My feet hurt

It's been crazy around here. Two weeks ago I taught our first five-day Culinary Camp for Teens of the summer, which requires me to be "on stage" from 11 am to 7 pm every day, and then there's the shopping, clean-up, and routine business duties. It's tiring. We wrapped that up on Friday with a cooking showcase, to which we invited the camp participants' parents and friends, and all the kids made hors d'oeuvres to show off their new cooking skills. The kids got to pick what they wanted to make for the showcase (with guidance), and they worked really hard on the dishes, so we ended the camp with a bang. Most of the kids' families came a few minutes before they were supposed to, and of course we weren't quite ready, so they waited out in the cafe and got to watch their kids run around and frantically clean up the kitchen. Here are some pictures of the final event:




Yes, in the background of the picture above there are two charming 13-year-old girls who apparently believe that cameras steal their souls. They behaved all week like they were in a competition to see who could act the most disaffected, as Jill's boyfriend David (who teaches high school) astutely characterized it. It was painful. I'm sure I was equally annoying when I was 13.

After all this excitement, the next day was the Highland Street Fair. We've been hearing all year about this annual event, which supposedly draws 40,000 people to the six-block Highland business area. In fact, several people said to us in rather threatening tones, "You know about the Street Fair, right? You better be ready." We were nervous, because we had no idea what to be ready for. We tried to figure out how many customers to expect, but we really didn't know, so we basically made as much of everything as we possibly could. That meant that the night after my culinary camp ended, I spent hours making hundreds of cookies and muffins, and Jill made dozens of gallons of iced tea, iced coffee, and lemonade. Then we got here early, with all the friends we could rope into helping, and what happened was...nothing. I mean, it was busy, but not nearly as busy as we had hoped/feared. We certainly did way more business than on an average Saturday, but it wasn't twenty times as much, which is about what we had prepared for. So we had a lot of muffins to donate. A lot.

And then the hits just kept coming: we had three private events last week, I taught three full cooking classes and one that was almost full, and today I started the second session of culinary camp. A bright spot about starting a new session of culinary camp is that it makes me feel young: on the first day of camp, all the kids get really tired and complain of their feet and backs hurting from standing all day, and of course my feet hurt too, but that's become a steady state, so I can pretty much ignore it and laugh at the kids.

One fun thing that's been happening over the past few weeks is that we've been getting to the bottom of some of the huge packages of ingredients that we bought when we first opened. When we placed our first couple of food orders, we really didn't know what we'd need, so it seemed to make sense to buy 30 pounds of peanut butter, for example. It turns out that 30 pounds of peanut butter comes in a bucket that a small child could easily drown in, which means that after you've used most of the peanut butter, you have to reach your whole arm in to scrape the stuff out of the bottom, inevitably getting peanut butter all over your arm. Thank goodness we're done with that. I also finished off the 50-pound bag of chocolate chips, which I am pretty proud of:

On the occasion of my thirtieth birthday

Last week I turned 30, a momentous occasion I celebrated by teaching a Sushi class. I'm not really into birthdays--I'm not one of those people who tries to hide which day is her birthday, but I'm also not interested in surprise parties or wearing a Burger King crown all day either. What I've found about my adult birthdays is that they nudge me toward reflection on the current state of my life, the events of the past year and the one ahead, and my general satisfaction. This birthday, being one that was heralded by my health insurance company sending me a letter saying that my premiums were increasing because I was "aging into a new bracket", was one that I thought might be accompanied by a fair amount of angst, but I never really felt that.

Along with me turning thirty, Generous Servings was 6 months old this past week. We're not past the infant mortality threat yet, but it's nice to be over the hump to making it through our first year. Today I was talking with our accountant about quarterly taxes, and he said, "How's the business going? Are you doing as well as you thought you would be?" People ask me this pretty often, and I'm always stumped, because to be honest, I never had a firm idea of where we should be at this point. Sure, I wrote a business plan with lots of projections, but anyone who believes his own projections for a brand-new business is delusional. Heck, five years ago I thought I'd be on my way to a tenure-track professor job at this point in my life, and instead I teach cooking classes, so I certainly don't believe my own projections.

I've definitely learned a lot this past year. There were things about running a business that I knew I'd have to learn, like how to file taxes, but those things are all boring. The more interesting lessons are the ones I had no idea would happen. Here are some that spring to mind:

1) Next time someone I know opens a business, I will show up for them in the first few months. I had no idea how important this would be--just to have warm bodies in your place makes such a huge difference for morale, even if you know they're there because they feel responsible. It's hard to open your doors and have no one come in. We have friends and family in the area who still haven't come in to see Generous Servings, and I'm sure they fully intend to do it at some point, but they've missed the critical window when we really needed them. On the other hand, some people really had a strong showing in those early days, and they will always have a special place in the history of Generous Servings. The family of our dad's cousin Bruce, most of whom live in Pennsylvania, somehow managed to come to both the cafe and cooking classes--with extra friends!--multiple times in the first month we were open, which was really nice.

2) The first two months are the hardest. I assumed that the beginning of the business would be difficult, but I wasn't sure how long it would take us to feel like we were mostly on top of things, and without having any light at the end of the tunnel, this business was feeling a lot like grad school. In hindsight, two months isn't that long, and if I'd known we would be so much more competent at the daily running of the business in just a couple of months, it would have been a lot easier to get through that early period.

3) There really is such a thing as cooking by smell. I often see articles in cooking magazines about using all five senses when you cook, but they always give really stupid examples of how to use hearing (hear bacon sizzle!) and smell. Hearing is still not anywhere near as useful a sense for cooking as sight or touch for me, but smell has really moved up in the ranks. When I'm teaching classes, there are often three or four dishes being made at once, and whatever's in the oven is out of sight, so it's easy to forget about it. However, I've noticed that I can now tell when a baking dish needs to be checked just by catching a whiff of the smell of the finished dish, and I certainly know when someone is burning garlic. It's kind of fun to surprise people by telling them, from across the room, to turn off the heat because their dish is done.

Today we move into a new phase of Generous Servings: it's the first day of our first session of Culinary Camp for Teens. I'm very excited, because teen camps were what got me into this business in the first place. I developed the idea in California, and they were a big hit there. Since we opened here in Denver in December, we've had to wait until now to do our first full-length camp, so it's been a long time in the making. I'm sure there will be lots of great stories, and hopefully I'll remember to take pictures, so stay tuned.