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!