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:
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:
posted by The Cooking Doctor at
8:27 PM
4 Comments:
I'm glad you've been busy, since that means all the word-of-mouth advertising has paid off. I'm also glad about the bottom of the peanut butter container, though now you'll just start on a new one, reaching the gooey zone eventually (faster, because of the ice cream sandwiches). Sorry about the annoying kids.
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I live just down the street from your shop. Just found your blog and I'm intrigued! I shall definitely be stopping in this week.
We're new to the neighborhood and have walked by several times, but we're excited to actually stop in and perhaps sign up for a class! And definitely have one of those ice cream sandwiches!
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