We're Open (Again)!

The drain problem has been fixed, and we are open for business again at 6:30 am! If you came by while we were closed, please come back, because we're even better than before! Now we have holiday lights, loyalty cards (buy nine drinks, get the tenth free), and really clean floors, in addition to our great coffee and baked goods.

Okay, this is getting boring

The drain cleaners are still snaking our sewer lines. They've been at it for the past three days, and let me tell you, it's been riveting. There have been some really dramatic moments when they thought they might have gotten all the way through, but those were false alarms. The second day they came out, we cut a small hole over the pipe where there was a blockage, and dug down to the pipe to see if it was broken. This produced what Jill called the Pit of Despair:



There wasn't anything wrong with the pipe at that location, so they kept snaking, and again ran into a blockage. The third day they started digging a large trench in our patio area to replace ten feet of pipe. We hope it's the right ten feet--there's really no way to tell until after they dig it up and put the new pipe in and see if water goes down it. The digging is not a speedy process, so it continues on tomorrow. On the fourth day of digging, my true love gave to me, four thousand dollars in plumbing bills, three clumps of tree roots, two overflowing toilets, and a whole lot of plastic bags.

Jill and I have used the downtime productively, finally getting the place decorated for the holidays. Here's a look from the inside:



And here's one view of the outside (pay no attention to the gate that is on the ground, covering up the big hole the drain cleaners left).


And from across the street, with Jill's car front and center:


We also hung up our lighted sign on the outside of the building, which should have been a simple matter of sliding a printed piece of acrylic into the grooves in the existing light box, but it turned out to be a very tight fit, so I had to whack at it a lot. Jill, always helpful and sympathetic, stood on the ground and took this movie without my knowledge:

A Good Week...Until the Flood

I’ve taught some fun cooking classes over the past two weeks. In the Hearty Soups and Breads class, the chicken and dumplings we made was hailed as the quintessential comfort food. The Secrets of Baking Fantastic Breads class turned out some really fantastic breads, including some tasty chocolate brioche, which I liked so much that I made more for the café to serve.

I finally got a chance to make croissant dough, which takes several days, and the resulting croissants and pains au chocolat (chocolate croissants) turned out terrific, if I do say so myself. I haven’t had a homemade croissant in a while, and I forgot how much better they are than those big fluffy things you get at the store. And the pain au chocolat…mmm. It is my personal mission to stuff as much chocolate as physically possible into each one, because I think chocolate croissants never have enough chocolate (and it’s not well-distributed, so most bites have no chocolate at all). I succeeded in putting in at least twice as much chocolate into these puppies as any other chocolate croissant I’ve ever had.

Jill and I have eaten a lot of my creations, because we still don’t have much business in the café, and it would be criminal to waste fresh pain au chocolat. Jill does have a few “regulars”, one of whom came back from a brief business trip to San Francisco and told Jill that he tried several little cafés there, but Jill’s coffee had completely spoiled him, and nowhere in San Francisco could measure up. He can't even go into Starbucks in an emergency anymore.

Our Gingerbread Decorating Party was also a big success, with a couple of kids who ate candy while their parents tried to construct artistic decorations and convince their children that the candy was reserved for decoration only. The gummy worms were very popular for both eating and decorations, and one family even made a compost pile in the yard, complete with worms. Here are a few pictures:

On Saturday we had our first big private event, which went really well. It was a birthday party with seventeen guests, who prepared a three-course meal with a Southwest theme: pumpkin soup, rack of lamb with pumpkin-seed crust, ancho-chile mashed potatoes, chocolate soufflés with cinnamon. The group was a lot of fun and totally made the event work for them, and Jill and I kept things rolling and did a lot of dishes. The food turned out well, everyone was happy, and the guests were hanging out over their umpteenth bottle of wine while I did endless loads of dishes, when suddenly the dishwasher and toilet started overflowing simultaneously. There were some moments of excitement as we tried to fix the problem, but it became clear that this was far beyond our plunging abilities, and we had to wait for the flood to abate.

Today we spent six quality hours with a plumber who snaked out our drains, turning up a lot of tree roots and also several plastic bags. He asked if someone had been trying to get rid of something, which is amusing because Jill and I are pretty sure we know who might have been flushing substances down the drain: one of the previous tenants of the building mentioned that he had had lots of great times in the place, including many that he didn’t remember. Too bad the contents of those bags had long since dissolved, because we might have been able to pay the plumber with them.

After a thousand dollars in labor, the plumber put a camera down the drain and announced that a few feet outside our building, under the concrete patio, our sewer pipe ends in mud. Perhaps it’s collapsed, and maybe we won’t have to replace a large section, but the only way to find out is to cut open the concrete. So we’re closed, for at least one more day. When we realized that we wouldn’t be able to open today, Jill and I both got some time off, which was incredibly nice. I did laundry for the first time in weeks, finished our new online registration system and winter class schedule, shoveled the last three snowfalls’ worth of snow off my path, and even bought a Christmas tree (I had mostly resigned myself to not having one this year, which would be the first year I ever didn’t have a tree, including all my years in college). It’s been a great day, although I normally don’t have to pay so much to have a day off. I’m realizing that Jill and I should have planned to take a day off without requiring a plumbing disaster, because we were both getting pretty ragged around the edges from the constant work. Now we’re really poor—the plumbing repairs are going to be significantly more expensive than our entire first year’s expected profit margin—but we’re ready to throw ourselves into the fray again.

We're Open!

It's been a while since I posted for a few reasons. First, I was waiting to get some good pictures of the building, and there never seemed to be the perfect time to take them. Second, we've been kind of busy. We opened last Sunday, and both before and after that Jill and I have spent every waking moment (and there haven't been a lot of other moments) working. There seems to be an infinite amount of "last minute" stuff to do, and we still haven't finished everything that was on our list of jobs to do before we opened. It's kind of discouraging.

Right before we opened, we had a big push to get the place in decent shape. Several of our friends helped, including Emily, who served as our master painter:


The heating system wasn't fully functional until two days before our Grand Opening, so we did most of our last-minute work in the cold, which is why I'm wearing a hat and scarf while unpacking our hundreds of boxes:


Jill's boyfriend David, who's behind all the boxes here, deserves special recognition for being the guy who got stuff done in the days right before we opened. He stepped in when Jill and I were getting too tired to deal with the "bad" jobs, like drilling the hundreds of holes in the outside wall that were necessary to hang our sign letters, which involved drilling into brick that alternately crumbled and resisted so much that you had to put your entire weight behind the drill, while standing in a ladder in the cold. David also should be awarded a Purple Heart for being injured multiple times in the line of duty.

We finally got the sign up, although not quite before the Grand Opening. I haven't had a chance to take a picture of it during the day, but here's a look at it on the whole building:


Here's the view when you walk in the front door:


We haven't had a lot of customers in the cafe, and those who have come seem surprised that we're open, so let me clarify that we are, in fact, open. Seven days a week, 6:30 am-5:00 pm on weekdays, 7:30 am-5:00 pm on weekends. The slow start was good for a few days so that Jill could work out the kinks with the equipment, get her employees up to speed, etc. But now we're ready for customers, so if you read this blog and you haven't come in yet, consider this your guilt trip. I can tell you that Jill's espresso is great. I just had a latte for the first time a couple of days ago, and it was fantastic. Our hot cocoa is really good too--we did extensive testing to find the right recipe and the right cocoa, and it's the best I've ever had.

Also, I've been baking all kinds of pastries and breakfast foods for the cafe, and they've been turning out really well. I wasn't sure how I would do in the beginning because I'm still getting used to the oven and stuff, but I've been very pleased with the quality of the baked goods. Everything is baked fresh every day, and it's getting sad to have no one eating them. I've made muffins (blueberry, cranberry-walnut-orange, and mocha chip), scones (sweet milk, oatmeal, and blueberry), biscotti (chocolate walnut and orange almond), pecan coffee cake, pumpkin bread, and chocolate brioche. See, you've been missing out. So far we've had comments that the blueberry muffins and the chocolate-walnut biscotti are the best ever in their categories, and I personally think that someone other than me should try the brioche.

I've also been making lots of savory breakfast food, because we expected some demand from people who wanted something to eat other than pastries (silly people). We're serving our version of stuffed French toast, which we call Colorado toast, filled with either caramelized apples or ham and Gruyere cheese. We also have breakfast pizzas with eggs and various toppings, like tomato and bacon with provolone, or the one I made tonight, which had sauteed mushrooms, red bell peppers, and onions, deglazed with a little sherry and seasoned with fresh thyme. Mmmmmm.

I spent a day making holiday cookies that we are selling as a cookie tray. There are a bunch of different miniature cookies, all of which taste really good (unlike the assortment you get at Safeway, which all taste like pasty sugar). You can preorder a cookie tray for pickup anytime before December 24. Let us know if you'd like one for a holiday party or to have around for munching!


Here's a look at the "working" part of the kitchen, where I do our baking and teach cooking classes:


And here's the dining area, where my classes sit down and eat the fruits of their labor:


You can see the beautiful gingerbread houses that were decorated in the first of my Gingerbread House Decorating parties (there's another one on December 23, so sign up now!). My classes have been going well, although we still need help promoting them to teenagers, because we haven't had enough teen registrations to hold a teen class yet. But the adult classes have been good: the Hearty Soups and Breads class had a good turnout and we made some great soups, and the Secrets of Baking Fantastic Breads class was also a lot of fun. Here are some of the great breads we made: