Tag Archives: Food

March 27, 2015 · 10:41 am

Easy Recipes

This Foodie Friday will involve a trip to the store for me. I like to avoid the markets over the weekend so Friday mornings are sometimes spent reviewing and searching for recipes. A little menu planning in advance means just today’s trip to the stores.

Pulled pork in BBQ sauce sandwich with slaw

Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I was going through a few food sites looking for ideas it struck me how many recipes involved the word “easy.” I suspect part of that is an appeal to the time crunch all of us seem to be under and part of it is to make cooking less intimidating for those whose kitchen skills involve a microwave and opening a can.  The recipes are indeed easy – dump some stuff in the slow cooker, walk away for 6 hours, voilà! Supper!  While I love my slow cooker and have made, say, pulled pork in it, I’m not going to tell you that the end product is anything like, or near as good, as what I produce from my smoker.  The smoker is a tricky beast to use and requires a lot of attention. Which is, of course, the business point.

I’m not going to tell you that we need to make things as difficult for ourselves as we can.  In fact, I think quite the opposite.  What I won’t do or ask my clients to do as part of making things easier is to denigrate the quality of their offerings.  That’s where “easy” tends to become hard.  Maintaining the greatness of your brand, your products, your services isn’t easy nor will it ever be.  It requires constant vigilance and a proactive mindset.  You can’t just set the cooker and walk away.

So here is the easy recipe for this Friday.  This is the one that gets us to great while being relatively easy. As a person, learn the basic skills you need and practice them.  That’s true in the kitchen and the office.  Possessing those skills – critical thinking and communicating first and foremost – and getting them right makes using them easy.  As a manager, hire and train only those people because when every member of the team gets the basics right every day the end product will be easy AND great.

You in?

 

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March 20, 2015 · 10:35 am

Let Me In

This Foodie Friday I’d like us to have a think about accessibility and food.  No, I don’t mean wheelchair ramps into restaurants or menus for the blind.  Maybe a better word might be “pretense.”  Let me say what I’m thinking about and you can fill in the blanks.  Either way, it relates to business as well (what a shock!).

I watch a lot of cooking and food shows.  Some of them feature chefs who give off an air of superiority – they know a lot more than you do.  That may be true about the methods but it’s not true about the taste.  Any of us knows what we like and dislike and I, for one, am not going to let some dolt with a few years for cooking school under his belt tell me what tastes good.  Let’s face it – many of us probably know as much about cooking techniques as they do.  What really good chefs have that we might not are moments of inspiration through which they transform food into something etherial.

I don’t want to paint with too wide a brush.  As this piece pointed out:

Plenty of big name chefs are popular in large part because of how accessible they want food culture to be (Anthony Bourdain has made an entire career of sharing his love and understanding of food), or how they want to share their knowledge rather than lording it over us simple peons (Wiley Dufresne is as much an enthusiastic Culinary Biophysicist as he is a Chef). Chefs who want to join in the conversation rather than control it are myriad, and they’re a vital part of the discussion.

All of this is applicable to you no matter what business you’re in.  We need to spend time making what we do accessible – to our consumers, to our partners, to our team.  What I mean is that we need to demystify it – take the very complex and help others to understand it so they in turn can engage in the conversation.  It may mean a meeting to explain the types of data you’re gathering.  It could be a video inside your factory to explain how a product is made.  It’s all really a recognition that the benefits of letting others in and engaging in conversation far outweigh the downsides.  No chef is going to tell me what I like.  No brand is going to either.  Be accessible – ask me the question and I’ll answer and hopefully you’ll respond.

That’s my take.  Yours?

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March 13, 2015 · 10:46 am

Will It Blend

the cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

Cheeseburger burrito from California Tortilla

It’s Foodie Friday and this week I have trendiness on my mind.  I came across a report recently from the National Restaurant Association. The What’s Hot in 2015 survey was conducted in October 2014.  They surveyed 1,276 members of the American Culinary Federation. The chefs were given a list of 231 items and were asked to rate each item as a “hot trend,” “yesterday’s news” or “perennial favorite” on restaurant menus in 2015.  You can read the results here – consider it “coming attractions” for what you might find on a menu when you dine out this year.

I’m not sorry to say the biggest declining trend (#1 in “yesterday’s news”) is the use of insects in dishes.  It appears that foams have run their course as well. Locally sourced ingredients – meat, seafood and vegetables – is the top trend.  How they’re used is a different matter and the winner there as a general trend is ethnic fusion.  These dishes are mash-ups from different cultures resulting in things such as a cheeseburger burrito or a poutine taco.  Since we live in a country of many cultures, this isn’t surprising.  But it is instructive well beyond food.

Great ideas are all around us.  Maybe they’re buried in the ways a competitor does business.  Maybe it’s something in an unrelated field (kind of like how we look at what food tells us about business each Friday).  We need to be looking constantly for sources of inspiration.  Mark Turner, in his book The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark, says that “humans are innovative and good at creative thinking due to the ability of our brains to blend two or more ideas and create a new idea.”  While we can argue about how great an idea topping Kung Pao Chicken with crumbled goat cheese might be, the important thing is that as business people we need to avoid the Not Invented Here thinking and look everywhere for inspiration.

I read a quote that “anyone can combine hoisin sauce with chutney and put it over pasta, but the end result has to taste good.”  That’s a great point.  Not every piece of fusion business thinking is great just as not every blending of ethnic foods quite works (Curried goat ceviche?  Nah…).  Thinking out of the box and trying to combine good ideas into great ones is the point.  If they blend, it just might be magic.

 

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