There's more than one thing to do with a paring knife

If you've ever read a cooking magazine like Bon Appétit, you might have noticed how each issue always has a story about a dinner party thrown by some famous foodie.  This month it's a fabulous fall party in the loft of a woman who writes a blog about soup.  Do we care about this woman and her décor and what her friends wear to a dress-casual-but-ready-to-be-in-a-national-magazine party?  I guess glossy food magazines just need some structures in which to provide recipes, so they invent these ideas.

Well, I'm waiting for a magazine to come check out the dinner parties we Generous Servings people throw, because we make some seriously good food, plus we do fun party activities.  Last week we had a pumpkin carving party, at which we also celebrated two birthdays and the hiring anniversary of our longest-staying employee (do you know who that is?  Here's a hint: he's tall and has red hair, and his name rhymes with Schmavis).  I cooked some recipes from my upcoming new class on Middle Eastern cooking, which came out quite good.  Our dessert was not as successful: we made a ridiculous cake from the aforementioned cooking magazine, which was supposedly created by a big-name restaurant pastry chef, but was honestly kind of stupid.  It turns out you don't really need chocolate cake with malted milk syrup, toasted marshmallows, white chocolate-malted milk crumbs, and malt fudge sauce.  Even if you like chocolate cake and malt, which I do.  It's just not that good to put all that stuff in one bite.  So when my own dinner party is featured in a magazine, I'm going to make a different dessert.  Perhaps a lovely flourless chocolate torte with avocado-banana sauce, which we're serving in Après right now and which is actually very good, despite the odd-sounding combination of ingredients.

After we ate, we got down to the serious business of carving pumpkins:

Each employee made one, all using original ideas (no store-bought patterns here!), and they came out great!

We put them on the Generous Servings patio with candles in them on Friday and Saturday nights and asked the customers to vote for their favorite, and the winning employee gets to choose a nonprofit for us to donate $50 to.  The winner was...the Latte Pumpkin, by Sharon (center top in the picture above)!  Sharon chose the Edison School Garden to receive our donation.


Remember Börk, our sourdough starter?  Well, we've been carefully tending to him, and last week it was finally time to try making some bread.  We did several experiments with different conditions:

And then we tasted the results:

We decided that all the loaves of bread that come from Börk should be called Börkson.  The Börkson bread that we made yesterday came out pretty darn good--maybe not quite perfect yet, but we all managed to eat a lot of it, especially with some homemade cultured salted butter.  Mmmmm....