Tag Archives: Foodie

May 2, 2014 · 8:47 am

Confiting Your Business

Foodie Friday and I have duck confit on the brain.

Duck confit with salad

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s one of my favorite foods and as I’m writing this I’m in the process of making a batch after one of my friends gave me a tub of duck fat. Stop making freaked out noises. You’ve probably had lots of stuff fried in duck fat without knowing it. It’s one of the professional kitchen’s secret weapons.

Duck confit is duck legs that are cured, usually in salt and spices, for a day and then the cure is removed and the legs are roasted at a low temperature covered in their own fat.  The resulting product can be kept for months.  You can confit anything but to me duck legs are the absolute pinnacle of the technique.  After all, fat is flavor and what could be more flavorful than food cooked in fat!

I think there is a lot to learn about business from confit.  After all, what is fat but stored energy?  They are also essential in preventing disease.  So much for all you sickly, skinny folks!  Every business person can benefit from the confit treatment when it comes to their business.

Think about it.  Immersing one’s self in the stored energy of the work. Recognizing that this immersion will focus you, letting you pay attention to the important stuff and  that the needs and priorities will change day by day.  Too many of us try to stay aloof in order to see the big picture.  Not a bad idea but getting immersed – letting the stored energy of the business cover you – can be a perspective change too, one that can prove beneficial.  As mentioned above, fat is flavor, and that immersion in the essence of the business can’t help but add to your understanding.

The magic of confit is that is intensifies the flavors, brings out the essences,  and holds them for a long time.  Doesn’t that sound like something from which a business can benefit too?

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April 25, 2014 · 8:46 am

Tasting Menus

The topic for our Foodie Friday Fun this week is tasting menus.

Augustin Théodule Ribot: The cook and the cat

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ll admit upfront that I tend to shy away from anything that reeks of what some call “chef totalitarianism” but as with most things I’m trying to keep an open mind.  As an article a while back in Vanity Fair put it “in the era of the four-hour, 40-course tasting menu, one key ingredient is missing: any interest in what (or how much) the customer wants to eat.”  You know what I mean.  Many top chefs no longer offer a full menu but will serve you six or eight courses of what they want to serve you.  While in almost every case the food is fantastic and based on the best ingredients the chef could procure that day, the customer has no say in the matter.  You must arrive at the designated time and eat what is put in front of you.  Maybe it’s kind of like going to a relative’s for dinner in that sense, but no relative of mine has ever charged me hundreds of dollars per person.

There’s a business point in this, of course.  I realize that customers have a choice – there are many restaurants in most towns – go elsewhere.  But should any service business force its customers to take it or leave it?  We’ve seen what happens in other businesses that  convey that attitude.   We see that sort of approach in lousy negotiators as well.  Instead of trying to listen to the important items expressed by the other party, they focus on their own needs and give no negotiating room to that party – or to themselves.  Can you imagine that person being successful?  I can’t.

“I’d never patronize a business who does that,” you say.  Really?  I suspect most of us click through various websites’ policies and accept them even though they’re offered on that same basis.  Sneaky?  Fair?  You tell me.

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April 18, 2014 · 8:13 am

Thought And Preparation

This is the time of year when many families host some sort of holiday gathering.

Grupp från Bonniers bokförlag vid middagsbord ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It might be a Passover seder or it could be an Easter Sunday gathering.  Our Foodie Friday Fun this week was spurred by that sort of activity.  I’m sure you’ve been to gatherings of this sort where the host had it all together.  The food came to the table all at the same time and at the appropriate serving temperature.  There were no shrieks of “we forgot the rolls” midway through the meal (you rarely hear that at a seder, by the way).  The snacks and drinks are out when guests arrive and the entire experience is executed with efficiency.

I’ve been to meals of a very different sort.  The food comes out one dish at a time and sits on the table until everything is ready, getting cold in the process.  The menu is not quite complete, usually because it wasn’t thought through carefully.  That’s really the point this week – the need for thought and preparation in the kitchen.  Turns out it’s critical in business too.

The two things need to go together for the cook – or businessperson – to be successful.  The hosts who don’t have it all together did think about what to serve.  There was thought.  The problem is that they didn’t translate that thought into preparation.  They didn’t have a real plan.  The opposite is also true.  You can prepare all you want – make various dishes – but without careful thought beforehand, the odds are that you’ll have a meal that just doesn’t work since no one wants all proteins or to have to make a last minute run to the store for the ingredients you didn’t write on your shopping list.

It’s the same in business.  Not taking the time to think a project or situation through before organizing those thoughts into the various types of preparation the enterprise needs to do is futile.  That preparation will have to be redone when something that wasn’t thought through comes to light.  It’s nice when someone volunteers to “dive in” to a project but it’s even better when they make that dive after thinking through the depth of the pool.

I hope if you end up at a gathering of family or friends this weekend you’ll take a step back and appreciate the thought and preparation that went into the day.  If it’s been done well you probably wouldn’t notice it otherwise.  It’s when there isn’t thought and preparation – done together – that you do notice because things go horribly wrong.  Make sense?

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