When is a door not a door?

When it's ajar. Also, as it happens, a door is not very useful when it's stuck closed, as we learned yesterday. The front door to Generous Servings had seen a lot of life before we moved in, and its condition didn't improve during the months of our renovations: there was about a week in the midst of heavy construction traffic when the threshold was hanging in midair after the original floor was removed from under it, and then our double stacked ovens were somehow forced through the door even though they're a few inches wider than the opening, and we have stomped in and out a hundred million times over the past 15 months. We've wanted to replace the door, for both functional and aesthetic reasons, but when we looked into this a while ago, we got sticker shock ($2000? For the cheap model?) and gave up.

Last week we decided it was time to do something about the half-inch crack under the door, especially since it's -15 degrees in the sun these days. So we got a door sweep, and asked our handy employee Travis to install it. It didn't totally block the crack, but it was an improvement. Until yesterday.

After we closed, we had a customer show up to drop off knives to be sharpened, so we let him in. On his way out he tried to pull the door instead of push it, and to everyone's surprise, the door wouldn't budge after that. We let him out the back door and proceeded to kick the bottom corner of the front door with Jill's steel-toed boots, but it was seriously not going to move. We determined that the new door sweep had gotten wedged under the door, making it impossible to push the door outwards. Jill and I took turns going outside (using the back door) into the sub-zero degree weather and pulling on the front door while the other person pushed. We worked on it for a long time, including jamming all the tools we had available under the door to try to push the sweep out (unsuccessfully).


Jill had to go home, so we started testing our keys to the other entrances to the building, in case we really couldn't use the front door. We discovered that we didn't have the correct keys to either our back door or Happy Cakes' front door, and when we tried the key to Happy Cakes' back door, the lock core fell out of the door. Therefore, one of us would have to stay in the building until we could get the front door open, or we'd be totally locked out. I volunteered to take the late shift.

Finally I had to call Travis to come bust me out. He heroically left a dinner party and arrived with more appropriate tools. He used a combination of a crowbar and brute force and managed to force the door opened, which resulted in the door sweep getting bent. We stepped outside to survey the damage, and Travis let the door swing closed to illustrate the problem. The door got stuck closed again, this time with both of us on the outside, neither of us with a key that worked in any door that would actually open, and me wearing just a sweatshirt (I mean, I had pants and shoes on too). It would have been a pretty funny scene if we were in a movie and I was not in danger of freezing to death on the doorstep of my own business.

Luckily the door wasn't stuck quite as firmly this time, so we were able to get it open after some tugging. We've removed the new door sweep so the problem won't recur, but this has been enough to convince us that it's time for a new door. Now we have to start the arduous process of getting people to show up and give us quotes, which in my past experience has been terribly difficult. Oh well, it's better than being trapped in Generous Servings.

Putting my money where my mouth is, reluctantly

Over the past couple of years I've been thinking a lot about the "local eating" movement, which espouses the concept that much of the dysfunction in Americans' diets can be repaired by fostering a closer relationship with the ingredients in our food, and supporting an agricultural economics that rewards nutritious and conscientious food production rather than amoral agribusiness. I read Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma (twice now, in fact) and was impressed enough by his arguments to cut high fructose corn syrup out of my diet (as well as the fast food it features so prominently in). This switch was relatively easy because as I've come to appreciate the taste of food more, I've found that high fructose corn syrup just doesn't taste good. In my monthly Cooking Basics class we make French toast and I always put out the real maple syrup with it, and everyone says it's the best French toast they've ever had, which may be true, but really I think they're mostly tasting how much better maple syrup is than the gross "pancake" syrups that are all artificially-flavored high fructose corn syrup. Seriously, even if it weren't killing you slowly (which you know it is), there is no good reason to eat high fructose corn syrup, and this is coming from an unrepentant sweet tooth. If you drink high fructose corn syrup straight from the bottle, which I certainly have, it's just not tasty like honey or molasses or brown sugar, all of which I also eat straight from the containers.

Then we had a Cooking Book Club class on The Omnivore's Dilemma, for which I bought lots of ingredients from the farmer's market, and we compared them side by side in simple preparations (or straight up) with the "identical" supermarket specimens. I swear, if I hadn't been present for the taste-tests, I wouldn't have believed the difference. We compared apples, pears, zucchini, eggs, tomatoes, and steak, and in every case the farmer's market item was significantly better. This was a small sample set, but the differences were way beyond the margin of error.

So now I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and it's making me a little crazy. First, I am not a fan of Kingsolver's writing style (including her fiction). I find her use of slang, interjections, and silly metaphors annoying and jarring. For example, she describes her family's decision to eat only local foods for one year as a "Dear John letter to a roomie that smells like exhaust fumes and the feedlot". You don't write Dear John letters to roommates, and no one calls them "roomies" any more (did anyone ever?). But obviously my opinion of Kingsolver's writing is in the minority, and it's dangerous for a blogger to critique anyone else's writing, so let's move on to the substance of the book. I'm getting excited by her descriptions of seasonal and local eating, and some of the time-honored methods she employs to manage the variable availability of food across the seasons: canning, freezing, culturing, etc.

I am on board with the concept that eating locally solves a whole bunch of problems: it reduces the amount of energy wasted in transporting food, it helps maintain both the taste and the nutrition value of fresh food, it ensures that farmers get more of each food dollar than the big bad companies that have taken over much of our food supply. But it has some obvious drawbacks. First, you have to know how to cook your own food, and be able to improvise when certain ingredients aren't available. I'm okay with the first part of that, and less happy but still able to manage the second part. The bigger problem for me is that these ingredients are more expensive. One of the reasons Generous Servings is now in its second year of business is because we're really careful about cost control. I do a fair amount of our shopping at Wal-Mart, which I hate, but I do enjoy getting paid every month. I've been thinking about this problem a lot, but I haven't gotten much closer to a workable solution.

I did make an effort at Thanksgiving, though. We hosted a big Thanksgiving party for family and friends at Generous Servings, and I was in charge of the food preparation. I decided to order a free-range turkey from a Colorado turkey farm, which I was supposed to pick up at the Winter Farmer's Market in Boulder on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. When I went there, I was surprised to find a full-fledged farmer's market, with tons of produce (nothing green, of course). I figured it was time to walk the walk, so I bought a bunch of potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and beets for our Thanksgiving feast. We've never had beets at Thanksgiving before, but what could be more in the culinary spirit of the holiday than eating local foods? The beets were good (the turkey was a disappointment, because I thought it was going to be a heritage breed but it turned out to be the same breed you get in all supermarkets, Broad Breasted White, and it tasted the same as the comparison store-bought turkey I also cooked). It was all expensive, except the potatoes, which were really cheap (but some were going bad, too). I'm not sure what I've learned from this exercise, but I'm still thinking, and I sense a New Year's resolution in the making.

Happy birthday, Generous Servings!

One year ago today we opened our doors! We're going to hold off on the big celebrations until next month, after the holiday glut. Please mark your calendars for Sunday, January 18, when we'll be holding our first annual Cook For A Cause. We're going to cook from 8 am to 8 pm to make food to donate to our partner food bank, The Carpenter's Cupboard. We need volunteers to help--please e-mail us at info@GenerousServings.com to sign up for a two-hour shift. If you can't stay for long, please stop by for coffee that day, because we'll be donating 50% of our proceeds to the food bank as well. Plus, we'll be holding a food and kitchen equipment drive--please bring non-perishable foods and used kitchen equipment (pots and pans, utensils, small appliances) that we can donate.

Thanks to everyone for making our first year so much fun, and honestly, for keeping us in business. We heard all the scary warnings about how many small businesses fail in the first year, and we consider ourselves to be really lucky to have so many great supporters. Let us know how we can improve in year two! We hope to see a lot of you.