We have fought the good fight, we have finished the race

Skipping to the punchline, we made it through the inspections and are officially legal for business as of 3:30 this afternoon, which is handy since our grand opening party is scheduled for Sunday afternoon (2-5 pm, please come!). Up until 11:30 am, we didn't think we were going to get the final sign-offs allowing us to occupy the building by this afternoon, and up until 2:30 pm we didn't think we would get the last person's signature on our business license, which is required for us to sell anything. It's been stressful.

I haven't taken many pictures this week because we've been going at warp speed the entire time. I've had about an hour and a half of sleep over the past three days. Our goal was to get through all the inspections in three days, although the process usually takes about five days (not including fixing any problems the inspectors found). We needed to expedite the process in order to have our license by today so that we could have our party on Sunday, and Chris and Aaron are famous for pushing through inspections, so we decided to give it a shot. One of the major obstacles was scheduling--there is no system for letting all the city departments know that you are done with construction and need the final sign-offs, so each inspector has to be called individually, and there is a very strict order in which they will sign off, but no one is totally sure what that order is. To fit all these inspections into a few days, we went ahead scheduled inspections that you aren't supposed to call for until you've already passed earlier inspections, and crossed our fingers that we wouldn't have to admit that to the inspectors, because they get really mad when you do that.

We thought the critical day would be Wednesday, because that's when we were getting inspected on the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) work, none of which was totally done yet. It was tight--at one point on Tuesday there were multiple people representing each of those trades stepping all over each other inside, trying to finish up, and some mild inter-trade tensions flared up. Jill and I stayed out of the way and exercised our skills as professional package trackers, following up with the shocking number of companies who didn't deliver our equipment on time. We still don't have a few things that were supposed to be here by the week before Thanksgiving. When we went to the building in the afternoon, we heard the good (and slightly surprising) news that we had passed all the MEP inspections, and we were moving forward with the next round of inspections on Thursday.

Thursday's inspections were the "big picture" ones: the health department, the final inspector from the building department, the fire department, and "public safety" (I don't understand why there is a separate inspector for public safety, since it seems to be included in the other categories, but apparently there is no one else who can check whether you have a double-sided deadbolt on your front door, which was one of the major comments from the public safety inspector). Jill and I stayed at the building until 5 am trying to finish painting (which is the never-ending job), and I could feel that I was developing a bad sore throat that was being exacerbated by the conditions in the building: the heat still wasn't working correctly, there was tons of dust in the air, and then I was breathing fumes from oil paint that we had to use to paint our metal doorframes).

Thursday started off badly. There were still a lot of workers in there doing cosmetic stuff (including such small details as finishing the ceiling around the hood and building the cafe counter), so the place was filled with ladders, drywall dust and sawdust, bits of insulation, and mud, and it looked like we were going to be ready to open in about a month, as opposed to the next day. The building department inspector came first, and he was irritated because apparently he was supposed to come last (Chris and Aaron said that on the job they did right before ours, the rule was that he was supposed to come first). He agreed to come back on Friday morning if we had gotten all the other signatures first, but he wasn't in a good mood about it. Then Don from the health department showed up, and the first thing he said as he walked in the door was, "Why did you call me? You guys aren't anywhere close to being ready." Apparently for his inspection the place is supposed to be cleaned and operational before you call for your health inspection (which makes sense now that I think about it, but I've been focused on the construction details for so long that I didn't even consider that we would have to prove that we know how to mop floors). He said to call him back when we got the place clean. The fire department guy was nice, but he said that our exit signs weren't visible enough and we had to install more, so he told us to call him back on Friday morning to show him that. No one was completely sure if or when the public safety guy was going to come, because we hadn't gotten confirmation from that office, but by the afternoon morale was very low and we were sort of hoping he wouldn't show up, so at least we could get the building in better shape before he saw it and got mad too. However, he did come, and he said that three of our large front windows needed to be replaced because they aren't made from tempered glass, which is a requirement for any window within two feet of a doorway (apparently a lot of people miscalculate by two feet when trying to walk through a doorway). That doesn't come cheap.

Chris and Aaron did their best to recover by getting all the subcontractors to agree to come back early on Friday to do the required work, and then we strategized about how to schedule the inspections again. We knew that the inspectors were already irritated, and they were going to be really mad if we called them out there again in the wrong order. Chris got on the phone with Don, the health department guy, while Jill and I worked with Aaron on the design of the coffee bar. Then Chris came back and announced that we were screwed--Don had said that he was totally booked on Friday, there was no way he was going to squeeze us in, and he'd be back out on Monday to see if we were ready. That would mean we couldn't have the party this weekend. Chris said he had begged Don, and there wasn't any hope. All of us looked at each other for a few seconds, and Jill and I were getting teary. Then I said that I'd call Don and grovel, because I had nothing to lose. I didn't have a plan, and when he answered I just started babbling and trying to sound upbeat about how we could all be "creative" and solve this problem together. My voice was extremely hoarse, and maybe that worked in my favor, because Don said he could come out at 3:30 on Friday. I was totally surprised and went back into the building with a big smile to tell everyone the good news, but the first thing Chris said was that Don's visit would still be too late--we had to file the signature card with the building department by 3:30, and there was no way that office was going to stay open late for us. I put my head down on the counter. I still didn't want to give up, but I couldn't call Don again, but so I decided to write him and e-mail asking if he could come earlier. He never wrote back, so our only hope was that he might be early. We had to tell our food suppliers to postpone our big first orders that had been scheduled for Friday, because we can't legally accept food deliveries until the building has been approved.

By this point I had completely lost my voice, and Jill and I worked out a plan for me to go into the building department at 3:27 and require them to find a sign language interpreter, which we figured would take long enough that Jill might be able to rush over with the completed signature card, so by the time they found someone to help with my disability, we'd have all the signatures. It was going to be dicey.

We knew that the building had to look fantastic when the inspectors returned on Friday, or they'd never sign off on it--we'd already lost the benefit of the doubt--so we got to work cleaning and arranging all our furniture and equipment. We had to make several emergency trips to buy things like toilet paper and fire extinguishers, without which we could be denied permission to open (I know this sounds reasonable, but considering that we still didn't have a complete ceiling, the toilet paper seemed like a ridiculous detail). I stayed there all night, although I did take a short nap on a piece of cardboard on the floor. By 7:00 am the subcontractors started arriving to do all the stuff the inspectors had required, and they thought I was acting really weird because I wasn't talking at all, only gesturing and mouthing words. We still hadn't heard from Don, but Jill and I just couldn't deal with having to tell everyone that our grand opening party was canceled, so we just kept working as if we were going to open tomorrow. Finally I went home around 10:30 am to take a shower and get an hour of sleep.

Forty-five minutes into my nap, Jill called and said that Don was on his way. I was so deeply asleep that I don't remember answering the phone, all I know is that I heard the message and headed for the door. I had to collect a few things I thought Don might ask for, so it took me about twenty minutes to get to the building. I walked in and Jill and Chris were standing together looking white around the eyes with fatigue and anxiety. Jill said, "Don already came, he signed it, and we're done." I didn't even understand what she was talking about for a second. When I finally realized what she was saying, it still seemed unreal, and I could tell it hadn't really sunk in for Jill or Chris either. Chris said that we wouldn't be able to get our business license because there had been some miscommunication with the public safety guy, and he was out on site visits for the rest of the day and wouldn't be available to sign our card. But we could still have our party (we just couldn't sell anything), which was the most important thing. We all weakly congratulated each other. I called the public safety office and left a message saying that they were the last signature we needed and we'd really love to see them that afternoon, but I was pretty sure you couldn't understand the message because I had to whisper it. We all went down to the city building, and for good measure, we stopped in at the public safety office and were told (again) that the inspector was out on inspections, and he wouldn't be available to sign our card until Monday morning.

When we got back to the building, we called our food suppliers and told them we could accept deliveries, although we still hadn't gotten our storage areas set up, so we didn't have anywhere to put the stuff. I still couldn't talk and I was starting to have dizzy spells, and I really wanted to go home to take a nap, but people kept showing up with stuff. As I was deciding that I was really leaving, I looked up to see yet another guy at the door. Chris said hi to him, so I figured maybe it was a contractor I hadn't met yet, but then he asked for me. I couldn't speak, so Jill stepped in, and we found out that this was the public safety guy. We have no idea why he came, but he was in a great mood and signed our form so we could get a business license. That meant I had to go back to the city building to file that form, and at every red light I had to put the car in park in case I fell asleep and released the brake.

Upon my return I called to find out where our chairs were (they were supposed to be delivered yesterday), and was told they'd be there in half an hour. I figured I'd wait for that delivery before going home to sleep. An hour later, I called back and was told the same thing. Another hour later I called again, and this time they said that their truck had had a mechanical failure and was unable to unload the four-ton shipment that was blocking our chairs from getting out, so we wouldn't get our delivery until Monday. I told the woman that I had been up for 80 hours and they better find some way of getting the chairs to us before 6:30 am tomorrow. She wasn't pleased with my tone. I got connected to her supervisor. He said there was no way the delivery could happen today. I said it had to happen. A few minutes later, he figured out a way to make it happen.

So tomorrow is opening day--we're doing a "soft opening" in which we'll serve people who stop by, but we're mostly using the day to finish organizing and get some pastries prepared. I was going to bake some stuff tonight, but I figured that it was getting critical that I recover my voice, so I went home and will now sleep for a little while before going back to bake (and figure out how to hang our menu, hook up our TVs, mount our business name on the exterior, salvage our accounting from the mess we've made over the past few days, etc.). We are on for Sunday--I hope you can come!

It's Coming Together

As expected, things have been incredibly busy as we finish up everything and get ready to open the doors! Our mom, sister, and brother visited for Thanksgiving and we put them to work painting the building. Jill and I have spent another 60 hours doing more painting this week, and it's finally getting finished. It was in the first 15 minutes or so that I recalled why I dislike painting. But now we have a really fun red accent wall that came out just how we imagined:


The dust in this picture was generated by Aaron, who was sanding down our custom coffee counter and bar, which he made using reclaimed wood from the demolition of the interior walls of the building. This is the raw wood, which will be sealed with a thick coat of polyurethane:




We also had some custom stainless steel fabrication done by Jon from Metalhead Fabrication, who did a great job making a table that fits around our stove.



People who stop by and see the building keep telling us that they don't think we're going to be ready to open this week, which is getting on my nerves. Considering how many other things we've accomplished that people said we wouldn't be able to do, I think predictions of failure at this final stage are overrated.

This week the building has been full of people finishing up their parts of the construction: plumbers, insulation installers, drywall guys, electricians, HVAC guys, delivery people, gutter repair people, and us! Jill and I are working about 21 hours a day to get the building in shape and also arrange for our food deliveries, utilities, insurance, employee training, equipment servicing, and about seven thousand other things. About all I do at home is take showers and recharge my cell phone. Yesterday I discovered some laundry in my dryer that's been there for several days. We told our significant others that if they want to see us, they better show up with a paintbrush or power tool. Jill's boyfriend hung our stereo speakers last night, so we finally have music to paint to.

Over the next three days, the building is going to be inspected by every city regulatory agency known to man. If we pass everything, we can open our doors on Friday. We won't be offering full service in the cafe because we need to make all our food, so Friday is really a prep day for us. We're making everything from scratch, from the pastries to the coffee syrups, so it will take us at least a day to be able to offer our full cafe menu. If we pass inspections this week, we're going ahead with our grand opening party on Sunday. If we get hung up on something, we'll have to delay the party by a week, but I'm feeling optimistic right now. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Looks Like Someone Has a Case of the Mondays

I've noticed that Mondays are bad days when you're the owner of a building that's under construction. Most Mondays of the past three months, I've gotten a call before 9 am informing me of that week's crisis. It's a rough way to start the week, especially when you're not a morning person and that call often wakes you up.

Today's crisis call was from Xcel Energy, informing me that there's no way our gas and electric meters can be set before December 10. This news was not totally out of the blue, because about a month ago we found out that Xcel sort of misplaced the application for new service that we submitted back in July, so although they've been working "as quickly as possible" since they rediscovered it, we've been stuck with no power for several weeks after we were ready to have it turned on. In fact, it's been a major issue during construction that we have only a small electric service, and no gas, which means the building doesn't have any lights or heat. That makes it impossible to work in there at night, and means that nothing dries well and we even have to worry about the pipes freezing. All this after the installation of our total-overkill ventilation system, which is capable of maintaining a comfortable temperature even if the building were relocated to Antarctica, but it requires power to do so. Our roof looks like aliens landed on it:



I've been on the phone daily with Xcel trying to get them to hurry up and turn on our service, and last week they told me it would be three to five business days, but apparently someone went into the system and noticed that they're actually three weeks out from the stage we've made it to. The various people I've been harassing at Xcel played Rock-Paper-Scissors to decide who had to tell me, and one of them was the person on the other end of my morning death knell. I argued for a long time, tried to come up with creative solutions (could we just use the old service until they could install the new one?--no way, the old service is totally incapable of handling the new load and is actually considered dangerous now, even though it wasn't dangerous two months ago when we disconnected it), and finally cried. No dice.

I considered spending the rest of the morning in the fetal position, but I pulled myself together and decided to proceed with my day as if we were still on track to open next week, because I wanted to make good use of the last day of my friend Max's visit (see below). When we got to the building, there were lots of guys there looking lively, but I saw a dark pall over them. The drywall crew was having a surprisingly emotive conversation about whether one of their girlfriends was getting too serious, which was interrupted by an argument about the sum of 1 1/4" plus 1 5/8". After that issue was resolved, they started talking about who needed a place to go for Thanksgiving, and inviting each other to various relatives' holiday meals, which would have been heartwarming if my heart had not been torn out and stamped on by Xcel. Then Aaron happened to mention that someone from Xcel had been there earlier doing an inspection, and we were on the schedule for our service to be turned on in a few days. Apparently there's nothing wrong with the old service and they just have to reconnect it. If I had time I would sue Xcel for emotional trauma.

So that was a bad start, but things got better. Max, a friend from California, had flown in this weekend to help us put the "state-of-the-art" in our kitchen. Max knows how to do more things that anyone else I've ever met, which is one of the highest compliments I can pay, and among his many skills is setting up awesome audio-visual systems. We spent the weekend on a crazy scavenger hunt around the great Denver metropolitan area, looking for the components necessary to rig up the video camera/flat-screen TV/computer/stereo system that will be part of the teaching kitchen. Some of these components are not standard-issue, and any normal person would order them online, but we didn't have time for that, so we got on the phone/internet and called every place we could think of in a 200-mile radius until we found what we needed. Micro Center is my new favorite store. We also spent some quality time in Best Buy, deflecting dozens of "are you folks finding everything okay?" assaults. Then there was an exciting interlude when we had to fit two big-screen TVs into Jill's Civic, during which Max measured the boxes and I employed my usual technique of ignoring the measurements and just trying to stuff the boxes in. As we used to say in my life as a research scientist, a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library. This reflects an interesting personality trait of researchers: you're supposed to read a lot about what other people have done, but in the end you just have to try things out yourself to see if they'll work (usually the answer is no when you're in science, which is one reason I don't play that game anymore). It's kind of like throwing yourself at brick walls to see if they'll break, as a profession.



Finally last night we set up the whole system at my house and watched "Office Space" on a big screen in my little living room, which was amusing. This is what it looked like:



Today was D-Day: it was Max's final day in Denver, and the last day before the ceiling gets totally closed up, so we had to construct our custom-made ceiling mounts for the TVs and run all the cables up in the attic. When I say "we", I mean Max, although I walked on ceiling rafters for the first time, which was scary. We were still up in the attic when we should have been driving to the airport, but we made it, and by the time I got home I was feeling really good about where we are in this project.

Announcing Our Grand Opening Party: Sunday, Dec. 2, 2-5 pm

Generous Servings is happy to announce our Grand Opening Party, which will be on Sunday, December 2 from 2:00 to 5:00 pm. Our beautiful new kitchen will be open to visitors, hors d’oeuvres will be served, and prizes will be given away! If you're in the neighborhood, please stop by.

Note: We will be open before December 2. We have cooking classes scheduled beginning on November 29, so please don't hesitate to register online for any of the classes listed on our class calendar. The cafe will be open too, so come sample one of our specialties: individually-brewed coffee, hot cocoa the way God intended it to be (with homemade marshmallows, of course), our secret-recipe homemade chai (which our family learned when our sister found herself sitting next to a chai expert on an airplane flight to Iowa...we'll tell you that story sometime), Vietnamese iced coffee (if you haven't had it, you haven't lived), classic espresso drinks, and some of the best house-baked pastries you can find in a coffee shop this side of Paris. (We're humble, too!)

How About that Ceiling?

The construction is done! I say that in the same spirit that George Bush announced an end to major combat operations in Iraq. Let me qualify: we now have walls, floors, and a ceiling, and all the stuff that goes under/behind/above them. The next two weeks will be the "finishing" stages: staining and sealing the floors, painting, adding the trim and fixtures, moving in the equipment, and getting inspected by every city authority known to man. Hopefully that will prove easier than stabilizing Iraq.

Here's what the cafe looks like now:

We think it's funny that Chris and Aaron used part of their custom-painted "Alley Closed" plywood sheet for the back wall of the coffee counter. Of course this will get covered up when the rest of the counter is built, but we'll always know that we have a part of that iconic sign built into our counter.

We're really happy with how high the ceilings ended up being. We never really knew for sure, because it depended on how much space the insulation took, but now that the ceilings are closed, the rooms still feel very spacious.

Here's the teaching kitchen:

You can see the huge hood over where the stove will go. There was a mini crisis about that, because the first time Jill and I walked in and saw the hood after it had been hung up, we realized that the location wasn’t where we had been imagining it. Some other things about the layout of the room had changed since we drew up the plans, and the hood ended up being way too close to the back and side walls. I almost had a heart attack. I was trying to calm myself by thinking that in ten or fifteen years I’d probably get over being upset that my stove was in the wrong place. However, Aaron worked some miracle that I do not want to examine too closely, and the mechanical guys agreed to move the hood for us (a big job, given that there’s a lot of ducting that has to be welded in place, so all of that had to be cut and redone). We like the mechanical guys. There are two main guys on our job, Jamey (who has two lip rings) and Helper (whose name we keep forgetting, and who has a blue mohawk), and we buy them lunch at Chipotle every time we stop by the building because we keep asking them to help us unload heavy stuff from various trucks. Since they moved my hood for me, we've bumped them up to free coffee for life.

The middle part of the kitchen will be occupied by prep tables, and then along the storefront side (where I was standing to take the above picture) will be a beautiful big dining table where we'll enjoy the fruits of our labors in the cooking classes and private events. It's going to be another week before we can move everything out of my garage and into the building, because we have to let the floors dry after they are stained, but very soon I'll be able to engage--heck, practically wallow--in one of my most favorite activities in the world: kitchen organization.

Do Not Decorate Cupcakes Like This Woman

I was surfing around on amazon.com and I came across Sandra Lee's "Semi-Homemade Desserts", cookbook, which shocked me not because she "cheats", but because of the way she's holding the pastry bag in the cover photo. Check it out here. What the heck is she doing? You do not squeeze the bag from the middle--that is pastry bag SUICIDE! I think she got a little distracted making eyes at the camera. Sheesh.

Speaking of semi-homemade, I just read that an archaeologist at UCLA conducted a study of American families' cooking habits, and she found that the average amount of time spent cooking dinner was not different based on whether the people used "convenience foods" (pre-cut vegetables, bagged salads, even "meal kits") or not. It took, on average, 52 minutes for all the people in the study to make dinner. I think Food TV has done a disservice by making people think it's reasonable to cook dinner in fifteen minutes or a half an hour. That just doesn't happen, and it's frustrating to try to do anything if you haven't left yourself enough time. I think an hour is a good amount of time to leave for making a relatively straightforward dinner. Not necessarily every night--leftovers are fine, and takeout certainly has a place in my meal planning--but if I'm going to cook, I don't want to be rushing off to something else. Of course, it's happened: I've eaten more than one homemade meal in my car because I was late for a meeting, and I'm pretty good at using a knife and fork while driving, but I wouldn't recommend the practice if you can avoid it.

No Painter, But Some Great Kitchen Gadgets

No, the building is not painted. Our painter flaked out. Actually, he flaked out eight times, and each time I had to call him to find out why he didn't show up. The seventh time I told him it was his last chance, and he came for half a day and then didn't come back the next day, so I fired him. For heaven's sake. We got another painter, but now we have to wait until the end of the week to see how the building turns out.

Tonight I was skimming through the fluff in the last issue of Gourmet and I ended up reading their "year's best cookbook" roundup, which is totally useless to me because I don't use cookbooks. In the review of Stéphane Reynaud's Pork & Sons, it mentions a recipe for blood sausage with walnuts and chestnuts, finished with cream, "which would be a hearty first course for a winter dinner party". Now that's just silly. Who the heck serves blood sausage at a dinner party in the United States? The editor of Gourmet, Ruth Reichl, should be more down-to-earth than that. I don't love Gourmet under her banner, but I adore her autobiographical trilogy. The funniest of the series is Garlic and Sapphires, but it's also the last one chronologically, so it's sort of cheating to start there. But let's not make pleasure reading into an ethical issue. If you know anyone who likes food, that book would make a fantastic gift: it's thoughtful, honest, and hilarious.

Don't buy all your cooking-related presents yet, though: Generous Servings is going to have a nice little cookwares section with my hand-selected recommended gadgets that are really worth the money. I've spent a lot of time arguing with cookware companies about why I only want to carry a single one of their products (which is because the rest are worthless)--that's not the way they want retailers to do things. But I am committed to selling only the items that I reach for on a daily or weekly basis in my own kitchen, and that I know will last for years. One catalog I looked through had lots of great stuff that I ordered for the teaching kitchen, but the last section was completely devoted to that little junk that always sits next to the cash register at cookwares stores: tiny whisks, measuring spoons for "pinch" and "dash", miniature rubber spatulas that are apparently made to go on your keychain. It's amusing to see where that stuff actually comes from--it never occurred to me that self-respecting companies would manufacture those silly things. If you really want a vegetable brush with a cartoon potato face on it or a brontosaurus-shaped pancake mold, let me know and I can get it for you cheap.

Compulsive Cookware Shopping

This week has been fun for me: we're still incredibly busy, but now that I've gotten some momentum up, I'm feeling good. Plus, we've finally taken some huge leaps that have been looming ahead of us (can a leap loom?) for months, and it feels great to have those decisions made.

One major set of decisions was what to buy for the kitchen, now that the big appliances are taken care of. Ever since we started thinking about opening Generous Servings, we've been compiling a list of equipment and smallwares we would need. I feel about kitchen stuff like Imelda Marcos felt about shoes, but I'm also really frugal and obsessive, so I've been carefully price-shopping to find the best place to buy each item. At first I was just going to check the prices on a few items and then make a choice about where to buy the whole lot, but one thing led to another, and I ended up spending about fifty-three hours comparing prices for each of the hundreds of things we need (here are some of the "p"s: paper towel dispensers, parchment paper, pastry bags, pastry brushes, peelers, peppermill, pitchers, plates, potato ricer, potholders...) at a half-dozen different suppliers, which in the end saved us at least $7. But I finally got to unleash my cookwares passion by going on a real live shopping spree at a local restaurant supply store, where I bought three overflowing shopping carts full of stuff. Tell the truth: aren't you a little bit jealous that my garage looks like a kitchen store:




I had a repair guy come work on the refrigerator we bought a few months ago at an auction (turns out it's actually a freezer--that's a whole different story), and when I told him that I teach cooking classes, he thought I meant that I did the classes in my garage. The garage is actually much more full now than when I took the picture a few days ago, and we're getting so many deliveries in the next couple of weeks that my car is going to be displaced soon.

Another really exciting thing we did was order our official Generous Servings aprons. The first screenprinting place we went to had cheap aprons, and I did not feel that the cut flattered me, which made me sad, since I basically have to live in one of these. Then we went to another place, and they had great aprons, but much more expensive. They did embroidery there too, which is a lot more pricey than screen printing, but it looks much classier. I fell in love with the idea of the nicer aprons with our logo embroidered on them, so I lobbied Jill and we decided to shell out for the top-of-the-line. I am so excited. I might wear mine around the house just to break it in.

Tonight I went to Lowe's in search of a blowtorch, which is one of my favorite little-known cooking tools. You can do lots of interesting cooking techniques with a blowtorch, and you definitely should not buy the $50 mini version from Williams-Sonoma. You can buy them for $25 at a hardware store and they come with much more gas, plus the one I got from Williams-Sonoma (many years ago, when I didn't know any better) didn't even work, and I couldn't figure out how to dispose of it because it was still full of butane. Anyway, at Lowe's they had two blowtorch options, so I asked the nearest friendly employee if he could explain the difference to me. He was like, "What do you plan to use it for?" You know, it just sounds weird if you answer "cooking" to that question. But anyway, I got a blowtorch, so if you want to play with it, sign up for the Advanced Pastry Decorating class, and I'll show you some neat things to do with it. Plus it's just really fun to use.

Jill hired our first employees: two great women who will be working in the cafe with Jill. So now we've got the team in place, we've got everything from aprons to wooden spoons to cafe furniture on the way, and all we need is a building. A couple of days ago I happened to stop by when the insulation was going in above the ceiling, so I finally got to see a guy on stilts:



Pretty cool. Next week the concrete floors are going to get stained and sealed, which will be really exciting, since we have no idea what color they are going to turn out (apparently when you stain concrete, the composition of the concrete can have drastic and unpredictable effects on its reaction with the stain, so the color you pick may come out totally different from how it looks on paper). And tomorrow the building is getting painted, so it will have a whole new look soon.

Every day I plan to do some marketing, and every day it gets pushed to the bottom of the list (and since I never get through the whole list, it never gets done). I'm just not a marketing kind of person--I hate bothering people, and even the best advertising campaign ends up with 97% of its targets being people who really weren't interested. However, I know we need to let people know about us, because although I hope that we can sustain the business mostly by word of mouth once we get rolling, that's not going to help us in getting started. Despite my dismal failure at marketing so far, we've already accepted registrations for many of our classes, and we're setting up private events for people who want to have holiday parties, birthday parties, a fun evening out with friends, and corporate events. I've had a great time working on menu options for these events--I like talking with people to find out what "feel" they want from their event, and then coming up with fantastic dishes that I know will exceed their expectations. If you're interested in setting up an event--'tis the season to plan holiday parties, so if there's an HR manager in your life, maybe give him or her a little hint about how fun and unique it would be to have a cooking party this year--send me an e-mail at Mary@GenerousServings.com and we'll get to work on it right away!

What a Week--When Is Vacation?

Wow, this week has been crazy. I've experienced a major psychological shift now that we're into the actual month that we will be opening in. For the amount of work we have left to do, I'd say we could comfortably open in about six weeks. But we're opening in three weeks. Hmmm. Luckily, one of the skills every professional student perfects is cramming. So we've kicked it into high gear. We're working practically every waking minute, and I had to subsist on leftover Halloween candy for several meals, although I did take some time off around 11 pm yesterday to make a nice dinner. Jill said I was crazy, which is indisputable, but I think it's a good sign that I'm still cooking for fun.

We're working so fast that the rest of the world is holding us back--this week the majority (of a large sample size) of the people we've had to meet or talk to have either been extremely late (like over an hour) or totally clueless about what they are supposed to be helping us with (lost our order, forgot to send the e-mail, added the numbers wrong, thought our business' name was General Savings), which is really painful because we can use every second. Nevertheless, we have barreled through an astounding array of activities in the past few days.

The week started with a Monday morning call from the contractors that three of the lights that we had rush-ordered last week didn't work, and we needed new lights right away to pass the above-ceiling electrical inspection scheduled for that afternoon. The guy at the lighting store managed to find some replacements, which was nice of him, although having three of thirty-one lights be defective leaves some doubt about their quality control procedures.

On Tuesday and Wednesday we went to a restaurant equipment auction. This was the fifth one we've attended, and all the auction guys know us (we stand out--there aren't many women at these things, and there definitely isn't another pair of sisters). We feel like pros now. At the first auction we went to, it took us a long time to even understand what the auctioneer was saying, and we were too nervous to bid. By now, we have a whole bidding strategy worked out. One thing that's fun about these auctions is that there is always some really strange equipment for sale. Here's Jill inspecting a large machine whose function was totally incomprehensible to us:


There's a mean lady at the auction house who makes sure that no one is stealing anything, and she came over and yelled at us while we were taking this picture (like maybe we were going to put this machine in our pocket and sneak out with it?), so we moved on to this really intense fry station:


Turns out we don't need one of those, and we also passed on the stuffed alligator (which a couple of people got into a bidding war over). We bought some good stuff, and today we had to rent a truck and pick it all up. Every time I rent from U-Haul, I wonder why anyone does (in this case, it was because there's a U-Haul location right next door to the auction house). The truck's brakes were somewhat questionable, but I did not have to use any runaway truck ramps. Here's me in my alternate career as a trucker:




Now we are placing orders for everything else we need so that we'll be stocked up for opening day. We also touched base with some of the semi-sketchy equipment resellers who hang out at these auctions, one of whom has our stove at his warehouse. We paid him a deposit back in August and told him we'd call him when we were ready to have it delivered, and since then we've been avoiding him because we didn't want to have to store it in my garage. But we promised him we would give him a batch of my new-favorite chocolate-chocolate chip-walnut cookies, which is worth way more than three months of free storage for the stove:



After eight hours at the auction, we came home and hammered out plans for where to get our furniture, what color we want our aprons to be, where the hood should hang over the stove, how to repair our gutters, how big to make the letters on our sign, who to call about composting our food scraps, and forty-three other things. Among the things we checked off the to-do list was deciding what color to paint the building. We picked this color:



If you don't like it, don't tell us. It took us forever to decide--we had a lot of people offering opinions, most of whom disagreed with each other, and this is the first one we can all live with. Besides, you're too late, the building is getting painted on Monday.

Inside the building, we now have walls, lights, and running water. Aaron finished pulling off the layers that covered one of our storefront windows (the middle window used to be covered up):



That went so well, we decided to break through another section of wall that was covering an unknown object, and this time we discovered a new door!


This building is totally bizarre. The door was covered up still with its "pull" sign still on it. But we're certainly happy to have all that glass along the street side of the building.

Yesterday we spent a fun afternoon at Coda Coffee, who is our coffee bean supplier. We hung out with the coffee guys and chatted about the true definition of a wet cappuccino, ergonomic espresso tamping techniques, and latte art. We experimented with making various drinks on their espresso machine, which helped keep us in practice while our own espresso machine lives in my spare bedroom. Soon our baby will have its place of honor on the cafe counter!