The Cooking Doctor

Our sixth Cook for a Cause breaks all records!

2011-09-14T20:19:00.002-06:00

On Sunday we had our sixth Cook for a Cause, and this one was special because we asked for donations of any extra garden produce in the hope that we could help turn some unwanted vegetables into healthy and tasty food for local families who need it. This posed a unique challenge for me in planning the recipes for the cook-a-thon, since I wasn't quite sure what ingredients we were going to end up with! To tell the truth, I really enjoy that kind of puzzle, and I'm proud of the interesting and delicious dishes we ended up making to utilize all the produce we got.

A small subset of the vegetables we started with--many from our friends' gardens and our local farmers' market.

Now that I think of it, doesn't this sound like a great idea for the next cooking reality show? People often ask me if I want to be on one of those silly shows, and I answer honestly that I'd rather eat bugs (which I already have anyway) than make a fool of myself pretending to cook on camera (because it's not real, you know) and saying scripted lines to create drama. But I would totally participate in a show where amateur or professional cooks were given a small budget and challenged to cook as much food as possible in 12 hours, all to be donated to a food bank. There we go, my ticket to fame.

I did the planning for Sunday's event, but I certainly didn't do all the work! We had 72 great volunteers who worked tirelessly to chop, simmer, stir, and eventually package over 2,000 pounds of ready-to-eat food. That's right, we made more than a TON of food to donate! And it's all delicious food that I'd be happy to eat for my own dinner: ratatouille with penne, and gumbo z'herbes (a traditional Cajun dish with many kinds of greens and meats). These volunteers also donated money to help pay for ingredients, and we also received donations from Cargill Meats, Heirloom Gardens, Rocky Mountain Pumpkin Patch, Monroe Farm, and Delmonico Farm. Thank you to everyone who made this event possible and so much fun! Here are some pictures of the day:

Many volunteers chopped the hundreds of pounds of greens that turned into gumbo z'herbes.

The meat table--which was in constant use for 6 hours--required dedication, as we trimmed and diced 300 pounds of meat for the gumbo.

Those freshly harvested vegetables turned into a delicious ratatouille.

So this week we've fed thousands of people who probably really need a wholesome, homemade dinner right now. It won't solve anyone's big problems, but I know from my own experience that a good meal can really turn around a day. And if we can do that while also helping avoid waste of any excess harvests, that feels like a good thing all around.

Recap of this summer's exciting Culinary Camp contests

2011-08-14T01:47:00.001-06:00

I know summer is coming to an end when the nights start cooling off, the school teachers look grim, and I've finished my last culinary camp. I ended the camp season on a high note with a fun group of kids, who eagerly participated in the many contests I make them do (for fabulous prizes, like meat thermometers and miniature nutmeg graters!). On each of our daily field trips I incorporate some silly contest to keep everyone on his toes. For example, at the farmers' market I gave each pair of kids $4 and told them to buy as much stuff as they could, using only that cash and their charm. This last group came back with a very impressive haul. Here's what we got for a total of $20:

The kids were endearingly excited to get to cook with their very own farmers' market purchases, so I came up with things to do with everything except the mini turnips (bottom right), although the kid who bought them told me he thought they would be good in soup (probably true, but it's August). I still have those, if anyone wants them. The purple beans were kind of disappointing, since they turned green when they were cooked. So what is the point of them being purple?

On another field trip we went to one of the Vietnamese markets down on South Federal. Just riding the RTD bus to get there is always an adventure. Once we arrived, I told the kids to run around and pick out the weirdest thing they could find (they love me at these stores). All the kids came back with something strange, and we voted on the truly weirdest item, which we bought and brought back with us to sample. Here was this last camp's winning delicacy:

Mmm, grass jelly. This came out of the can just like store-bought cranberry jelly, but the flavor was pretty similar to burned hay (which I haven't eaten much of, but I can imagine). I cannot fathom what anyone would do with this item (the turnip-soup kid said he thought grass jelly could also be good in soup--apparently at his house all random ingredients go into soup). We all tried a (very small) bite, and threw the rest away. This is usually the fate of the weird things we buy at the Asian stores, but it's still fun to try them. In the past we have sampled puffed fish skin, white fungus with sugar, aloe beverage, some kind of shredded dried pork product that had the consistency of hair, and silkworm larvae (that was totally disgusting). This is why I love teaching 12-year-olds: they're still gullible enough to believe you when you tell them something doesn't taste gross. You just can't do that with adults (at least, not more than once).

I survived another restaurant opening (and closing, on the same day!)

2011-08-05T23:57:00.001-06:00

Next week is my last Teen Camp of the summer, and as usual by this time of year, the novelty of spending all my waking hours with a bunch of 12-year-olds has worn off a bit. The Advanced Teen Camp's takeover of Après two weeks ago was successful, if exhausting. It was fairly typical for a restaurant opening: we hadn't quite gotten all the prep done, we hadn't had time to do a dry run, and our timing was a mess. But we fed 30 people a three-course menu with two options for each course, entirely conceived, cooked, and served by 10 kids with no restaurant experience. The food was good--I would have paid for that meal--and the kids held up under the pressure. I'm pretty sure they've all decided not to go into the restaurant industry, which is a wise choice.

As always when I work with kids, they provided some unexpected pleasures and amusements. At a tense moment right before our restaurant's opening, I was coaching the "servers" on how to take orders, and the kids were frantic about what they were going to write the orders on. When I said, "Relax, I have some pads for you," they all cheered. Who would have thought that getting to write on order pads would be their favorite part of the whole experience?

I should have taken some pictures of the food we served, but it was so crazy that I never thought of it. At the end of the camp, I told the kids they might as well play with knives while I took a group shot:

Watch kids defy death!

2011-07-20T22:29:00.002-06:00

It's summertime, and that means one thing for me: Teen Culinary Camps! I'm in the middle of my third camp of the summer, and this one is an advanced version, for kids who have already taken a camp in the past. We're going to take over Après for a night and the kids are going to run the restaurant! Today we worked out what our menu is going to be, tomorrow we're going to practice the dishes, and Friday is show time. Hopefully I'll still be alive after that to tell you how it went.

Here are my advanced culinary campers demonstrating their crêpe-flipping skills:

We've got lots of other fun activities on the agenda for the camps, including several techniques that may not be advisable without commercial fire extinguishers handy, such as flambéeing and using blowtorches:

I also bought some dry ice for the kids to play around with, which is really not dangerous at all, although the kids think it is (and most adults I talk to seem to believe it to be as well...I'm not sure which political party is using dry ice in their fear-mongering ads). In fact, in my last session I let the kids play with dry ice and use the blowtorch on the same day, and they were almost beside themselves with disbelief that they were being encouraged to skate so close to death twice in one day. They are used to hearing that things are too dangerous, so this is a whole new experience. Here are a bunch of kids with dry ice in their water glasses (no, I did not let them drink the dry ice):

We had a cookie-baking contest, which went amazingly well. All the kids brought in recipes, some of them written on tiny folded scraps of paper, others written in previous centuries by people who still refereed to baking soda as "bicarbonate of soda", none of them including a long enough creaming step (a key to good cookies), and I helped translate them into ten batches of fantastic cookies. There wasn't a dud in the group.

Then of course we had to sample all the cookies, and let me tell you that tasting ten cookies, even in small pieces, is enough to make anyone woozy. The kids soldiered through, though, and had recovered sufficiently to eat large quantities of fudge for dessert.

Two guys walk into a cafe...

2011-05-02T01:50:00.001-06:00

Funny things happen when you hang around in a cafe for long enough. We get a lot of odd people passing through. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might recall Pander and Flander, the anarchists who stopped by during the Democratic National Convention a few years ago. Then there are the quirky regulars, like the guy who adjusts the position of our dog water bowl outside our patio every day. But last week we had the weirdest interaction ever.

Jill and I were in the kitchen when two men dressed in suits came into the cafe. We don't see suits very often around here, and these were not your regular off-the-rack suits, these were $10,000 tailored suits. One guy even had the calf-length-overcoat thing going on. They went up to the counter, and Jill and I could see through the window that one of the men was talking at length with the barista, which we take as a bad sign--usually it means there's going to be a high-maintenance customer situation. The barista left the men and came into the kitchen, reinforcing our fears that they were insisting on talking to a manager. However, that wasn't the case this time. Instead, the barista said that the men were looking for a deaf woman who was named "Edna or Adna or something like that". They said they were trying to deliver Braille books and they needed to find this deaf woman. We all agreed, that's the worst cover story we've ever heard. There's no way these guys were working for some nonprofit outfit. Nor were they working for one of our country's fine investigatory departments, unless government salaries have gone up a lot. These guys were private. Gentlemen, if you want to unobtrusively locate someone, you're going to need to come up with a better story, and lose the Armani suits. We told the men that we didn't know anyone who fit that description, which is what we would have told them regardless of whether we did or not. They left and stood on the corner outside the cafe, where they were joined by two other men, one of whom was an older Godfather type, and the other of whom was a scruffy guy with long hair and sunglasses, clearly the muscle. They talked for a while and then got into a rental car with dark-tinted windows. We were so busy spying on them that we didn't think to take pictures, so we're hoping they come back. But Edna, if you're reading this, they're getting close. Might be time to relocate.

Gearing up for Denver Restaurant Week 2011

2011-02-25T12:53:00.001-07:00

If you're not from around here, or you are but you don't like any restaurants other than Generous Servings, you might not know about Denver Restaurant Week. It's actually two weeks, during which participating restaurants offer multi-course meals for the "mile-high price" of $52.80 per couple. Before we go any farther, can I just mention that it's annoying to price a meal per couple? But $26.40 per person just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Last year Après had been open for only a week when Restaurant Week rolled around, and we were way too disorganized to participate, but we decided we'd do it this year. It starts tomorrow, and we're all getting a little anxious about how it's going to go. A lot of other chefs say that it's a nightmare: the customers are "bargain hunting" and so they don't get any extra stuff and they leave bad tips, people get upset when they can't get in, the staff gets exhausted, restaurants poach servers from each other to try to meet the demand, service and quality slip, and by the end of the two weeks half your staff has quit. Great. But if you don't participate, you don't have any business, because all the customers are taking advantage of the great deals around town.

So here's hoping that it's fun and we make a lot of new friends. We've stocked up on everything we can, and we're all psyched up for a big push. Three hundred and one restaurants are participating this year, so maybe we won't all be very busy. Supposedly this is the largest Restaurant Week in the country (other cities, like New York and Boston, also have similar events), but I happen to know that 11 of our 301 restaurants are the local Outback Steakhouse locations, so I'm not sure we can count those.

Today I went to the Restaurant Week kick-off press conference. It was the first press conference I've ever been to, and I have to say I was underwhelmed with the quality of the speeches. Afterwards they took a picture of a bunch of participating chefs with the mayor. Check out this picture and see if you notice anything strange (other than the giant wine glass the mayor is holding):

Yes, there are 40 chefs here, and two of them are women (I'm at near the middle, wearing the only blue chef's coat). When they were organizing us for the picture they called us "gentlemen". Excuse me. That means dining at Après, during Restaurant Week or any other time, puts you on the moral high ground as a supporter of gender equality. Give us a call and make a reservation. And I know that if you're reading this, you already know this, but please tip well. Just because we offered you a deal doesn't mean the servers should suffer. Jill and I are taking ourselves out to two great restaurants that we normally couldn't afford, so maybe we'll see you out there!

Quick, what's the first thing you think of when I say "kumquat"?

2011-02-12T11:00:00.001-07:00

You know what a kumquat is, right? It looks like a miniature orange (although it's not technically a citrus fruit). Americans' average consumption of kumquats is 0.2 per year. I made up that number, and it's probably high, but I am really bringing up the average. In Après we use them in a sauce for our chocolate torte, and although we have served the torte with many other delicious sauces (most recently a pomegranate-clove sauce, which was great), my favorite accompaniment is the original kumquat sauce that I invented right around this time last year, when Après first opened (in fact, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary, and we're having a Dessert Wine Tasting to celebrate!).

So when they show up in grocery stores, I buy a whole lot of kumquats: at least a few dozen every week. I've discovered that buying kumquats is a great conversation starter. Every time someone sees me putting them in a bag, he or she says, "Now what do you do with those things, anyway?" And although I am always interested in talking about food, and I really do know what to do with kumquats, this question inevitably stumps me for a second, and I say, "You eat them." Which destroys my credibility, even though it's completely true.

Last week a woman in the grocery store asked me what to do with kumquats, and I told her that you eat the whole thing, peel and all, just pop it in your mouth. I gave her one from the bin and told her to try it, because I shop enough at Sunflower to feel perfectly comfortable giving out free samples. She looked at me like I was insane, pretended to eat it, and walked away without tasting it. Okay, I've done everything I can for you.

Kumquats are one of the few fruits that are carried only seasonally in stores. They have a short ripening season, and they aren't popular enough here to try to get them to produce out of season or cultivate them in the Southern Hemisphere (they are native to China), so they are sold only between about November and March. I understand this. I embrace this. That's why the kumquat sauce is on our menu right now, and won't be in a few months. However, this past week I went to three different stores and couldn't find kumquats, and when I asked the produce guys whether they had any, each one shook his head and said, "Not this time of year, they aren't in season." I've gotten this response before, and I have learned that it's what they say whenever they're out of some type of produce. They just tell you it's out of season, which puts them on both the intellectual and moral high ground, since you're supposed to feel bad for even wanting to buy fruit that is out of season AND dumb for not knowing which season the fruit ripens in. This strategy does not work on me, and it makes me really mad, because 1) I am not dumb, 2) I am attempting to buy food in season, and 3) you doing selling heirloom tomatoes in February right over there! I do support encouraging people do buy produce in season, but not by lying to them. I also support kumquat consumption, so if you see any in your store, pop one in your mouth (you can eat one in the store, just tell them I said it was fine)--they'll be gone in another month!

Our fifth Cook for a Cause!

2011-01-31T21:18:00.003-07:00

Yesterday we held our fifth Cook for a Cause Day, our 12-hour cook-a-thon benefiting the Carpenter's Cupboard Food Bank in Wheat Ridge. More than 70 great volunteers joined us to cook over the course of the day, and we were able to donate almost 500 pounds of wholesome, handmade food.

We made shepherd's pie and a special squash lasagna (named "squasagna" by our friend Kathryn) using all the squash donated from people's gardens this summer. The food turned out delicious, we had a good time, and more than 700 people will eat a little better over the next few days, thanks to everyone who helped out. It was nice to cook with some old friends and meet lots of new ones who we hope to see again soon. Here are some pictures from the event:

All these carrots were hand-diced (and this is a fraction of the total)! Luckily several volunteers had taken our Knife Skills class and led the charge!

We boiled 150 pounds of potatoes...

...and riced them all to make the most fluffy mashed potatoes ever to top a shepherd's pie!

Lots of pans of sauce being cooked! That's me checking things out, second from the left--not sure why I look so serious, since everything was turning out great!

More pans of sauce!

We had lots of mozzarella, thanks to a generous donation from Leprino Foods.

After hosting this event five times, we've got a good system for packaging and labeling the hundreds of pans of food!

If you give a kid dry ice...

2011-01-03T00:18:00.002-07:00

Happy New Year! It's exciting to be saying that for the third year as a business owner. At this time last year we were still imagining how Après would look, and now we're planning a celebration of the Dessert Bar's first birthday (a fun dessert wine tasting on February 13)! I'm looking forward to 2011 as the year we don't add any more extensions to our business.

We had a nice holiday season around Generous Servings, including a couple of days off (we were closed on Christmas and New Year's Day), which feels weird when you work seven days a week almost every week. Last week I taught only two cooking classes, both for teens. The first was a bread baking class, during which we made several great bread recipes, the runaway favorite being monkey bread (which is mostly sugar with some bread dough inside it). The second class was a food science class, which was a lot of fun. It was not the neatest class: here's a picture of the remnants of one "experiment" (playing with cornstarch and water):

We also cooked with some cornstarch, made a gelatin dessert, and did some spherification (a classic molecular gastronomy trick):

And of course, we used some dry ice to make ice cream:

The kids came up with all kinds of other things they wanted to test with dry ice (they tried freezing the spheres we made in the other experiment, making carbon dioxide-filled soap bubbles, etc.). They were excited to learn that you can buy dry ice at the grocery store, and disappointed that you have to be 18 (they were all under 15). Several of them assured me that they could easily pass for 17 at the movies, and personally, I think using a fake ID to buy dry ice is probably better than using it for cigarettes, so I wished them luck.

I'm not sure anyone really learned any science in the class, but the more important point is to be excited by something you don't really understand, and I think we accomplished that. That seems like a good way to start a new year.

Why take a cooking class at Generous Servings?

2010-12-27T21:28:00.001-07:00

If you're thinking about taking a cooking class, you've got several options in the Denver area. Taking a cooking class is an investment of time and money, so it makes sense to think about which cooking school will offer you the best experience. And from our point of view, we want to attract customers who will be happy with what we offer, so we appreciate the opportunity to tell you about the Generous Servings philosophy and unique approach to teaching cooking.

One of the most important features of our classes is that they are 100% hands-on. We don't do demonstration classes, and we don't do lectures. Of course we show you how to do things--that's kind of the point--but we make sure that the participants get to try everything, from the chopping to the cooking to the final tasting for seasoning. We think this is by far the best way to learn to cook, and it will give you the confidence to apply what you learn at home. If you wanted to watch someone else cook, you could do that for free on TV!

In order for each participant to be involved in the preparation of every dish, we keep our classes very small. Almost all our classes are limited to 10 participants. In a group that small you will be able to see what's going on around the kitchen, get a chance to try everything you want to do, and ask the instructor any questions you think of. We don't cram as many people as possible into our classes. If you're shopping around for a cooking school, perhaps the most important question to ask is, how big are the class sizes? Most other cooking schools in the area have class sizes of 18 to 24 people, or even more!

Your experience in a cooking class will depend largely on your instructor, and we are very careful with how we select and train our cooking instructors. There are a lot of people who are good cooks, but very few of them are good teachers as well. A good cooking instructor will be able to guide you to success with the recipes, impart numerous helpful tips along the way, and make sure you enjoy yourself. Many cooking schools employ restaurant chefs as their instructors, but most of those people have no training as teachers, and they aren't always good at translating their restaurant experience into information that's useful for home cooks. Our instructors have extensive teaching experience, approachable personalities, and they love working with home cooks and developing recipes that will work in anyone's kitchen. That being said, we don't dumb down cooking: you won't find any mixes in our classes, nor will you be told that you need to buy some silly gadget to be a better cook. If you want to geek out about anything food-related, we are right there with you. You should see us when we all go out to dinner together: we can analyze the food all night long. All our instructors love to cook and experiment at home, and we're always testing new potential class recipes on our friends and families.

Finally, when you patronize Generous Servings, you know that you are also helping the less fortunate in our community. Every single day we donate food and money to nonprofits, food banks, and local organizations, adding up to thousands of pounds of food and thousands of dollars each year. Each month we feature a local cause for our Community Give-Back Day, and twice a year we sponsor a Cook for a Cause Cook-a-Thon to donate half a ton of food to charity. To learn more about our donations, please click here. We know how lucky we are to own a business and have such great customers, and we know that there are lots of people who can't afford the luxury of taking a cooking class or buying a homemade croissant. It's not just our name; being generous is part of our business model. Sometimes it's a challenge to strike the balance, but we think it's worth it.

Thanks for considering Generous Servings for a cooking class, and we hope to see you soon!

ISO poison tester for sprinkles--POSITION FILLED

2010-12-03T01:19:00.000-07:00

We had a very nice Thanksgiving around Generous Servings. Our whole family came into town and we immediately put them to work, as has been our tradition since the first Denver Brinig Thanksgiving three years ago. One of our sisters is an expert at holiday light installation, so she was in charge of interior and exterior decoration. The building is looking very festive now.

We also got our family to help make hundreds of cookies, which we decorated in the first of our two Holiday Cookie Decorating Parties this past weekend. It's always fun to see how people of all ages approach the process of decorating cookies. In this last class there were two very cute brothers who were about 4 and 6 years old, and they were really intent on tasting all the decorations--more than once. They ate the frosting directly off the plastic knives we gave them, and they ate the sprinkles by the spoonful. Here's one of them:

This week I've been working on a new dessert for Après: ginger crème brûlée with cranberry-pear compote. The flavors are very good, and that's the most important thing, but the most dramatic element of this dessert is the garnish:

That caramel spiral is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen. It took me a while to work out the kinks in making it--this is what my work area looked like a few days ago:

Smashed between the holidays is an exciting milestone for us: yesterday Generous Servings was three years old! We always have a public celebration of our anniversary in January at our Cook for a Cause event (this year scheduled for January 30; register now to join us in this fun all-day Cook-a-Thon for charity!), but Jill and I privately observe the actual day by going out to dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. This year we might have to order in, since we're adopting a dog this weekend (named Gravy, to be friends with Biscuit), but one way or another, we'll raise a fork to Generous Servings.

We're so full of hot air

2010-11-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

If you've ever seen one of those silly Food Network "challenge" shows where teams compete at making towering cakes or sugar sculptures, you know that the most dramatic part is when the teams have to (inexplicably) move their finished creations to a different table. It's just asking for trouble. But it's true that in real restaurant life, the food does need to get from the kitchen to the dining room, and although the chef may have a vision for how to plate a dessert, if the servers can't get it out to the customers in one piece, it's not going to have the intended effect.

At Après we lean heavily on our servers. One of the most fun parts about running the Dessert Bar is that I get to create desserts with playful presentations. There's a fine line between whimsy and foolishness, and I enjoy walking that line. But it turns into a true team effort to get some of those desserts to the table, since I'm not the one who has to get the plate through a swinging door, past the blowing heating vents, around an obstacle course of chairs, and in front of the customer before the ice cream melts.

Almost all of our desserts involve juxtapositions of hot and cold, so timing is critical. Most of them involve garnishes balanced precariously on another object (which may be melting or on fire at the same time). At first we made our servers to carry out grills with live fire, and when that got easy we started pouring rum on the plates and lighting that on fire. Last month we asked them to make ice cream at the table using dry ice. And last week we debuted a pumpkin soufflé, which has a presentable life span of less than 30 seconds. Is this getting ridiculous? Yes. But by Jove, it's a fantastic soufflé. I know, because I did at least 40 individual tests to get it right.

This isn't a great picture, but I didn't have very long to set it up! When we get an order for a soufflé, we whip an egg white by hand (Travis and I are so buff, we can do this all night long), and then we fold it into the pumpkin base and pour it into the ramekin. It takes exactly 2 minutes and 20 seconds for us to cook the soufflé (using some new oven technology that you don't have). The moment it's done, we have to rush it out to the diner, because the dramatic rise of a soufflé is held up only by hot air. The first couple of times we made one to order, we all stood in front of the oven watching the timer count down, because we were afraid to do anything else and miss the second the soufflé was done. But now we've gotten so good at multitasking that the servers sometimes come back to get the soufflé when there are less than 5 seconds on the clock. Several times when the servers have carried it out, we've gotten a round of applause! (It tastes good too, this isn't just a show.)

We've brought back one of our favorite fall desserts, Travis's signature apple dumpling. After I had a come-to-Jesus moment a few years ago and swore to use only local apples (instead of the really substandard grocery store ones that have been in storage since last fall), we've tried our apple dumpling recipe with a dozen different local varieties. We have a clear favorite, Cameo apples, and I just found those for the first time last week, so apple dumplings are back in style! The apples won't last forever, so come try one before they're gone!

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

2010-10-20T01:09:00.002-06:00

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....

Dry ice ice cream: looks like a typo, but it's not!

2010-09-30T19:57:00.002-06:00

A few weeks ago I got obsessed with the idea of making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. A couple of places around town are doing it, and the theory is that the faster you freeze the ice cream base, the less time the ice crystals have to form, so you get very small ice crystals and hence a super-smooth ice cream. Jill and I checked out the process at The Crushery on South Pearl, and it's true, their ice cream was extremely smooth (and extremely cold--you could pick up flakes of it and it wouldn't melt). However, when I did some research on how to acquire liquid nitrogen, I found several stories of terrible liquid nitrogen accidents, including some in kitchens (since it's stored in pressurized tanks, if something goes wrong the tank can easily fly through your wall). So then I thought about using dry ice, which is not nearly as cold, and doesn't have to be stored under pressure.

Dry ice, which is solid carbon dioxide, is pretty easy to buy, and does chill liquids very quickly (and with a satisfying cloud of "smoke"). However, it also carbonates the liquid, which we discovered when I made my first batch of dry ice ice cream using coffee ice cream base. Carbonated coffee is not good. So then we brainstormed some ice cream flavors that carbonation would actually enhance, and we came up with a good list: champagne, root beer, real beer. We have a milk stout on our beer list, so we decided to work with that, and after a few experiments, we figured out how to make milk stout ice cream right at your table:

First we combine the dairy and the beer in a bowl.

Then we add the dry ice and stir for about one minute.

The finished ice cream is served with a ginger spice cake (also made with stout)!

Our servers, who actually have to do all the work here, have been good sports about this crazy dish, and it certainly is impressive to watch!

The birth of Börk, and a squash invasion

2010-09-23T14:26:00.001-06:00

We've had an exciting week at Generous Servings! First, we have welcomed a new life into our happy family: I am please to introduce you to Börk, who weighed 2 ounces on Monday and is growing rapidly:

I decided that it was time to start a sourdough culture. It's a big decision, but after I taught a super-fun Breads class on Sunday, I knew it was the right time for me. I've toyed with the idea of having a yeast starter for many years--it does, after all, combine my two greatest interests, microbiology and food--but whenever I would look up instructions for how to do it, I would always get annoyed at the imprecision and often completely ridiculous explanations of the "science" behind it. I have found that most people's understanding of these old "homesteading" techniques is firmly stuck in the 1800s. This was the case back when we were trying to optimize our butter-making procedure, and it's even worse for anything involving microbes. If I still worked in my old lab at Stanford, it would take literally $50 and two easy days of work to figure out exactly what is in ten different sourdough cultures, but apparently no one has ever done this for a sourdough starter. I realize that you probably can't get a grant for this, but you don't need a grant. We wasted $50 on useless experiments about once an hour in my old lab, and having a good idea of what's going on in a starter wouldn't be useless at all. There are a lot of people out there trying to figure out why their starter died, or didn't do what they wanted, and they have nothing to go on. Alas, I didn't think of this idea when I had the chance.

Anyway, I did as much research on starters as I could, and then I decided it was time to wade in. So I mixed up some whole wheat flour and orange juice (based on the best web info I could find, at this site), and we named our starter Börk, after the last three words in the Muppet Swedish Chef's classic song.

Now we wait and see what happens! If all goes well, in a few weeks we can try making bread using Börk. If she dies, or gets overcome by mold or foul-smelling bacteria, we'll try again.

Yesterday was Squash Day! It turns out that if you ask people at the end of the summer to donate squash, this is what you get (Jill is in this picture for scale; also note the weird curved squash on the far left):

We forgot to weigh the squash before we got started, but I think it was about 200 pounds. Four of us hacked away at it for several hours:

Until we reduced it to many, many pans of roasted squash:

This is the kind of job that makes you think you will never eat squash again. But I'm sure by the time we thaw this out in January to use in our next Cook for a Cause, I'll be all excited about a great recipe we're going to make to use it all up.

As long as I'm eating watermelon, it's still summer

2010-08-26T12:11:00.009-06:00

Events are conspiring to make it feel like the end of summer, with the kids back in school and everyone getting all serious again, but here in Colorado we've just started to get summer produce. We picked our first tomatoes from the Generous Servings hell strip a few weeks ago, so we're featuring these "ultra-local" tomatoes in our salads and several dishes in Après.

Gardener friends of ours have repeatedly snuck in to "give" us squash that we didn't ask for, so we decided to embrace this generosity and we're collecting squash for the next three weeks that we will cook and freeze for this winter's Cook for a Cause (so if you've got extra summer squash--zucchini, yellow squash, etc.--bring it by!).

I just developed a new dish for Après, called Watermelon Carpaccio with Basil Ice Cream. Want to see it?

I got the idea for this dish when I taught a Farmers' Market Cooking class a couple of weeks ago, and I bought a yellow watermelon for a salad. Several of the students had never seen a yellow watermelon before and had difficultly believing that it was real, which made me look at it with new eyes and realize that it is very striking. I don't know if it's annoying to call these watermelon slices "carpaccio"--it was a fad on the coasts about 10 years ago to call all kinds of thinly-sliced non-meat items "carpaccio", which by my calculations indicates that the trend should just be reaching Denver about now. The other components on this plate are the basil ice cream, black pepper, and balsamic vinegar reduction. It's all very light and cool. Basil ice cream, by the way, is very good. It's not too basil-y but not too sweet either.

I finally remembered that one of my friends asked to see a picture of our "idea board", where we hang pictures and recipes that we think might provide inspiration for our desserts. Here's what the board looks like:

Who put this chocolate in my croissant?

2010-08-10T23:40:00.006-06:00

A guy came into the café on Sunday and bought a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino. He left, then came back in to tell us that our pains au chocolat aren't authentic because in France they would never put that much chocolate in a croissant. What I don't understand is, was that a complaint? Because it is a goal of my life to put as much chocolate into our pains au chocolat as physically possible, and I think we may hold the international record (see http://thecookingdoctor.blogspot.com/2007/12/good-weekuntil-flood.html for an early example). So maybe this guy was just confused by how good it tasted? Or maybe he was more deeply troubled, because he ordered his cappuccino extra-wet, and they would never make it that way in Italy, but we thought it would be rude to tell him that.

It's Culinary Camp time again, and dealing with some of our adult customers reminds me that one of the reasons I like working with kids is because they are so rarely supercilious. Or maybe they try to be but it's so ineffective that I don't notice. Instead, they are charmingly clueless. For example, two of the kids from my last camp decided to buy a drink from the café at the end of the camp, and they noticed the penny cup next to the cash register. They asked what it was for but the barista didn't do a good job of explaining it, so they concluded that it was related to the adjacent tip jar. They were very pleased with themselves when each of them took a penny from the cup and grandly put it in the tip jar.

Today while we were walking on our field trip, a couple of girls starting telling scary stories (this was not one of the subversive conversation topics I planted, although I enjoy doing that sometimes, like when we discuss yeast and I ask them what foods other than bread are made with yeast, and eventually someone says wine, at which the other kids get a shocked expression like, "Are we even allowed to talk about that before we're 21?" Why yes, you are. This is my own personal form of First Amendment activism). Here I transcribe in its entirety one of their scary stories:

Girl #1: Oh, I know one. There was this doll and this girl bought it. The doll had three black fingers. The girl didn't notice that before she bought it. She brought it home and the next day the doll killed her mom. Then it had two black fingers. The next day it killed her dad, and it had one black finger. Then it killed her brother, and it had 10 black fingers.
Girl #2: Wait, it had three black fingers when she bought it?
Girl #1: Yeah, so it had killed seven people before that.
Girl #2: Oh, that's creepy.

Is that creepy?

Today's field trip was to an Asian grocery store, where we had a competition to see who could find the weirdest food product (I usually win because I know where they keep the frogs). Then we went next door to the boba (bubble tea) shop and I bought durian boba for the kids (durian is a really stinky fruit that doesn't taste like much, but smells like a dead rat). I've tried it before, and between you and me, it's gross (we got some other flavors, too). The woman who works in the boba shop always tries to sell me more stuff, using her special sales method of yelling at me, at full volume, while I'm trying to order: "You mix peach and passionfruit! Is very good! You try sticky rice! You have too many people, need more tea! Mix strawberry and banana! Mango! Mix durian and jackfruit! Get sandwich!" I tell you, it's always an adventure. Tomorrow we're off to a butcher shop, which is a new field trip destination that I'm very excited about, so stay tuned.

These kids are mayonnaise-making MACHINES!

2010-07-15T23:20:00.010-06:00

Culinary Camp #2 is coming to an end, which may not mean much to you, but it's a major milestone for me. My summers are punctuated by these all-consuming adventures, somewhat surreal weeks immersed in the lives of 13-year-olds. I spend eight solid hours a day interacting with ten kids the entire time, trying to keep them engaged and productive--no breaks, no iPhones, no TV, no pretending you don't hear them screaming. And the amazing thing is, we mostly succeed in making food that any cook would be proud of.

Here are the cupcake contest entries from this week:

On the left is a chocolate cupcake with strawberry frosting, on the right is a high-concept S'Mores cupcake (with marshmallow buttercream made with homemade marshmallow fluff), and in the foreground was the dark-horse winner, a banana split cupcake (Jill, who is the esteemed cupcake judge, predicted that there was no way this one was going to get her vote because it wasn't chocolate, but the banana cupcake was surprisingly light and delicious). Seriously, these cupcakes--the creations of a bunch of 13-year-olds plus me making up recipes on the fly--were better than a lot of cupcakes I've had from professional cupcake bakeries. I'm not going to name names, I'm just saying...

Another recipe we're making in the camps this year is homemade mayonnaise, which I have gotten very familiar with since we've been making it every week for the Caesar Chicken Salad Spears we're serving in Après. The first time I was testing the recipe, I had some...difficulty...making the mayonnaise (it requires whisking an egg yolk constantly while adding a cup of oil drop by drop--which takes about 20 minutes of full-on whisking, and if that doesn't sound hard, I dare you to try it). The problem is that if you don't add the oil slowly enough, or don't whisk hard enough (or maybe if you whisk too hard, or the bowl is too warm, or some other factors we can't figure out), the emulsion breaks--often at the last second--and it becomes a lumpy puddle of oil instead of a thick, smooth mayonnaise. When Travis and I tried making mayonnaise the first time, we had it break on us six times in one day. That would be a total of an hour and a half of whisking, down the tubes. In addition to being exhausting, it was totally demoralizing since mayonnaise is in the canon of French recipes that chefs are supposed to be able to make, and even though no normal person cares about the Mother Sauces any more (I certainly don't), it seems like I should be able to make them if I set my mind to it. Since that terrible day I've learned how to save the mayonnaise if it breaks, and now that I know that trick, we've never had the problem again, of course. But I figured this would be a great way to wear out the kids, so I put them in teams and set them whisking. I just walk around saying, "Good job! Keep whisking! No stopping!" And you know what? So far the kids are four for four--not a single broken batch of mayonnaise. Travis and I are outraged--we are totally losing to the kids.

Another strategy for burning off energy is to take field trips, preferably ones that involve a fair amount of walking (unfortunately this burns off my energy as well, so it's not as good as making mayonnaise). On Wednesday we went down the street to the Seafood Landing fish shop, and Bruce, the owner, showed us how he cuts up a salmon. The kids reacted to this demonstration with a mixture of emotions:

Tomorrow is our last day, and we end with a party for which each kid cooks a recipe of his choosing. This year I decided that we are going to make a cookbook of all the kids' recipes, and the theme was that each kid had to come up with a food that reminds him of something, and write a little intro to his recipe telling the story of its connection to him. I thought it was a pretty good idea, but it turns out that 13-year-olds don't have any food stories. Maybe I've read too many foodie memoirs, in which the author always has some food memory from when he was four years old--apparently that isn't a universal experience, or maybe those stories are imposed on your childhood memories after you grow up. It's been kind of painful trying to help the kids come up with recipes. Oh well, new idea for next year.

All-American ribs and cupcakes

2010-07-04T16:39:00.011-06:00

Last week I taught the summer's first Teen Culinary Camp, and my ten intrepid teen cooks and I had many adventures. We went to a couple of new locations for field trips, and let's just say that my bus route planning skills left something to be desired. There was a lot of walking, and it was about 98 degrees out every day last week. But the kids were troupers and we had a lot of fun.

One of the things we made was ribs--we brined them and smoked them on the grill--and they turned out great. I don't even like ribs (I firmly believe that the only true form of barbecue is pulled pork), and I liked these. So did the kids:

I have learned that it is important to have a lot of contests during the camps (with prizes, of course), so one activity we're doing this year is a cupcake creation contest. The kids have to come up with a new cupcake/frosting flavor combination (there are rules, including that they can't use a store-bought candy or cookie, so no Snickers buttercream), and the judging (performed heroically by Jill) is based on presentation, flavor, and creativity. Here are two of the creations from the first camp, a mocha cupcake with cherry buttercream and a chocolate cupcake with caramel buttercream and strawberries:

They turned out great, which is a small miracle considering that I had to make up recipes for these flavors on the fly (we did this collaboratively, of course, but given the difference in the amounts of baking experience that the kids and I bring to the project, it's mostly the Socratic method plus some dictatorial commands when they demur). I mean, how do you make cherry buttercream? That's never occurred to me before, and my first instinct would be to use cherry liqueur, but since these are 13-year-olds, we try to lay off the booze. Turns out it works pretty well to puree fresh cherries and cook them down into a jam and then whip that into the buttercream.

The third group decided to do a Rocky Road cupcake, which involved mixing mini-marshmallows into their batter. When they proposed this I was trying to think whether I'd ever seen a cake with marshmallows in it, and I couldn't remember any, but it seemed like a reasonable idea. Um, no. When you put marshmallows in cake batter, they melt in the oven and puff up dramatically, so the cupcakes sort of exploded. They ran out of the cups, glued themselves onto the top of the muffin tin, and never turned solid on the inside. Kind of hard to get out of the tin. But as I told the dismayed kids, buttercream hides a multitude of flaws, and they actually tasted pretty good, so we had three strong contenders for the contest, and ensuring that only took a few months off my life.

Speaking of contests, today I was a celebrity judge for a Fourth of July pie baking contest, which was pretty exciting. We're having a Fifth of July party for the Generous Servings crew tomorrow, since we're open our regular hours today (until 10 pm). If you're around tonight after the fireworks, come on in for a dessert or at least an ice cream sandwich! You can't get more American than an ice cream sandwich. Only in this country would anyone have the idea to take two desserts, cookies and ice cream, mash them together, and then eat them with your hands.

Well, that was exciting

2010-06-12T01:19:00.002-06:00

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?

2010-06-09T23:42:00.004-06:00

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

2010-06-09T01:30:00.002-06:00

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!

2010-06-02T00:13:00.004-06:00

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.

We're going bananas

2010-05-10T23:36:00.007-06:00

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

2010-05-07T22:55:00.008-06:00

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?

Mad scientist on the loose!

2010-04-28T02:04:00.007-06:00

Oh man, the science experiment today was great! My last post didn't have any pictures, so this time I'm making up for it with a photoessay. Here's what we did:

Make some Earl Grey tea and mix in some sodium alginate (which is a seaweed derivative).

Drop this mixture into a bath of calcium chloride (a simple salt). We made some big blobs using a teaspoon:

and zillions of small drops using a multi-dropper gadget that came in the kit:

(I would like to note that I refused to read the directions for this setup and I injected the tea into the droppers instead of sucking it up through the tips, which later perusal of the instructions revealed was specifically noted as something you should not do; this reckless experimental streak is why research scientists say that a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library.)

Once the drops are in the calcium chloride solution, you wait 30 seconds, then scoop out the blobs:

I need some practice before we go prime-time, but this is cool.

It's incredible! The alginate and calcium react to form a thin "skin" on the outside of the blobs, which makes it possible to pick up a blob of tea. When you put it in your mouth (or pop it with a fork) it bursts, so it's like you took a bite of something and it turned into a sip! It's a very strange sensation--all of us stood around for an hour just playing with the blobs and eating them. The most fun part was watching each person's face as the blob turned the liquid in his mouth--it was a shock even when it was our second or third time trying it! We pulled some people in from the cafe and made them try it too, just to watch more people's reactions.

What are we going to do with this? I don't know, but it's fun!

Booking and cooking

2010-04-26T01:42:00.008-06:00

Now that our Après schedule has settled into a routine, I have Fridays off. After a few weeks of sitting around and wondering what I used to do with myself on my days off, I decided that I'll start cooking again. This sounds kind of funny, since obviously I cook the other six days of the week, but I haven't cooked for myself at my house in years. It's not that I'm tired of cooking now that I do it for a job, it's just that I'm usually at work around mealtimes, and I don't feel a need to cook at home any more. But it's always annoyed me when restaurant cooks try to teach cooking classes but they've obviously forgotten what it's like to cook at home, so I don't want to lose touch with the experience of cooking without the 17 saucepans and 100 square feet of counter space that we have at Generous Servings. Plus, I'm a nicer person when I cook.

I'm also a nicer person when I have a lot of good books to read, and I've been totally out of books for a month or so now. I've had to resort to reading the various alumni magazines that show up in my mailbox (amusingly addressed to Dr. Brinig), which are so self-congratulatory that I can only handle a few pages at a time. Then a few weeks ago, I was doing some recipe research online and I stumbled upon Orangette, a food blog written by Molly Wizenberg, and I became completely obsessed.

I've known about Orangette for years, because Molly Wizenberg also writes a column for Bon Appétit, but I've carefully avoided ever looking at her blog. For one thing, I think blogging is self-indulgent, and reading blogs is a little like playing with imaginary friends (yeah, I know, yet here we are). For another, the quality of writing in most blogs is abysmal. And finally, the first of Wizenberg's Bon Appétit columns that I read featured a sappy story about her husband, Brandon, and seemed to be mostly about how cute they were, with a recipe tacked on to the end as an excuse for publishing the essay in a food magazine. As far as I can tell, it's in her contract with Bon Appétit that she will always tell a lovey-dovey story about Brandon, regardless of the supposed topic of the column.

However, now that I've started reading Orangette, I am totally charmed by it. Wizenberg's writing is fantastic, and the Brandon stuff is more interesting when you (creepily) watch their relationship develop in "real time" in her blog. The mushy parts still make me a bit queasy, but the blog has a truer focus on food, and the real hook is that every single dish she writes about makes me want to get up and cook it. Right then. Regardless of time of day, season, or even whether I like the food she's describing. She cooks, takes pictures of, and writes about simple, straightforward food with such passion and clarity that I just can't read enough. I've started going through the archives of the blog from the very beginning (2004), and I've spent at least 20 hours over the past week reading it.

So when I resolved to start cooking on Fridays, I had a bunch of Orangette recipes that I wanted to try. However, there were some unexpected obstacles. First, I have no ingredients at my house. Seriously, none. Anything perishable perished long ago, and even my pantry staples have somehow migrated to Generous Servings during various emergencies. Second, most of my kitchen equipment has taken up permanent residence at Generous Servings as well. Third, I've forgotten how to use my oven.

This past Friday I decided to make this asparagus flan, which is a perfect example of something that I really don't like (custards are a hard sell for me) but chose because it happened to be in the Orangette post I was reading at that moment, which triggered this spastic compulsion to cook whatever she writes about. Inexplicably, I also chose to make braised cabbage, which is more up my alley in terms of flavors, but is totally out of season and really doesn't go with asparagus flan. And the meal was...a disaster. Well, the cabbage was good, but the flan didn't work: it never set, and eventually I got tired of waiting and took it out of the oven, and when I turned it out onto a plate, it oozed into a puke-green, gelatinous, lumpy puddle. Yum. In hindsight I think I could have applied some lessons from my high altitude crème caramel experience, and it might have helped if I had turned my oven onto bake instead of preheat (but how are these settings different? I looked in my user's manual and online and still can't figure it out).

While the flan was cooking (or not), I read another Orangette posting about popovers, and suddenly I had an irresistable urge to bake a dozen popovers at 10 pm (and I had 2 eggs left over from the flan, so I actually could make them). I have a great recipe for popovers that I often teach in my baking classes, yet I decided to make the Orangette recipe without stopping to compare the two. After I made the batter I discovered that my muffin tin relocated to Generous Servings at some point, so I had to bake the popovers in a weird nonstandard shallow tin that I must have inherited from someone. Guess what? They didn't work--there was no pop in my overs. They ended up in the trash, along with the flan, and all I had to eat was cabbage.

So the cooking-for-myself plan is not working out too well so far. Luckily, in the past few days two kind people lent me books to save me from book-deprivation insanity. One was Molly Wizenberg's book, A Homemade Life, which is a lot like her blog. I read it all in one day, like the crazed stalker I have become.

The other book was a glossy coffee table tome from the Chicago restaurant Alinea, which is famous for its molecular gastronomy cooking (you know, all kinds of crazy flavor combinations with ingredients that are gelled, frozen, freeze-dried, set on fire, turned into foam, centrifuged, etc.--you pay $150 for them to serve you 24 courses of items not immediately recognizable as food). I have never paid much attention to the molecular gastronomy fad: for a long time, I had real science experiments to do, and felt no need to experiment on my food. In fact, I sort of hate "experimenting" with cooking: I want my food to work, every time. But I've gotten a little curious recently as I've been thinking about some new garnish ideas for Après, and one thing led to another, and now I'm staring at pictures like this with my mouth open in shock. Is this even appetizing, or simply novelty for its own sake? Do we need pumpernickel ice cream and pickle powder? My brain doesn't know what to do with this stuff.

The juxtaposition of Orangette's homey, unfussy food and the molecular gastronomers' futuristic, complicated compositions is startling. It's making me feel a bit unhinged. But it's also helping mold my own sense of my cooking style, which I've been thinking about a lot while developing dishes for Après. I want to bring out the essence of ingredients while giving our customers a flavor experience they probably wouldn't have at home, and serve food that's whimsical without being silly. But be warned, I borrowed a molecular gastronomy kit from someone and I've got a science experiment in the refrigerator right now...

Oh, radish!

2010-04-15T20:04:00.006-06:00

I don't know why that posting title sounds funny to me, but it does. I have radishes on the brain. This is not a common problem for me; in fact, I can count the number of times I've really thought deeply about radishes on one hand. I don't like radishes whenever their presence is obvious. The best thing I've ever done with a radish is carve a mouse out of it. But this week I've been working on a radish dish for Après, and suddenly radishes seem a lot more interesting!

Here's how it happened: the other day I made some cultured butter, which I haven't tasted since last summer when I used to sell it at the Micro-Market. Of course we make butter around here all the time, but usually we don't go to the trouble of culturing it, since the cultured flavor gets lost when you use the butter for baking. Cultured butter is just about the tastiest thing in the universe. It has a slight tang, like sour cream, but with the perfect rich smoothness of butter. You make it just like you make yogurt or sour cream: you add a culture (a mixture of bacteria) to cream and let it grow, and the bacteria eat some of the milk sugars and produce fantastic flavors. In our case, we take the cultured cream and churn butter from it, and then we have cultured butter!

Since I had this cultured butter on hand, I was trying to think of a dish that would highlight it. Personally, I feel that the best thing to do with cultured butter is eat it straight up, off a spoon, but I don't think a lot of people are going to do that. I did some searches for appetizers that star butter, and I found one for radishes and butter: just spread butter on a raw radish, sprinkle with salt, and eat. Since I don't like radishes, I wasn't too excited to try it, but later that same day I was reading the blog Orangette (more on that later) and I saw a reference to exactly the same treatment of radishes and butter (apparently this is how French people eat radishes). So I got some radishes and we slathered a bunch of butter on them and ate them, and they tasted...pretty good! The butter tones down the radishes' peppery bite, and a little crunchy salt on top never hurts.

I figured I was on a roll, so I also tried another recipe for butter-braised radishes. I've never had a cooked radish before, and it turns out they're quite tasty--they lose their watery-ness and take on the hearty texture and earthy sweetness of other cooked root vegetables. The tasting crew here is divided over whether we like radishes better cooked or raw, but we are unanimous that we like them with butter! So we decided to let everyone judge for himself, and we're running an Après special called Radishes and Butter Two Ways. We hope some other people will give them a chance!

The rise of rhubarb

2010-04-04T22:23:00.013-06:00

We've now had more than two consecutive sunny, warm days, so I'm declaring it spring. Plus, with the time change (not to mention the official first day of spring), it feels like the psychological darkness of winter is behind us. In case you were wondering, I am not a skier.

The only bad thing about warmer weather is that all our refrigerators started breaking: this past week we've had one broken ice machine, two broken refrigerators, a now a third refrigerator is acting funny. And every one of those was a separate service call, which kind of makes me want to go outside and bang my head against the brick wall.

To keep up with the weather, we're working on a new dessert for Après. It's time to phase out our citrus desserts, plus the apple dumpling (which really hasn't been in season for about five months, but cool weather always feels apple-y, so we did it). There's really only one spring fruit-like ingredient: rhubarb, one of the weirder dessert ingredients around. It's hard to be inspired by something that looks like celery and has a sour flavor and stringy texture. And yet, there is that amazing color...

To guide the development of our rhubarb dessert, I laid down two ground rules. First, the whole point of using rhubarb is that it's seasonal, so we are not going to pair it with non-seasonal ingredients, which includes strawberries (or, saints preserve us, raspberries, which won't be in season for months and months). Second, the final dish has to feature the appeal of rhubarb, which means we had to find a way to coax a nice flavor out of it without covering it up.

My initial thought was to dress up a rhubarb tartlet, which seemed classic and simple. I thought almonds might be a nice pairing, and I found a recipe for almond gelato which was essentially frozen almond paste--Jill's favorite food--so I figured that couldn't be a bad garnish. I made a nice delicate tart crust, and some pastry cream flavored with a dash of cardamom, but I was stumped on how to make the rhubarb into a pretty tart topping, since usually it breaks down into a stringy mush when it's cooked, and no matter how many warm childhood memories you have about rhubarb, stringy mush is not appetizing. I did some web searching and found a crazy recipe for cooking rhubarb stalks "sous vide", which is a technique used by fancy chefs like Thomas Keller to cook everything from vegetables to meats at a low, controlled temperature "without air" (basically sealed in a plastic bag, and placed in warm water bath). This allows delicate ingredients to retain their original shape while softening and cooking through, and it's super-easy if you own a temperature-controlled water bath. Which I don't. But I tried to approximate the method using a big pot of water and checking the temperature every few minutes, and it turns out that the pilot light on our stove does a perfect job of maintaining the water at the correct temperature for the rhubarb recipe.

Surprisingly, it worked great! I put rhubarb stalks in a ziploc bag with some water, sugar, and vanilla bean seeds and an hour later we had nice, soft rhubarb that held its shape and soaked up a little sweet vanilla flavor. When I put this in my tart shell on top of the cardamom pastry cream, and added a scoop of almond gelato on the side, it looked pretty good. Then we all grabbed spoons and tasted it, and there was an awkward moment while everyone basically said "huh." It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good. We batted around ideas for a while--maybe the crust was too thick, or there was too much pastry cream, or the ice cream was overwhelming, or we needed a layer of rhubarb compote in the tartlet, but after half an hour, we came to the conclusion that it just didn't taste like much of anything. The components were all good, but the rhubarb flavor got swamped as soon as we tried it with anything else.

Then, as we were cleaning up from the taste test, we saw the ziploc bag with the rosy rhubarb poaching liquid in it, and we figured we might as well taste that (that is a good summary of one of my life's driving philosophies: might as well taste that). Bingo! It was fantastic! Like lemonade, but pinker! Like pink lemonade, but real-er pink! I drank a whole glass of it, and now we have a entirely new concept: rhubarb soup! I remembered a recipe by Pierre Hermé (whose cookbook jacket calls him "The Picasso of Desserts", which might win him the chef ego contest, although the competition is fierce) for strawberry-rhubarb soup, and I found some other ideas online to tweak my sous vide recipe to make the liquid come out as flavorful as possible. Now I'm working on the presentation and accompaniments: a scoop of homemade crème fraîche, a cardamom-almond lace cookie, and if all goes well we'll be debuting the dessert this week.

We got a nice review on one of Westword's blogs: http://blogs.westword.com/cafesociety/2010/03/sugar_high_apres_dessert_bar_a.php. Congrats to Travis for manning the ship during our first reviewer visit (that we know about)!

To close, I took a picture of a creation made by one of our servers who lent an able hand during an afternoon of marathon ice cream sandwich making. He couldn't bear to throw away the scraps of cookie and ice cream that were left, so he made himself a sundae (which is probably not going to appear on our menu, but you can always disassemble an ice cream sandwich to make your own version):

Après is up and running!

2010-02-27T00:34:00.010-07:00

Thank you to all our good friends who came to check out the Après Dessert Bar during our first few weeks! It's been a lot of fun, although of course there were some unpleasant crises and Jill and I have both come down with terrible colds, likely due in part to the stress and lack of sleep. I know some of my out-of-town readers have been hoping for the "after" pictures of the space, but it turns out to be so small that it's very hard to photograph! In fact, I think we might have the smallest restaurant in Denver, which is pretty cool. Here's one shot from our Grand Opening last weekend (you're looking at the entire seating area here--all 18 seats!).

I'll try to take some more pictures soon, so you can see some of the details we're so proud of. One of the heartwarming things about opening Après is all the help we've gotten from the friends we've made over the last couple of years of running Generous Servings: we had friends ably assist with everything from upholstering the banquette seat to sewing the table runners to choosing the wines.

Now that we've been open for almost two weeks, I'm running into an unexpected problem: we planned to rotate one new item onto our menu every couple of weeks, and I have several new recipes waiting in the wings, but I can't choose which of the current ones to vote off the island! The seven desserts we serve now are my favorite seven desserts in the world. The popular favorite appears to be the oliebollen, which are little Dutch doughnuts that I discovered while putting together recipes for my winter Teen Camp this year. They are pretty much the greatest thing in the universe, and we serve them with a ginger caramel dipping sauce, which is also the greatest thing, and people are already telling us that we can never take this item off the menu. Also, whenever anyone orders this, everyone in the kitchen yells "Oliebollen!" (pronounced "O-lee-bole-en") in a goofy Dutch accent (not that we know what a Dutch accent sounds like), so that's another reason to keep them.

Then there's the flourless chocolate torte. Boring, kind of overdone, you say? Uh, I have had a lot of flourless chocolate tortes, and this one is not dragged down by the ubiquity of its imitators. Plus, we serve it with a kumquat purée, which is the least boring fruit I can think of. If it were served with a raspberry purée, I would grant you that it was a little quotidian, but that is not the case. Besides, it is a restaurant rule (as well as a personal one) that you must have something chocolate on your menu, and there is not going to be a better dark chocolate dessert this side of paradise.

Okay, next up for rewiew is the apple dumpling. This is a dessert I would never order at a restaurant, because things with lots of pastry tend to disappoint me: they're always pasty and dry. But Travis loves apple dumplings, and we worked on our version until it was the epitome of apple dumpling-ness, with perfect pastry, great sauce and ice cream, but still very much the comfort food one wants it to be. And then some people came last week and tried a bunch of desserts, and on the way out one of the guys told me that the apple dumpling was the best. I waited for him to qualify that statement with "of your desserts" or "of all the apple dumplings I've ever had" or even "dessert I've ever had". But instead he paused and said, "Just the best. The best thing I've ever eaten. I can't imagine anything better." So how can we take it off the menu now? Plus, it comes with a really cool apple chip on top.

I could go on, trying to choose between my children. The logical choice to go would be the one dessert that no one has ever ordered, the mint granité with grapefruit and port reduction, but it is the most inventive and interesting dessert I've ever had. In fact, it was the first dessert I thought of when I sat down to brainstorm for Après, all those months ago. And I just figured out how to make these awesome ice bowls to serve the granité in (it's hard to see in the picture, but the shaved granité is piled inside a bowl made of ice). Just because no one orders it doesn't mean it's done anything wrong.

So what's a proud parent to do? I'll keep thinking about it while I test my newest idea, a Meyer Lemon concoction with homemade crème fraîche. Meanwhile, you better come in and taste everything on the current menu quick!

Construction again!

2010-01-31T18:18:00.008-07:00

Last weekend we scrunched up all the stuff in the kitchen to make room for the construction that will occur over the next 10 days, getting ready for the opening of the Dessert Bar. That means soon I get to engage in one of my favorite activities, kitchen organization! Right now the kitchen is a little tight, though, since one whole side is plasticked off:

So far this round of renovations has been much more fun than the original build-out for Generous Servings. The Apres side of the building is mostly empty during the construction, so here is the "before" picture:

We have already snuck in at night with some of our new lights and decorations and held them up in the room so we can imagine how it's going to look. Jill and Travis and I are really happy with the preliminary look: what has been purely imaginary for months now is starting to take real shape, and we like it.

While we're waiting on the construction, we have been doing a lot of shopping (and everything is in my garage again), including a trip to the restaurant supply store, in which Jill found these great hats:

Our Third Cook for a Cause Day

2010-01-26T01:10:00.007-07:00

On Sunday we celebrated our second anniversary with our third Cook for a Cause Day, a 12-hour cook-a-thon with dozens of volunteer cooks helping to make food to donate to The Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. We made shepherd's pie and deep dish sausage pizzas, both of which turned out great! (I even enjoyed some leftovers for lunch today, which is pretty amazing since I spent 14 hours cooking those dishes yesterday, which is enough to turn me off to most foods for at least a month.)

Thanks to everyone's hard work and generous donations, we were able to donate 520 pounds of food, which will provide a hearty and tasty meal for over 800 hungry people. We had a great time celebrating our second anniversary with so many friends, and it's nice to be able to give something to members of our community who are struggling to give their families the kind of great food that we get to eat every day.

Here are some pictures from the day:

One thing we've learned is that the earliest shift is UNSTOPPABLE when it comes to prepping for the rest of the day. It's 8 am, a time that I usually try to sleep through, and these people are ready to chop mountains of carrots. Just give them knives and get out of the way.

Some happy pizza chefs adding the homemade pizza sauce to our deep-dish pizzas. We made a great crust too!

Mashed potatoes are so funny! Seriously, the mashed potatoes on top of our shepherd's pies were fantastic.

Christmas in January...I guess that's just called tardiness

2010-01-20T20:04:00.006-07:00

The last few days have been insane! The phone has been ringing non-stop, except for the two times that the construction workers down the street hit our phone line and knocked it out. I've been meeting with wine distributors to try to find some great wines for Après, although it's turning out to be really tricky to find dessert wines, because most distributors don't carry many of them. One of the strange things about getting a liquor license is that after you have one, you aren't allowed to buy alcohol from a retail store anymore, instead you have to buy it from a middleman called a distributor. Call me cynical, but I suspect that the state is making some money off this arrangement. The problem is, each distributor sells specific wines, so you can't just pick out a bunch of wines and make one phone call to get them. You have to look up which distributor sells each of the wines, apply for credit terms with them, negotiate pricing, etc. For a place that wants to have a small but ecclectic wine list, this system is a pain in the aspic.

In addition to being on the phone almost every minute, we've been receiving deliveries multiple times a day (often from the same FedEx guy, which is confusing to me). We've got new equipment, plates, decorations, tables, gadgets, and silverware coming in from all over the place. That part has been fun. A few days ago we received our mini-grills that will be used for the Make-Your-Own S'Mores, and we tested them out:

We decided maybe the flame was a little too high in this test...

Recipe testing for new dessert bar--it's a tough life...

2010-01-18T02:53:00.011-07:00

Our new dessert cafe, called the Après Dessert Bar at Generous Servings, is opening in a month, and we've been testing recipes like crazy. It's been surprisingly difficult in some cases. For example, I found an interesting recipe for bitter orange crème caramel that I decided to try. Crème caramel is the same thing as flan: a baked custard with a caramelized sugar sauce on the bottom, which is turned out of the ramekin when it's served. It's a very simple, classic dessert, with only four ingredients: eggs, milk, sugar, and vanilla. The trick is to get the texture right, because eggs curdle if they're heated too vigorously, so it's necessary to bake the custards at a low temperature and in a water bath to protect the eggs from the heat. You also have to know when to take it out of the oven, since the custard will keep cooking after it's removed, so you have to be confident and take it out when it's still very loose. I've made crème caramel lots of times, and my only problem has been that I think it's kind of boring, but I figured this bitter orange version might be more interesting. I boiled down some orange juice and added it to a basic crème caramel recipe, put the custards in a low oven, and came back to check them an hour later. What I saw was enough to permanently traumatize me. The custards were completely runny, totally curdled, had lost a lot of their volume to evaporation, and had a disgusting orange liquid floating around, like a bottle of milk that rolled under your seat and was left in your car for two weeks in the summer. They were the ugliest thing I have ever made.

I blamed the recipe, and went back to my recipe for plain crème caramel from cooking school. Same problems. I tried some other published recipes, and made some tweaks to the oven temperature, but I could barely produce anything edible, much less presentable. It turns out that it's really hard to make crème caramel at high altitude, although I have never heard anyone mention that (which might cast some doubt on my abilities, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it). I did a lot of research and only found a few minor notes about altitude issues, but I guess maybe crème caramel is enough of a dinosaur recipe that most people just don't try it any more, so no one is talking about how it is a complete disaster at high altitude.

After witnessing about ten failed attempts, Jill had the idea of contacting someone we know who went to cooking school in Boulder, and we got a high altitude recipe from him, which turned out to be a completely different recipe. It's not even technically crème caramel, but more of a hybrid between crème caramel and crème brûlée (which is a richer custard made with egg yolks and cream, instead of whole eggs and milk). The egg yolks help it set a lot faster (before it completely evaporates), and the baking temperatures and times are totally different. After making that recipe with minor variations at least eight times (even the caramel part doesn't work right up here, so I had to invent my own caramel recipe), I am happy to report that I can make a really good crème caramel. In the process of working on it, I've come to have a much greater appreciation for this dessert--it still wouldn't be my first choice at a restaurant, but it does have a certain purist appeal. I even tried making it with a real vanilla bean and we didn't like it as much as the version made with vanilla extract, so I decided not to tamper with the flavoring at all, and let the texture do the talking.

Another recipe that was really tricky was homemade graham crackers, which we need for our Make-Your-Own S'Mores dessert. It turns out that it's hard to capture the essence of a graham cracker, and it's probably harder at high altitude, although I never tried at sea level, so I can't compare. A few months ago I went to dinner at a fancy restaurant that has a well-known pastry chef, and I got a dessert that had a not-good homemade graham cracker in it, so I feel even more triumphant now that I've figured it out. If anyone from Rioja would like to contact me, I'd be happy to share my recipe, even though you didn't even respond to my application to be an assistant pastry chef for you when I first moved out here and needed a temporary job. No hard feelings, but my graham crackers are better than yours.

Other recipes have been much more cooperative, and for the past few weeks we've been focusing on garnishes and plating. Travis and I have been scouring magazines for presentation ideas, and we got a bulletin board to put up pictures and brainstorm for future recipes. There are notes like "USE CARDAMOM!" and "avocado in dessert?", plus lots of pages torn from my extensive cooking magazine collection. It's fun to have all our creative juices flowing, and we can't wait to unveil the results of our efforts next month!

The 2009 gingerbread house

2010-01-01T23:57:00.013-07:00

Happy 2010! I finally have some pictures of our gingerbread house to post. I decided to make a gingerbread Victorian house, modeled after a real house that's just a few blocks from Generous Servings. Here's a photoessay of the construction:

First I made a small cardboard model, then a scale model that I could disassemble and use as templates to cut the gingerbread slabs.

I cut holes in the wall pieces for windows and filled them with crushed Lifesavers, then put them back in the oven to melt the candy and make "stained glass". After the gingerbread pieces were cut out, I left them out to harden for a few days.

I made the curved parts of the house out of pastillage, a sugar and gelatin dough that can be cut and shaped and then dries hard enough to support a fair amount of weight. This picture shows a cut-out of one wall piece. The large pieces for the towers were molded around Quaker Oats containers, big tin cans, and a styrofoam bell I found at a craft store.

I glued all the pieces together, in stages, with royal icing. I left the walls for a few days to make sure they were sturdy enough to hold up the roof and decorations.

About ten days after I started, we were ready to decorate. Most of the decoration was finished in one long night. I am proud of the utilization of candy on this house--I personally believe that it's a cop-out to decorate a gingerbread house completely in royal icing. The part that took the longest was the coffee bean roof tiling. Jill and I worked on that for many hours. There's always one boring part of this type of project, which you get about 10% done with and realize you never should have started, and the coffee bean roof was that part. The chimney is made of Boston baked beans candy, which is one of those candies you would never notice unless you were standing in the candy aisle scrutinizing every variety for building material potential. The people at the grocery store must have thought I had very eclectic taste in candy.

And here are some pictures of the final creation:

This isn't as good a picture, but it shows my favorite feature of the house, the weathervane.

The door mat has an authentic "fuzzy" texture because it's the inside face of one of those weird spongy sandwich cookies (also used on the top and bottom of each window). I couldn't fit "Welcome", so it just says "Hello".

The vagary of fame

2009-12-11T23:57:00.004-07:00

(Interesting, I have never used the word "vagary" before. I'm not sure I used it correctly in the post title, but it seems a shame to take it off now.)

Anyway, I am very excited tonight because I have discovered that we are internationally famous for our gingerbread houses. I learned this from the program I use to stalk my stalkers--it shows how many people have checked our website and blog, where they live, how long they stayed on each page, etc. It also shows what link they followed to get to my website, and I noticed tonight that tons of people were linking to this blog from a Google image search result for "log cabin gingerbread house". Try it yourself--currently we are the third result for that search phrase. This is super-fun. If you happen to be one of my very newest fans, here's the picture you were looking for:

The "logs" are big pretzel sticks (cut to fit), the roof is made of chocolate-covered grahams, and the chimney "stones" are this gross trail mix called "Sumo Mix" that you can buy at Sunflower Market, which consists of some kind of wasabi-coated nuts. And hey, while you're here, write a comment and tell me what you're doing with your gingerbread house this year.

The log cabin gingerbread house was a creation of 2008, so we're totally past that. I am in the process of building a fantastic Victorian house gingerbread creation, but it's not done yet, so I'm saving that for another blog posting.

In addition, a participant in one of my classes last week told me that he had mentioned to a friend that he was going to take a cooking class at Generous Servings, and the friend told him to make sure to check out our bathroom. We never thought we would be famous for our bathroom. As Jill said, it's not exactly what we dreamed, but there much worse things to be famous for.

Apple pies and kettle corn

2009-11-14T22:38:00.009-07:00

We are racing into the holiday season with great enthusiasm: I've already taught my first Practice Thanksgiving class and two Holiday Pie classes, and today I tested several types of apples to determine the best combination for our apple pies (order yours now--Thanksgiving orders must be received by this Thursday!). We only use local apples in our pies (and homemade butter in the crusts, of course), and each year the crops are a bit different, so I bought a bunch of different types and tested them all. Thank goodness we have an AppleMaster, a fun gadget that peels, cores, and slices apples, which is the only as-seen-on-TV gadget that I can wholeheartedly recommend. Here is the pile of peels and cores that were left after today's tests (with the last apple on the AppleMaster in the background):

A few days ago I was visited by the Gingerbread House Muse and inspired to begin a gingerbread creation in the spirit of my award-winning Gingerbread Cathedral of Sienna. The Muse told me that I've been resting on those laurels for too long, and it's time to design something a little more local. Stay tuned for the results!

Since it's cold and snowy out, I decided tonight was the perfect night for some homemade kettle corn. Actually, every night is the perfect night for kettle corn! It's my favorite quick treat. I have been honing the recipe for months now (not so hard when there are only four ingredients), and I present you with this perfect version:

Homemade Kettle Corn

3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 cup fresh popcorn kernels (they do get stale, so buy a new container if your current one is from the twentieth century)
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt

Put the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot and place over high heat for 1 minute. Add 1 popcorn kernel and put the lid on. Wait for the kernel to pop (while you're waiting, measure the other ingredients into a bowl so you can pour them in all at once).
When the kernel pops, quickly pour in all the other ingredients, put the lid back on, and shake the pan vigorously. Reduce the heat to medium-high and shake often, cracking the lid every ten seconds or so to let steam escape.
When the popping slows to one per second, take the pan off the heat and leave the lid slightly ajar until the popping stops. Take the lid off carefully (it may have a lot of condensation on the underside) and pour the kettle corn into a bowl.

Generous Servings in the national press!

2009-10-24T23:38:00.007-06:00

Well, the secret is out: Generous Servings has been featured in a national publication. Well, you might consider it a former national publication. And we weren't exactly featured. And we have no idea why we were in it. Let me explain.

Several months ago a reporter and photographer from Cookie ("a lifestyle magazine for the modern mother") stopped by Generous Servings, apparently wanting to take a picture of one of our croissants for the magazine. I wasn't there, and when I arrived, I got a hopelessly jumbled message about who these people were and what they wanted--did they want a picture of us baking a croissant, or someone eating it? (This was made more confusing by the fact that everyone told me that a reporter from Cooking magazine had come by, and I know there is no such thing as Cooking magazine because I subscribe to every cooking magazine on the planet). We didn't have any croissants that day (we sell them only on Saturdays), but Travis was in the process of making some croissant dough, and he had told the reporter to come back in the afternoon and maybe we could bake one croissant for them to photograph.

We were really busy in the kitchen that day, so baking a sample croissant for some random reporter who really wanted a picture of a croissant but didn't bother to call ahead to find out what day we had them was not a priority. They did come back, and we didn't have a croissant baked yet, so they waited for a long time, eating some soup and making us feel awkward. We finally baked a single croissant and it came out kind of ugly, but we gave it to them anyway and hoped they would leave. Apparently they decided against an action shot, and they wanted to use one of our plates (and did we have anything a little more attractive than our plain white plates), and our table, and an extension cord for their lights, and then they decided it needed more color so they wanted some jam, and a little knife, and this went on forever. Finally they said they were done, and they tried to give back the croissant (torn in pieces by this time), but we said they could eat it. They looked skeptical and took a tiny little piece that they wouldn't even be able to taste, and then said, "Mmmmm...." like it was actually disgusting and they were just being polite. Travis and I were extremely offended, because a whole croissant just went to waste, pearls before swine.

In all the confusion, no one thought to ask them why they specifically wanted a picture of our croissants, but at least I remembered to find out what magazine they worked for and when the picture was supposed to run. Turns out it was the November issue of Cookie magazine, which was doing a story on fun places to go in Denver, so we've been keeping our eyes open for that issue. In the meantime I heard that Cookie was one of the magazines that Conde Nast was closing (along with the indispensible Elegant Bride, and Gourmet, which I do feel a little sad about), so the November issue was the last one published. Travis got his hands on it, and here we are:

You can see our croissant (the middle of the three little pictures), with the heretical jam (I feel that our croissants do not require embellishment, unless it's chocolate). And how nice of them to compliment the soup that they ate while waiting for us to have the croissant ready. The whole thing is still a mystery to me--why put a picture of a croissant in a parenting magazine? Especially a croissant you haven't even tasted?

Until we hire out our full-time media liaison, if you would like a picture of a specific pastry, you might want to call ahead.

O fleeting days of harvest

2009-09-19T22:59:00.003-06:00

I feel I should write an ode to the produce that's finally bursting out of the gardens around here. Lucky for you I don't write poetry, so we can all be spared that exercise. We have tomatoes galore from our hell strip garden, and it's so much fun to be able to serve our own cherry tomatoes on salads instead of having to buy them. Every time I walk by the tomato display at Sunflower I feel superior.

Last year I felt that I missed many opportunities to eat local produce when it was in season, and to preserve it for the winter, so I vowed to do better this year. I have done pretty well at the eating part, but I really haven't learned anything about preserving. My only serious attempt so far has been to buy a box of peaches a few weeks ago to freeze. I spent a couple of hours blanching, peeling, slicing, and bagging all 20 pounds of peaches, and then I put the whole cache in my freezer. The next day, I decided to thaw out a bag to see how they were. Turns out they are great! The next week I thawed another bag, and I am currently finishing off my third bag, which means that I have eaten one-third of my entire winter's store of peaches within three weeks of freezing them. I'm not sure how this food preservation thing is going to work for me, since once all the hard work is done, it seems irresistable to eat the products immediately!

We had our first cold, rainy autumn day last week--it didn't get above 55 degrees all day--and as soon as I woke up I was thinking about making soups, stews, pot roast, stuffing, etc. Finally I'm feeling like fall food, although not without some preemptive nostalgia for summer. I taught a Farmers' Market class last week where we cooked with butternut squash, potatoes, and beets, and the meal tasted like fall on a plate.

I have also discovered Tuscan kale, aka dino or lacinato kale. Summer, one of our cooking instructors, introduced me to it in her Tuscan cooking class, and it is my new favorite vegetable. If you haven't tried it, keep your eyes open--it has dark green leaves with a bumpy texture like alligator (or dinosaur) skin. It's really tasty, and I'm looking forward to cooking some soups with it this winter.

Recap of summer

2009-08-18T00:25:00.007-06:00

Despite my lack of blog updates, if you've been around Generous Servings you know it's been a busy summer. Hey, if you want blog updates, feel free to write me encouraging comments on my posts. Otherwise it's kind of like writing a diary that you pretend other people want to read, which is pretty lame.

I just finished my last of four Culinary Camps for Teens, and that is a great feeling. Not that I don't like teaching the kids, but it's a lot of work, and I am more than happy to hand them over to their school teachers. As a public service, I would like to inform those teachers and parents that they are not doing a great job of alcohol education. During my last camp I was talking to the kids about yeast, and I asked them what foods other than bread were made with yeast. They came up with beer, and I confirmed that yeast eat the sugars in grains and produce alcohol. Then one of them said, "So why is alcohol poisonous?" The question was a non sequitur, which confused me, but I said, "Well, what do you mean by poisonous?" The kids looked at me like I was trying to trick them and one girl said, "It's illegal for a REASON. It's poisonous." These fourteen-year-olds think you shouldn't get drunk because you will immediately die of alcohol poisoning. And when they find out that isn't true, what are they going to think?

At the beginning of the summer we had our second Cook for a Cause event, which was a ton of fun. Plus, we made a ton of food to donate to The Carpenter's Cupboard food bank. We prepared mountains of squash and tomatillos for squash enchiladas with tomatillo sauce, and we made meat lasagna.

We conscientiously tasted everything, and it was good.

We also survived our second Highland Street Fair, which is a madhouse. We sold out of ice cream sandwiches by the early afternoon of last year, so this year we decided we would make twice as many. We had ice cream sandwich-making marathons during the week leading up to the Street Fair, and we made 300 of them, which nearly killed us. Then the weather on the big day turned out to be cold and rainy, so we only sold 25 ice cream sandwiches, which was not beneficial to morale.

I've just finished posting the schedule for our October and November classes, which means I've been trying to remember what it's like to want to eat turkey and decorate holiday cookies, while still teaching classes on farmers' market recipes. This would be more pleasant if I were looking forward to winter, but since I dread winter for the entire year, it's painful to dwell on the prospect for any amount of time in the summer. So now I am promptly forgetting all about winter for the next two months!

My beer-drinking secret

2009-05-30T01:19:00.004-06:00

When Jill and I started thinking about adding soups and salads to our menu, one of our criteria for doing so was that we would have to find a way to make our own bread. We don't like buying things that we can make, because the quality suffers so much when baked goods are not fresh. However, baking great artisan bread in relatively large quantities usually requires a different set of equipment and even different ovens than we have, so it took us a while to figure out how to do it. We eventually developed a recipe based on Cook's Illustrated's "no-knead bread", which has a unique mixing and baking technique that results in great flavor and crust development. One of the unusual things about the recipe is that you mix the dough the night before baking the bread, and the dough includes beer to impart a nice fermented flavor. The best beer to use is a light American-style lager, which doesn't make the bread taste too beery, so I buy 24-packs of whatever cruddy beer is on sale at the liquor store. I make the dough on Sunday night, and Travis comes in early on Monday morning to shape and bake the loaves.

This process has been working well for us for months. A few weeks ago I took a Sunday off, so I asked Travis to mix the dough himself. The next day when I got to work, Travis said that he was so relieved about something that had been bothering him for a long time. Every Monday he would find empty beer cans in the recycling bin, and he didn't realize that I was using the beer for the bread dough. He thought I just hung out by myself late at night at Generous Servings and drank really bad beer. He was less concerned about my drinking habit than my poor taste in beer. When he told me this I laughed so hard that I strained a muscle in my side.

Have you made it to the Highland Micro-Market yet? We had a great turnout on our first market day. The second week was much slower because the weather was bad, and this past Thursday was steady but not super-busy. It's always nervewracking to start something like this, because the beginning is so uneven, and you're never sure if it's going to work out. Of course all the vendors need to make a certain amount of money for it to be worth their time, although no one is trying to get rich from selling stuff at a farmers' market. God bless those of you who have come to the MiMa several times already--you're the greatest!

I got my first CSA box from Heirloom Gardens (one of the farmers at the MiMa), and it was full of great greens. There was some cress in there that was incredibly fresh and spicy--I've never had such fresh cress before, and the intensity of flavor is amazing. I am looking forward so much to tomatoes and peas and such.

Mitch (The Green Fooder) is offering Ela Family Farms' fruit shares through the MiMa, and I would trade my kingdom for a peach right now. Colorado peaches don't show up until August, so when they do, make sure you've got a guaranteed supply and eat as many as you possibly can. I was in California last weekend and bought some cherries at a farm stand, and they were so good I realized that I had forgotten what in-season cherries taste like. Local fruit, picked ripe, is so much better than the year-round stuff from the grocery store, so sign up for a fruit share this year and revel in the best, freshest fruit around. If you end up with too much to eat (which doesn't seem likely), come to my Summer Pies and Tarts class and I'll show you how to make a great pie with it.

Je suis une snob

2009-04-28T21:26:00.007-06:00

I know this is totally impolitic, but I have a funny story to tell about one of our recent class participants. First, a little background. Ever since we opened, I have been resisting teaching a French cooking class, because I thought it would lend itself to cooking snobbery, and I can't stand that. However, people kept asking and asking for French cooking. I told them that American cooking IS French cooking, and there's really no reason to learn to make pâté or the other iconic French dishes. We just don't eat those things, despite Julia Child's best efforts. However, a couple months ago Krista volunteered to teach a French cooking class, so I gave in and put it on the schedule.

A few weeks ago, Krista sent me her recipes for the upcoming French class. While I was editing them, I was thinking how fussy French cooking is. French recipes start with instructions like, "Take a very fresh chicken..." Here in the land of the free, we take whatever chicken we get at the store. Plus I was all grumpy about having to look up where to put the accent marks: I know enough French to be annoyed when people get their accents wrong, but not enough to be totally sure of them myself.

As I was helping Krista set up for the class, I was complaining about prissy French cooking, and I snidely speculated that the people who choose to take a French cooking class might not be my favorite bunch. Right at that moment (I'm finally getting to the point of the story here), the first class participant arrived...wearing chef's whites and a beret. I had to leave the room to avoid an embarrassing fit of laughter. Luckily Krista was much more gracious and mature.

However, everyone else got the last laugh, because the class turned out to be totally fun (and the beret guy wasn't snobby at all), and I realized during the class that it is really true that many of the basic techniques of American cooking are embedded in the French culinary tradition. Even if you never make a classic "French" dish at home, learning those recipes will make you a better cook. So the French cooking class is here to stay, and if it makes you have a better time, you are welcome to wear a beret.

Butter butter butter butter butter

2009-04-15T00:35:00.005-06:00

Butter is my new favorite food. Not ingredient, food. Generous Servings now uses only homemade butter in all our cooking, which gives you another reason to have one of our croissants or scones--they are more homemade than almost anything you'll ever eat.

It is very fun to have a bowl full of ten pounds of butter, as you can see:

And it is very good for moisturizing one's hands. This is not to say that my butter recipe development has been without frustrations. There has been a lot of cream thrown out of the mixer onto the floor. One time the cream never turned into butter, although I mixed it for about an hour and a half (usually it takes 15 minutes). That evening our cleaners happened to be working in the kitchen, and they asked me several times what I was making. I kept saying that I was making butter, and they would look dubiously at the bowl full of cream, which never looked remotely like butter. The next time they came, I was making cultured butter, which requires me to sterilize all the implements I use, so I had an array of big pots of boiling water, alcohol swabs, thermometers, and spoons balanced precariously to prevent their bowls from touching the counter, and a whole area of the kitchen blocked off. Again, the cleaners asked what I was doing, and I said I was making butter. At this point, they think I'm delusional.

One of the unexpected difficulties of selling food is dealing with the packaging. It's taken me a long time to figure out the best way to package the butter: what shape should it be in? where do I get the right kind of foil? how big should the label be? And that stuff is expensive, particularly if you aren't buying it in huge quantities. But the Micro-Market is opening in less than a month, so today I made some big decisions and ordered the equipment I need to scale up this project.

How can you get your hands on some of this great butter? I'm glad you asked. At the Highland Micro-Market (MiMa), of course! I will be there with lots of butter, along with other local producers selling vegetables, fruit, herbs, meats, honey, eggs, and more. We've been spending lots of time getting ready for the MiMa, so we really hope to have a great turnout when we open! Heck, just come for the free butter samples. The MiMa will be held every Thursday from 2-6 pm, starting May 14, on the Generous Servings patio. Check out the website: www.HighlandMiMa.com. We'll have an option to order your butter, too, so you can be assured that I won't sell out if you're coming toward the end of the market. Stay tuned for that.

Announcing: your neighborhood MiMa!

2009-02-26T01:03:00.002-07:00

I am so excited to announce that this summer Generous Servings will be hosting the world's first Micro-Market (MiMa)! I have joined a group of people who are committed to bringing local food to the Highland area, and we're going to have a weekly market on the Generous Servings patio featuring very local food and crafts. We really hope that this helps people eat more locally, because we'll be able to keep our prices low and guarantee that you're getting fresh, seasonal produce that hasn't been shipped from Chile or California and consumed fifteen times its weight in fuel just to get to the store. In fact, some of the products sold at the MiMa are going to walk over.

We'll have fruits and vegetables grown right in the neighborhood (including in my front yard), meats and eggs from the region (no one ranches in Denver, but the meat will be from within 100 miles), and prepared foods made from local ingredients, including my fast-growing line of homemade butter (sweet cream and old-fashioned cultured butter, plus flavored butters like orange-honey and garlic-herb...mmmm...).

When can you purchase these fantastic products? On Thursday afternoons between 2 and 6 pm, starting on May 14! We'll have a pre-order system set up soon so you can place orders too, since all the vendors will have small supplies and we don't want to run out too early. I'm working on a website for the Highland MiMa now, so I'll post the link as soon as it's decent. Meanwhile, if you know someone who has a lot of fruit or vegetables that he or she might want to sell, put us in touch!

Everyone's a critic

2009-02-26T00:23:00.008-07:00

I know it is impolitic to complain about customers, but there have been four customers--total over the past 14 months--who have ruined my day. That's not a very large number, but those four people really stand out in my mind. And unfortunately, the most recent irate customer also wrote a review online, so if you happen to be one of our 800 satisfied customers, and you have a few minutes, it would be awesome if you'd write a little review online too, to balance things out. Not that I don't appreciate being personally identified as "heartless, rude, and insensitive".

I will admit to rude, occasionally, but I know who this reviewer was, and I wasn't rude to her. I didn't make an exception to our class cancellation policy (cancellations more than 7 days before the class get a full refund, within that time we give 50% credit towards a future class), and I think she felt that it was a rude policy, regardless of my tone while enforcing it. The tough thing is, when people have an emergency and can't come to a class they've registered for, they always think they should be the exception, because they have an EMERGENCY. But that's exactly what the policy covers, and maybe what they don't realize is that we're such a small business and the maximum number of people in each of our classes is 10, so if we didn't get any money from two people because they decided not to come to a class at the last minute, then we would lose at least 20% of our income for that day. Instead, our policy is to meet them halfway--which means we're still losing money because some random person's father-in-law or great-uncle died. That's a lot more consideration than you'd get from TicketMaster ("tickets cannot be cancelled, exchanged or refunded unless the event has been cancelled or postponed"), and it's more generous than some of the other cooking schools in the area (although they generally cap their classes at 24 people, so having a few people cancel is not such a big deal). But people still get mad at us. I don't know how to make this more fair to everyone.

Even if you do think I'm heartless, rude, and insensitive, please consider posting something saying I'm also witty and perceptive, or creative and hard working, or a good speller. If my obit writer relies on Google searches, I'd like him to discover some characteristic about me other than my rudeness. Then again, I'm probably digging my own grave right now. Does this seem like a rude post? Because I'm just trying to figure out the most fair way to run a business. We didn't name it Generous Servings by accident--we actually do try really hard to be generous. I better write a nice post next to regain some good karma.

The first Cook for a Cause is a huge success!

2009-01-19T14:54:00.010-07:00

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

2009-01-16T00:33:00.005-07:00

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

2009-01-01T00:30:00.004-07:00

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.

When is a door not a door?

2008-12-15T22:25:00.005-07:00

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

2008-12-07T20:53:00.004-07:00

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!

2008-12-02T22:01:00.000-07:00

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.

Generous Servings' heaven strip

2008-11-02T21:27:00.009-07:00

We have finally completed a project that has been on the to-do list since we bought the building: we landscaped the "hell strip" (which is the official term for the space between the street and the sidewalk, so named because the property owner is responsible for maintaining it within city requirements, but can't use it for anything useful). In fact, one of the first things our architect mentioned when we took him to see the building, before we even owned it, was that we'd have to do something about the hell strip (he's the one who explained the term to us). To review, here's what the hell strip looked like last fall, when we took over:

This past spring, we got all the crazy plants and the railroad-tie planter dug out, which left us with a lovely dirt patch. Then we ran out of energy on that project, so it stayed like that for a long time:

Finally, two of our regular customers, Larry and Bob, got so tired of us ignoring their helpful advice on how to landscape the area that they just did it themselves. They put in tons of work, both of the manual labor kind and their signature bargain-hunting skills to find us plants, rocks, and other materials. They did a fantastic job, and we owe them free coffee for the next two centuries. They put in a cute little plum tree and some herbs and groundcover plants that will spread over the next year. The plants are still small now, and they don't show up very well in pictures, but already the hell strip looks a million times better.

And just when you thought life couldn't get any more exciting, Jill and I went to the semi-annual Sysco food show. As soon as we walked in the entrance, Jill said, "Well, we've found our photo backdrop for this trip." I certainly hope you can zoom in on the picture below to really appreciate the detail of the ice sculpture we are standing in front of. In case you're having a hard time getting oriented, let me tell you that it includes a whole squid (or maybe an octopus?) and a lobster holding three pieces of asparagus in its claw. A true masterpiece.

As the Beach Boys tell us, Christmas comes this time each year

2008-10-18T21:59:00.007-06:00

For the past month, I've had the strange experience of being immersed in holiday baking despite the fact that the weather is still on the fence between summer and fall. Generous Servings will be selling holiday pies, cookies, and other festive breads and pastries this holiday season, and we spent weeks baking all the different recipes so we could take pictures of everything to make a brochure and website. My sense of seasons is so affected by food that the smell of spice cookies immediately starts me singing "Good King Wenceslas", which means that by the time Christmas actually rolls around, I will have been humming carols for four months. Good thing I know all the words, or I might get bored.

Before embarking on the cookie marathon, we hired two assistant bakers/baristas, who plunged (at least up to their elbows) into making doughs and icing. Between the four of us, we made dozens of types of cookies, pies, and my masterpiece, the Buche de Noel (Yule Log cake):

Ooooooh, don't you want one of those for your holiday centerpiece? (Meringue mushrooms included!) To see lots more pictures of yummy stuff, check out http://www.GenerousServings.com/pastries.html. And if you want a Thanksgiving pie or a cute cookie assortment for a holiday party, please PLEASE pre-order them, so we can hire enough elves to bake everything.

We also rolled out a brand-new soup and salad menu last week. We're making homemade soups each day, with homemade bread (seriously), plus some great salads. In our ongoing process of getting a clue about marketing, we had the great idea to put some signs on our windows about our new menu, and they are having the predictable effect of increasing traffic in the cafe. Honestly, we are the worst marketers in the world--how can it have taken a year for us to realize we should put signs in the windows? Here's a picture showing the decals that we put up, which we think look pretty sharp:

Along with the great customers we've been seeing lots of recently, a really strange man came in and gave Jill a "present" that he had found on the ground outside. Here she is modeling it:

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We built a freezer!

2008-09-05T05:29:00.007-06:00

We've been working all summer on getting a walk-in freezer to go outside, because our indoor freezer is constantly packed to the gills. Every time we want to put something in the little freezer (which is much bigger than a home freezer, but still seems little to us), we have to take something else out, and with our ice cream sandwiches holding strong, we badly need more room. However, a walk-in freezer is a big investment, and it's taken us a long time to investigate our options, decide what we want, get bids, and save up the money. During this process, my boyfriend found an internet site selling "do-it-yourself" freezers that don't require a refrigeration technician to install. That would save us $1,000 on installation costs, and the freezers were cheap, so after exacting a promise from my boyfriend to help us with the installation, eventually we decided to go down that route.

The freezer arrived in pieces in the middle of a private event we were hosting last week. Between serving the main course and the dessert, Jill and I ran out and unloaded the pieces off the truck. They were not light, and of course we were wearing nice clothes and everything. Here's a picture of Jill with the pieces:

Then my boyfriend came and did the installation, including pouring a new concrete pad to put the thing on. This is us in the early stages of putting the pieces together (our existing walk-in refrigerator is in the background):

Just like when you buy furniture that requires assembly, the instructions that came with this thing were obviously translated from another language, and also intended for refrigeration technicians who had done this kind of thing before (despite the fact that it was a DIY freezer). In the above picture, my boyfriend is holding a piece of metal that did not appear anywhere in the installation diagrams, which we couldn't figure out where to put. Here is another picture when we were almost done with the installation:

As you can see here, he's is still holding the same piece of metal, which we never figured out where to put. (You can't see it, but I am wearing the "Burritos for Obama" t-shirt that I got for free when I was walking around downtown during the convention.) At this point, only one other piece remained uninstalled: the 250-pound compressor that sits on the roof of the walk-in (covered with the green tarp in the above picture). Hmmm, how to get that up there. I called the company that sold us the freezer and asked them how they recommended getting the compressor on the roof, and the guy kind of laughed and said he had no idea.

This stumped us for a while. We went to an equipment rental store and tried to rent some kind of winch, but nothing was the right size. The equipment rental guys were all intrigued by the problem, and eventually they got us in touch with a crane company, and believe it or not, we rented a crane (with operator). It was not a big crane, and we only had it for an hour, but it was pretty cool. So now we have a nice spacious freezer, which is working great.

This morning I went to a restaurant equipment store to buy some shelving for the freezer. While the sales guy was entering my company information into the computer, he asked me what we do at Generous Servings. I said I teach cooking classes, and he said, "There is certainly a need for that! I'm not trying to be sexist or anything, but there are a lot of women out there who have no clue how to cook." Uh, what part of that statement is not sexist? I said, "There are a lot of men out there who have no clue how to cook either," and he said, "Well, sure, but the expectations are a lot lower. We can live on beer and potato chips, but women have to feed a family! I mean, most men are out making money, while women have kids to cook for." He bumbled on about how he and his brothers had to learn to cook out of self-preservation because their mom couldn't cook, and I just couldn't think of anything productive to say. Dude, you're talking to a 30-year-old woman who owns her own business and is wearing a sweatshirt that says, "What part of quantum theory don't you understand?", and you are a 45-year-old loser salesman at a restaurant equipment store. Not to be sexist or anything.

Life moves on after the vegans depart

2008-09-02T01:13:00.006-06:00

Well, the DNC is gone, and in its wake at Generous Servings are two jars of Vegannaise (vegan "mayonnaise"), a box of "Not Chick'n" brand of not-bouillon cubes, and nine pepper grinders (for which I have no explanation). It was actually pretty fun.

The "celebrity chef", Tal, arrived on Saturday, and he didn't look like Mario Batali. He's a skinny ex-New Yorker with a generous, laid-back attitude. His sidekick Lex ("as in Lex Luther") flew in from Texas, and was kind of like you'd hope a chef from Texas would be: big, melodramatic, loving the media circus. They were full of praise for our kitchen. Tal said he had expected to be cooking in some basement, so our spacious, bright kitchen was a welcome surprise. A good start.

The first couple of days of cooking with them were the funniest, because we got to hear all about their vegan cooking philosophies. There was lots of talk of cleansing toxins, probiotics, and doing yoga. Besides me, there were several other helpers who had been hired from the vegan cooking network, most notably a chef from Boulder named Ron who exists entirely in his own universe, including while talking to others. He was a Franciscan monk for 25 years but finally quit because they didn't appreciate his cooking. The first day I cooked with Ron, he had brought a bottle of Mona Vie, a "potent new blend of 19 rare and powerful fruits." Ron was handing out shots of this juice and I was very interested to try it because I just read a Newsweek article about the sketchy pyramind scheme used to make money off this stuff (a bottle costs $40, and the only way to get it is to become an unpaid distributor for the company). Ron assured me that this was the active formulation, with glucosamine, which is good because I had been really worried about that. No point in drinking the inactive formulation! Ron drinks two shots a day, and he credits it with his health and energy. However, I thought it tasted disgusting, and I couldn't even drink my shot. I'll just have to get my energy, joint health, cancer-avoidance, relief from warts and seizures, sex drive, and healthy skin elsewhere.

It turns out that the cooking wasn't very intense: with four or five people helping each day, we finished all the hors d'oeuvres by about 11 am, and then Tal and Lex took them down to the hotel and stayed there for the rest of the day. Some of the vegan things we cooked were surprisingly good, including a fake chicken product that I had been disparagingly referring to as "toficken", but which actually tasted almost exactly like chicken. Less successful was a breakfast that Tal cooked for all of us one day that included fake scrambled eggs and fake bacon that tasted like fake food.

On Thursday there were hugs all around, and we took a group picture that Tal promised to e-mail to me but I haven't gotten yet. Then the vegans were off to convert new souls, and I spent an hour throwing away random vegan ingredients they had left behind. I gave away the pepper grinders to my Herbs and Spices class that night.

The DNC finds Generous Servings

2008-08-22T22:13:00.005-06:00

As you know, the Democratic National Convention is rolling into town next week. Denver is going pretty crazy: lots of road closures, all the hospitals standing by to treat terrorist attack victims, the ACLU already writing its freedom-of-speech suits so it can just fill in the names of the people involved when some protesters get arrested. We already got a visit from a pair of anarchists named Pander and Flander who were passing through Denver on their way to Burning Man and wanted to drop off some anarchist pamphlets. They bought coffee, so apparently anarchists do use legal tender, which was something I've often wondered about.

For the most part, we were planning on lying low during the convention. We made extra cookies in case we get some tourist overflow, and we were going to offer some lunchtime cooking classes to give people from the convention a break from disgusting catered food. Other than that, we were going to avoid downtown, and we weren't going to sell Obamuffins or anything. However, a few days ago the DNC found us, and made us an offer we couldn't resist.

We got a call from a realtor who said he was helping organize a big catered event for a very prominent Democrat. I don't know if I should use her name, but let's just say that she's a liberal talking head whose last name starts with "H" and rhymes with "Schnuffington". The realtor's name is Barry, and his partner's name is Tom, so we might as well just call them Tom and Jerry for short. These guys were supposed to lay the groundwork for the Schnuffington Post's DNC contingent, which includes providing catered hors d'oeuvres for 300 people all day for the four days of the convention. To this end, Ms. Schnuffington is flying a caterer out from L.A., and of course this guy needs a kitchen to cook in. The call from Barry was because the kitchen they had originally lined up for the caterer had fallen through, and they were frantically searching for another place for this guy to work. Barry said that he didn't want to drop names, but the caterer was a something of a celebrity chef. There's really nothing worse you could say to try to win Jill and me over, except possibly that he's a celebrity chef who's going to be cooking an all-vegan menu, which is the next thing Barry said. We said we didn't rent our kitchen, thanks anyway.

A few hours later, Tom and Barry showed up to beg in person. They said they could make this worth our while, and monetary figures were mentioned. They were desperate, and it began to seem like a pretty good business proposition for us. Don't worry, we weren't extortionists. I ended up talking to the celebrity chef on the phone (who I've never heard of, and to give him credit, he didn't sound snooty), who was on his way back from catering Ellen DeGeneres' birthday party. We worked out a deal, and the chef is arriving tomorrow to take a tour of the kitchen. They paid us a deposit with Ms. Schnuffington's personal credit card, which is pretty funny.

In the meantime, Tom and Barry have been in near-constant communication with us, trying to figure out what they need to buy for the chef, dropping stuff off, etc. They wanted me to recommend prep cooks to help the chef, and I said I was free (now that they're taking over my kitchen). They asked me to send them my resume, which was sort of amusing, since my current occupation is The Boss Of This Kitchen. But the chef won more points in my estimation when he wrote back in response to my "application" that I would be great! (exclamation his). I will admit that I suffered a moment of insecurity--what if he asks me to do something I don't know how to do? Then I remembered that my whole job these days is to know how to do most cooking stuff, and fake it when I don't.

I've spent the last couple of days trying to make sure that we're all ready for next week, since I'm not sure how much we'll be able to use the kitchen for Generous Servings' cooking, and who knows what this week will hold for any of us. I'm excited to be a part of something that should be pretty interesting and stimulating but that I have absolutely no responsibility for. I'm very curious to see how the chef handles the inevitable problems with this job (some of which I can already anticipate--for example, there is no plan for how to get the food from Generous Servings to the downtown hotel where it's being served). Being a caterer, especially one who flies to different states, requires a lot of thinking on your feet, and this guy must be really good at it, since he's the Caterer to the Stars. We'll see!

On grocery shopping and bread

2008-08-11T23:05:00.006-06:00

A lot of people ask me where we get the ingredients for our classes. The short answer is, I go grocery shopping a lot. We get some stuff from Sysco, which is the Microsoft of food suppliers: everyone sort of hates them, everyone still uses them. Actually, I shouldn't badmouth Sysco, because our rep is nice (hi Carlo!), and they've given us a semi-permanent exemption from the minimum order amount because we're just a little too small to ever quite make it. Anyway, we get stuff like flour, sugar, paper products, dish detergent, and trash bags from Sysco.

Then there is a pantheon of stores I do "specialty shopping" at, including Asian markets, Indian markets, Vitamin Cottage (for very large quantities of wheat bran to make bran muffins), King Soopers (for the kind of sparkling water we use in the cafe), Safeway (for the gyoza wrappers I like to use for potstickers), and a few others.

Most of the good stuff--produce, cheese, meat, strange legumes--we get from Sunflower Market, which is like Whole Foods without the attitude or alternative economic system. There's a Sunflower about a mile from Generous Servings, so I can walk there with my teen camps, not to mention stopping there on my way to and from home. I go to Sunflower, on average, more than once a day. Despite my omnipresence, I got the cold shoulder when I tried to negotiate a discount. They told me they don't do discounts, although a chef behind me in line one day got a discount on his purchase. After much effort, I convinced Sunflower to let me do a cooking demonstration there a couple of weeks ago, and they're finally starting to warm up to me. Apparently before they saw me in action, they thought I was lying when I told them that I teach cooking classes.

Tonight I was in Sunflower, as usual, but I hadn't eaten dinner and I was starving. One sad fact about Sunflower is that their prepared foods (soups, pasta salad, etc.) are really bad, so that wasn't going to be a solution to my starvation. I decided to get the ingredients for a veggie sandwich, a dish I perfected a decade ago when I worked in a microbiology lab in Charlottesville, Virginia. I used to make these sandwiches whenever I didn't have any leftovers to bring for lunch, and they were so good that I would look forward to lunch all morning. The sandwich has cucumbers, tomatoes, roasted red peppers (which I keep in my freezer), maybe a little mesclun mix, and hopefully alfalfa sprouts on it. If you have some boursin cheese, it's awesome as a spread, or you can smoosh some ripe avocado on. If you have both boursin and avocado, oh happy day. I got so good at making this sandwich that I could do it all with one knife, which requires peeling the cucumber with a bread knife. But the real secret to the sandwich was the bread.

There was a bread bakery in Charlottesville called the Albemarle Baking Company, which made the most fantastic baguette I've ever had. The most fantastic by an order of magnitude. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just making up the memory of this bread, but I know that's not the case because I actually discovered this bread on two independent occasions. The first was when I took a semester off from Yale and went down to Charlottesville to apprentice to a chef in a little bed and breakfast restaurant. They served this fantastic bread at the restaurant I worked in, but I didn't know where it came from, and it never occurred to me that private citizens might be able to obtain the bread for themselves. After I finished my apprenticeship, I went back to college and finished my degree, and then I moved back to Charlottesville for a year. Halfway through that year, I bought a sandwich from a coffee shop, and I realized that it was made with the same mythical bread that I remembered from the restaurant. This time I asked where they got the bread, and they told me about the Albemarle Baking Company. For the next several months, I bought as much of the bread as I could (they often sold out of the baguettes, and even when they had them there was a limit on how much each person could buy). Usually I would eat a whole baguette in the car on the way home. After I moved from Charlottesville, I assumed I'd eventually find equally good bread in California, but I never did, despite buying baguettes at dozens of bakeries. Denver hasn't even come close, so if you've got a nomination, please pass it on.

So tonight I was stumped about what bread to buy for my veggie sandwich. I started feeling sorry for myself that I never have time to bake bread, which then made me laugh because I actually bake bread most days of the week, it just isn't directly for me. In my previous life, before cooking was my job, I used to have lots of interesting food in my refrigerator and freezer at home. Now my fridge looks like those of some of the guys I dated in grad school: all I have are beverages and condiments. I've exhausted all of my frozen emergency rations, too, so there's no hope that I might dig out some good bread. Sunflower sells a lot of artisan breads, but I felt them through the wrappers and all the crusts were soft, which is not a good sign. I ended up buying some ciabatta, and by the time I got home (after swinging by King Soopers; why go shopping at one place when you can easily stop at two?) I was starting to self-digest. I toasted the bread, which helped a lot, and made my sandwich (with no roasted red peppers, because of course I don't have any of those in my freezer anymore), and you know what? It was great. Even the bread tasted pretty good. Avocado hides a multitude of flaws. Now I will patiently await the next time I know I'll have good bread, in my Secrets of Baking Fantastic Breads class next week. Mmmmmm.

Culinary Camps march on

2008-07-21T23:34:00.007-06:00

I've spent most of the past few months teaching Culinary Camps for Teens. Today was the first day of the fourth session of the summer (each five days long), and I'm happy to report that this was the most fun first day so far. This camp has a great group of kids (not to say that any of my participants hasn't been great, but this group really clicks well), and we had tons of fun today. We walked to the Sunflower Market and had a tropical fruit tasting, which was cool (including a first for me: I'd never had a burro banana before--it was really good!). All the kids in this group are enthusiastic about trying new things, and today we had one of the moments that these camps are designed in the hope of: one of the girls decided to try a bell pepper for the first time in her memory, and it turns out that she likes them.

I've taken some pictures of each of the last three camps, so here's a montage:

Making pasta--always a big hit.

Here's one group of kids working on their fruit animals--they were supposed to make animals (real or imaginary) out of an assortment of fruits and vegetables.

Some fruit animal creations.

My feet hurt

2008-06-23T20:27:00.011-06:00

It's been crazy around here. Two weeks ago I taught our first five-day Culinary Camp for Teens of the summer, which requires me to be "on stage" from 11 am to 7 pm every day, and then there's the shopping, clean-up, and routine business duties. It's tiring. We wrapped that up on Friday with a cooking showcase, to which we invited the camp participants' parents and friends, and all the kids made hors d'oeuvres to show off their new cooking skills. The kids got to pick what they wanted to make for the showcase (with guidance), and they worked really hard on the dishes, so we ended the camp with a bang. Most of the kids' families came a few minutes before they were supposed to, and of course we weren't quite ready, so they waited out in the cafe and got to watch their kids run around and frantically clean up the kitchen. Here are some pictures of the final event:

Yes, in the background of the picture above there are two charming 13-year-old girls who apparently believe that cameras steal their souls. They behaved all week like they were in a competition to see who could act the most disaffected, as Jill's boyfriend David (who teaches high school) astutely characterized it. It was painful. I'm sure I was equally annoying when I was 13.

After all this excitement, the next day was the Highland Street Fair. We've been hearing all year about this annual event, which supposedly draws 40,000 people to the six-block Highland business area. In fact, several people said to us in rather threatening tones, "You know about the Street Fair, right? You better be ready." We were nervous, because we had no idea what to be ready for. We tried to figure out how many customers to expect, but we really didn't know, so we basically made as much of everything as we possibly could. That meant that the night after my culinary camp ended, I spent hours making hundreds of cookies and muffins, and Jill made dozens of gallons of iced tea, iced coffee, and lemonade. Then we got here early, with all the friends we could rope into helping, and what happened was...nothing. I mean, it was busy, but not nearly as busy as we had hoped/feared. We certainly did way more business than on an average Saturday, but it wasn't twenty times as much, which is about what we had prepared for. So we had a lot of muffins to donate. A lot.

And then the hits just kept coming: we had three private events last week, I taught three full cooking classes and one that was almost full, and today I started the second session of culinary camp. A bright spot about starting a new session of culinary camp is that it makes me feel young: on the first day of camp, all the kids get really tired and complain of their feet and backs hurting from standing all day, and of course my feet hurt too, but that's become a steady state, so I can pretty much ignore it and laugh at the kids.

One fun thing that's been happening over the past few weeks is that we've been getting to the bottom of some of the huge packages of ingredients that we bought when we first opened. When we placed our first couple of food orders, we really didn't know what we'd need, so it seemed to make sense to buy 30 pounds of peanut butter, for example. It turns out that 30 pounds of peanut butter comes in a bucket that a small child could easily drown in, which means that after you've used most of the peanut butter, you have to reach your whole arm in to scrape the stuff out of the bottom, inevitably getting peanut butter all over your arm. Thank goodness we're done with that. I also finished off the 50-pound bag of chocolate chips, which I am pretty proud of:

On the occasion of my thirtieth birthday

2008-06-06T03:38:00.002-06:00

Last week I turned 30, a momentous occasion I celebrated by teaching a Sushi class. I'm not really into birthdays--I'm not one of those people who tries to hide which day is her birthday, but I'm also not interested in surprise parties or wearing a Burger King crown all day either. What I've found about my adult birthdays is that they nudge me toward reflection on the current state of my life, the events of the past year and the one ahead, and my general satisfaction. This birthday, being one that was heralded by my health insurance company sending me a letter saying that my premiums were increasing because I was "aging into a new bracket", was one that I thought might be accompanied by a fair amount of angst, but I never really felt that.

Along with me turning thirty, Generous Servings was 6 months old this past week. We're not past the infant mortality threat yet, but it's nice to be over the hump to making it through our first year. Today I was talking with our accountant about quarterly taxes, and he said, "How's the business going? Are you doing as well as you thought you would be?" People ask me this pretty often, and I'm always stumped, because to be honest, I never had a firm idea of where we should be at this point. Sure, I wrote a business plan with lots of projections, but anyone who believes his own projections for a brand-new business is delusional. Heck, five years ago I thought I'd be on my way to a tenure-track professor job at this point in my life, and instead I teach cooking classes, so I certainly don't believe my own projections.

I've definitely learned a lot this past year. There were things about running a business that I knew I'd have to learn, like how to file taxes, but those things are all boring. The more interesting lessons are the ones I had no idea would happen. Here are some that spring to mind:

1) Next time someone I know opens a business, I will show up for them in the first few months. I had no idea how important this would be--just to have warm bodies in your place makes such a huge difference for morale, even if you know they're there because they feel responsible. It's hard to open your doors and have no one come in. We have friends and family in the area who still haven't come in to see Generous Servings, and I'm sure they fully intend to do it at some point, but they've missed the critical window when we really needed them. On the other hand, some people really had a strong showing in those early days, and they will always have a special place in the history of Generous Servings. The family of our dad's cousin Bruce, most of whom live in Pennsylvania, somehow managed to come to both the cafe and cooking classes--with extra friends!--multiple times in the first month we were open, which was really nice.

2) The first two months are the hardest. I assumed that the beginning of the business would be difficult, but I wasn't sure how long it would take us to feel like we were mostly on top of things, and without having any light at the end of the tunnel, this business was feeling a lot like grad school. In hindsight, two months isn't that long, and if I'd known we would be so much more competent at the daily running of the business in just a couple of months, it would have been a lot easier to get through that early period.

3) There really is such a thing as cooking by smell. I often see articles in cooking magazines about using all five senses when you cook, but they always give really stupid examples of how to use hearing (hear bacon sizzle!) and smell. Hearing is still not anywhere near as useful a sense for cooking as sight or touch for me, but smell has really moved up in the ranks. When I'm teaching classes, there are often three or four dishes being made at once, and whatever's in the oven is out of sight, so it's easy to forget about it. However, I've noticed that I can now tell when a baking dish needs to be checked just by catching a whiff of the smell of the finished dish, and I certainly know when someone is burning garlic. It's kind of fun to surprise people by telling them, from across the room, to turn off the heat because their dish is done.

Today we move into a new phase of Generous Servings: it's the first day of our first session of Culinary Camp for Teens. I'm very excited, because teen camps were what got me into this business in the first place. I developed the idea in California, and they were a big hit there. Since we opened here in Denver in December, we've had to wait until now to do our first full-length camp, so it's been a long time in the making. I'm sure there will be lots of great stories, and hopefully I'll remember to take pictures, so stay tuned.

Dangerous Minds in the Kitchen

2008-05-24T00:06:00.002-06:00

For the last month, I've been volunteering for Operation Frontline, a nonprofit that puts on cooking and nutrition classes for various disadvantaged populations. I contacted them several months ago because it seemed like something right up my alley, and after talking with the Operation Frontline rep, I agreed to do a six week program teaching teenagers how to cook, and also to host the class in our kitchen at Generous Servings. I was excited about this--I love teaching teens to cook, and it seemed like this volunteer opportunity was exactly the type of thing we've been looking for to put the "generous" in Generous Servings.

The teens for my class were recruited from a group at the local United Way that is composed of kids in foster care who are learning life skills that will help with their imminent emancipation (how bizarre to use that term to refer to getting out of foster care--these kids aren't slaves!). I had a meeting with various people involved with the group to discuss the particular needs of this population, and it became clear that there was some skepticism about whether I could handle working with these kids. In an attempt to impress upon me the severity of the potential behavioral issues of these teens, one person said, "It's going to be like 'Dangerous Minds' in the kitchen," which immediately became a joke around Generous Servings. Jill and I even rented "Dangerous Minds" the night before my first class so that I could get warmed up. Now we refer to the class as Dangerous Minds, as in, "I've got Cooking Basics on Sunday, Herbs and Spices on Tuesday, and Dangerous Minds on Wednesday."

Despite the dire warnings, none of the teens has attempted to stab me with a chef's knife yet. In fact, they are incredibly well-behaved. It actually makes me sad, because I think they've had all the normal teen boundary-pushing tendencies beaten out of them. They raise their hands to talk, even when we're just sitting around the dining table, they call me "Miss", and one of them showed me her hands for my approval after she washed them. A few of them are not really interested in the cooking, but the majority are really into it, which is fun. We're working from a curriculum set by the program, which also incorporates nutrition lessons (there's a volunteer nutrition educator who does that part), so all the recipes are "lite". That part is kind of annoying, since I think fat-free cheese is about the grossest thing on the planet, but I'm surviving. So far we've made pizzas (with whole wheat crust, which doesn't work, in case you're wondering), macaroni and cheese with low-fat everything and whole wheat pasta, fruit smoothies, and vegetable chili and buckwheat pancakes (both my recipes, which came out fantastic). I hope the kids are having fun--it's hard to tell with these kids, but I think they're getting something out of it. If nothing else, they have a darn good pancake recipe.

Another great day at the Food Show

2008-05-23T23:57:00.005-06:00

Last week we went to our second Sysco Food Show. We didn't have much time, but luckily we understood the layout since this was our second time, so we were able to efficiently run around to get all the best samples. First we had to check in, where we were given nametags with barcodes on them, and then when we entered the show there were people with barcode scanners who had to scan our breasts. Perhaps not the best way to control access.

We also decided that we have a tradition to uphold in terms of getting a really interesting picture of ourselves taken (last time we got the picture of us in front of the patriotic crown roast of lamb). It wasn't until the very end that we found the perfect backdrop. There was a produce display that inexplicably had a very elaborate tropical landscape set up behind it, complete with waterfall (unfortunately we are standing in front of the waterfall in this picture). We asked one of the produce guys to take our picture, which he did with enthusiasm, although I will note that Jill and I are the only people who treat the Sysco Food Show as a tourist attraction.

Meat and pastries

2008-05-05T03:36:00.008-06:00

Jill and I had a great adventure this morning: we went on a tour of a meat packaging plant. We're not really sure why we got invited to go there, but it seemed like an opportunity that shouldn't be missed. It was very educational. This wasn't the slaughterhouse--there were no cattle being shot or bled out or anything--just the place where they take big muscles and cut them into steaks, chops, etc. It was actually quite sanitary--the workers all had a lot of blood on their white coats, but the floors were clean, it didn't smell bad, and of course it was very cold. The whole building was refrigerated. Too bad no one warned us about that.

The guy who showed us around was insane, in the way of anyone who really REALLY likes his job. He takes meat very seriously. He would tell us a fact and then quiz us on it a few minutes later. He also complimented our practical footwear, saying that "some girls show up in flip-flops!" You know how silly girls are.

I was going to take some pictures of the meat cutters, but honestly, it wasn't that exciting, and they didn't look like they really wanted to have their pictures taken. We didn't get to handle any meat ourselves, but we still got to wear some really spiffy duds, and since we were pretending to be tourists, we asked someone to take our picture:

On a different note, I've been lookng forward to making almond croissants for a while now...but the thing is, the traditional preparation requires having leftover croissants to fill with almond paste and re-bake, and it's taken a long time to accumulate enough leftover croissants. I finally made them a couple of days ago, and here's a picture to make you hungry:

I also made my favorite of all our pastries, the chocolate-orange sweet rolls:

We've gotten a lot of compliments on our biscotti, so we've started having it available all the time. The problem is that the batches I now make don't really fit in the little mixers, and we are still awaiting some parts before the big mixer can be repaired. Around 2:00 am I find this kind of scene quite funny:

That's the time of night when everything gets a little surreal, and I start to lose fine motor control and spill stuff, so it seems amusing that chunks of biscotti dough are flying out of the mixer.

The other thing that I've been making a lot of is our new most-popular item: ice cream sandwiches. I'm getting better at it, and I've developed a new recipe for a softer peanut butter cookie and a chocolate chip cookie to go on the outside. Here's a picture we took of some of our classic combinations:

From top to bottom, you've got a plain chocolate sandwich, a peanut butter sandwich with chocolate chips, and a chocolate sandwich with everything (nuts, chips, and toasted coconut). Mmm, good.

Speaking of things that are good, the other day I had a thing that was not good. Here's what happened. One of our customers requested that we make bran muffins, and he told us that Starbucks' bran muffins were really good. I haven't had a pastry from Starbucks in a while, because last time I checked they were gross, but he was so enthusiastic that I figured it was worth a shot. I stopped in a Starbucks last week (which made me feel really guilty--everyone I know says he doesn't approve of Starbucks, but when you own an independent coffee shop, you have to walk the walk), but they were out of bran muffins. In fact, they said they always sold out of bran muffins early, which added to the mystique, so I told Jill to keep her eyes open for a Starbucks bran muffin too. A few days ago, I went to the same Starbucks and they were sold out again, so then I went to the Starbucks half a block away, and they had the elusive bran muffins! I got one in triumph and broke off a piece to try as I was leaving the store. It was really bad. Not just a little bad, but really bad, like you don't even want to swallow it because it's so dry and gritty. I called Jill and told her that I had found the bran muffin, and before I could say anything she said, "Yeah, I bought one too, and it sucks." This is how much of the muffin I choked down, in the service of research:

Why do people buy these things? My irritation has nothing to do with hating Starbucks on principle. I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. And this is not a question of being a pastry snob. I totally understand why people might buy a not-so-good pastry if they were munchy and didn't have somewhere else convenient to get something better. But this muffin was not in the "not-so-good" category, it was really terrible. You can get better muffins plastic-wrapped in 7-Eleven. Well, maybe. I haven't eaten one of those in a long time either. You know that the plastic is probably the healthiest part of those things.

Anyway, as requested, I've been testing out some bran muffin recipes. I made two recipes and had several people taste-test them, and each of them had their fans. I like one of them much better than the other, and since I'm the baker, I think I know which one is going to win. We're trying to decide whether people really want sticky walnut topping on their bran muffins, and that's why they think the Starbucks version is good, in which case we'll just put walnuts on ours. If you feel strongly about this, let me know.

The ice cream sandwich conundrum

2008-04-30T02:04:00.009-06:00

We've been getting geared up for summer at Generous Servings. First, we got some furniture for our brand-new patio. We had bought seven wrought-iron patio tables at an auction back in October, which have been living in my back yard, so first we had to rent a truck to move them to Generous Servings. Then we needed some chairs. We heard that there were some for sale at Costco, so I went out there with my boyfriend Matt, intending to buy 28 chairs and then go rent another truck to haul them back. Once we bought the chairs, I felt that it would be much easier to try to stuff them into our cars than to go through the hassle of renting a truck, so we called Jill's boyfriend David to meet us there with another car. Meanwhile, Matt and I worked on wedging the greatest possible number of chairs into my car. By the time David arrived with Jill's car, we had determined that we could fit all the chairs into back seats and passenger seats of the two cars, but now there were three of us, so someone wasn't going to be able to come home, at least not in any comfortable fashion. We discussed the idea of one of us riding in the trunk, and I was the only person who didn't feel claustrophobic at the thought (plus David and Matt were just being helpful, so it was pretty much up to me to sacrifice myself), so I was elected to go home in the trunk. It seemed kind of exciting, actually. But then David discovered that he could somehow fold himself around the chair legs in the back seat and actually sort of sit down, although he would be impaled if the car went around a corner too quickly. So Matt drove my car, I drove Jill's car, David squeezed into the back, and we got all the chairs home in one load.

Here's a picture of our building, with the patio out front and the pear trees in bloom:

A couple of weeks ago we were brainstorming about a fun summertime treat we could offer on the weekends, when there are lots of families walking around the neighborhood, and we came up with the idea to make ice cream sandwiches. We found good recipes for both chocolate and peanut-butter cookies for the outside of the sandwich, and I made a small batch to try out. The first weekend we offered them, we sold out and almost had food riots. So Jill and I went to work trying to figure out an efficient way to make a lot of ice cream sandwiches. This is not as easy as you might think--ice cream sandwiches are the messiest things I have ever made. Somehow we end up with both crumbs and melted ice cream all over the kitchen. But we are perfecting a top-secret method, which we may patent. Here are some cryptic photos of the process:

And then comes the secret part, where we get the ice cream inside the cookies, which we can't show you (actually, we just didn't take a picture of it, because both of us were so sticky). The final results (minus the mini chocolate chips we roll them in once they've had a chance to firm up for a while in the freezer):

Hail the conquering heroes!

2008-04-10T21:57:00.005-06:00

I've been storing up things to blog about, but I haven't had a good block of time to type them out in weeks. March was a busy month for us, with more than one private event every week, which meant that whenever I wasn't actually teaching a class or doing an event, I was preparing for the next one. April is much quieter, which is not good in a business sense, but I have to admit it's nice to do silly things like my laundry.

There is much to report. First, you will be pleased to hear that Generous Servings decisively won our court battle against the evil shipping company that dropped our mixer. They didn't show up to the court date. I had to sit in the courtroom (hardly the echoing chamber of justice I was hoping for; the decorating scheme leaned heavily toward wood laminate) for the requisite 20 minutes past our court time to make sure that they weren't going to come late, which I spent in conversation with the only other person who had showed up for his court date (a guy who was being sued for $2800 for knocking over and scratching a bike in a bike shop). There were three cases on the docket, but no plaintiff-defendant pair was present, so there wasn't a lot of drama. The only other people there to witness my great triumph were the judge, who had a really impressive Santa Claus beard, and a court clerk who obviously had years of practice at cutting people off who were about to launch into long stories. When it was my turn, the judge called me up, asked my name, checked that I had the sheriff's affidavit of service (proving that the freight company had been notified about our court date), and told me to tell my story. I kept it to the one-sentence version--the freight company dropped my mixer and now it doesn't work--and since there was no one there to contest it, that was about all there was to do. The judge asked me a few questions about the estimate for repairing the mixer, and then it was over. My very first court victory. Of course, collecting the money is an entirely different matter--the court doesn't help you with that. I followed my dad's very crafty suggestion of allowing the appeal period to elapse before I contacted the company to tell them where to send the check--no point in drawing their attention to the fact that they lost while there's anything they can do about it. Now that it's been more than 15 days, I am ready to resume my usual role of Most Annoying Customer You've Ever Tried To Screw Over. Thank you very much, I'll be here all week.

Around the same time as my legal debut, we also had our first unannounced inspection by the Health Department. The inspector was very nice, and it didn't take long for me to casually mention that I have a Ph.D. in microbiology, after which we really bonded--he had a master's in biology! We had a heart-to-heart conversation about science, including the joys of labeling and handwashing. Jill had to leave the room to keep from laughing. The inspector gave us a clean report, which we have hung up in the bathroom, in case you'd like to see it. He also said he'd stop by for coffee soon, which I think should give us some extra credit, because if the health department inspector is willing to eat in your establishment, that's a very good sign.

Another exciting thing that happened was totally unexpected. A month ago, some people came in who are planning on opening a chain of coffee shops in the area, and they were sampling baked goods from every bakery they could find to determine where to purchase the pastries for their stores. They asked where we bought our pastries, and we told them we baked them all here, and we gave them some pastries to sample. A week later they called and said that our pastries were the best they'd had in Denver. So we set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of wholesaling our pastries to their coffee shops, which I have no idea how to do, but seems like an interesting possibility. That meeting was today, so I've been baking extra all week to stockpile a broad variety of our pastries for them to try. I got a little nervous about the meeting--I feel like I'm jumping into yet another arena in which I am lacking some vital information that would come with experience. I got stressed out about needing to calculate how much it costs us to make each pastry, but when I finally got around to gathering all the ingredient costs and putting my Excel skills to work, I learned some interesting facts about what we sink money into (our most expensive item to make is banana bread--would you ever have guessed that?). Also, it turned out to be fun to realize how many kinds of pastries we actually make (I've never seen them all piled up in one place before), and how proud I am of their quality. I don't know if the wholesaling thing will work out--there are a lot of practical issues (delivery, liability, etc.) that might prove difficult--but it was a good meeting, and we'll keep talking.

We're running a special on class registrations right now--sign up for three classes and get $30 off--so if you've been looking at a few classes (or want to sign up for a class with a couple of friends), now's the time. We've also got $1 lattes in the cafe through tomorrow to celebrate the grand opening of our patio (which is actually closed now because it snowed). That's it for now--I've got to do dishes from the very fun Chicken In Every Pot class that I just finished. I'll leave you with a quote from one of the participants' feedback forms: "I loved this class--I learned so many new recipes and skills that I will be able to use at home. Everything tasted amazing and Mary was a great teacher--very helpful and patient. I want to come back for more classes soon."

Awwwww, I love you guys. Group hug.

The Sidewalk Police Strike Again!

2008-03-22T23:26:00.001-06:00

As the weather has gotten warmer and we’ve had a few balmy fake-spring days, fixing our patio has become a high priority. Ever since we first saw the building, we’ve planned to put some patio furniture out on the concrete area in front, and to comply with the code for outdoor eating areas, we commissioned a railing to be constructed back in December. We got bids and picked a railing company that seemed very eager to please, although there were clearly some communication issues. While they worked on fabricating the railing, we set about getting rid of the huge shed that was taking up part of the patio area. We put it on craigslist, got a few bites, and eventually met with a guy who bought it from us and was going to rent a truck to haul the shed away while we were gone over New Year’s.

Unfortunately, right about then we had our sewer back-up, the repairs for which involved jack hammering a ten-foot long trench through the patio area. Now we were going to have to replace the concrete, and that was one too many things for us to deal with back in December. We told the railing guys to hold off on installing the railing, because we still needed to have the shed removed, and we weren’t sure what to do about the concrete. Then we left on vacation.

When we came back, the shed was gone, and the railing guys were at work installing the railing. As I said, communication was not their strong point. Since they were already cementing the railing in place, we figured there wasn’t much point in arguing about it. Then the guy who had paid for the shed showed up and wanted to know where the shed had gone, which came as a surprise to me, since I thought he had taken it. Turns out the railing guys had taken it, because they thought they were being helpful and getting it out of the way. They had paid $150 to have it towed to their house, and they wouldn’t give it back without getting their money back, although I pointed out that they had actually stolen the shed from us. I finally spoke with the boss, who turned out to be the 15-year-old brother of the salesman I’d been dealing with, and the only one who spoke fluent English. We negotiated for me to ransom the shed for $75 so I could give it to the guy who had already paid me for it. I had to go to the railing guys’ house with the cash, and I thought they might kill me. It was not a good scene.

All of this excitement totally sapped our energies for dealing with the patio concrete problem, so we just left the jack hammered trench there for a few months, enclosed by a totally useless railing. Finally, a few weeks ago we got motivated to get quotes on the concrete work, including replacing the sidewalk squares that the sidewalk police had told us we had to have fixed before the summer so that we can get our permanent certificate of occupancy. We found a concrete guy, Matt, who seemed totally competent, reliable, and gave us a good bid. We felt very comfortable about him doing the work, and to our surprise, he was ready to get started the next day.

In order to do the sidewalk repairs, we needed a permit from the sidewalk police, which involves inspections at several stages of the project. Matt’s crew tore out the old patio and the cracked sidewalk stones on Tuesday, and the sidewalk police came out to inspect the demolition, but instead of focusing solely on the sidewalk, the guy walked around the area and noticed that one of our gutter downspouts drained into a pipe that had previously been covered by the patio concrete, and the pipe was broken. He said that we would now need to repair that pipe and drain the water properly to the gutter, which requires a permit from Wastewater Management. Therefore we couldn’t have the concrete poured until a Wastewater Management engineer came out and looked at the situation, which could take six weeks. When any question includes “Wastewater Management”, the answer is always six weeks, even if the entrance to your commercial building is obstructed by a large pit and the entire sidewalk is closed.

At this point, Jill and I both identified a distinctive sinking feeling that we haven’t felt since the end of major combat operations on the building renovations. This feeling characterized the six months between when we first decided to try to buy this run-down building and when we finally wrested the last installment of the construction loan from the bank. I’ve never experienced this feeling in a sustained way in any other context—apparently it is quite unique to building repairs involving city permits. This is the feeling that will prevent me from doing any project like this ever again in my life (unless, as Jill said today, we make ten million dollars on the eventual sale of this building, in which case it might be worth it, but we’re sticking to that threshold). One component of this feeling is the certain knowledge that if inspectors spend enough time at your building, they will find problems.

As luck would have it, the Wastewater Management engineer showed up the following day before I got there, and he did ask Jill several tricky questions, which she did not know the answers to (at least, not the “right” answers in this situation). The engineer must have had a lunch date or something, because he inexplicably did not follow up on those questions, and instead gave us a fairly limited set of requirements for fixing the drainage problem, and went away.

On Thursday afternoon the concrete truck came, and despite the fact that one of our customers walked right through a freshly-poured sidewalk stone (the concrete guys had moved to another area and hadn’t put the cones around it the first stone immediately), we now have a lovely smooth sidewalk, a great patio, plus a new walkway around the back of the building, and much-improved drainage away from the building. I was going to take some pictures today but it started snowing. One of our regulars helpfully informed me that March is Denver’s snowiest month, followed by April. I think that kind of psychological torment is totally unnecessary.

Long time, no blog

2008-03-10T07:22:00.004-06:00

I know, it's been a long time, but there just hasn't been too much to blog about recently. I try not to write too many posts that say, "Everything is pretty much like it was last week." I also avoid the captain's-log posts: "Fair day, wind from the east. Played three games of whist." There's a certain type of event that makes for good blogging: it has to be sort of stupid but not so bad that it doesn't seem funny. Sometimes I wish this blog could be a more accurate record of this phase of my life, including the really hard things about running a business and the mistakes we make while trying to do it, but although I really don't mind telling almost anything to almost anyone in conversation, there are limits to what I want on the permanent written record. Especially since our lending bank checks this blog multiple times a day, which is a little creepy, don't you think? (And also inefficient, since I only post about once a week on average; although they haven't checked since March 5, so perhaps my strategy of not writing for a while is working.) I'm being stalked by a bank.

So anyway, the past couple of weeks have been fine. We've been busy, but not insanely busy. I taught our first Cooking with Kids class, featuring nine three- to six-year-olds and their parents, which was messy. The food was quite spectacular, given the circumstances: we made a great melon and grape salad with lime-cardamom dressing, mini quiche with bacon, monkey bread, and homemade granola-yogurt parfaits. Honestly, I'd make any of those recipes again for myself, they came out so well. Then I spent three hours sweeping granola out of every crevice of the kitchen.

We've done several private events, including one which we have decided was the most boring group of people we've ever met, all of which have been quite successful. At the last private event, we made some great dessert hors d'oeuvres, including individual tiramisu and bananas Foster in phyllo cups. I'm still playing with the best ways to make desserts in the amount of time we have available, and both of these recipes were winners. I've also started teaching a coconut milk-sticky rice dessert in my Asian-Inspired Meals classes that I really like. Mmmm, dessert.

Since I don't have any relevant pictures for this post, here's a random picture of some people in a private event playing with the pasta machine (which I call "Play-Doh for adults"):

Second time's the charm

2008-02-24T00:45:00.003-07:00

I taught the second halves of two classes this week, and both of them were tons of fun. In both cases, I felt like the first classes weren't my best--they were okay, but we didn't really get warmed up. It was nice to have a second meeting, and it was almost like seeing old friends again--there's really a camaraderie that's formed by cooking together.

The Cake Decorating class made some really lovely cakes, frosted like the pros do it, with cool garnishes, including this minimalist one (made by an engineer, can you tell?)

I can tell you that it's very difficult to make corners as clean as you see on that cake. That's why you almost always see borders piped around the edge of cakes--the corners look bad.

The Cooking Basics class was also a good time. We made some great food, of course, and it was cool to find out a little more about the class participants. Among the students were an Episcopal priest, a Russian kettlebell trainer, and a manufacturer of hiking and camping equipment--the diversity made for some interesting conversation when we were all enjoying the fruits of our labors at the end of the class.

Tonight we had a nice private event, and the participants made a chocolate-hazelnut torte that was really fantastic. It's hard to produce a fancy baked good in an just hour or two, because that type of dish usually requires a lot of cooling time, but this torte was easily ready by the time we got to dessert. Luckily the torte served 12 and there were 11 guests, so yours truly got to taste some at the end.

And finally, we have posted our class schedule for April. We've got some cool new classes, including one on sauces, and another on sushi (and other things you can roll). I'm expecting the sushi one to sell out, because a lot of people have asked about it, so sign up early if you're interested.

Just call me Legal Eagle

2008-02-20T02:51:00.005-07:00

My list of new experiences that I have had because I am a business owner was augmented today: I filed a suit in small claims court. Let me hasten to note that I decry our litigious society as much as the next person, and I'm not planning on making this a habit, but I am unapologetically glad to be suing Old Dominion Freight Lines, even if I lose. The reason I'm suing them is because they dropped my big industrial mixer during transport, and now the bowl-lift mechanism is messed up and the mixer will only run on medium speed. Want to see what happens when you try to mix flour into muffin batter on medium speed?

Because of this, I can't use the big mixer, which means I have to make our pastries in a million small batches on the little mixers, which is getting old. When I first set up the mixer and realized it had concealed damage, I called the freight company to report the damage, and they sent me a claim form to complete, which required getting an estimate for the repairs. Things were a little busy for me around then, but I found a repair guy (of course I didn't already have a repair guy, so this took some work) and got him out there, and his assessment was even worse than I thought: he took it apart and said that the internal damage was extensive, and the repairs would be $1300. I duly noted this and sent the claim form back to the freight company. They responded that they would only consider claims made within 15 days of delivery (which would have been in November, when we didn't even have lights in the building, much less the 220-volt outlet for the mixer), so too bad. I wrote them some letters, asked to speak with supervisors, etc., but they kept saying no. They said that everyone knows about the 15 day rule, which I certainly did not know about, and couldn't have done anything about even if I had known it, because I didn't have a way to test the mixer at that point. What bothers me about this is that they aren't even arguing that they didn't cause the damage, and there is no doubt in my mind that they did. They are hoping that I am dissuaded by technicalities, which, for the record, I am not.

In my last letter to them, I threatened to "contact my lawyer", which I did--that would be my dad. The crack legal team of Brinig and Brinig determined that I could file in small claims court, so I filled out the notice of claim and summons to trial forms, and today I went down to the courthouse before my aerobics class. It took me a really long time to find parking, so I didn't have much time, but I figured it couldn't take that long to drop off my papers. I went through the metal detector, at which two security guards were debating whether the shotgun one of them owned was single- or double-action (I feel like if you own one of them, you should know), and got in line behind three other people. There were three clerks helping people, which seemed promising, but as it turned out, turnover was not quick. I waited it out for twenty minutes, and got to be first in line, but then it was one minute before my aerobics class was supposed to start, so I had to bail.

After my class, I came back (the security guards were debating whether there was fruit in a Manhattan) and made it all the way to the clerk. She looked at my forms and said she wasn't sure if I should file them because it wasn't clear whether the shipping company actually "conducts business" in Denver, which is a requirement for filing in small claims court. She said I should go down the hall to a free legal class that was just ending, and ask the instructor what he thought. The instructor was about 22 years old, although he looked comfortable in a suit, which I can't say about any of my friends or former colleagues (an interesting reflection on the types of jobs I've had). He said I was "probably" in the right court, and the only way to find out was the file the suit and go to my court date, at which the judge would throw the suit out if I had filed it incorrectly. This does not seem like an efficient system.

Anyway, I filed the suit. I asked how to get the sheriff to serve it to the company's agent, and the clerk told me I had to go to the sheriff's office, which is in the Webb Building. My eyes lit up, which he misinterpreted as enthusiasm for going to the Webb Building, but it was actually because I know where that is (a major step when have no sense of direction). The Webb Building, a.k.a. the What Is the City But the People Building, is where you go to get building permits! I've spent a big chunk of my life there.

So I paid off the sheriff, and my suit is on its way. I felt really pleased, imagining the "customer service" person I communicated with at ODFL finding out about this. It's just not fair that they treat small fish so poorly, and I hope I make things difficult enough for them that they'll be nicer next time. Even if we lose the suit, I feel like I've taken a stand, and that's important to do when you can. Remember the Alamo and all that.

Lots of classes!

2008-02-18T02:28:00.004-07:00

This past week has been busy, and the coming week is pretty full too. We had a private event last night that went late, and then I taught a class this morning on hors d'oeuvres. Jill and I ended up doing a lot of cooking for the private event, so we were both really tired, and I fell asleep on top of my comforter without setting my alarm, so I barely woke up in time for my class today. It wasn't an auspicious beginning, but the class participants were great and we had a good vibe going, so it turned out to be a lot of fun. We made some very tasty hors d'oeuvres, including coconut shrimp, potstickers, empanadas, and chicken satay. Look how happy these people are to be making empanadas!

I also taught classes every evening of last week except Monday (my "day off", which is actually the day I spend on the phone lighting fires under people's feet to make them do their jobs). I was kind of dreading the Valentine's Day class, because I knew it was made up of four couples, and I was afraid there was going to be a lot of canoodling. Nothing wrong with a little of that, but it's hard to teach a class and get the food made when pairs of people are physically attached to each other. However, my fears were for naught, because the everyone in the class was totally fun and had a great sense of humor about the fact that it was Valentine's Day and all normal people feel kind of silly acknowledging the cheesiest holiday of the year.

Tuesday night was the first (of two) Cake Decorating classes, and Wednesday was the first (of two) Cooking Basics classes, so I get to see both groups of people again this coming week. I'm looking forward to that--it's fun to get to know people a little better than a single class allows, and it's also very satisfying to be able to see progress from one class to the next. I've been thinking about different ways to foster that type of longer-term relationship with the class participants--maybe some kind of cooking club? Then again, that concept brings images of 1950s housewives clucking over each other's Jello creations, which is not what I'm going for. I need to develop the idea a bit.

Muffins and magnets

2008-02-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

I just taught a very nice class on pasta (From Simple to Spectacular, in fact), and I am now drinking some of the leftover wine and procrastinating on doing the dishes. I know from experience that this is a very bad idea, because the food starts to congeal and harden on the dishes, so it just makes them more difficult to wash, but I am feeling mellow and blissfully unconcerned at the moment. Ask me how I'm feeling in four hours, when I'm still doing dishes.

Anyway, the class was fun and turned out some nice food, which for the first time I remembered to take some pictures of for our website (stay tuned! I'll be posting them any day now...). I also took a picture of the apricot-almond muffins I made, because I made a really fun garnish (it's a caramelized apricot):

How can anyone resist ordering one of these muffins? Heck, I would buy one just to figure out how sharp the point is (actually, very sharp). By the way, we just started selling our muffins by the half-dozen and dozen, if you want to pre-order some for a meeting or brunch.

I also finished a project today that we have been planning for months: our awesome bulletin board. Coffee shops always have those messy-looking walls covered with posters and bulletin boards--I am actually intimately familiar with those walls, because I used to poster to advertise my cooking classes in California. We like the idea of having a place for community announcements, but we wanted it to look cooler. This was, in fact, one of the things Jill and I discussed for hours before we even owned a building. Our first idea was to put up a magnetic board, because magnets look better than tape and it's easier to take down outdated posters. Then we thought it would be really fun to have a random magnet collection. You know all those weird magnets that you can't remember where they came from, but you feel bad about throwing away in case they might be the only memento you have of some really important trip or relationship? Yeah, I don't have any of those. But if I did, I would want to put them on the Generous Servings magnet board! We are officially starting a magnet collection, so if you have any magnets to contribute (the kitschy-er, the better), bring them in and we'll give you $0.10 off your drink.

Jill then had the inspiration to use magnetic paint to make a whole wall into a magnet board. And I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to use some of the picture frame scraps left in the building by the previous tenant. Over the past few days I have painted a section of the wall with magnet paint (more painting...), and today I put up the frame (made of four different styles of frame), and we added our budding magnet collection. How cool is this?

You might want to zoom in on that picture so you can see the really great "Hang 10" magnet that Jill bought in Hawaii. We thought we had lost it, but today I was scrounging around and found it in one of the fifty-three compartments of our roll-top desk.

Also visible on the extreme left of the above picture is our homemade vanilla syrup, which is 500 times better than the commercial stuff. Today we perfected our recipe for homemade mint syrup. During the tasting, Jill made a few lattes to sample the syrup in, and I have to tell you that they were fantastic.

And finally, we got our knives sharpened today, and we scheduled a time for the knife sharpening guy to come back and sharpen anyone else's knives. I'll send out an e-mail if you're on our e-mail list, but in case you want to plan ahead, it's going to be on Monday, February 18. You can drop off your knives the previous weekend, and pick them up on Tuesday. Sharp knives...what a joy.

Fun in the snow

2008-02-04T21:44:00.001-07:00

It started snowing (again) this afternoon, which prompted Jill and me to play one of our favorite guessing games: will Robert show up? Robert is one of the more colorful characters we've gotten to know as business owners. He's a small, wiry guy with gaunt cheeks and very few teeth, and on several occasions I've seen him with black eyes or lacerations on his face. He usually smells rather strong, some of his fingernails are black, he stoops, and his hands shake. He calls me "dear" and clings to me when we shake hands. I think he's about 40, although it looks like it hasn't been a very comfortable 40 years.

We first met him during the early stages of the building renovations. He was part of the concrete removal crew that excavated the old floor, and his job was to stand in the dumpster and move large pieces of concrete around. One day back in September, when I was taking a break from hammerdrilling plaster off the brick walls, Robert asked me what my plans were for snow removal. I had actually been wondering what we were going to do about that--I certainly did not plan to shovel snow off our sidewalk every morning before the cafe opened--so I was eager to hear Robert's proposal. He said he lived a few blocks away and had a snow-removal crew who would come three times a day, when necessary. He said they did snow removal for many businesses in the area, and he was only taking two more customers for this winter. I asked how much they charged, and he said he was running a September special: $150 pre-paid. I thought he meant $150 each time, which was outrageous, but he clarified that he meant $150 for the whole winter, which was also outrageous, in the other direction. I almost fell off my ladder in my haste to sign up. Robert went to great lengths to offer me references, including dragging one of his other clients into the building as the poor guy was walking past, and Robert also painstakingly hand-wrote a "contract" on a piece of notebook paper, pledging his services to "Mary and Jill".

During the rest of the fall, Robert showed up at various times looking for extra work, including on the day that I fired one of the painters who was supposed to do the exterior of the building. Robert said he did painting, and he quoted a very low price, so I hired him. I gave him half the money up front, but he didn't show up the first eight times he was supposed to paint. I called him every time, and sometimes he would tell me long stories about how his truck's transmission had broken for the second time in a year, so he bought a new truck, which then failed the emissions test, so he couldn't go pick up the power washer from Home Depot... One time he said he had had to go to an unexpected funeral. Another time he was supposed to meet me at the building at 9 am so I could let him in to plug in the power washer, and when he stood me up I got really mad because normally I am still asleep at that time, and instead I had gotten up just to stand around and wait for Robert. I called his house at 10 am and a woman answered whom I had obviously woken up, and when she put Robert on the line he told me that his water heater had broken and he'd had to fix it, but he'd be at the building the next day. Uh huh, and I'm the Energizer Bunny. He kept asking for more of the money (to pay the truck registration, rent the power washer, etc.). I finally told him to forget the power washing and do the painting or I was going to hire someone else and make Robert pay me back all the money I'd given him, and then he showed up and used a paint sprayer without masking the windows or ground, so there was blue paint all over the glass and sidewalk (there still is paint on the sidewalk). I told him he couldn't do any more painting, or have any more money, until he cleaned up the mess, which he never did. I figured we'd seen the last of Robert.

The first time it snowed, Robert and another guy showed up and shoveled, much to our surprise. Robert asked what time the cafe opened in the morning, so he could make sure he got there to clear the walk before our customers came. The second and third snowfalls, he didn't come. We bought a shovel and salt and did it ourselves. The next few times, Robert or the other guy came (whenever Robert came, he would knock on the window and wave to make sure I saw him), although they never managed to make it before the cafe opened. Whenever we saw Robert, he would say something like, "I'm going to come back tomorrow morning, before you open--no excuses this time!" About half the time he didn't come. Last month he told us that he was sorry about not coming sometimes, and he'd had to fire the guys who worked for him because they were so unreliable. From now on, he was going to take care of it himself. He didn't come the next time.

Robert did come this afternoon, although it's still snowing and he may or may not come tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, I unearthed my car and went in search of a cake box that's the right size for the birthday cake I'm making. We've had several requests for birthday cakes, and while that wasn't part of our original business plan, it gives me a chance to keep my cake decorating skills sharp, so I'm happy to oblige. One surprising thing is that many people who order birthday cakes can't decide what message they want me to write on the top. I kind of figured that was a rhetorical question. Anyway, to get the cake box for the big cake I'm making, I had to put up with the astounding number of drivers who go ten miles below the speed limit because of the snow, which is an inexplicable Denver phenomenon. Come on, I lived in California for the past seven years, there is no way I should be a better snow driver than most Denverites. Maybe this inability to drive in the snow is somehow related to the altitude.

Four weeks and counting!

2008-02-02T23:35:00.000-07:00

We have accomplished our New Year's resolution to be open for four consecutive weeks. Jill and I went out to dinner at our favorite Vietnamese restaurant to celebrate. We wanted to try something new, so we asked our waiter what he recommended, and he immediately said emphatically, "14C. Is best." We didn't know exactly what 14C was, but we ordered it, and it was quite tasty (it was garlicky fried shrimp served over a sweet-and-sour cabbage salad). The waiter came back and asked how we liked it, and we said it was very good, to which he replied, "Yes. Is best." That man has a straightforward relationship with food.

We had a good day in the cafe today--we sold out of all our hot food and pastries. Don't worry, we have lots more for tomorrow: I just made more croissant dough today, plus we've got breakfast pizzas with acorn squash, pancetta, and sage; apricot-almond muffins; apple-cream cheese danish; peanut butter cookies; and more. A woman came in this afternoon and paused in the doorway, looking around. We asked if we could help her with anything, and she told us that her husband had brought her one of our orange-cranberry-walnut muffins this morning, and after tasting it, she had to come here and see the place for herself. I'm not sure what she was expecting to see, but as long as she likes the muffins, that's the important thing. A few weeks ago we heard from a guy who had bought a blueberry muffin on his way to work, and after he ate it he called us to tell us it was the best muffin he'd ever had. That was very nice--I have to admit that I've never considered calling a place after I left to tell them how good their food was.

The cooking classes are filling up, too. We had a full class for last night's Fast and Easy Asian-Inspired Meals, and The Zen of Chopping class tomorrow is also full. The Zen of Chopping class is really fun, and recently I saw proof that the skills really stick. At the beginning of one of the Winter Comfort Food classes, I doled out vegetables that needed to be chopped to everyone, without giving many specific instructions (I don't worry too much about precision chopping in my general classes). A few minutes later, I came back to check on the person who was mincing the onion, and I was amazed to find a pile of the most beautifully minced onion I've ever seen. I was so surprised I stuttered. My incoherent exclamations brought the whole class over to admire the onions, and when I complimented the woman who had chopped them, she said, "Well, you're the one who taught me how." I hadn't recognized her as one of my previous Zen of Chopping students! Even better! I think all the other participants in that class signed up for tomorrow's Zen of Chopping class, and now it's full. I'm looking forward to sending another ten expert choppers out into the world--my small contribution to making the world a safer and more peaceful place.

We'll probably add another Zen of Chopping class to the schedule in March, because we have a waiting list for our next two sessions. If you're interested in getting an e-mail when we add classes, and when we have our next knife sharpening day, please send a message to Info@GenerousServings.com with the word "subscribe" in the subject line (we won't spam you).

Things are settling down...knock on wood

2008-01-30T01:02:00.001-07:00

Things have changed a lot in the past few weeks. Jill and I are getting adjusted to the routine, which is making life a lot easier for us. It used to be that every day we’d come in to work and have no idea what was going to happen, but we’re starting to be able to predict and prepare much better. Jill had her first afternoon off last week, and today I worked for fewer than eight hours. I had the weird experience of not really knowing what to do with the rest of my day.

Another great change is that the café has been getting quite busy on the weekends! There was a very nice article about Generous Servings in the North Denver Tribune last week (read it here), and lots of people read it and came into the café to check us out. Hopefully they were impressed by our coffee and pastries, and charmed by the little spiral cookie (called tuile, pronounced “tweel”) we give with every drink (seriously, it would charm my socks off if someone gave me a free cookie with my coffee, especially if it was as cute as our tuile). Plus, there's Jill's latte art:

We hosted another fun private event on Monday, where the group made a menu including hand-rolled gnocchi and pear-cranberry bread pudding. On Saturday we had the first session of the “A Chicken in Every Pot” class, which was tons of fun. I even enjoyed doing the dishes after that class because I was so amused by the fact that we actually had cooked chicken in so many pots. I admit that sometimes I think of the class names before I think of the class content—in the case of the chicken class, I think the two thoughts came to me simultaneously. A class where we focus on creative ways to cook chicken! And a funny-sounding presidential campaign slogan! What could be better? Today I realized that I had missed a great opportunity to use the word “canoodling” in relation to a Valentine’s Day class. Ah well, next year. I am making homemade truffles in personalized chocolate boxes in honor of the Day, so if you’ve got someone to give one to, come in and pre-order yours now for pickup between February 10 and 14. Homemade truffles, in case you haven’t had one recently, are about three thousand times better than the packaged candies, and they’re best when they’re fresh, which they aren’t going to be unless you buy them from a shop that makes them on site. This picture is of our sample box, which has been sitting on the cafe counter for a week, so it's looking a bit ragged.

We’re trying some new types of classes in February and March, in response to requests and suggestions we’ve gotten. We’re offering one class for teens and adults to take together, and another for parents and kids. Plus, we’ve got a whole slew of new class topics on the schedule, from Indian food to herbs and spices to salads.

Jill and I have been working on our smoothie recipe, which we want to be able to make completely from scratch (no weird store-bought smoothie “bases” or powders, full of strange chemical-tasting gums, which is what most coffee shops use). We tested all kinds of thickeners for our smoothies, and we’ve finally developed a fantastic recipe. We tried making a vanilla smoothie (with no other flavors except our homemade vanilla syrup), which is not something either of us would ever order, and we agreed it was good enough that we’d like to have another one. So if it ever warms up here, we’ll be ready with a great lineup of warm-weather drinks.

Have you ever found a dog hair in your muffin?

2008-01-18T05:43:00.001-07:00

One of the interesting things Jill and I have observed now that we are cafe owners is that a lot of people don't know that you aren't allowed to bring dogs into food establishments. I mean, universally not allowed. It's not a rule we made up, it's the Health Department. And let's note, for the record, that every single person who works in our entire building owns a dog, so it's not like we hate dogs. But it's a little weird that people just walk right in the door of the cafe with their big, hairy dogs. I'm not talking teacup dogs, I'm talking Irish setters.

Jill got tired of intercepting people who came in with their dogs and nicely informing them that they had to leave their dogs outside (and one person then tied her large dog to our brand-new patio railing, right next to the sign that said "Please do not touch railing" because the concrete was still setting), so she put a sign on the door that said "No animals allowed". I thought this sounded kind of negative, so I suggested the following sign:

"We're sure your dogs don't shed, drool, sniff inappropriately, or have kennel cough, but the Health Department still doesn't allow them to come inside. For waiting patiently, and because we really do love dogs, we have homemade dog treats to give them. Feel free to tie your lovely canine to the tree behind you."

We thought it was funny, but the next day we saw a woman walking her dog come up to the door, read the sign, and turn around and leave. That was not the intended response. Sorry, we don't sell senses of humor.

Speaking of humor, one element of our building that we have received lots of compliments on is our bathroom decor. We covered the walls with our many prestigious awards and certificates, framed in Wal-Mart's finest $2 frames, including Jill's 2003 "Know Your Constitution" award, my certificate for having the highest average in Science in sixth grade, and Biscuit's (my dog) diploma for finishing obedience training. It's hard to capture the effect in pictures, because it's best when you're actually sitting on the toilet and have time to read all the certificates, but here's a look at the bathroom:

Fixing Stuff

2008-01-17T02:44:00.000-07:00

Lots of my cooking students ask me how late I stay at work after the classes end. The answer is, pretty much forever. I often don't get any baking done during the day, because there is an endless number of errands to run, financial records to update, and phone calls to make (mostly to people I called the day before, who were supposed to call me back but didn't--I estimate that over 75% of the people I call do not return the call or do whatever their job is that I need them to do). So it's not until everyone else leaves that I really get in the zone with baking. The only problem is, after I bake until 1:00 am, I still have to clean the kitchen, which involves hours of dishes and mopping. The amount of cleaning I do on a daily basis is getting to be a drag. Luckily, I'm getting faster at it as well. And yesterday we had cleaners come, which we are planning on doing once every two weeks as a special treat for Jill and me. Not having to mop made it one of the best days of my life. My joy was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I had to repaint the bathroom (during our sewer backup there was some, uh, material that got on the walls). This is at least the tenth time I have had to paint since I first thought the painting was finished.

A lot of other niggling things have gotten taken care of recently, too. We had a repair guy come out to fix the pilot lights on our stove (I've been lighting the burners with matches all this time). He replaced the pilot light supply tubes ($20 in parts, $140 in labor, including charging us for two hours of travel despite the fact that his company is located about four miles away), and also remarked that he really liked our stove set-up (we have the stove inset into a stainless steel prep table), and he'd never seen anything like it. Having the stove repair guy compliment your stove is pretty great. In case you haven't had a chance to fully appreciate it in previous photos, here's a closer view from the front of the room and the back:

Be honest: you really want to cook on this stove, don't you. In other repair news, I also utilized my extensive plumbing knowledge to fix a leak in our pre-wash sprayer (which required use of a wrench) and our dishwasher (requiring teflon tape), plus we made the light store send us replacements for the four (out of 31) long-life fluorescent bulbs that have already burned out, and we got Aaron to help us fix the drip from one of our sink faucets. Why are this many things broken when they are all brand-new, you ask. This is a good question.

And in a very exciting development, we received our cafe tables today--only two months late! We can finally return the really bad rental tables we have been forced to use all this time, and I can begin my campaign to get the table company to reimburse us for the rental fees (it's $400 worth of fees, and my guess is that it will take me eight hours of arguing and I have a 70% chance of getting that money reimbursed, but it's the principle of the thing). Unfortunately the table company forgot to include the hardware for assembling the tables, but that didn't slow us down, we just went right to the hardware store and bought the requisite screws. We put the tables together and are adjusting to the new look (the new tables are very small, which was a design decision we made a long time ago to maximize seating in our limited space, but it's going to take us a little while to get used to the way the place looks now). Soon (hopefully) I will be able to show you good pictures of how the place looks, because Aaron, our contractor, is also a professional architectural/interior photographer, and he's going to take some pictures and let us have copies.

Happy 2008!

2008-01-06T01:50:00.000-07:00

2007 was quite a year for Generous Servings. We opened, we closed, we opened again, we closed again. Our resolution for 2008 is to stay open for four consecutive weeks. Jill and I got back from our sister's wedding in Hawaii on Friday and defied jetlag to get everything ready for our Grand Opening of 2008, which occurred on Saturday.

The cafe was busy, which was great, plus I taught the first day of the two-day Winter Vacation Culinary Camp for Teens. I have six kids in the camp, and it's a young group: the oldest is 14. This camp has the usual mix of personalities, although none of the kids is particularly shy. Lots of people in the cafe watched part of the camp through the window between the kitchen and cafe, plus pedestrians on the street stopped to look through the storefront windows, and one of the kids asked me whether it bothered me to have people watching me all the time. I said that I usually didn't pay attention to the audience, but the kids decided that the best thing to do would be to wave at everyone who stared at them. Over the next few hours this turned into vigorous waving and jumping around, and then into doing the disco "YMCA" letters and bursting into song every time someone walked by. It's an interesting form of advertisement, but better than one of their other ideas, which was to pretend they were tied to the table and motion for help to see if anyone would come rescue them.

When not harassing passersby, we made Asian Crispy Chicken Salad for lunch, and then walked to Sunflower Market for a tour of the meat and produce departments. The guy stocking produce was charmed by my young charges and kept coming over to give us samples of stuff. The cashier asked if they were all my children.

When we got back, we made salsa and guacamole for a snack, and then worked on our dinner of steak fajitas with homemade tortillas and arroz verde. We made brownies for dessert, and we started the most popular recipe: homemade marshmallows. Marshmallows are really fun to make because the mixture goes through several dramatic transformations, and the kids were big fans of eating the marshmallow before it hardened (when it's basically marshmallow fluff).

After the first day of camp, I would trust the kids more than 95% of adults I know to do a good job of mincing garlic, taking brownies out of the oven at the right time, or measuring flour accurately. They also learned tons of cooking trivia: how to tell if a sugar syrup is at the hard ball stage, why some people think cilantro tastes like soap, what the numbers that designate sizes of shrimp mean. And they're getting good at knife skills: by tomorrow evening I'd bet money that any of the kids would be better at chopping than his or her parents. That's one of the most satisfying things for me about these camps: the kids really learn to cook.

We're Open (Again)!

2007-12-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

The drain problem has been fixed, and we are open for business again at 6:30 am! If you came by while we were closed, please come back, because we're even better than before! Now we have holiday lights, loyalty cards (buy nine drinks, get the tenth free), and really clean floors, in addition to our great coffee and baked goods.

Okay, this is getting boring

2007-12-18T20:29:00.000-07:00

The drain cleaners are still snaking our sewer lines. They've been at it for the past three days, and let me tell you, it's been riveting. There have been some really dramatic moments when they thought they might have gotten all the way through, but those were false alarms. The second day they came out, we cut a small hole over the pipe where there was a blockage, and dug down to the pipe to see if it was broken. This produced what Jill called the Pit of Despair:

There wasn't anything wrong with the pipe at that location, so they kept snaking, and again ran into a blockage. The third day they started digging a large trench in our patio area to replace ten feet of pipe. We hope it's the right ten feet--there's really no way to tell until after they dig it up and put the new pipe in and see if water goes down it. The digging is not a speedy process, so it continues on tomorrow. On the fourth day of digging, my true love gave to me, four thousand dollars in plumbing bills, three clumps of tree roots, two overflowing toilets, and a whole lot of plastic bags.

Jill and I have used the downtime productively, finally getting the place decorated for the holidays. Here's a look from the inside:

And here's one view of the outside (pay no attention to the gate that is on the ground, covering up the big hole the drain cleaners left).

And from across the street, with Jill's car front and center:

We also hung up our lighted sign on the outside of the building, which should have been a simple matter of sliding a printed piece of acrylic into the grooves in the existing light box, but it turned out to be a very tight fit, so I had to whack at it a lot. Jill, always helpful and sympathetic, stood on the ground and took this movie without my knowledge: