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.