Tag Archives: Food

November 21, 2012 · 10:30 am

Giving Thanks

Several years ago I wrote a pre-Thanksgiving post on the “three f’s” of the holiday.  You may recall that I described them as:

English: Oven roasted turkey, common fare for ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • “F” number one is Family. It’s the thing for which I am most thankful. Having them here at this holiday is a labor of love and I hope they’ll all keep showing up for many years more.
  • “F” number two is Feasting. We do ask everyone to bring something – an appetizer, wine, or a dessert, usually. Obviously it’s not because it lightens the work load very much but because it makes them a part of the process. It’s OUR meal as a family and our shared celebration. The word “feast” comes from the same root as “festival” (yes, it’s also the same root Seinfeld used for “Festivus“) and we try to make it one. All those days of prep come together in a 45 minute orgy of eating. This holiday is very much like Christmas or Hanukah in that way – you prepare for quite a long time and then it’s over way too quickly.
  • “F” number three is Football. This is America’s national sport and we’re very much a sports-oriented group. I’ll never forget my Uncle Harry who would sit with us every year and watch the games. “I don’t understand,” he would say, “they all fall down, they all get up, they do it again. What kind of game is this?” It could be paint drying – the point is that it’s a family ritual and through it we bond.

They haven’t changed.  Our family has been challenged this year by many of the same things that millions of other families face.  Illnesses, the economy, wacky weather, and the other day-to-day events that keep it…interesting…  Even so, we’re very fortunate and tomorrow will be a day to remember that.  If anything, the adversity has pulled us even closer.

I’m very thankful, among other things, for those of you that take the time to read the screed every once in a while.  I appreciate your comments when I hit home and even more so when I miss the mark.  Have a great holiday!

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November 16, 2012 · 9:30 am

Miracle Berries

Let’s end the week with a Foodie Friday Fun look at miraculin.

Things are about to get real tasty

(Photo credit: Jonathan Harford)

I know – you haven’t really thought about it in a while, but as food topics go it’s very interesting.  Miraculin is the stuff found in an African berry that serves to change completely the taste of foods you ingest after eating the berry.  The berry is known as a miracle berry and was discovered almost 300 years ago by a guy exploring the wilds of Africa.  It seems that there was a terrible famine and yet one tribe out of the thirty the explorer met were well-fed.  Apparently they would eat this berry and were then able to eat stuff that under normal circumstances was unpalatable.  In short, it makes bad tasting food taste good.

The berries work by masking some of the taste receptors on your tongue, primarily the ones that read “sour”.  Things that are sour taste sweet.  That’s the business point today.

I’ve known a number of managers who seem to eat miracle berries right before they read their financial reports or analytics.  There is never anything wrong – nothing tastes sour – at least not internally.  Oh sure – the market may be bad (good time to steal share!) so growth is limited or the new product we launched isn’t really being trashed on social media – it’s just a few vocal haters.  This is the business miracle berry at work.

I’m as big an optimist as there is.  However, there is a difference between being optimistic and lying to yourself.  It’s one thing to put a good face on the numbers; it’s another to overlook the realities those numbers express.  If you can’t understand what the data is telling you then you need to do one of two things – find someone who does and is unafraid to tell you or get into a business where you can make sense of what’s going on.  Reading the numbers whilst under the effects of the business miracle berry is not an option.

While miracle berries helped the African tribe avoid famine and stay healthy, the business equivalent of eating miracle berries can get you very sick and maybe even kill your business.  How are your taste buds as we end the week?

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October 26, 2012 · 10:40 am

Eating What You Don’t See

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s take just a minute to think about what goes into you receiving a simple plate of food at a restaurant.

English: White House Executive Chef, Cristeta ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been with many folks who order and scarf down their meals without a thought as to the enormous enterprise that went into making that dish happen. I know they thought about if the food was good and if the service was up to their standards. They didn’t really consider, however, all the other elements that go into a great meal.
Consider how much work goes into that one plate of food. Someone (the chef) has to plan the menu and order the components. When those ingredients show up at the restaurant, they need to be inventoried and broken down (by prep cooks) into products with which the line cooks can work. Primal cuts are broken down into steaks and chops. Cases of potatoes and bags of carrots are peeled. All this before the real prep work begins. It’s an assembly line of sorts although we don’t think of kitchen work as a manufacturing job.

Prep cooks give way to the line cooks who actually fabricate the dish for you. In between are the servers and the rest of the front of house folks. All these people need to be hired, trained, supervised and paid. What’s the business point?
The point is that we don’t notice, nor should we. Most of us are in the same boat.  When I was teaching I knew that for every hour of classroom time there would be another hour or two of prep that the kids never saw.  A simple budget presentation of one slide can involve dozens of people and hundreds of hours of prep yet the only time that anyone asks about the process is when something is out of whack.  That’s really the business point.  Apple is famous for doing technology that “just works.”   Web pages and sites involve thousands of hours of design, coding, and creativity but we tend not to notice that until something broken.  We don’t think about how our cars were built and designed until something is wrong.  The list goes on and on.

Cooking in a professional kitchen involves something unknown to most jobs – the physical reproduction of a product, from 50-60 times a day, presented in a seamless manner.   Like the proverbial swimming duck, there’s an awful lot going on under the water.  We might just be most successful when no one knows that but us!

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