Cooking and Cooking and Cooking
It's been an interesting month, basically hit the ground running in the coffee shop kitchen, and am now in the midst of overhauling the menu and the entire approach to food preparation there.
The coffee shop is Espress Yourself, on Lincolnway next to Gil Drugs, just a couple of blocks from home. It makes for a great commute! They've had a fixed menu for quite some time now, but it was time for a change, and I was basically given carte blanche to come up with a new menu comprised exclusively of from-scratch ingredients. No more prefab ingredients, artificial ingredients, etc., or even purchased doughs or piecrusts. Every soup, muffin, pie, and quiche is made from scratch, short of grinding the flour and laying the eggs. It would be great to go organic, but the cost of organic food here is prohibitive, and the selection limited. We're still working out the kinks in this ambitious transition, but my premise is if the basic ingredients are fresh, you can make yummy food. By the end of this coming week everything should be in place and running as smoothly as a small kitchen can. I've been testing and adapting recipes and trying to figure out how much they cost per serving, etc. Now I'm also trying to figure out how many pounds of basic ingredients I need to buy and prep every week, such as flour, sugar, carrots, apples, eggs, cream, etc. We make the final decision on the new core menu this weekend.
Steve is doing a new website for them, as well, and it should be ready any day now. It's been interesting and fun and quite satisfying.
It's also time for me to get back to painting again, which I will do over the weekend. Painting will seem like such a refreshing change of pace now.
The coffee shop is Espress Yourself, on Lincolnway next to Gil Drugs, just a couple of blocks from home. It makes for a great commute! They've had a fixed menu for quite some time now, but it was time for a change, and I was basically given carte blanche to come up with a new menu comprised exclusively of from-scratch ingredients. No more prefab ingredients, artificial ingredients, etc., or even purchased doughs or piecrusts. Every soup, muffin, pie, and quiche is made from scratch, short of grinding the flour and laying the eggs. It would be great to go organic, but the cost of organic food here is prohibitive, and the selection limited. We're still working out the kinks in this ambitious transition, but my premise is if the basic ingredients are fresh, you can make yummy food. By the end of this coming week everything should be in place and running as smoothly as a small kitchen can. I've been testing and adapting recipes and trying to figure out how much they cost per serving, etc. Now I'm also trying to figure out how many pounds of basic ingredients I need to buy and prep every week, such as flour, sugar, carrots, apples, eggs, cream, etc. We make the final decision on the new core menu this weekend.
Steve is doing a new website for them, as well, and it should be ready any day now. It's been interesting and fun and quite satisfying.
It's also time for me to get back to painting again, which I will do over the weekend. Painting will seem like such a refreshing change of pace now.
posted by meg at 11:39 AM
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