Tag Archives: Food

October 23, 2015 · 9:18 am

On Cooking

This Foodie Friday, I’d like to take a moment to express my appreciation for what goes on in my kitchen.  I know for many of you, time spent there is a painful, sometimes bloody, reminder that cooking is a chore.  I don’t see it that way, and as I’m thinking about it I’m realizing that there is some business thinking that goes along with my point of view.

I love cooking.  It’s therapeutic in many ways to me.  Even though one rule in my kitchen is that an appropriate form of music is playing (as loudly as I can get away with) as I cook, it’s actually quiet.  Appropriate music, by the way, is something that corresponds to the food being cooked: zydeco when I’m cooking Cajun, country when we’re making barbecue, and the Big Night soundtrack when an Italian meal is in the offing.  Try it – your food will be better!

Back to the quiet.  Most of us have a hundred thoughts rattling around.  It’s the collateral damage of our multitasking world.  When I’m cooking, I have one focus at a time – doing my mise en place or the smells as a dish is cooking.  How often have you taken the time out of your busy business day – even 30 seconds – to do something similar?

I appreciate the physical act of cooking, just as I appreciate that I’m constantly learning, finding better ways to do things, and getting better.  I don’t like making mistakes, but I do learn from them and rarely make the same one a second time. Those are the business points too.  My cooking is improving because of experience, not because I took a few years to go to culinary school.  I have friends who did, and they’ll tell you that the reality of the restaurant kitchen is nothing like the CIA.  It’s the same with every young person, fresh out of business school.  Doing beats almost everything.

I read someplace that kitchens are where we create community, and food is all about community.  I like to think of business that way too – a community of my team, the other teams that make up our enterprise, and the customers, partners, and suppliers that make up the community as a whole.  What are your thoughts?

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October 16, 2015 · 9:30 am

Food For The Ages

Celebrating my dad’s 90th birthday got me thinking about age and why some people live so long. As a happy coincidence, I read some things the other day that represent this week’s Foodie Friday Fun. They had to do with some of the oldest living humans and to what they attribute their long lives. As it turns out, foods of various sorts are involved, as is an excellent business/life lesson.

The NY Post reported on a Brooklyn woman who is 116 and eats bacon, eggs, and grits every day. In fact, she has been known to eat bacon throughout the day and claims that the secret to living a long and happy life involves surrounding yourself with positive energy and bacon helps to do that. Not to be outdone in attributing long life to consumption of pork products, there is a woman in China that is 117. She has eaten twice-cooked pork three times a day and says pork is the secret to her longevity.

Then there is the woman in New Jersey who is 110 and attributes her long life, in part, to the three beers she drinks each day along with a shot of whiskey. Since researchers say centenarians typically show such characteristics as a steady routine and avoidance of stress, a few beers and a shot to keep one happy can’t hurt alleviate the stress.

Pork not your thing?  Well, there is a woman who is 116 years young in Japan who says the secret food is sushi, particularly mackerel on vinegar-steamed rice, and she has it at least once every month.  “Eat and sleep and you will live a long time,” she said in a message to The Telegraph. “You have to learn to relax.”

While these women can’t agree on which food is the secret, they do agree on being happy and relaxing.  I suspect that those things are not high on many folks’ lists as they deal with the daily stresses of business.  Wouldn’t the odds of generating long-term profits increase if we were around to help make that happen?  So get some rest this weekend, eat some bacon, have a beer, and relax.  It will all be there on Monday!

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October 9, 2015 · 9:07 am

A Bowl Of Learning

This week’s Foodie Friday Fun was inspired by a salad I had for lunch yesterday. Business thinking from a salad? You bet! As I keep reminding you, we can learn from everything. So what was so special and businesslike about this particular bowl of greens?

Salad with balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt a...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The salad in question was a chef’s salad of sorts, even though it went by another name. It was basically a pile of greens – some frisée, some watercress, a couple of various lettuces – topped by turkey, various salumi, chopped bacon, and a hard boiled egg. Not exactly the sort of thing that a cook would have to spend years in culinary school to develop. There was a dressing on the salad too – a white balsamic dressing that was a simple vinaigrette made with white balsamic. So what can we learn from this?

The salad was delicious. Every element was carefully chosen. The mortadella was not too fatty to throw off the balance, the bacon was nicely cooked, slightly smoky and not greasy. The egg was hard-boiled perfectly – not overly cooked so the white was rubbery. Even the salami and turkey were cut into perfectly bite-sized pieces, and they were terrific on their own. So where is the business lesson in all this goodness?

Even the simplest product or service can be great if it’s executed properly with the highest-quality materials. A kid could put this salad together (although you might want to cut the meats up for them) but an expert had to choose each ingredient. The cooked elements – again, very simple – were done to perfection. There wasn’t too much dressing and the salad had been carefully tossed to coat the greens without a pool of vinaigrette in the bottom of the plate.

We have a tendency in business to forget how important the ingredients are. Those are the people we hire, the simple but clear plans and presentations we deliver, and the objectivity we bring to every business decision. Every one of those ingredients needs to be the best quality we can find, since inferior ingredients mean an inferior product, even if the execution is perfect. On the other hand, imperfect execution can ruin even the best ingredients.

Simple doesn’t mean easy.  This salad reminded me of that. You?

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