has been a lot of cream thrown out of the mixer onto the floor. One time the cream never turned into butter, although I mixed it for about an hour and a half (usually it takes 15 minutes). That evening our cleaners happened to be working in the kitchen, and they asked me several times what I was making. I kept saying that I was making butter, and they would look dubiously at the bowl full of cream, which never looked remotely like butter. The next time they came, I was making cultured butter, which requires me to sterilize all the implements I use, so I had an array of big pots of boiling water, alcohol swabs, thermometers, and spoons balanced precariously to prevent their bowls from touching the counter, and a whole area of the kitchen blocked off. Again, the cleaners asked what I was doing, and I said I was making butter. At this point, they think I'm delusional.

One of the unexpected difficulties of selling food is dealing with the packaging. It's taken me a long time to figure out the best way to package the butter: what shape should it be in? where do I get the right kind of foil? how big should the label be? And that stuff is expensive, particularly if you aren't buying it in huge quantities. But the Micro-Market is opening in less than a month, so today I made some big decisions and ordered the equipment I need to scale up this project.

How can you get your hands on some of this great butter? I'm glad you asked. At the Highland Micro-Market (MiMa), of course! I will be there with lots of butter, along with other local producers selling vegetables, fruit, herbs, meats, honey, eggs, and more. We've been spending lots of time getting ready for the MiMa, so we really hope to have a great turnout when we open! Heck, just come for the free butter samples. The MiMa will be held every Thursday from 2-6 pm, starting May 14, on the Generous Servings patio. Check out the website: www.HighlandMiMa.com. We'll have an option to order your butter, too, so you can be assured that I won't sell out if you're coming toward the end of the market. Stay tuned for that.

Announcing: your neighborhood MiMa!

I am so excited to announce that this summer Generous Servings will be hosting the world's first Micro-Market (MiMa)! I have joined a group of people who are committed to bringing local food to the Highland area, and we're going to have a weekly market on the Generous Servings patio featuring very local food and crafts. We really hope that this helps people eat more locally, because we'll be able to keep our prices low and guarantee that you're getting fresh, seasonal produce that hasn't been shipped from Chile or California and consumed fifteen times its weight in fuel just to get to the store. In fact, some of the products sold at the MiMa are going to walk over.

We'll have fruits and vegetables grown right in the neighborhood (including in my front yard), meats and eggs from the region (no one ranches in Denver, but the meat will be from within 100 miles), and prepared foods made from local ingredients, including my fast-growing line of homemade butter (sweet cream and old-fashioned cultured butter, plus flavored butters like orange-honey and garlic-herb...mmmm...).

When can you purchase these fantastic products? On Thursday afternoons between 2 and 6 pm, starting on May 14! We'll have a pre-order system set up soon so you can place orders too, since all the vendors will have small supplies and we don't want to run out too early. I'm working on a website for the Highland MiMa now, so I'll post the link as soon as it's decent. Meanwhile, if you know someone who has a lot of fruit or vegetables that he or she might want to sell, put us in touch!

Everyone's a critic

I know it is impolitic to complain about customers, but there have been four customers--total over the past 14 months--who have ruined my day. That's not a very large number, but those four people really stand out in my mind. And unfortunately, the most recent irate customer also wrote a review online, so if you happen to be one of our 800 satisfied customers, and you have a few minutes, it would be awesome if you'd write a little review online too, to balance things out. Not that I don't appreciate being personally identified as "heartless, rude, and insensitive".

I will admit to rude, occasionally, but I know who this reviewer was, and I wasn't rude to her. I didn't make an exception to our class cancellation policy (cancellations more than 7 days before the class get a full refund, within that time we give 50% credit towards a future class), and I think she felt that it was a rude policy, regardless of my tone while enforcing it. The tough thing is, when people have an emergency and can't come to a class they've registered for, they always think they should be the exception, because they have an EMERGENCY. But that's exactly what the policy covers, and maybe what they don't realize is that we're such a small business and the maximum number of people in each of our classes is 10, so if we didn't get any money from two people because they decided not to come to a class at the last minute, then we would lose at least 20% of our income for that day. Instead, our policy is to meet them halfway--which means we're still losing money because some random person's father-in-law or great-uncle died. That's a lot more consideration than you'd get from TicketMaster ("tickets cannot be cancelled, exchanged or refunded unless the event has been cancelled or postponed"), and it's more generous than some of the other cooking schools in the area (although they generally cap their classes at 24 people, so having a few people cancel is not such a big deal). But people still get mad at us. I don't know how to make this more fair to everyone.

Even if you do think I'm heartless, rude, and insensitive, please consider posting something saying I'm also witty and perceptive, or creative and hard working, or a good speller. If my obit writer relies on Google searches, I'd like him to discover some characteristic about me other than my rudeness. Then again, I'm probably digging my own grave right now. Does this seem like a rude post? Because I'm just trying to figure out the most fair way to run a business. We didn't name it Generous Servings by accident--we actually do try really hard to be generous. I better write a nice post next to regain some good karma.

The first Cook for a Cause is a huge success!

We had our Cook for a Cause day yesterday, and it was great! We got started at 8 am with the early crew, who were actually early for the first shift, and they were hard-core. You do not want to get in the way of people who sign up to volunteer at 8 am on a Sunday. I thought we might spend that whole first shift prepping ingredients, but they got that out of the way in the first fifteen minutes, and we were off! Here's some of our intrepid morning cooks:


One fun thing was that we got to use all our big pots, which we never use otherwise. (The only reason we have them was because we bought them for cheap at an auction.)


Over the twelve hour cook-a-thon, we had about 70 great volunteers, and it was a lot of fun to cook with everyone! I enjoyed getting to see some of my former class participants again, plus lots of our cafe regulars. With so many hands, we were able to really get up some speed on the prep and assembly of the dishes. Here's the lasagna assembly table during one shift:


Our final tally was about 720 pounds of food that we will donate to the Carpenter's Cupboard food bank in Wheat Ridge. That's almost 900 servings of lasagna with meat sauce, chili, and spaghetti marinara. The great thing is that all of this is nutritious and homemade with high-quality ingredients, and it's going directly to people who really need it. We'd like to thank Sunflower Market, who donated some sausage for the lasagna. I taste-tested lots of batches of our lasagna sauce and chili, and they were really awesome. Despite the fact that I oversaw the preparation of an insane amount of lasagna yesterday, I am actually kind of hungry for lasagna right now, because it was so good. Below are a few more pictures of our fantastic volunteers. Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate our first anniversary, and we're excited to do this type of event again in the future!

Here's the thank-you note we received from the food bank:

What a wonderful spot Mary and Jill have found to locate their shop! It's not just because it's a busy corner, because they have landed smack in the middle of some of the nicest people in Denver. We propose a minor name change, from 'Generous Servings' to 'Generous People'.

The food prepared by those of you who participated in last Sunday's "Cook-a-thon" has provided The Carpenter's Cupboard with a gourmet array of meals for big families that we are afraid has made us the food bank of choice in the area.

Thank you for the love and support that you showed on that sunny Sunday. God bless you all.

Making a better butter batter

A few months ago I happened to be looking at the label of the butter we buy, and I noticed that it has two ingredients: cream and "natural flavorings". What the heck are natural flavorings in butter? They make it taste more like butter? Isn't butter a singular ingredient by itself? I looked at the butter I had at my house, and it said the same thing. Something weird is going on here.

In hindsight, it seems odd that I've never made butter before now--I've never even overwhipped cream enough to make it by accident. It's super-easy to make fresh butter--just shake (or whip) cream for a while, and all of a sudden it happens (most grocery-store cream has been ultra-pasteurized, which sometimes interferes with the process, so you may want to look into this before shaking a jar of cream for half an hour and not getting any butter). But as I was poking around online, I started learning about the fabled "cultured butter", which is made from cream that has been allowed to ferment with the same bacteria that give tang to yogurt and buttermilk. Cultured butter is supposed to taste way better (in fact, the "natural flavorings" in store butter are supposed to make it taste like it's been cultured), and anything that involves bacteria sounds fun to me, so I decided to try making it.

I was very disappointed in the quality of information online, and I've decided that once I figure out how to do this, I'm going to write a book. Or at least a blog. It's very difficult to figure out which bacteria and how much you should add to culture your cream. So I just started experimenting. I made several batches of butter with different amounts of store-bought yogurt and buttermilk to supply the starter cultures. Then we had a butter taste test, comparing my batches to the store butter we had in the fridge. Here are Jill and Travis developing their butter palates.


Yes, this was a double-blind tasting, and we were taking notes. We do not take this lightly. We all ate enough plain butter to feel a little ill for a while afterwards.

The results were clear: store butter has a nasty aftertaste and a waxy texture once you start thinking about it (and eating enough of it straight up to really taste it). My butter batches were all better than the store ones, and the more buttermilk I added, the better.

So we are on the right track, and now I'm really getting serious about this. I'm going to order some butter cultures from various companies that supply commercial starter cultures, although I am not happy about having to order cultures all the time, when I am perfectly capable of growing my own bacteria, thank you very much. But I need decide what to grow and then figure out whether we really have the facilities to grow our own. Man, I wish I still worked in a lab right now. This would be totally simple if I had a few incubators and maybe a nice shaker and an autoclave...and a centrifuge and a really good scale and a liquid nitrogen freezer...

Meanwhile, we made croissants out of my homemade butter. Mmmmmm.

The 2009 Resolution Edition

Yesterday I pulled out all our 2008 files and put them in our storage filing cabinet, leaving the working filing cabinet very empty (Jill pulled out one of the drawers this morning and almost fell out of her chair because the drawer rolled out with no resistance). It occurred to me that the changing of the calendar year hasn't meant much to me for most of my life, since I used to work by the academic year for so long, but now I really do organize my files, and my thoughts, around the calendar year. And that means it's time to reflect on the past year and make plans for the next.

I like New Year's resolutions. They're basically to-do lists with a little extra creativity, and I work from to-do lists all the time. So here are my resolutions for Generous Servings for 2009 (these are for the parts of the business that I have the most direct input into; Jill can make her own resolutions for the cafe and associated parts of the business):

1) Be more generous! I think this might be a resolution every year, and the question will be how to implement it each year. We are starting 2009 with a bang, with our Cook for a Cause day on January 18. We've had a great response from people who are willing to volunteer some of their time that day to help cook the food that we're going to donate to our partner food kitchen. We are hoping this will become an annual tradition, so we'll always have a way to celebrate our anniversary and each new year with generosity.

In the process of planning for Cook for a Cause, I've been trying to get grocery stores to donate some meat for us to cook, and I've run into some obstacles that I am feeling the urge to tackle. The meat department guys at Sunflower and King Soopers have told me that they regularly throw away lots of meat that's past its expiration date (the guy at King Soopers told me he threw out 100 pounds of ground beef the day before I talked to him), and they aren't allowed to give it to anyone after it's expired. I proposed that they could simply call me when they have a bunch of meat that's ALMOST expired, and I would come and stand outside the store until 30 seconds before the official expiration time, and they could donate it to me at that point. They said no. I got mad. I understand the food-safety issues here, and I'm not going to start an argument about how there can't be one second when meat suddenly becomes unsafe to eat. I'm not going to wait by the dumpster and pull the meat out after they toss it; I'm willing to work within the system to handle the meat in an unassailably safe way and avoid all the waste. I feel like this idea could be a really great way to make the world a better place. I have the facilities to take this almost-expired meat, keep it safe (in our freezers) until we can cook it, and then donate the cooked (and therefore safe) food to people who really need it. All I need is a partner in the meat business, so my mission is going to be to find that person. If you know somebody who could help, please put me in touch with him or her.

2) Everyone gets a day off. When Jill and I started Generous Servings, we figured that we could be totally dedicated to the business for our first year, and then it would be time to work out a schedule that would be sustainable in the long run. Now is that time. We're going to take one day off per week. That way we have some time to work on our personal resolutions!

3) Generous Servings is getting serious about composting. We've been trying to compost since we opened, but we've run into a lot of problems--first Happy Cakes was going to compost our stuff, and then we were going to pay our trash company to do it, but neither of those ever happened. So now we've lined up a great group of home composters who can take our compostables home to their gardens. We've started collecting our compostables on a trial basis for the past few weeks, and it makes a huge difference in how much trash we have to throw out, so we are really excited to make this a part of our routine in 2009.

4) I am learning to make cheese! What better use for my years of training as a microbiologist? I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but now that I've got the idea, I am already dreaming of my own personal cheese factory. I've started making butter, too, so soon we may be using homemade butter and cheese in all our food at Generous Servings. Whoa, that would be cool.

5) I think the Highland neighborhood needs a farmers market. I heard that the merchants' association had considered this idea a few years ago, and I'm going to see if I can revive it. There isn't a farmers' market nearby (the one they used to have at the old Elitch Theatre didn't happen this summer--unless I just missed it?--so I'm going to do some investigating to find out why). If we had one, I could sell cheese there! And we could have farmers' market cooking classes, which would be awesome. If you would support a farmer's market in the neighborhood, let me know!

Since pictures of gingerbread houses are way more interesting than resolutions, here's a totally irrelevant picture to close this post. Have a great start to 2009.

When is a door not a door?

When it's ajar. Also, as it happens, a door is not very useful when it's stuck closed, as we learned yesterday. The front door to Generous Servings had seen a lot of life before we moved in, and its condition didn't improve during the months of our renovations: there was about a week in the midst of heavy construction traffic when the threshold was hanging in midair after the original floor was removed from under it, and then our double stacked ovens were somehow forced through the door even though they're a few inches wider than the opening, and we have stomped in and out a hundred million times over the past 15 months. We've wanted to replace the door, for both functional and aesthetic reasons, but when we looked into this a while ago, we got sticker shock ($2000? For the cheap model?) and gave up.

Last week we decided it was time to do something about the half-inch crack under the door, especially since it's -15 degrees in the sun these days. So we got a door sweep, and asked our handy employee Travis to install it. It didn't totally block the crack, but it was an improvement. Until yesterday.

After we closed, we had a customer show up to drop off knives to be sharpened, so we let him in. On his way out he tried to pull the door instead of push it, and to everyone's surprise, the door wouldn't budge after that. We let him out the back door and proceeded to kick the bottom corner of the front door with Jill's steel-toed boots, but it was seriously not going to move. We determined that the new door sweep had gotten wedged under the door, making it impossible to push the door outwards. Jill and I took turns going outside (using the back door) into the sub-zero degree weather and pulling on the front door while the other person pushed. We worked on it for a long time, including jamming all the tools we had available under the door to try to push the sweep out (unsuccessfully).


Jill had to go home, so we started testing our keys to the other entrances to the building, in case we really couldn't use the front door. We discovered that we didn't have the correct keys to either our back door or Happy Cakes' front door, and when we tried the key to Happy Cakes' back door, the lock core fell out of the door. Therefore, one of us would have to stay in the building until we could get the front door open, or we'd be totally locked out. I volunteered to take the late shift.

Finally I had to call Travis to come bust me out. He heroically left a dinner party and arrived with more appropriate tools. He used a combination of a crowbar and brute force and managed to force the door opened, which resulted in the door sweep getting bent. We stepped outside to survey the damage, and Travis let the door swing closed to illustrate the problem. The door got stuck closed again, this time with both of us on the outside, neither of us with a key that worked in any door that would actually open, and me wearing just a sweatshirt (I mean, I had pants and shoes on too). It would have been a pretty funny scene if we were in a movie and I was not in danger of freezing to death on the doorstep of my own business.

Luckily the door wasn't stuck quite as firmly this time, so we were able to get it open after some tugging. We've removed the new door sweep so the problem won't recur, but this has been enough to convince us that it's time for a new door. Now we have to start the arduous process of getting people to show up and give us quotes, which in my past experience has been terribly difficult. Oh well, it's better than being trapped in Generous Servings.

Putting my money where my mouth is, reluctantly

Over the past couple of years I've been thinking a lot about the "local eating" movement, which espouses the concept that much of the dysfunction in Americans' diets can be repaired by fostering a closer relationship with the ingredients in our food, and supporting an agricultural economics that rewards nutritious and conscientious food production rather than amoral agribusiness. I read Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma (twice now, in fact) and was impressed enough by his arguments to cut high fructose corn syrup out of my diet (as well as the fast food it features so prominently in). This switch was relatively easy because as I've come to appreciate the taste of food more, I've found that high fructose corn syrup just doesn't taste good. In my monthly Cooking Basics class we make French toast and I always put out the real maple syrup with it, and everyone says it's the best French toast they've ever had, which may be true, but really I think they're mostly tasting how much better maple syrup is than the gross "pancake" syrups that are all artificially-flavored high fructose corn syrup. Seriously, even if it weren't killing you slowly (which you know it is), there is no good reason to eat high fructose corn syrup, and this is coming from an unrepentant sweet tooth. If you drink high fructose corn syrup straight from the bottle, which I certainly have, it's just not tasty like honey or molasses or brown sugar, all of which I also eat straight from the containers.

Then we had a Cooking Book Club class on The Omnivore's Dilemma, for which I bought lots of ingredients from the farmer's market, and we compared them side by side in simple preparations (or straight up) with the "identical" supermarket specimens. I swear, if I hadn't been present for the taste-tests, I wouldn't have believed the difference. We compared apples, pears, zucchini, eggs, tomatoes, and steak, and in every case the farmer's market item was significantly better. This was a small sample set, but the differences were way beyond the margin of error.

So now I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and it's making me a little crazy. First, I am not a fan of Kingsolver's writing style (including her fiction). I find her use of slang, interjections, and silly metaphors annoying and jarring. For example, she describes her family's decision to eat only local foods for one year as a "Dear John letter to a roomie that smells like exhaust fumes and the feedlot". You don't write Dear John letters to roommates, and no one calls them "roomies" any more (did anyone ever?). But obviously my opinion of Kingsolver's writing is in the minority, and it's dangerous for a blogger to critique anyone else's writing, so let's move on to the substance of the book. I'm getting excited by her descriptions of seasonal and local eating, and some of the time-honored methods she employs to manage the variable availability of food across the seasons: canning, freezing, culturing, etc.

I am on board with the concept that eating locally solves a whole bunch of problems: it reduces the amount of energy wasted in transporting food, it helps maintain both the taste and the nutrition value of fresh food, it ensures that farmers get more of each food dollar than the big bad companies that have taken over much of our food supply. But it has some obvious drawbacks. First, you have to know how to cook your own food, and be able to improvise when certain ingredients aren't available. I'm okay with the first part of that, and less happy but still able to manage the second part. The bigger problem for me is that these ingredients are more expensive. One of the reasons Generous Servings is now in its second year of business is because we're really careful about cost control. I do a fair amount of our shopping at Wal-Mart, which I hate, but I do enjoy getting paid every month. I've been thinking about this problem a lot, but I haven't gotten much closer to a workable solution.

I did make an effort at Thanksgiving, though. We hosted a big Thanksgiving party for family and friends at Generous Servings, and I was in charge of the food preparation. I decided to order a free-range turkey from a Colorado turkey farm, which I was supposed to pick up at the Winter Farmer's Market in Boulder on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. When I went there, I was surprised to find a full-fledged farmer's market, with tons of produce (nothing green, of course). I figured it was time to walk the walk, so I bought a bunch of potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and beets for our Thanksgiving feast. We've never had beets at Thanksgiving before, but what could be more in the culinary spirit of the holiday than eating local foods? The beets were good (the turkey was a disappointment, because I thought it was going to be a heritage breed but it turned out to be the same breed you get in all supermarkets, Broad Breasted White, and it tasted the same as the comparison store-bought turkey I also cooked). It was all expensive, except the potatoes, which were really cheap (but some were going bad, too). I'm not sure what I've learned from this exercise, but I'm still thinking, and I sense a New Year's resolution in the making.

Happy birthday, Generous Servings!

One year ago today we opened our doors! We're going to hold off on the big celebrations until next month, after the holiday glut. Please mark your calendars for Sunday, January 18, when we'll be holding our first annual Cook For A Cause. We're going to cook from 8 am to 8 pm to make food to donate to our partner food bank, The Carpenter's Cupboard. We need volunteers to help--please e-mail us at info@GenerousServings.com to sign up for a two-hour shift. If you can't stay for long, please stop by for coffee that day, because we'll be donating 50% of our proceeds to the food bank as well. Plus, we'll be holding a food and kitchen equipment drive--please bring non-perishable foods and used kitchen equipment (pots and pans, utensils, small appliances) that we can donate.

Thanks to everyone for making our first year so much fun, and honestly, for keeping us in business. We heard all the scary warnings about how many small businesses fail in the first year, and we consider ourselves to be really lucky to have so many great supporters. Let us know how we can improve in year two! We hope to see a lot of you.

Generous Servings' heaven strip

We have finally completed a project that has been on the to-do list since we bought the building: we landscaped the "hell strip" (which is the official term for the space between the street and the sidewalk, so named because the property owner is responsible for maintaining it within city requirements, but can't use it for anything useful). In fact, one of the first things our architect mentioned when we took him to see the building, before we even owned it, was that we'd have to do something about the hell strip (he's the one who explained the term to us). To review, here's what the hell strip looked like last fall, when we took over:



This past spring, we got all the crazy plants and the railroad-tie planter dug out, which left us with a lovely dirt patch. Then we ran out of energy on that project, so it stayed like that for a long time:



Finally, two of our regular customers, Larry and Bob, got so tired of us ignoring their helpful advice on how to landscape the area that they just did it themselves. They put in tons of work, both of the manual labor kind and their signature bargain-hunting skills to find us plants, rocks, and other materials. They did a fantastic job, and we owe them free coffee for the next two centuries. They put in a cute little plum tree and some herbs and groundcover plants that will spread over the next year. The plants are still small now, and they don't show up very well in pictures, but already the hell strip looks a million times better.



And just when you thought life couldn't get any more exciting, Jill and I went to the semi-annual Sysco food show. As soon as we walked in the entrance, Jill said, "Well, we've found our photo backdrop for this trip." I certainly hope you can zoom in on the picture below to really appreciate the detail of the ice sculpture we are standing in front of. In case you're having a hard time getting oriented, let me tell you that it includes a whole squid (or maybe an octopus?) and a lobster holding three pieces of asparagus in its claw. A true masterpiece.

As the Beach Boys tell us, Christmas comes this time each year

For the past month, I've had the strange experience of being immersed in holiday baking despite the fact that the weather is still on the fence between summer and fall. Generous Servings will be selling holiday pies, cookies, and other festive breads and pastries this holiday season, and we spent weeks baking all the different recipes so we could take pictures of everything to make a brochure and website. My sense of seasons is so affected by food that the smell of spice cookies immediately starts me singing "Good King Wenceslas", which means that by the time Christmas actually rolls around, I will have been humming carols for four months. Good thing I know all the words, or I might get bored.

Before embarking on the cookie marathon, we hired two assistant bakers/baristas, who plunged (at least up to their elbows) into making doughs and icing. Between the four of us, we made dozens of types of cookies, pies, and my masterpiece, the Buche de Noel (Yule Log cake):


Ooooooh, don't you want one of those for your holiday centerpiece? (Meringue mushrooms included!) To see lots more pictures of yummy stuff, check out http://www.GenerousServings.com/pastries.html. And if you want a Thanksgiving pie or a cute cookie assortment for a holiday party, please PLEASE pre-order them, so we can hire enough elves to bake everything.

We also rolled out a brand-new soup and salad menu last week. We're making homemade soups each day, with homemade bread (seriously), plus some great salads. In our ongoing process of getting a clue about marketing, we had the great idea to put some signs on our windows about our new menu, and they are having the predictable effect of increasing traffic in the cafe. Honestly, we are the worst marketers in the world--how can it have taken a year for us to realize we should put signs in the windows? Here's a picture showing the decals that we put up, which we think look pretty sharp:



Along with the great customers we've been seeing lots of recently, a really strange man came in and gave Jill a "present" that he had found on the ground outside. Here she is modeling it:

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We built a freezer!

We've been working all summer on getting a walk-in freezer to go outside, because our indoor freezer is constantly packed to the gills. Every time we want to put something in the little freezer (which is much bigger than a home freezer, but still seems little to us), we have to take something else out, and with our ice cream sandwiches holding strong, we badly need more room. However, a walk-in freezer is a big investment, and it's taken us a long time to investigate our options, decide what we want, get bids, and save up the money. During this process, my boyfriend found an internet site selling "do-it-yourself" freezers that don't require a refrigeration technician to install. That would save us $1,000 on installation costs, and the freezers were cheap, so after exacting a promise from my boyfriend to help us with the installation, eventually we decided to go down that route.

The freezer arrived in pieces in the middle of a private event we were hosting last week. Between serving the main course and the dessert, Jill and I ran out and unloaded the pieces off the truck. They were not light, and of course we were wearing nice clothes and everything. Here's a picture of Jill with the pieces:


Then my boyfriend came and did the installation, including pouring a new concrete pad to put the thing on. This is us in the early stages of putting the pieces together (our existing walk-in refrigerator is in the background):


Just like when you buy furniture that requires assembly, the instructions that came with this thing were obviously translated from another language, and also intended for refrigeration technicians who had done this kind of thing before (despite the fact that it was a DIY freezer). In the above picture, my boyfriend is holding a piece of metal that did not appear anywhere in the installation diagrams, which we couldn't figure out where to put. Here is another picture when we were almost done with the installation:


As you can see here, he's is still holding the same piece of metal, which we never figured out where to put. (You can't see it, but I am wearing the "Burritos for Obama" t-shirt that I got for free when I was walking around downtown during the convention.) At this point, only one other piece remained uninstalled: the 250-pound compressor that sits on the roof of the walk-in (covered with the green tarp in the above picture). Hmmm, how to get that up there. I called the company that sold us the freezer and asked them how they recommended getting the compressor on the roof, and the guy kind of laughed and said he had no idea.

This stumped us for a while. We went to an equipment rental store and tried to rent some kind of winch, but nothing was the right size. The equipment rental guys were all intrigued by the problem, and eventually they got us in touch with a crane company, and believe it or not, we rented a crane (with operator). It was not a big crane, and we only had it for an hour, but it was pretty cool. So now we have a nice spacious freezer, which is working great.

This morning I went to a restaurant equipment store to buy some shelving for the freezer. While the sales guy was entering my company information into the computer, he asked me what we do at Generous Servings. I said I teach cooking classes, and he said, "There is certainly a need for that! I'm not trying to be sexist or anything, but there are a lot of women out there who have no clue how to cook." Uh, what part of that statement is not sexist? I said, "There are a lot of men out there who have no clue how to cook either," and he said, "Well, sure, but the expectations are a lot lower. We can live on beer and potato chips, but women have to feed a family! I mean, most men are out making money, while women have kids to cook for." He bumbled on about how he and his brothers had to learn to cook out of self-preservation because their mom couldn't cook, and I just couldn't think of anything productive to say. Dude, you're talking to a 30-year-old woman who owns her own business and is wearing a sweatshirt that says, "What part of quantum theory don't you understand?", and you are a 45-year-old loser salesman at a restaurant equipment store. Not to be sexist or anything.

Life moves on after the vegans depart

Well, the DNC is gone, and in its wake at Generous Servings are two jars of Vegannaise (vegan "mayonnaise"), a box of "Not Chick'n" brand of not-bouillon cubes, and nine pepper grinders (for which I have no explanation). It was actually pretty fun.

The "celebrity chef", Tal, arrived on Saturday, and he didn't look like Mario Batali. He's a skinny ex-New Yorker with a generous, laid-back attitude. His sidekick Lex ("as in Lex Luther") flew in from Texas, and was kind of like you'd hope a chef from Texas would be: big, melodramatic, loving the media circus. They were full of praise for our kitchen. Tal said he had expected to be cooking in some basement, so our spacious, bright kitchen was a welcome surprise. A good start.

The first couple of days of cooking with them were the funniest, because we got to hear all about their vegan cooking philosophies. There was lots of talk of cleansing toxins, probiotics, and doing yoga. Besides me, there were several other helpers who had been hired from the vegan cooking network, most notably a chef from Boulder named Ron who exists entirely in his own universe, including while talking to others. He was a Franciscan monk for 25 years but finally quit because they didn't appreciate his cooking. The first day I cooked with Ron, he had brought a bottle of Mona Vie, a "potent new blend of 19 rare and powerful fruits." Ron was handing out shots of this juice and I was very interested to try it because I just read a Newsweek article about the sketchy pyramind scheme used to make money off this stuff (a bottle costs $40, and the only way to get it is to become an unpaid distributor for the company). Ron assured me that this was the active formulation, with glucosamine, which is good because I had been really worried about that. No point in drinking the inactive formulation! Ron drinks two shots a day, and he credits it with his health and energy. However, I thought it tasted disgusting, and I couldn't even drink my shot. I'll just have to get my energy, joint health, cancer-avoidance, relief from warts and seizures, sex drive, and healthy skin elsewhere.

It turns out that the cooking wasn't very intense: with four or five people helping each day, we finished all the hors d'oeuvres by about 11 am, and then Tal and Lex took them down to the hotel and stayed there for the rest of the day. Some of the vegan things we cooked were surprisingly good, including a fake chicken product that I had been disparagingly referring to as "toficken", but which actually tasted almost exactly like chicken. Less successful was a breakfast that Tal cooked for all of us one day that included fake scrambled eggs and fake bacon that tasted like fake food.

On Thursday there were hugs all around, and we took a group picture that Tal promised to e-mail to me but I haven't gotten yet. Then the vegans were off to convert new souls, and I spent an hour throwing away random vegan ingredients they had left behind. I gave away the pepper grinders to my Herbs and Spices class that night.

The DNC finds Generous Servings

As you know, the Democratic National Convention is rolling into town next week. Denver is going pretty crazy: lots of road closures, all the hospitals standing by to treat terrorist attack victims, the ACLU already writing its freedom-of-speech suits so it can just fill in the names of the people involved when some protesters get arrested. We already got a visit from a pair of anarchists named Pander and Flander who were passing through Denver on their way to Burning Man and wanted to drop off some anarchist pamphlets. They bought coffee, so apparently anarchists do use legal tender, which was something I've often wondered about.

For the most part, we were planning on lying low during the convention. We made extra cookies in case we get some tourist overflow, and we were going to offer some lunchtime cooking classes to give people from the convention a break from disgusting catered food. Other than that, we were going to avoid downtown, and we weren't going to sell Obamuffins or anything. However, a few days ago the DNC found us, and made us an offer we couldn't resist.

We got a call from a realtor who said he was helping organize a big catered event for a very prominent Democrat. I don't know if I should use her name, but let's just say that she's a liberal talking head whose last name starts with "H" and rhymes with "Schnuffington". The realtor's name is Barry, and his partner's name is Tom, so we might as well just call them Tom and Jerry for short. These guys were supposed to lay the groundwork for the Schnuffington Post's DNC contingent, which includes providing catered hors d'oeuvres for 300 people all day for the four days of the convention. To this end, Ms. Schnuffington is flying a caterer out from L.A., and of course this guy needs a kitchen to cook in. The call from Barry was because the kitchen they had originally lined up for the caterer had fallen through, and they were frantically searching for another place for this guy to work. Barry said that he didn't want to drop names, but the caterer was a something of a celebrity chef. There's really nothing worse you could say to try to win Jill and me over, except possibly that he's a celebrity chef who's going to be cooking an all-vegan menu, which is the next thing Barry said. We said we didn't rent our kitchen, thanks anyway.

A few hours later, Tom and Barry showed up to beg in person. They said they could make this worth our while, and monetary figures were mentioned. They were desperate, and it began to seem like a pretty good business proposition for us. Don't worry, we weren't extortionists. I ended up talking to the celebrity chef on the phone (who I've never heard of, and to give him credit, he didn't sound snooty), who was on his way back from catering Ellen DeGeneres' birthday party. We worked out a deal, and the chef is arriving tomorrow to take a tour of the kitchen. They paid us a deposit with Ms. Schnuffington's personal credit card, which is pretty funny.

In the meantime, Tom and Barry have been in near-constant communication with us, trying to figure out what they need to buy for the chef, dropping stuff off, etc. They wanted me to recommend prep cooks to help the chef, and I said I was free (now that they're taking over my kitchen). They asked me to send them my resume, which was sort of amusing, since my current occupation is The Boss Of This Kitchen. But the chef won more points in my estimation when he wrote back in response to my "application" that I would be great! (exclamation his). I will admit that I suffered a moment of insecurity--what if he asks me to do something I don't know how to do? Then I remembered that my whole job these days is to know how to do most cooking stuff, and fake it when I don't.

I've spent the last couple of days trying to make sure that we're all ready for next week, since I'm not sure how much we'll be able to use the kitchen for Generous Servings' cooking, and who knows what this week will hold for any of us. I'm excited to be a part of something that should be pretty interesting and stimulating but that I have absolutely no responsibility for. I'm very curious to see how the chef handles the inevitable problems with this job (some of which I can already anticipate--for example, there is no plan for how to get the food from Generous Servings to the downtown hotel where it's being served). Being a caterer, especially one who flies to different states, requires a lot of thinking on your feet, and this guy must be really good at it, since he's the Caterer to the Stars. We'll see!

On grocery shopping and bread

A lot of people ask me where we get the ingredients for our classes. The short answer is, I go grocery shopping a lot. We get some stuff from Sysco, which is the Microsoft of food suppliers: everyone sort of hates them, everyone still uses them. Actually, I shouldn't badmouth Sysco, because our rep is nice (hi Carlo!), and they've given us a semi-permanent exemption from the minimum order amount because we're just a little too small to ever quite make it. Anyway, we get stuff like flour, sugar, paper products, dish detergent, and trash bags from Sysco.

Then there is a pantheon of stores I do "specialty shopping" at, including Asian markets, Indian markets, Vitamin Cottage (for very large quantities of wheat bran to make bran muffins), King Soopers (for the kind of sparkling water we use in the cafe), Safeway (for the gyoza wrappers I like to use for potstickers), and a few others.

Most of the good stuff--produce, cheese, meat, strange legumes--we get from Sunflower Market, which is like Whole Foods without the attitude or alternative economic system. There's a Sunflower about a mile from Generous Servings, so I can walk there with my teen camps, not to mention stopping there on my way to and from home. I go to Sunflower, on average, more than once a day. Despite my omnipresence, I got the cold shoulder when I tried to negotiate a discount. They told me they don't do discounts, although a chef behind me in line one day got a discount on his purchase. After much effort, I convinced Sunflower to let me do a cooking demonstration there a couple of weeks ago, and they're finally starting to warm up to me. Apparently before they saw me in action, they thought I was lying when I told them that I teach cooking classes.

Tonight I was in Sunflower, as usual, but I hadn't eaten dinner and I was starving. One sad fact about Sunflower is that their prepared foods (soups, pasta salad, etc.) are really bad, so that wasn't going to be a solution to my starvation. I decided to get the ingredients for a veggie sandwich, a dish I perfected a decade ago when I worked in a microbiology lab in Charlottesville, Virginia. I used to make these sandwiches whenever I didn't have any leftovers to bring for lunch, and they were so good that I would look forward to lunch all morning. The sandwich has cucumbers, tomatoes, roasted red peppers (which I keep in my freezer), maybe a little mesclun mix, and hopefully alfalfa sprouts on it. If you have some boursin cheese, it's awesome as a spread, or you can smoosh some ripe avocado on. If you have both boursin and avocado, oh happy day. I got so good at making this sandwich that I could do it all with one knife, which requires peeling the cucumber with a bread knife. But the real secret to the sandwich was the bread.

There was a bread bakery in Charlottesville called the Albemarle Baking Company, which made the most fantastic baguette I've ever had. The most fantastic by an order of magnitude. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just making up the memory of this bread, but I know that's not the case because I actually discovered this bread on two independent occasions. The first was when I took a semester off from Yale and went down to Charlottesville to apprentice to a chef in a little bed and breakfast restaurant. They served this fantastic bread at the restaurant I worked in, but I didn't know where it came from, and it never occurred to me that private citizens might be able to obtain the bread for themselves. After I finished my apprenticeship, I went back to college and finished my degree, and then I moved back to Charlottesville for a year. Halfway through that year, I bought a sandwich from a coffee shop, and I realized that it was made with the same mythical bread that I remembered from the restaurant. This time I asked where they got the bread, and they told me about the Albemarle Baking Company. For the next several months, I bought as much of the bread as I could (they often sold out of the baguettes, and even when they had them there was a limit on how much each person could buy). Usually I would eat a whole baguette in the car on the way home. After I moved from Charlottesville, I assumed I'd eventually find equally good bread in California, but I never did, despite buying baguettes at dozens of bakeries. Denver hasn't even come close, so if you've got a nomination, please pass it on.

So tonight I was stumped about what bread to buy for my veggie sandwich. I started feeling sorry for myself that I never have time to bake bread, which then made me laugh because I actually bake bread most days of the week, it just isn't directly for me. In my previous life, before cooking was my job, I used to have lots of interesting food in my refrigerator and freezer at home. Now my fridge looks like those of some of the guys I dated in grad school: all I have are beverages and condiments. I've exhausted all of my frozen emergency rations, too, so there's no hope that I might dig out some good bread. Sunflower sells a lot of artisan breads, but I felt them through the wrappers and all the crusts were soft, which is not a good sign. I ended up buying some ciabatta, and by the time I got home (after swinging by King Soopers; why go shopping at one place when you can easily stop at two?) I was starting to self-digest. I toasted the bread, which helped a lot, and made my sandwich (with no roasted red peppers, because of course I don't have any of those in my freezer anymore), and you know what? It was great. Even the bread tasted pretty good. Avocado hides a multitude of flaws. Now I will patiently await the next time I know I'll have good bread, in my Secrets of Baking Fantastic Breads class next week. Mmmmmm.

Culinary Camps march on

I've spent most of the past few months teaching Culinary Camps for Teens. Today was the first day of the fourth session of the summer (each five days long), and I'm happy to report that this was the most fun first day so far. This camp has a great group of kids (not to say that any of my participants hasn't been great, but this group really clicks well), and we had tons of fun today. We walked to the Sunflower Market and had a tropical fruit tasting, which was cool (including a first for me: I'd never had a burro banana before--it was really good!). All the kids in this group are enthusiastic about trying new things, and today we had one of the moments that these camps are designed in the hope of: one of the girls decided to try a bell pepper for the first time in her memory, and it turns out that she likes them.

I've taken some pictures of each of the last three camps, so here's a montage:

Making pasta--always a big hit.

Here's one group of kids working on their fruit animals--they were supposed to make animals (real or imaginary) out of an assortment of fruits and vegetables.


Some fruit animal creations.

My feet hurt

It's been crazy around here. Two weeks ago I taught our first five-day Culinary Camp for Teens of the summer, which requires me to be "on stage" from 11 am to 7 pm every day, and then there's the shopping, clean-up, and routine business duties. It's tiring. We wrapped that up on Friday with a cooking showcase, to which we invited the camp participants' parents and friends, and all the kids made hors d'oeuvres to show off their new cooking skills. The kids got to pick what they wanted to make for the showcase (with guidance), and they worked really hard on the dishes, so we ended the camp with a bang. Most of the kids' families came a few minutes before they were supposed to, and of course we weren't quite ready, so they waited out in the cafe and got to watch their kids run around and frantically clean up the kitchen. Here are some pictures of the final event:




Yes, in the background of the picture above there are two charming 13-year-old girls who apparently believe that cameras steal their souls. They behaved all week like they were in a competition to see who could act the most disaffected, as Jill's boyfriend David (who teaches high school) astutely characterized it. It was painful. I'm sure I was equally annoying when I was 13.

After all this excitement, the next day was the Highland Street Fair. We've been hearing all year about this annual event, which supposedly draws 40,000 people to the six-block Highland business area. In fact, several people said to us in rather threatening tones, "You know about the Street Fair, right? You better be ready." We were nervous, because we had no idea what to be ready for. We tried to figure out how many customers to expect, but we really didn't know, so we basically made as much of everything as we possibly could. That meant that the night after my culinary camp ended, I spent hours making hundreds of cookies and muffins, and Jill made dozens of gallons of iced tea, iced coffee, and lemonade. Then we got here early, with all the friends we could rope into helping, and what happened was...nothing. I mean, it was busy, but not nearly as busy as we had hoped/feared. We certainly did way more business than on an average Saturday, but it wasn't twenty times as much, which is about what we had prepared for. So we had a lot of muffins to donate. A lot.

And then the hits just kept coming: we had three private events last week, I taught three full cooking classes and one that was almost full, and today I started the second session of culinary camp. A bright spot about starting a new session of culinary camp is that it makes me feel young: on the first day of camp, all the kids get really tired and complain of their feet and backs hurting from standing all day, and of course my feet hurt too, but that's become a steady state, so I can pretty much ignore it and laugh at the kids.

One fun thing that's been happening over the past few weeks is that we've been getting to the bottom of some of the huge packages of ingredients that we bought when we first opened. When we placed our first couple of food orders, we really didn't know what we'd need, so it seemed to make sense to buy 30 pounds of peanut butter, for example. It turns out that 30 pounds of peanut butter comes in a bucket that a small child could easily drown in, which means that after you've used most of the peanut butter, you have to reach your whole arm in to scrape the stuff out of the bottom, inevitably getting peanut butter all over your arm. Thank goodness we're done with that. I also finished off the 50-pound bag of chocolate chips, which I am pretty proud of:

On the occasion of my thirtieth birthday

Last week I turned 30, a momentous occasion I celebrated by teaching a Sushi class. I'm not really into birthdays--I'm not one of those people who tries to hide which day is her birthday, but I'm also not interested in surprise parties or wearing a Burger King crown all day either. What I've found about my adult birthdays is that they nudge me toward reflection on the current state of my life, the events of the past year and the one ahead, and my general satisfaction. This birthday, being one that was heralded by my health insurance company sending me a letter saying that my premiums were increasing because I was "aging into a new bracket", was one that I thought might be accompanied by a fair amount of angst, but I never really felt that.

Along with me turning thirty, Generous Servings was 6 months old this past week. We're not past the infant mortality threat yet, but it's nice to be over the hump to making it through our first year. Today I was talking with our accountant about quarterly taxes, and he said, "How's the business going? Are you doing as well as you thought you would be?" People ask me this pretty often, and I'm always stumped, because to be honest, I never had a firm idea of where we should be at this point. Sure, I wrote a business plan with lots of projections, but anyone who believes his own projections for a brand-new business is delusional. Heck, five years ago I thought I'd be on my way to a tenure-track professor job at this point in my life, and instead I teach cooking classes, so I certainly don't believe my own projections.

I've definitely learned a lot this past year. There were things about running a business that I knew I'd have to learn, like how to file taxes, but those things are all boring. The more interesting lessons are the ones I had no idea would happen. Here are some that spring to mind:

1) Next time someone I know opens a business, I will show up for them in the first few months. I had no idea how important this would be--just to have warm bodies in your place makes such a huge difference for morale, even if you know they're there because they feel responsible. It's hard to open your doors and have no one come in. We have friends and family in the area who still haven't come in to see Generous Servings, and I'm sure they fully intend to do it at some point, but they've missed the critical window when we really needed them. On the other hand, some people really had a strong showing in those early days, and they will always have a special place in the history of Generous Servings. The family of our dad's cousin Bruce, most of whom live in Pennsylvania, somehow managed to come to both the cafe and cooking classes--with extra friends!--multiple times in the first month we were open, which was really nice.

2) The first two months are the hardest. I assumed that the beginning of the business would be difficult, but I wasn't sure how long it would take us to feel like we were mostly on top of things, and without having any light at the end of the tunnel, this business was feeling a lot like grad school. In hindsight, two months isn't that long, and if I'd known we would be so much more competent at the daily running of the business in just a couple of months, it would have been a lot easier to get through that early period.

3) There really is such a thing as cooking by smell. I often see articles in cooking magazines about using all five senses when you cook, but they always give really stupid examples of how to use hearing (hear bacon sizzle!) and smell. Hearing is still not anywhere near as useful a sense for cooking as sight or touch for me, but smell has really moved up in the ranks. When I'm teaching classes, there are often three or four dishes being made at once, and whatever's in the oven is out of sight, so it's easy to forget about it. However, I've noticed that I can now tell when a baking dish needs to be checked just by catching a whiff of the smell of the finished dish, and I certainly know when someone is burning garlic. It's kind of fun to surprise people by telling them, from across the room, to turn off the heat because their dish is done.

Today we move into a new phase of Generous Servings: it's the first day of our first session of Culinary Camp for Teens. I'm very excited, because teen camps were what got me into this business in the first place. I developed the idea in California, and they were a big hit there. Since we opened here in Denver in December, we've had to wait until now to do our first full-length camp, so it's been a long time in the making. I'm sure there will be lots of great stories, and hopefully I'll remember to take pictures, so stay tuned.

Dangerous Minds in the Kitchen

For the last month, I've been volunteering for Operation Frontline, a nonprofit that puts on cooking and nutrition classes for various disadvantaged populations. I contacted them several months ago because it seemed like something right up my alley, and after talking with the Operation Frontline rep, I agreed to do a six week program teaching teenagers how to cook, and also to host the class in our kitchen at Generous Servings. I was excited about this--I love teaching teens to cook, and it seemed like this volunteer opportunity was exactly the type of thing we've been looking for to put the "generous" in Generous Servings.

The teens for my class were recruited from a group at the local United Way that is composed of kids in foster care who are learning life skills that will help with their imminent emancipation (how bizarre to use that term to refer to getting out of foster care--these kids aren't slaves!). I had a meeting with various people involved with the group to discuss the particular needs of this population, and it became clear that there was some skepticism about whether I could handle working with these kids. In an attempt to impress upon me the severity of the potential behavioral issues of these teens, one person said, "It's going to be like 'Dangerous Minds' in the kitchen," which immediately became a joke around Generous Servings. Jill and I even rented "Dangerous Minds" the night before my first class so that I could get warmed up. Now we refer to the class as Dangerous Minds, as in, "I've got Cooking Basics on Sunday, Herbs and Spices on Tuesday, and Dangerous Minds on Wednesday."

Despite the dire warnings, none of the teens has attempted to stab me with a chef's knife yet. In fact, they are incredibly well-behaved. It actually makes me sad, because I think they've had all the normal teen boundary-pushing tendencies beaten out of them. They raise their hands to talk, even when we're just sitting around the dining table, they call me "Miss", and one of them showed me her hands for my approval after she washed them. A few of them are not really interested in the cooking, but the majority are really into it, which is fun. We're working from a curriculum set by the program, which also incorporates nutrition lessons (there's a volunteer nutrition educator who does that part), so all the recipes are "lite". That part is kind of annoying, since I think fat-free cheese is about the grossest thing on the planet, but I'm surviving. So far we've made pizzas (with whole wheat crust, which doesn't work, in case you're wondering), macaroni and cheese with low-fat everything and whole wheat pasta, fruit smoothies, and vegetable chili and buckwheat pancakes (both my recipes, which came out fantastic). I hope the kids are having fun--it's hard to tell with these kids, but I think they're getting something out of it. If nothing else, they have a darn good pancake recipe.

Another great day at the Food Show

Last week we went to our second Sysco Food Show. We didn't have much time, but luckily we understood the layout since this was our second time, so we were able to efficiently run around to get all the best samples. First we had to check in, where we were given nametags with barcodes on them, and then when we entered the show there were people with barcode scanners who had to scan our breasts. Perhaps not the best way to control access.

We also decided that we have a tradition to uphold in terms of getting a really interesting picture of ourselves taken (last time we got the picture of us in front of the patriotic crown roast of lamb). It wasn't until the very end that we found the perfect backdrop. There was a produce display that inexplicably had a very elaborate tropical landscape set up behind it, complete with waterfall (unfortunately we are standing in front of the waterfall in this picture). We asked one of the produce guys to take our picture, which he did with enthusiasm, although I will note that Jill and I are the only people who treat the Sysco Food Show as a tourist attraction.

Meat and pastries

Jill and I had a great adventure this morning: we went on a tour of a meat packaging plant. We're not really sure why we got invited to go there, but it seemed like an opportunity that shouldn't be missed. It was very educational. This wasn't the slaughterhouse--there were no cattle being shot or bled out or anything--just the place where they take big muscles and cut them into steaks, chops, etc. It was actually quite sanitary--the workers all had a lot of blood on their white coats, but the floors were clean, it didn't smell bad, and of course it was very cold. The whole building was refrigerated. Too bad no one warned us about that.

The guy who showed us around was insane, in the way of anyone who really REALLY likes his job. He takes meat very seriously. He would tell us a fact and then quiz us on it a few minutes later. He also complimented our practical footwear, saying that "some girls show up in flip-flops!" You know how silly girls are.

I was going to take some pictures of the meat cutters, but honestly, it wasn't that exciting, and they didn't look like they really wanted to have their pictures taken. We didn't get to handle any meat ourselves, but we still got to wear some really spiffy duds, and since we were pretending to be tourists, we asked someone to take our picture:


On a different note, I've been lookng forward to making almond croissants for a while now...but the thing is, the traditional preparation requires having leftover croissants to fill with almond paste and re-bake, and it's taken a long time to accumulate enough leftover croissants. I finally made them a couple of days ago, and here's a picture to make you hungry:



I also made my favorite of all our pastries, the chocolate-orange sweet rolls:


We've gotten a lot of compliments on our biscotti, so we've started having it available all the time. The problem is that the batches I now make don't really fit in the little mixers, and we are still awaiting some parts before the big mixer can be repaired. Around 2:00 am I find this kind of scene quite funny:


That's the time of night when everything gets a little surreal, and I start to lose fine motor control and spill stuff, so it seems amusing that chunks of biscotti dough are flying out of the mixer.

The other thing that I've been making a lot of is our new most-popular item: ice cream sandwiches. I'm getting better at it, and I've developed a new recipe for a softer peanut butter cookie and a chocolate chip cookie to go on the outside. Here's a picture we took of some of our classic combinations:


From top to bottom, you've got a plain chocolate sandwich, a peanut butter sandwich with chocolate chips, and a chocolate sandwich with everything (nuts, chips, and toasted coconut). Mmm, good.

Speaking of things that are good, the other day I had a thing that was not good. Here's what happened. One of our customers requested that we make bran muffins, and he told us that Starbucks' bran muffins were really good. I haven't had a pastry from Starbucks in a while, because last time I checked they were gross, but he was so enthusiastic that I figured it was worth a shot. I stopped in a Starbucks last week (which made me feel really guilty--everyone I know says he doesn't approve of Starbucks, but when you own an independent coffee shop, you have to walk the walk), but they were out of bran muffins. In fact, they said they always sold out of bran muffins early, which added to the mystique, so I told Jill to keep her eyes open for a Starbucks bran muffin too. A few days ago, I went to the same Starbucks and they were sold out again, so then I went to the Starbucks half a block away, and they had the elusive bran muffins! I got one in triumph and broke off a piece to try as I was leaving the store. It was really bad. Not just a little bad, but really bad, like you don't even want to swallow it because it's so dry and gritty. I called Jill and told her that I had found the bran muffin, and before I could say anything she said, "Yeah, I bought one too, and it sucks." This is how much of the muffin I choked down, in the service of research:


Why do people buy these things? My irritation has nothing to do with hating Starbucks on principle. I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. And this is not a question of being a pastry snob. I totally understand why people might buy a not-so-good pastry if they were munchy and didn't have somewhere else convenient to get something better. But this muffin was not in the "not-so-good" category, it was really terrible. You can get better muffins plastic-wrapped in 7-Eleven. Well, maybe. I haven't eaten one of those in a long time either. You know that the plastic is probably the healthiest part of those things.

Anyway, as requested, I've been testing out some bran muffin recipes. I made two recipes and had several people taste-test them, and each of them had their fans. I like one of them much better than the other, and since I'm the baker, I think I know which one is going to win. We're trying to decide whether people really want sticky walnut topping on their bran muffins, and that's why they think the Starbucks version is good, in which case we'll just put walnuts on ours. If you feel strongly about this, let me know.

The ice cream sandwich conundrum

We've been getting geared up for summer at Generous Servings. First, we got some furniture for our brand-new patio. We had bought seven wrought-iron patio tables at an auction back in October, which have been living in my back yard, so first we had to rent a truck to move them to Generous Servings. Then we needed some chairs. We heard that there were some for sale at Costco, so I went out there with my boyfriend Matt, intending to buy 28 chairs and then go rent another truck to haul them back. Once we bought the chairs, I felt that it would be much easier to try to stuff them into our cars than to go through the hassle of renting a truck, so we called Jill's boyfriend David to meet us there with another car. Meanwhile, Matt and I worked on wedging the greatest possible number of chairs into my car. By the time David arrived with Jill's car, we had determined that we could fit all the chairs into back seats and passenger seats of the two cars, but now there were three of us, so someone wasn't going to be able to come home, at least not in any comfortable fashion. We discussed the idea of one of us riding in the trunk, and I was the only person who didn't feel claustrophobic at the thought (plus David and Matt were just being helpful, so it was pretty much up to me to sacrifice myself), so I was elected to go home in the trunk. It seemed kind of exciting, actually. But then David discovered that he could somehow fold himself around the chair legs in the back seat and actually sort of sit down, although he would be impaled if the car went around a corner too quickly. So Matt drove my car, I drove Jill's car, David squeezed into the back, and we got all the chairs home in one load.

Here's a picture of our building, with the patio out front and the pear trees in bloom:



A couple of weeks ago we were brainstorming about a fun summertime treat we could offer on the weekends, when there are lots of families walking around the neighborhood, and we came up with the idea to make ice cream sandwiches. We found good recipes for both chocolate and peanut-butter cookies for the outside of the sandwich, and I made a small batch to try out. The first weekend we offered them, we sold out and almost had food riots. So Jill and I went to work trying to figure out an efficient way to make a lot of ice cream sandwiches. This is not as easy as you might think--ice cream sandwiches are the messiest things I have ever made. Somehow we end up with both crumbs and melted ice cream all over the kitchen. But we are perfecting a top-secret method, which we may patent. Here are some cryptic photos of the process:




And then comes the secret part, where we get the ice cream inside the cookies, which we can't show you (actually, we just didn't take a picture of it, because both of us were so sticky). The final results (minus the mini chocolate chips we roll them in once they've had a chance to firm up for a while in the freezer):

Hail the conquering heroes!

I've been storing up things to blog about, but I haven't had a good block of time to type them out in weeks. March was a busy month for us, with more than one private event every week, which meant that whenever I wasn't actually teaching a class or doing an event, I was preparing for the next one. April is much quieter, which is not good in a business sense, but I have to admit it's nice to do silly things like my laundry.

There is much to report. First, you will be pleased to hear that Generous Servings decisively won our court battle against the evil shipping company that dropped our mixer. They didn't show up to the court date. I had to sit in the courtroom (hardly the echoing chamber of justice I was hoping for; the decorating scheme leaned heavily toward wood laminate) for the requisite 20 minutes past our court time to make sure that they weren't going to come late, which I spent in conversation with the only other person who had showed up for his court date (a guy who was being sued for $2800 for knocking over and scratching a bike in a bike shop). There were three cases on the docket, but no plaintiff-defendant pair was present, so there wasn't a lot of drama. The only other people there to witness my great triumph were the judge, who had a really impressive Santa Claus beard, and a court clerk who obviously had years of practice at cutting people off who were about to launch into long stories. When it was my turn, the judge called me up, asked my name, checked that I had the sheriff's affidavit of service (proving that the freight company had been notified about our court date), and told me to tell my story. I kept it to the one-sentence version--the freight company dropped my mixer and now it doesn't work--and since there was no one there to contest it, that was about all there was to do. The judge asked me a few questions about the estimate for repairing the mixer, and then it was over. My very first court victory. Of course, collecting the money is an entirely different matter--the court doesn't help you with that. I followed my dad's very crafty suggestion of allowing the appeal period to elapse before I contacted the company to tell them where to send the check--no point in drawing their attention to the fact that they lost while there's anything they can do about it. Now that it's been more than 15 days, I am ready to resume my usual role of Most Annoying Customer You've Ever Tried To Screw Over. Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.

Around the same time as my legal debut, we also had our first unannounced inspection by the Health Department. The inspector was very nice, and it didn't take long for me to casually mention that I have a Ph.D. in microbiology, after which we really bonded--he had a master's in biology! We had a heart-to-heart conversation about science, including the joys of labeling and handwashing. Jill had to leave the room to keep from laughing. The inspector gave us a clean report, which we have hung up in the bathroom, in case you'd like to see it. He also said he'd stop by for coffee soon, which I think should give us some extra credit, because if the health department inspector is willing to eat in your establishment, that's a very good sign.

Another exciting thing that happened was totally unexpected. A month ago, some people came in who are planning on opening a chain of coffee shops in the area, and they were sampling baked goods from every bakery they could find to determine where to purchase the pastries for their stores. They asked where we bought our pastries, and we told them we baked them all here, and we gave them some pastries to sample. A week later they called and said that our pastries were the best they'd had in Denver. So we set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of wholesaling our pastries to their coffee shops, which I have no idea how to do, but seems like an interesting possibility. That meeting was today, so I've been baking extra all week to stockpile a broad variety of our pastries for them to try. I got a little nervous about the meeting--I feel like I'm jumping into yet another arena in which I am lacking some vital information that would come with experience. I got stressed out about needing to calculate how much it costs us to make each pastry, but when I finally got around to gathering all the ingredient costs and putting my Excel skills to work, I learned some interesting facts about what we sink money into (our most expensive item to make is banana bread--would you ever have guessed that?). Also, it turned out to be fun to realize how many kinds of pastries we actually make (I've never seen them all piled up in one place before), and how proud I am of their quality. I don't know if the wholesaling thing will work out--there are a lot of practical issues (delivery, liability, etc.) that might prove difficult--but it was a good meeting, and we'll keep talking.

We're running a special on class registrations right now--sign up for three classes and get $30 off--so if you've been looking at a few classes (or want to sign up for a class with a couple of friends), now's the time. We've also got $1 lattes in the cafe through tomorrow to celebrate the grand opening of our patio (which is actually closed now because it snowed). That's it for now--I've got to do dishes from the very fun Chicken In Every Pot class that I just finished. I'll leave you with a quote from one of the participants' feedback forms: "I loved this class--I learned so many new recipes and skills that I will be able to use at home. Everything tasted amazing and Mary was a great teacher--very helpful and patient. I want to come back for more classes soon."

Awwwww, I love you guys. Group hug.

The Sidewalk Police Strike Again!

As the weather has gotten warmer and we’ve had a few balmy fake-spring days, fixing our patio has become a high priority. Ever since we first saw the building, we’ve planned to put some patio furniture out on the concrete area in front, and to comply with the code for outdoor eating areas, we commissioned a railing to be constructed back in December. We got bids and picked a railing company that seemed very eager to please, although there were clearly some communication issues. While they worked on fabricating the railing, we set about getting rid of the huge shed that was taking up part of the patio area. We put it on craigslist, got a few bites, and eventually met with a guy who bought it from us and was going to rent a truck to haul the shed away while we were gone over New Year’s.

Unfortunately, right about then we had our sewer back-up, the repairs for which involved jack hammering a ten-foot long trench through the patio area. Now we were going to have to replace the concrete, and that was one too many things for us to deal with back in December. We told the railing guys to hold off on installing the railing, because we still needed to have the shed removed, and we weren’t sure what to do about the concrete. Then we left on vacation.

When we came back, the shed was gone, and the railing guys were at work installing the railing. As I said, communication was not their strong point. Since they were already cementing the railing in place, we figured there wasn’t much point in arguing about it. Then the guy who had paid for the shed showed up and wanted to know where the shed had gone, which came as a surprise to me, since I thought he had taken it. Turns out the railing guys had taken it, because they thought they were being helpful and getting it out of the way. They had paid $150 to have it towed to their house, and they wouldn’t give it back without getting their money back, although I pointed out that they had actually stolen the shed from us. I finally spoke with the boss, who turned out to be the 15-year-old brother of the salesman I’d been dealing with, and the only one who spoke fluent English. We negotiated for me to ransom the shed for $75 so I could give it to the guy who had already paid me for it. I had to go to the railing guys’ house with the cash, and I thought they might kill me. It was not a good scene.

All of this excitement totally sapped our energies for dealing with the patio concrete problem, so we just left the jack hammered trench there for a few months, enclosed by a totally useless railing. Finally, a few weeks ago we got motivated to get quotes on the concrete work, including replacing the sidewalk squares that the sidewalk police had told us we had to have fixed before the summer so that we can get our permanent certificate of occupancy. We found a concrete guy, Matt, who seemed totally competent, reliable, and gave us a good bid. We felt very comfortable about him doing the work, and to our surprise, he was ready to get started the next day.

In order to do the sidewalk repairs, we needed a permit from the sidewalk police, which involves inspections at several stages of the project. Matt’s crew tore out the old patio and the cracked sidewalk stones on Tuesday, and the sidewalk police came out to inspect the demolition, but instead of focusing solely on the sidewalk, the guy walked around the area and noticed that one of our gutter downspouts drained into a pipe that had previously been covered by the patio concrete, and the pipe was broken. He said that we would now need to repair that pipe and drain the water properly to the gutter, which requires a permit from Wastewater Management. Therefore we couldn’t have the concrete poured until a Wastewater Management engineer came out and looked at the situation, which could take six weeks. When any question includes “Wastewater Management”, the answer is always six weeks, even if the entrance to your commercial building is obstructed by a large pit and the entire sidewalk is closed.

At this point, Jill and I both identified a distinctive sinking feeling that we haven’t felt since the end of major combat operations on the building renovations. This feeling characterized the six months between when we first decided to try to buy this run-down building and when we finally wrested the last installment of the construction loan from the bank. I’ve never experienced this feeling in a sustained way in any other context—apparently it is quite unique to building repairs involving city permits. This is the feeling that will prevent me from doing any project like this ever again in my life (unless, as Jill said today, we make ten million dollars on the eventual sale of this building, in which case it might be worth it, but we’re sticking to that threshold). One component of this feeling is the certain knowledge that if inspectors spend enough time at your building, they will find problems.

As luck would have it, the Wastewater Management engineer showed up the following day before I got there, and he did ask Jill several tricky questions, which she did not know the answers to (at least, not the “right” answers in this situation). The engineer must have had a lunch date or something, because he inexplicably did not follow up on those questions, and instead gave us a fairly limited set of requirements for fixing the drainage problem, and went away.

On Thursday afternoon the concrete truck came, and despite the fact that one of our customers walked right through a freshly-poured sidewalk stone (the concrete guys had moved to another area and hadn’t put the cones around it the first stone immediately), we now have a lovely smooth sidewalk, a great patio, plus a new walkway around the back of the building, and much-improved drainage away from the building. I was going to take some pictures today but it started snowing. One of our regulars helpfully informed me that March is Denver’s snowiest month, followed by April. I think that kind of psychological torment is totally unnecessary.

Long time, no blog

I know, it's been a long time, but there just hasn't been too much to blog about recently. I try not to write too many posts that say, "Everything is pretty much like it was last week." I also avoid the captain's-log posts: "Fair day, wind from the east. Played three games of whist." There's a certain type of event that makes for good blogging: it has to be sort of stupid but not so bad that it doesn't seem funny. Sometimes I wish this blog could be a more accurate record of this phase of my life, including the really hard things about running a business and the mistakes we make while trying to do it, but although I really don't mind telling almost anything to almost anyone in conversation, there are limits to what I want on the permanent written record. Especially since our lending bank checks this blog multiple times a day, which is a little creepy, don't you think? (And also inefficient, since I only post about once a week on average; although they haven't checked since March 5, so perhaps my strategy of not writing for a while is working.) I'm being stalked by a bank.

So anyway, the past couple of weeks have been fine. We've been busy, but not insanely busy. I taught our first Cooking with Kids class, featuring nine three- to six-year-olds and their parents, which was messy. The food was quite spectacular, given the circumstances: we made a great melon and grape salad with lime-cardamom dressing, mini quiche with bacon, monkey bread, and homemade granola-yogurt parfaits. Honestly, I'd make any of those recipes again for myself, they came out so well. Then I spent three hours sweeping granola out of every crevice of the kitchen.

We've done several private events, including one which we have decided was the most boring group of people we've ever met, all of which have been quite successful. At the last private event, we made some great dessert hors d'oeuvres, including individual tiramisu and bananas Foster in phyllo cups. I'm still playing with the best ways to make desserts in the amount of time we have available, and both of these recipes were winners. I've also started teaching a coconut milk-sticky rice dessert in my Asian-Inspired Meals classes that I really like. Mmmm, dessert.

Since I don't have any relevant pictures for this post, here's a random picture of some people in a private event playing with the pasta machine (which I call "Play-Doh for adults"):