Muffins and magnets

I just taught a very nice class on pasta (From Simple to Spectacular, in fact), and I am now drinking some of the leftover wine and procrastinating on doing the dishes. I know from experience that this is a very bad idea, because the food starts to congeal and harden on the dishes, so it just makes them more difficult to wash, but I am feeling mellow and blissfully unconcerned at the moment. Ask me how I'm feeling in four hours, when I'm still doing dishes.

Anyway, the class was fun and turned out some nice food, which for the first time I remembered to take some pictures of for our website (stay tuned! I'll be posting them any day now...). I also took a picture of the apricot-almond muffins I made, because I made a really fun garnish (it's a caramelized apricot):


How can anyone resist ordering one of these muffins? Heck, I would buy one just to figure out how sharp the point is (actually, very sharp). By the way, we just started selling our muffins by the half-dozen and dozen, if you want to pre-order some for a meeting or brunch.

I also finished a project today that we have been planning for months: our awesome bulletin board. Coffee shops always have those messy-looking walls covered with posters and bulletin boards--I am actually intimately familiar with those walls, because I used to poster to advertise my cooking classes in California. We like the idea of having a place for community announcements, but we wanted it to look cooler. This was, in fact, one of the things Jill and I discussed for hours before we even owned a building. Our first idea was to put up a magnetic board, because magnets look better than tape and it's easier to take down outdated posters. Then we thought it would be really fun to have a random magnet collection. You know all those weird magnets that you can't remember where they came from, but you feel bad about throwing away in case they might be the only memento you have of some really important trip or relationship? Yeah, I don't have any of those. But if I did, I would want to put them on the Generous Servings magnet board! We are officially starting a magnet collection, so if you have any magnets to contribute (the kitschy-er, the better), bring them in and we'll give you $0.10 off your drink.

Jill then had the inspiration to use magnetic paint to make a whole wall into a magnet board. And I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to use some of the picture frame scraps left in the building by the previous tenant. Over the past few days I have painted a section of the wall with magnet paint (more painting...), and today I put up the frame (made of four different styles of frame), and we added our budding magnet collection. How cool is this?


You might want to zoom in on that picture so you can see the really great "Hang 10" magnet that Jill bought in Hawaii. We thought we had lost it, but today I was scrounging around and found it in one of the fifty-three compartments of our roll-top desk.

Also visible on the extreme left of the above picture is our homemade vanilla syrup, which is 500 times better than the commercial stuff. Today we perfected our recipe for homemade mint syrup. During the tasting, Jill made a few lattes to sample the syrup in, and I have to tell you that they were fantastic.

And finally, we got our knives sharpened today, and we scheduled a time for the knife sharpening guy to come back and sharpen anyone else's knives. I'll send out an e-mail if you're on our e-mail list, but in case you want to plan ahead, it's going to be on Monday, February 18. You can drop off your knives the previous weekend, and pick them up on Tuesday. Sharp knives...what a joy.