We built a freezer!

We've been working all summer on getting a walk-in freezer to go outside, because our indoor freezer is constantly packed to the gills. Every time we want to put something in the little freezer (which is much bigger than a home freezer, but still seems little to us), we have to take something else out, and with our ice cream sandwiches holding strong, we badly need more room. However, a walk-in freezer is a big investment, and it's taken us a long time to investigate our options, decide what we want, get bids, and save up the money. During this process, my boyfriend found an internet site selling "do-it-yourself" freezers that don't require a refrigeration technician to install. That would save us $1,000 on installation costs, and the freezers were cheap, so after exacting a promise from my boyfriend to help us with the installation, eventually we decided to go down that route.

The freezer arrived in pieces in the middle of a private event we were hosting last week. Between serving the main course and the dessert, Jill and I ran out and unloaded the pieces off the truck. They were not light, and of course we were wearing nice clothes and everything. Here's a picture of Jill with the pieces:


Then my boyfriend came and did the installation, including pouring a new concrete pad to put the thing on. This is us in the early stages of putting the pieces together (our existing walk-in refrigerator is in the background):


Just like when you buy furniture that requires assembly, the instructions that came with this thing were obviously translated from another language, and also intended for refrigeration technicians who had done this kind of thing before (despite the fact that it was a DIY freezer). In the above picture, my boyfriend is holding a piece of metal that did not appear anywhere in the installation diagrams, which we couldn't figure out where to put. Here is another picture when we were almost done with the installation:


As you can see here, he's is still holding the same piece of metal, which we never figured out where to put. (You can't see it, but I am wearing the "Burritos for Obama" t-shirt that I got for free when I was walking around downtown during the convention.) At this point, only one other piece remained uninstalled: the 250-pound compressor that sits on the roof of the walk-in (covered with the green tarp in the above picture). Hmmm, how to get that up there. I called the company that sold us the freezer and asked them how they recommended getting the compressor on the roof, and the guy kind of laughed and said he had no idea.

This stumped us for a while. We went to an equipment rental store and tried to rent some kind of winch, but nothing was the right size. The equipment rental guys were all intrigued by the problem, and eventually they got us in touch with a crane company, and believe it or not, we rented a crane (with operator). It was not a big crane, and we only had it for an hour, but it was pretty cool. So now we have a nice spacious freezer, which is working great.

This morning I went to a restaurant equipment store to buy some shelving for the freezer. While the sales guy was entering my company information into the computer, he asked me what we do at Generous Servings. I said I teach cooking classes, and he said, "There is certainly a need for that! I'm not trying to be sexist or anything, but there are a lot of women out there who have no clue how to cook." Uh, what part of that statement is not sexist? I said, "There are a lot of men out there who have no clue how to cook either," and he said, "Well, sure, but the expectations are a lot lower. We can live on beer and potato chips, but women have to feed a family! I mean, most men are out making money, while women have kids to cook for." He bumbled on about how he and his brothers had to learn to cook out of self-preservation because their mom couldn't cook, and I just couldn't think of anything productive to say. Dude, you're talking to a 30-year-old woman who owns her own business and is wearing a sweatshirt that says, "What part of quantum theory don't you understand?", and you are a 45-year-old loser salesman at a restaurant equipment store. Not to be sexist or anything.

Life moves on after the vegans depart

Well, the DNC is gone, and in its wake at Generous Servings are two jars of Vegannaise (vegan "mayonnaise"), a box of "Not Chick'n" brand of not-bouillon cubes, and nine pepper grinders (for which I have no explanation). It was actually pretty fun.

The "celebrity chef", Tal, arrived on Saturday, and he didn't look like Mario Batali. He's a skinny ex-New Yorker with a generous, laid-back attitude. His sidekick Lex ("as in Lex Luther") flew in from Texas, and was kind of like you'd hope a chef from Texas would be: big, melodramatic, loving the media circus. They were full of praise for our kitchen. Tal said he had expected to be cooking in some basement, so our spacious, bright kitchen was a welcome surprise. A good start.

The first couple of days of cooking with them were the funniest, because we got to hear all about their vegan cooking philosophies. There was lots of talk of cleansing toxins, probiotics, and doing yoga. Besides me, there were several other helpers who had been hired from the vegan cooking network, most notably a chef from Boulder named Ron who exists entirely in his own universe, including while talking to others. He was a Franciscan monk for 25 years but finally quit because they didn't appreciate his cooking. The first day I cooked with Ron, he had brought a bottle of Mona Vie, a "potent new blend of 19 rare and powerful fruits." Ron was handing out shots of this juice and I was very interested to try it because I just read a Newsweek article about the sketchy pyramind scheme used to make money off this stuff (a bottle costs $40, and the only way to get it is to become an unpaid distributor for the company). Ron assured me that this was the active formulation, with glucosamine, which is good because I had been really worried about that. No point in drinking the inactive formulation! Ron drinks two shots a day, and he credits it with his health and energy. However, I thought it tasted disgusting, and I couldn't even drink my shot. I'll just have to get my energy, joint health, cancer-avoidance, relief from warts and seizures, sex drive, and healthy skin elsewhere.

It turns out that the cooking wasn't very intense: with four or five people helping each day, we finished all the hors d'oeuvres by about 11 am, and then Tal and Lex took them down to the hotel and stayed there for the rest of the day. Some of the vegan things we cooked were surprisingly good, including a fake chicken product that I had been disparagingly referring to as "toficken", but which actually tasted almost exactly like chicken. Less successful was a breakfast that Tal cooked for all of us one day that included fake scrambled eggs and fake bacon that tasted like fake food.

On Thursday there were hugs all around, and we took a group picture that Tal promised to e-mail to me but I haven't gotten yet. Then the vegans were off to convert new souls, and I spent an hour throwing away random vegan ingredients they had left behind. I gave away the pepper grinders to my Herbs and Spices class that night.