We're going bananas

Today was a funny day at Generous Servings. I think the stress is starting to get to us. First, Jill decided her legs were too tired to walk around the kitchen, so she brought in our new desk chair and rolled around while doing other jobs.

And then this happened--see if you can find Travis in this picture:

What's going on here is that we looked out our window and spotted someone from our traumatic past going into the bank across the street. There was a woman with him, who came over to spy on us, pretending to look at our class calendar in the window. Jill and I ran into the other room and Travis ducked down just in time, as she came up to the window. Then she came into the cafe to "pick up a copy of our class schedule", which really means case the joint, and Jill and I went into hiding and made Travis go out there. Good times.

Finally, I tried a recipe for sugar-roasted bananas that I saw on a molecular gastronomy site. It seemed easy enough: encase peeled bananas in a sugar-egg white crust and bake for an hour. I thought it might make a cool start to a twist on banana splits. I got two bananas, pressed the sugar crust around them, and it all looked fine going into the oven, but here's what came out:

Whoa. All that foamy stuff is solid, by the way--like a cross between styrofoam and coral, but really banana-y. And the bananas themselves exploded out of the shells. I didn't think bananas were capable of such drama--they usually seem so staid and boring. I might expect this kind of behavior from a loud-mouth mango or a flashy pomegranate, but not a banana. Sure, bananas self-digest fairly impressively, but there's just not a lot of excitement in something that changes from "cottony" to "mushy". So this roasting catastrophe was shocking. I don't know if it was due to the high altitude or what, but it was gross. That is not going to make it onto the menu.

The good news is, we are very close to perfecting a great buttermilk panna cotta (which we're going to serve with rosemary-Framboise reduction, which is about the tastiest sauce in the universe), so at least no one is going to starve around here.

The engine of the economy makes biscuits

It's been a long month at Generous Servings. We've had six employees quit, at different times, for different reasons. None of those reasons included hating us or finding our work environment unwelcoming, but in the wake of anyone quitting, the rest of us have to work harder, and morale suffers. Six people quitting--one today, one on Monday, one on Wednesday--makes me seriously consider just walking out the door and going as far away as I can get on the $57 in my bank account. I could live out of my car, not have to worry about paying my mortgage, and get a job in someone else's coffee shop so that I don't have to deal with this kind of thing ever again. It sounds really appealing, except it would suck for Jill, and she's one of the few people who hasn't quit yet.

Apparently, although our small business is the engine of the economy, constantly hiring and keeping that big bad unemployment number at bay, there are a lot of people who only need a job for five weeks before they move on. Is this going to be a funny story when I tell it in ten years? Hmmm, I don't think so.

I was going to tell you about the fun party we threw for all the Generous Servings employees on Monday, but it doesn't seem that fun any more. Even though everyone got to use a fire extinguisher to put out real (but not scary) fires (what can I say, some fires started in tin cans and we had fire extinguishers ready, so we took turns using them, and we are all super-good at fire extinguishing now, so if you have a fire, give us a call right after you call 911).

Despite my depression, I did make some food today (again, an odd statement--I actually make food every single day, but today I made it just for myself). I tried a bizarre sauteed chicken breast recipe from Cook's Illustrated, in which you brush on a fake "skin" of melted butter and cornstarch. This one is not going to make it into the canon. I was testing it out as a possible recipe to teach in some of my classes, but it's just too weird. I feel bad for Cook's Illustrated--I think they're out of recipes that fit their homestyle, nothing-exotic-or-complicated principles. How many times can you perfect roast turkey?

I also "made" some corn on the cob, because even though it's not in season it smelled really good in the store, and I love corn to death. In this case, the half of the cob that I ate before cooking it (I was really hungry, and the chicken was taking forever) was better than the cooked result, which got all rubbery. Should have just eaten it all raw. I don't think corn really counts as a vegetable, but I put extra chives in the sauce for the chicken, so that averages out.

Finally, I made sweet potato biscuits from Orangette, because I like sweet potatoes, and I like biscuits. I almost had a disaster when I realized I was nearly out of baking powder (what has my life come to? What kind of baker runs out of baking powder? It's not the kind of shortage that sneaks up on you). Luckily, that's one problem that my encyclopedic knowledge of culinary trivia can help with. The biscuits came out pretty good, but now the question is, what am I going to do with a full batch of biscuits? My batch made 7.5 biscuits (well, I know, but I wasn't going to just throw away the leftover dough), and I ate 2.5 for dinner, and another half for a midnight snack, but that still leaves a lot of biscuits. I could have one for breakfast, but they're a little on the salty side (although if you ate them with country ham, as the recipe recommends, I'm sure you wouldn't notice how salty the biscuits were). I guess I could feed them to Biscuit, but doesn't that seem a little cannibalistic?