Our New Coffee Counter and a Eulogy for Summer Vegetables

Last week Jill and I walked through the site and made lots of final decisions about where things should be placed (electrical outlets, switches, etc.), and decided on the final design for the coffee bar. It was kind of stressful: the framers were standing there with their nail guns while Jill and I tried to imagine how deep and high to make the counters, where all the equipment was going to go, and what the flow of customers would be like. We tried to ease the tension by doing some square dancing to the country music the guys had on, but no one seemed really amused. So we made our best guess and let the guys go to it, and a few hours later, Jill could get a sense of the space that will be her home away from home:


(Jill always serves coffee with her eyes closed; it's one of her special talents.) Luckily, the counter as it was framed in seems big enough to us.

We just got our new phone lines installed, so feel free to call us at (303) 455-9730 (of course, you'll have to leave a message, but we'll call back!). Everyone advised me not to pay the phone company its outrageous price for running the phone lines inside the building to our jacks, so I didn't, but then it was unclear who was going to do that work. It turns out, that person is me. I climbed around in the rafters nailing the lines up, which took me about eight times as long as it would have taken anyone who knew what he was doing, but it was quite satisfying (it also makes it easy to know who to blame if the phone doesn't work). Luckily there are about twelve ladders in the building, so getting up to the ceiling wasn't a problem, and although I almost dropped a hammer on my head (hard to imagine, but possible), I emerged unscathed from the mission.

Today it snowed here--a lot. After I bundled up in eight layers of outerwear, I rushed outside to see if I could save any of my garden. I picked all the remaining tomatoes off my plants, harvested my chard, cut my basil plants at the ground, and bid a tearful goodbye to my tarragon. I felt like those Italian winemakers who set fires in their vineyards to try to keep the frost from getting to their grapes. I am going to make pesto tonight and pretend that it's still summer for one more day. I don't know what to do with my tiny green cherry tomatoes. For now they are decorating my table:


Aww, how festive. Too bad the green tomatoes remind me of the slaughter of the innocents. As I was digging tomatoes out of the snow today, I was thinking that I need to come to terms with the fact that I do not like the weather here as much as I liked northern California, but no one can afford to live in the Bay Area unless they invented Google, so I just have to get used to it. Then I went to meet a woman who was selling some cooking equipment, and it turns out she and her husband both went to Stanford twenty years ago. We were making desultory chit-chat about Stanford, and the husband said, "The one thing I really miss about Stanford is the weather--it doesn't get better than that." So apparently two decades of Colorado living haven't erased the memories. I'm sure there will be something to like about this winter...drinking hot cocoa, for one. That will make at least one or two hours of cold weather seem cozy. And how about gingerbread houses? Can't do that in the summer. Of course, you can make gingerbread houses in California, as I did last year (check out my Cathedral of Siena).

No really, there are lots of great things to cook in the fall and winter. Sign up for a class, or contact us about a holiday event for your family, friends, or company. Tonight I'm eating pesto, but then it's on to soups, root vegetables, and holiday foods.