Tag Archives: Foodie

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 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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October 2, 2015 · 11:21 am

Old Food

Our Foodie Friday Fun this week is centered on aging. I realize that the topic of “old food” might not seem very appealing, but the reality is that you want some things to be old. OK, I guess “aged” seems a nicer way to put that.

Very few red wines, for example, are meant to be consumed “young.” Spare me the lecture on how winemakers these days can regulate the tannins to make reds drinkable not long after vintage. Really good reds need some time to mellow and develop flavor.

English: A glass of red wine.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You’d rather eat “old” (read aged) beef. Most great steakhouse dry-age beef. They expose big cuts to air so dehydration can further concentrate the meat’s flavor. It’s expensive: the meat loses weight from dehydration, and it also must be trimmed of its completely dried exterior before cooking. The process develops flavor and allows enzymes naturally present in the meat to break down the muscle tissue.

We eat “new” cheese – there is nothing better than fresh mozzarella di buffala. That said, one cheese place I go asks you what you’re doing with the mozzarella (eating it as is or cooking with it) so he can give you the cheese of the correct age. Older, drier mozzarella is better for cooking, after all.  You wouldn’t want to eat most other great cheeses right after they’re made.

So why all the thinking about old food? Because there is something to be learned from it that can be applied to business. We live in a time when things happen really quickly.  There are tons of new ideas that become new businesses.  There is a lot to be said for letting those ideas age a bit before acting on them.  I realize that sometimes there is a limited window of opportunity, but think about how often we put out version 1.0 of something (and I mean that in a broader sense than software) only to realize we could have made it better or found more bugs.  Had we let the product age, it probably would have been better.

We do that with people too.  We cherish the new (read young). Speaking as a veteran (aged!) executive, we tend to have broader perspectives that have been formed through both success and failure.  While it’s often said that one business or another is a young person’s business, most of those young people have older advisors, especially in their early and mid stages.

I know that foods have expiration dates and that they become unpalatable if not inedible.  A little aging – a little time – does, however, seem to help most foods and ideas.  Let that thought age a bit…

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