The first Cook for a Cause is a huge success!

We had our Cook for a Cause day yesterday, and it was great! We got started at 8 am with the early crew, who were actually early for the first shift, and they were hard-core. You do not want to get in the way of people who sign up to volunteer at 8 am on a Sunday. I thought we might spend that whole first shift prepping ingredients, but they got that out of the way in the first fifteen minutes, and we were off! Here's some of our intrepid morning cooks:


One fun thing was that we got to use all our big pots, which we never use otherwise. (The only reason we have them was because we bought them for cheap at an auction.)


Over the twelve hour cook-a-thon, we had about 70 great volunteers, and it was a lot of fun to cook with everyone! I enjoyed getting to see some of my former class participants again, plus lots of our cafe regulars. With so many hands, we were able to really get up some speed on the prep and assembly of the dishes. Here's the lasagna assembly table during one shift:


Our final tally was about 720 pounds of food that we will donate to the Carpenter's Cupboard food bank in Wheat Ridge. That's almost 900 servings of lasagna with meat sauce, chili, and spaghetti marinara. The great thing is that all of this is nutritious and homemade with high-quality ingredients, and it's going directly to people who really need it. We'd like to thank Sunflower Market, who donated some sausage for the lasagna. I taste-tested lots of batches of our lasagna sauce and chili, and they were really awesome. Despite the fact that I oversaw the preparation of an insane amount of lasagna yesterday, I am actually kind of hungry for lasagna right now, because it was so good. Below are a few more pictures of our fantastic volunteers. Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate our first anniversary, and we're excited to do this type of event again in the future!

Here's the thank-you note we received from the food bank:

What a wonderful spot Mary and Jill have found to locate their shop! It's not just because it's a busy corner, because they have landed smack in the middle of some of the nicest people in Denver. We propose a minor name change, from 'Generous Servings' to 'Generous People'.

The food prepared by those of you who participated in last Sunday's "Cook-a-thon" has provided The Carpenter's Cupboard with a gourmet array of meals for big families that we are afraid has made us the food bank of choice in the area.

Thank you for the love and support that you showed on that sunny Sunday. God bless you all.

Making a better butter batter

A few months ago I happened to be looking at the label of the butter we buy, and I noticed that it has two ingredients: cream and "natural flavorings". What the heck are natural flavorings in butter? They make it taste more like butter? Isn't butter a singular ingredient by itself? I looked at the butter I had at my house, and it said the same thing. Something weird is going on here.

In hindsight, it seems odd that I've never made butter before now--I've never even overwhipped cream enough to make it by accident. It's super-easy to make fresh butter--just shake (or whip) cream for a while, and all of a sudden it happens (most grocery-store cream has been ultra-pasteurized, which sometimes interferes with the process, so you may want to look into this before shaking a jar of cream for half an hour and not getting any butter). But as I was poking around online, I started learning about the fabled "cultured butter", which is made from cream that has been allowed to ferment with the same bacteria that give tang to yogurt and buttermilk. Cultured butter is supposed to taste way better (in fact, the "natural flavorings" in store butter are supposed to make it taste like it's been cultured), and anything that involves bacteria sounds fun to me, so I decided to try making it.

I was very disappointed in the quality of information online, and I've decided that once I figure out how to do this, I'm going to write a book. Or at least a blog. It's very difficult to figure out which bacteria and how much you should add to culture your cream. So I just started experimenting. I made several batches of butter with different amounts of store-bought yogurt and buttermilk to supply the starter cultures. Then we had a butter taste test, comparing my batches to the store butter we had in the fridge. Here are Jill and Travis developing their butter palates.


Yes, this was a double-blind tasting, and we were taking notes. We do not take this lightly. We all ate enough plain butter to feel a little ill for a while afterwards.

The results were clear: store butter has a nasty aftertaste and a waxy texture once you start thinking about it (and eating enough of it straight up to really taste it). My butter batches were all better than the store ones, and the more buttermilk I added, the better.

So we are on the right track, and now I'm really getting serious about this. I'm going to order some butter cultures from various companies that supply commercial starter cultures, although I am not happy about having to order cultures all the time, when I am perfectly capable of growing my own bacteria, thank you very much. But I need decide what to grow and then figure out whether we really have the facilities to grow our own. Man, I wish I still worked in a lab right now. This would be totally simple if I had a few incubators and maybe a nice shaker and an autoclave...and a centrifuge and a really good scale and a liquid nitrogen freezer...

Meanwhile, we made croissants out of my homemade butter. Mmmmmm.

The 2009 Resolution Edition

Yesterday I pulled out all our 2008 files and put them in our storage filing cabinet, leaving the working filing cabinet very empty (Jill pulled out one of the drawers this morning and almost fell out of her chair because the drawer rolled out with no resistance). It occurred to me that the changing of the calendar year hasn't meant much to me for most of my life, since I used to work by the academic year for so long, but now I really do organize my files, and my thoughts, around the calendar year. And that means it's time to reflect on the past year and make plans for the next.

I like New Year's resolutions. They're basically to-do lists with a little extra creativity, and I work from to-do lists all the time. So here are my resolutions for Generous Servings for 2009 (these are for the parts of the business that I have the most direct input into; Jill can make her own resolutions for the cafe and associated parts of the business):

1) Be more generous! I think this might be a resolution every year, and the question will be how to implement it each year. We are starting 2009 with a bang, with our Cook for a Cause day on January 18. We've had a great response from people who are willing to volunteer some of their time that day to help cook the food that we're going to donate to our partner food kitchen. We are hoping this will become an annual tradition, so we'll always have a way to celebrate our anniversary and each new year with generosity.

In the process of planning for Cook for a Cause, I've been trying to get grocery stores to donate some meat for us to cook, and I've run into some obstacles that I am feeling the urge to tackle. The meat department guys at Sunflower and King Soopers have told me that they regularly throw away lots of meat that's past its expiration date (the guy at King Soopers told me he threw out 100 pounds of ground beef the day before I talked to him), and they aren't allowed to give it to anyone after it's expired. I proposed that they could simply call me when they have a bunch of meat that's ALMOST expired, and I would come and stand outside the store until 30 seconds before the official expiration time, and they could donate it to me at that point. They said no. I got mad. I understand the food-safety issues here, and I'm not going to start an argument about how there can't be one second when meat suddenly becomes unsafe to eat. I'm not going to wait by the dumpster and pull the meat out after they toss it; I'm willing to work within the system to handle the meat in an unassailably safe way and avoid all the waste. I feel like this idea could be a really great way to make the world a better place. I have the facilities to take this almost-expired meat, keep it safe (in our freezers) until we can cook it, and then donate the cooked (and therefore safe) food to people who really need it. All I need is a partner in the meat business, so my mission is going to be to find that person. If you know somebody who could help, please put me in touch with him or her.

2) Everyone gets a day off. When Jill and I started Generous Servings, we figured that we could be totally dedicated to the business for our first year, and then it would be time to work out a schedule that would be sustainable in the long run. Now is that time. We're going to take one day off per week. That way we have some time to work on our personal resolutions!

3) Generous Servings is getting serious about composting. We've been trying to compost since we opened, but we've run into a lot of problems--first Happy Cakes was going to compost our stuff, and then we were going to pay our trash company to do it, but neither of those ever happened. So now we've lined up a great group of home composters who can take our compostables home to their gardens. We've started collecting our compostables on a trial basis for the past few weeks, and it makes a huge difference in how much trash we have to throw out, so we are really excited to make this a part of our routine in 2009.

4) I am learning to make cheese! What better use for my years of training as a microbiologist? I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but now that I've got the idea, I am already dreaming of my own personal cheese factory. I've started making butter, too, so soon we may be using homemade butter and cheese in all our food at Generous Servings. Whoa, that would be cool.

5) I think the Highland neighborhood needs a farmers market. I heard that the merchants' association had considered this idea a few years ago, and I'm going to see if I can revive it. There isn't a farmers' market nearby (the one they used to have at the old Elitch Theatre didn't happen this summer--unless I just missed it?--so I'm going to do some investigating to find out why). If we had one, I could sell cheese there! And we could have farmers' market cooking classes, which would be awesome. If you would support a farmer's market in the neighborhood, let me know!

Since pictures of gingerbread houses are way more interesting than resolutions, here's a totally irrelevant picture to close this post. Have a great start to 2009.