Well, that was exciting

In my last post I mentioned our Living Social online deal, which ran on Thursday. The Living Social website has a counter that shows in real time how many vouchers have been sold as the 24-hour window elapses. I happened to be awake shortly after the deal went live, so I checked how it was doing, and I was surprised that four vouchers had been bought in the first half hour, since that was 5:30 am. Then again, I am never clear on what goes on in the waking world at that hour, so I went back to sleep, like normal human beings should do at that time of morning (night).

A few hours later, the number was in the triple digits and growing very quickly. I spent at least 15 minutes sitting at my computer and refreshing my webpage every five seconds to see how many more had been bought. In fact, I called Jill (who was at work) and we engaged in this activity together over the phone for a while, getting a little giddy.

By around 11 am, when I showed up at Generous Servings, the number was at 300. We placed bets on how much higher it would go in the next 18 hours, but by early afternoon our bets were all surpassed, so we had to place new bets. It turns out that Susan's bet (the highest of all of them) was the closest (she always wins everything! It's not fair!). She bet 700. Here's the final screen showing the total:

Yup, 702 vouchers. That's a lot of customers an 18-seat restaurant. So if you are one of our new favorite people, call for reservations!

Do you ever wonder how these deals work for the merchant? Me too, and now I know the terms of the major players. Their agreements are labeled "confidential", which strikes me as rather self-important. I'm going to stamp "confidential" on all of my correspondence from now on. In fact, this blog post is confidential. We all know that it's silly to post things online that you could get in trouble for, though.

Yesterday someone passed a counterfeit $50 bill in Après. This is the second counterfeit bill we've gotten at Generous Servings (that we know of). Prior to that, I didn't even think counterfeiting was real; I thought it was a convenient device in caper movies to finance the clever schemes. In case it's ALSO real that there is that one nerdy technophile thief on the team who can hack into the power grid and might be reading this blog: we got a counterfeit-detection marker, so tell the rogue team leader, the safe-cracker/runway model, and the explosives expert dude to leave us alone.

So you want to be a rock star?

In a few hours, the Après Dessert Bar will be the deal featured on LivingSocial.com! [Here's the link: http://livingsocial.com/deals/2242-50-off-generous-servings ] Living Social is one of those websites, like Groupon, that sells vouchers for at least 50% off products, each only available for one day. Our deal will be $20 of food and drink for $10! And this is a great time to come visit us, because today we rolled out what we think is THE ultimate birthday/non-birthday treat: the Rockstar Sundae. We have insider information that both Mick Jagger and Bono, disparate though their careers have been, attribute their success to this sundae, but that's not why we named it the Rockstar Sundae. It's because the sundae itself is a rock star. Don't believe me? You better just come in and try it. It's composed of a chocolate cupcake with our signature brown sugar-vanilla ice cream, espresso fudge, whipped cream, homemade maraschino cherries (yup, we make our own the real way, which involves a long soak in maraschino liqueur and no food coloring), peanut brittle, and a pirouette cookie. And it costs $7, so if you get the Living Social voucher you can come in and eat three of them for $1 in cash, which is almost guaranteed to turn you into a rock star on the spot.

Chard drama at Cook for a Cause

Our Fourth Cook for a Cause Day on Sunday was a lot of fun, and we made a lot of food, and my feet hurt a lot. For this edition we cooked Moroccan meatball tagine and braised chicken with chard. I chose those recipes because I thought they were interesting and people would enjoy learning how to make them, especially learning how to use up chard, which is a leafy green that everyone with a garden or CSA share is trying to get rid of by the end of the summer, and most people don't know how to cook. So I figured I would show everyone how to deal with chard, as a public service.

At least, that was my plan. However, on Saturday afternoon our Sysco order arrived without the 30 pounds of chard we were supposed to get. Apparently the chard supply truck broke down and they didn't bother to inform me earlier that the chard wasn't going to show up. If you haven't had the pleasure of trying to find 30 pounds of chard between Saturday afternoon and Sunday at 7 am, when you are working in a restaurant until midnight, it's not really possible. We actually had a couple of big chard plants growing in our garden, which were volunteers from last year, but when we collected all of those leaves it was only a little more than one pound. Thirty pounds of chard, loosely packed, can fill a Mini.

I called everyone I could think of who might have chard in their garden, but no one else had any growing yet (meaning our chard was a miracle?). Then I sent an e-mail to all the Cook for a Cause volunteers asking if any of them had chard, or a similar green, that they would donate. I had a fantasy that this would work out like in a cheesy movie, where every person would bring in three leaves of chard, and together, we would have more than enough! [inspirational music swells in background] But in my real life, no one brought in any chard.

I ended up combining our garden chard with some from the grocery store, plus a bunch of arugula we also had growing in our garden, and then I harvested a couple of pounds of dandelion greens from my yard (I have a lot of dandelions, and at their peak I bet I could get 30 pounds of dandelion greens, but unfortunately I just mowed my lawn last weekend--which is unusual because I mow it less than once a month). Between all those greens, it worked out fine.

It's kind of fun to use all our big pots at the same time.

Mmmm, Moroccan meatballs! What makes them Moroccan? Spices: Moroccan cuisine often uses "sweet" spices, like cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger, in savory dishes.

All told, we donated about 500 servings of great food to the Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Get your generosity on!

It's time for our Fourth Cook for a Cause--this Sunday (June 6) we'll be cooking from 8 am to 8 pm and donating all the food to the Carpenter's Cupboard food bank in Wheat Ridge. If you haven't been part of one of these events before, they are super-fun. You get to hang out in our nice kitchen with fun people, make a ton of food, eat some of it, feel like a good person, and go home without cleaning up. What's not to love?

We still need help in the 12-2 pm and 6-8 pm volunteer slots, so please register at www.GenerousServings.com/CookforCauseJune6.html if you'd like to join us.

I can feel the G-force pushing the air out of my lungs as the summer acceleration kicks in. In two weeks we've got the Highland Street Fair to deal with, and then my first Culinary Camp for Teens. We're also running a deal with Living Social, one of those websites where you buy a coupon for a big discount at a store, so we hope that will bring the mobs stampeding into Apres. We're now putting the final touches on our next Apres menu item, a cupcake-sundae-peanut brittle creation. Last week we debuted our Flaming Pineapple dessert, which is officially called Roasted Pineapple Flambe with Pineapple-Star Anise Sorbet and Spicy Caramel. It is good--the sorbet part is the staff's new favorite. Plus, we really wanted to light something on fire. We first tried this dessert with regular rum, which didn't light on fire very well, and that was very disappointing. Then I bought some Bacardi 151 rum, which has a warning on the label that it should not be used in flaming drinks or dishes, which is pretty funny since I've never heard of anyone using 151 for any other purpose. Man, does that stuff burn.

Another new thing that we're doing is breakfast burritos. If you don't live in Colorado, I can't explain this phenomenon to you. Yes, it's a burrito with breakfast-type foods in it, but that doesn't begin to hint at the passion many Coloradans feel for this dish. People have been asking us to make breakfast burritos for a while now. Actually, since the day we opened. I've been resisting that whole time, on the grounds that pre-cooked eggs are disgusting and breakfast burritos are not a real food recognized anywhere other than this state, but I'm just too tired to resist any more. Now that we have the kitchen to ourselves in the morning, we can cook the eggs close to when we sell the burritos, so they don't sit around and do that bizarre congealing thing eggs do. I know that some people buy their burritos ahead of time specifically to let all the ingredients meld together and get soggy and gross, and I don't want to hear about it. I prefer to live in denial. So come get your precious breakfast burrito, with your precious homemade green chile, before I get to work in the morning, and don't tell me about it, because there are some things that we can just agree to disagree on, and we don't need to keep bringing up sensitive subjects like how disgusting it is to eat chorizo and chiles for breakfast.