Humble Feast Dinners at the Neighborhood Kitchen

A year ago I was browsing commercial real estate listings with a long term plan to invest in a building for a long term home for Patty Pan. I stumbled on a property close to my house that was just the right size and just the right price. It was a commercial space in a residential neighborhood and I've always liked those very much. The savvy broker had included an email from a neighbor testifying to the neighborhood's readiness to support a community-minded food business. The neighbor's email went on to wish for a Fair Trade espresso bar or a bistro run by an established chef.

We had no intention of opening a coffee shop or café. (Been there, done that.) But we certainly were looking for a place that we could grow into a neighborhood institution, fostering connections around food.

Back in 2011 I launched a series of monthly local foods dinner events dubbed the "Humble Feast", an antidote to the lavish, expensive local foods galas featuring celebrity chefs and ingredients donated by hardworking farmers and fishermen. Instead of a mind-blowing meal made up of dishes few home cooks could replicate, I wanted to prepare simple, tasty, affordable fare that could also inspire home cooking.

It seemed like an obvious, appealing idea but it turned out to be a tough sell. It was hard to find a comfortable, affordable space where we could host our dinners and we just weren't very good at getting the word out. We had some reasonably successful events and some morale-busting evenings when almost nobody showed.

Early this year I bought the building in Briarcrest, which included a small dining room off the kitchen. We built a beautiful pass-through window with an onyx counter and bamboo plywood trim. And we invited the neighbors for dinner. They came, they ate, and they told their friends. They've come month after month, enjoying our humble endeavor, filling our tiny dining room to capacity and spilling into the kitchen and the parking lot.

The dinners are going so well that, starting the first of the year, we'll begin holding them weekly rather than monthly. We're so grateful to have landed in this neighborhood.

Here's a recipe for the Shepherd's Pie that we served at the last dinner. It's tasty and adaptable, and makes a great winter comfort food.

Shepherd’s Pie (makes 6 servings)

 6 medium-size potatoes (any kind but russets)

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pound ground beef, ground lamb, crumbled tofu, finely chopped seitan, or cooked lentils or beans
2 teaspoons salt
2 cups finely chopped vegetables (I recommend carrots, parsnips, turnips, rutabagas, and winter squash)
¼ cup chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons other finely chopped fresh herbs (I recommend rosemary, oregano, and thyme.)

 

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

 Boil water in a large saucepan. Cut the potatoes in quarters, add them to the water, and cook them for about ten minutes, until they’re very soft.

 Meanwhile, heat two tablespoons olive oil in a large skillet. Add the onions and garlic and cook for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent. If you’re using beef or lamb, crumble it into the pan once the onion is well cooked, along with one teaspoon salt. If you’re using a vegetarian protein, you’ll add it later.

 Cook the meat on medium-low heat for 5 to 10 minutes, until it’s nicely browned. Add the vegetables and salt and cook for about 10 minutes longer, until they’re very tender. If you’re using a vegetarian protein, add it now. When the protein and vegetable mixture is heated through, add the herbs.

 Drain the potatoes, add the remaining tablespoon two teaspoons olive oil and one teaspoon salt, and mash well. Spread the protein and vegetable mixture in the bottom of a large casserole pan, and spread the mashed potatoes on top. Divide them in four portions and drop them in different portions of the pan to make the potatoes easier to spread.

 Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, until it’s piping hot.

Cooperative Economics

Traditional businesses use a relatively straightforward formula for evaluating success. Profit means a job well done while loss spells trouble.

The equation is fuzzier for a cooperative which, by definition, exists to benefit its members. Profit is anything left over after subtracting operating expenses from incoming revenue, but wages and salaries weigh in as operating expenses. The more a coop pays its members, the less it has left over in profit.

Earlier this year I bought the building where Patty Pan Cooperative now operates. The business pays rent to me and this rent goes to pay down my mortgage and increase my equity in the property. The rent benefits me personally, yet it comes out of Patty Pan's bottom line.

We've been grappling with these equations all summer as we've earned our livelihoods and set aside funds to pay for the expensive build-out we completed last spring. We need profit to pay back our loans, and we need profit to create a cushion because it's good to save for emergencies and a seasonal business tends to be short of cash half the year.

We recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to buy equipment to make our own tortillas out of local, organic, whole grains. Naturally we evaluated whether the tortilla project would make our business more profitable, and concluded that these tortillas will probably cost the same as the ones we currently use. However, some of the costs will switch from the material expense of buying a finished product to the labor expense of making it ourselves.

In other words, the tortillas will cost the same according to traditional calculations, but the process will give back more to our members. There are other benefits as well. By buying grain from local growers, we'll cycle funds back into the closely knit farmers' market economy. Our quesadillas will be tastier and healthier. And we'll stay interesting. When you've been around a lot longer than any of your competitors, staying interesting can be an uphill battle.

Speaking of interesting, the research and development process for our tortilla project has been fascinating. It's challenging to create a light, flexible tortilla using 100 percent whole grain flour. We're open to harmless add-ins like lecithin or baking powder, but we'd really rather study the behavior of the dough and learn how to achieve the results we want using just flour, olive oil, salt, and water.

We've made appealing prototypes using a small electric tortilla press designed for home use, but the real work will start once we buy and install the professional equipment that can press tortillas to a consistent thickness, and cook them at a consistent heat.

We're curious, we're engaged, and our morale is high. We're looking forward to getting started.

COGS

Like most reasonably sane people, I'll do almost anything to avoid bookkeeping and data entry. But the strangest thing happens once I actually sit down and start inputting numbers: they tell a story, explaining why we've felt short on cash or where we're been spending too much.

This past winter I applied for an SBA loan, a bear of a process. I managed to pull together the accounting information necessary to convince the bank that I was loan worthy, although it took most of my waking hours for a stretch.

I worked with a loan consultant, who also happened to be my real estate broker. I showed him a draft of a cash flow projection, which I had prepared to show that the business could pay the rent even if it didn't grow much. If I were a loan officer, that would be what I would want to see.

The loan consultant commented that if my projections didn't project real growth then the bank would assume I had no confidence, and he asked me to revise the projection to show that we'd grow by 20 percent annually.

This was a reasonable request: we have, in fact, grown about 20 percent per year for the past 10 years. But when I plugged in the numbers, the profit barely changed. Scratching my head, I revisited some of the other figures. In particular, I looked at the payroll cost, which had been 46 percent of the gross last year.

I knew that payroll percentage was too high and I had some ideas about why that was case and how we could correct it. I changed the projected payroll cost to 40 percent, which was still higher than what we'd typically spent, at least up until last year.

The bottom line tripled!

So I've developed a new fixation with COGS, or cost of goods sold, the accounting concept that measures the direct costs such as materials and payroll that go into creating what a business sells, as opposed to indirect costs such as rent and vehicle expenses, which are also necessary but peripheral.

I'm observing correlations between ways of organizing tasks and number of hours spent to achieve outcomes. I'm walking that fine line between managing and micromanaging, seeing connections between the accounting information and day to day processes. I'm actually finding it fascinating.

An Excruciating Question

 

I just read an editorial by a restaurateur lamenting that a $15/hour minimum wage would send his business into a tailspin. As expected, comments were scathing, mostly agreeing that anyone who can find the money to start and grow a business should be able to pay workers more.

It's difficult to talk about the issue of fair pay from the perspective of a business owner without sounding like a privileged, entitled jerk. The best pieces I've read have focused on specific parts of the proposal, such as some proponents' unwillingness to make any exceptions, even for tipped servers who earn well over $15/hour overall.

 For most of the twenty seven years that I've run small businesses, I've earned less than my employees, who are legally entitled to at least minimum wage--however low it may be--whether or not the business actually earns enough to cover these wages. When the business didn't earn enough to cover wages, I accrued personal debt. When the business didn't earn enough to pay me, I didn't get paid.

There are laws against exploiting other people but there are no laws against exploiting yourself. I've pulled all-nighters, worked consecutive eighty-hour weeks, and gone years without a vacation.

I'm not complaining. I love my work and feel lucky to have had a strong support system during the years it took to nurture my company into solvency. I've had social and economic advantages sufficient to break multiple falls.

I honestly don't know whether I'm for or against this minimum wage proposal. It's intriguing but drastic. I'm especially worried about the lovely farmers struggling to create successful business models in the context of an industry and infrastructure that sabotages them at every turn.

I'm certainly in favor of a living wage but I'm also all too familiar with the challenges of managing small business cash flow. Workers absolutely should be paid more, especially in the foodservice industry, but the money has to come from somewhere.

On some level every penny that an employee earns is a penny that a business owner does not earn. Whether you're talking about corporations and shareholders or independent business owners working grueling schedules and paying off heavy debt, this zero-sum scenario stands in the way of finding a productive solution to the minimum wage conundrum.

Last year Patty Pan became a worker-owned cooperative. I'm still an owner, but now I'm also an employee and most of the other employees are owners as well. Our cooperative hasn't always radiated sunshine and rainbows, but we have managed to successfully collaborate, building a business that is bigger and smarter than the company I created on my own.

In healthy workplaces the interests of workers and business owners are aligned. Fair wages motivate employees to give back in ways that bring in enough revenue to cover higher payroll costs. But  money is an imperfect motivator. Praise and purpose can yield even better results.

It costs little to show appreciation and build a work culture where contributions are meaningful and valued. These basic decencies can't stand in for a living wage, but they can keep workers engaged, improving a company's odds of success despite higher payroll costs.

The tragedy of the $15/hour minimum wage debate is that it pits workers against small business owners, especially if proponents insist on sudden, drastic changes and don't allow any exceptions. There's justifiable resentment on both sides, and this resentment will likely make employees feel less appreciated and make employers question whether their payroll dollars are well spent. Workers who don't feel appreciated are less likely to do quality work, less likely to help build the kind of thriving businesses that can afford to pay higher wages.

There's no way to know for certain how the proposed minimum wage hike will actually affect small businesses. It's useful to crunch numbers but the situation is really too complicated to predict. I only hope that once it's decided, we'll manage to find productive common ground and move forward without resentment and recrimination.

 

Permit Purgatory

We spent most of last week in permit hell, fending off a plan reviewer who kept springing new, expensive, time consuming requirements. Now we're in permit purgatory, waiting for final plan approvals and field inspections.

Believe it or not, I believe in the permitting process. I'd rather live in a world where plumbing and electrical work is regulated and inspected than one without oversight. But I suspect that nobody--including the plan reviewers and inspectors--would disagree that the process is deeply flawed.

The city creates a code based on national and international standards, and then hires plan reviewers and inspectors to enforce that code. They aim for consistency in situations whose specifics are far from consistent. They struggle with issues of safety and liability, balancing these concerns against the prohibitive costs that businesses like ours incur installing grease traps and fire suppression systems.

And then there's the human element. During my first encounter with the plan reviewer, he shook his head and told me that the building I'd bought was a small business graveyard. I walked away from the second encounter visibly close to tears when he informed me that we would have to install a vent hood over our under-counter dishwasher, delaying our project well over a month and doubling the cost of installing an already expensive machine.

I went home and slept, and awoke with a fresh perspective on power dynamics. Heading back to city hall, I suggested that, since the code required a vent hood but few restaurants have vent hoods over their dishwashers, the powers that be clearly had some leeway and discretion. Perhaps he could exercise that discretion in our favor?

He consulted with his supervisor, backed off about the vent hood, and came back with some additional questions about our project. I answered them respectfully and applied retroactively for an inexpensive permit covering some minor modifications we'd already made.

The other evening he called to say he'd been out of the office for some training work, and was catching up after hours on permit approvals. He had a stack of permit applications on his desk related to our project and only had time to review one at the moment. Which would we like completed first?

Building a Kitchen

We've been hard at work outfitting a new space for Patty Pan. Some of the work involves hands-on building, sanding, texturizing, painting, and installing. Other phases involve standing around and scratching our heads, ruminating, brainstorming and problem solving.

I've built kitchens before, and it's always been a lonely and stressful endeavor. I'm not especially handy and I don't know much about building materials so the process has always required making decisions involving large sums of money that I didn't really have, basing those decisions on scant information and insufficient experience.

It's so different building this kitchen as a coop. Between us we have construction experience, artistic sensibilities, networks to scavenge building materials, and plenty of camaraderie. We're sharing the burden and excitement of making decisions, the frustration of snags and the glory of breakthroughs.

When I built my first tiny kitchen in Fremont, I hired a friend of a friend to build a custom walk-in cooler in an odd-size space off the main kitchen. We submitted a drawing to the building department and they took six weeks to look it over before sending it back with the concerns about the format of the drawing, but no real issue with our actual proposal for the walk-in. We redrew the plans and resubmitted them, paying additional fees and delaying the project several weeks.

When I built the Lucky Palate kitchen on Queen Anne, I paid a professional $1000 to draft a layout drawing and help with contracting logistics. He presented the price tag as a good deal and he may have been telling the truth: compared to the revenue from drafting a floor plan for a full service restaurant, my project must have been barely worth his while. Still, $1000 was a lot of money to me.

This time around we bought cad software and drew up the plan ourselves. There was a steep learning curve but we learned new skills and the health department accepted the drawing the first time around. We've had similar experiences with everything from relocating light switches to moving heavy equipment.

It feels strange to say, but this time around we may actually be having fun.

Becoming a Cooperative

Six years ago I came up with a five-year plan for my future,  right around the time my lovely landlords in Ballard sold the building I was leasing to some not-so-lovely landlords. I was going to take five years to learn some marketable skills and then sell the Patty Pan and do something less physically demanding.

A few years went by and I realized that I didn't want to sell my business. I love what I do: working outdoors, hanging out with farmers,  bartering for amazing ingredients, and getting folks excited about eating vegetables. I love market culture and I love being self employed. I've also seen businesses under new ownership go downhill and I didn't want to see that happen to Patty Pan. I care about it too much.

But the summer season can be grueling and I'm not getting any younger.

Patty Pan has fabulous employees, folks who come back year after year even though the work is seasonal and tiring. I don't know if you've ever been served by them, but folks are always telling me how pleasant and committed they are.

A few years ago I started talking to a couple of key employees about sharing ownership of the business but the time just wasn't right. This year, the time felt right. The business is making a profit and it's become grown above and beyond anything I could have created myself, in part because we've built a shared knowledge base and we have enough collective experience to keep getting better at what we do.

So we've become an employee-owned cooperative, as of the first of the year. It's been quite a journey. Every cooperative is different: most cooperatives start out as cooperatives, with a group coming together and deciding they want to build something together. Patty Pan started out as a sole proprietorship, and we've had to figure out how to share responsibility and revenue in ways that were fair to everyone. The arrangement had to offer enough to members to make them want to join, and it had to offer me enough to make me want to share.

We crafted a set of bylaws that cover everything from how we'll share equity, to how we'll distribute profits, to how we'll make different types of decisions, to how we'll kick out someone who is stealing. It's been quite a journey. I'm feeling happy, but a bit disoriented. I know I'm disoriented when I can't figure out what I want to eat.

How Patty Pan Upgraded Our Ingredients, Retained Our Low Prices, and Maintained Our Impressive Food Cost Percentages

Patty Pan tried an experiment this past summer. We began using better cheese, better corn masa, better corn, better beans, and better tomatoes. (Our quesadilla vegetables and our meat were already high quality and didn't need to be upgraded.)

But we didn't want to raise our prices. We pride ourselves on low prices and it felt important to continue offering a good value. Times are still hard.

We approached the question as a creative problem-solving exercise, analyzing the cost of each of our menu items and looking for ways to tinker. Here's an example: I've noticed for years that most of my staff used too much cheese when they made quesadillas.

Of course we didn't want to skimp on cheese, but when you use too much cheese it oozes out the sides, gets all over your spatula, and generally creates a sticky, unpleasant quesadilla-making experience. Over the course of making hundreds of thousands of quesadillas, I've found that it's easier to keep the cheese an inch from the edge of the tortilla. It spreads so the result is sufficiently cheesey, and you end up using a lot less cheese.

I'd tried to communicate this to my staff on various occasions, but somehow it didn't click and in the end it felt sensible to just pick my battles. But when we started using more expensive cheese, it became more urgent to get this point across.

We use twelve-inch tortillas. I asked a math whiz friend to calculate the area of an eleven-inch circle relative to the area of a twelve-inch circle. It turns out that an eleven-inch circle is thirty seven percent smaller that a twelve-inch circle. Thirty seven percent. So, armed with this information, I set out to make my point again. This time it clicked, my employees began keeping the cheese away from the tortilla edges, and we were able use higher quality, more expensive cheese without spending extra money on cheese.

We also revised our menus, putting the items with the best food cost percentages closest to the top. Folks tend to order more of items that are listed higher up on the menu. It cost a chunk of money to reprint five sets of menus, but it was a good investment and had the desired result: folks ordered more of those higher margin items.

Actually, we did raise one price: the kid's quesadilla. We raised it because we introduced a couple of varieties of kid's tamales and we wanted to get the parents on board with encouraging the kids to eat tamales rather than quesadillas. We figured we could achieve this by offering the kid's tamales for a lower price than the kid's quesadillas.

We think our kid's tamales are better products than our kid's quesadillas. They use better ingredients and they're much easier for us to heat and serve. They're also a better gateway product, one that is more likely to encourage kids to eventually try our adult tamales. There's a much smaller step between eating a small tamale with beans and a big tamale with beans than between eating a small white quesadilla with just cheese and eating a big red quesadilla stuffed with cheese and vegetables.

Now the numbers are all in, and we were excited to discover that our food cost percentage didn't change at all compared with last year, even though we upgraded our ingredients and, for all practical purposes, didn't raise our prices.

So here's the lesson: Don't believe any business that tells you it has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. Of course, there really are some situations when a business has no choice other than to raise its prices to cover increasing costs. But there are also so many ways to tinker with numbers and marketing strategies and find alternative approaches to make it all work.

In the end, we're limited only by our imaginations.

Buzz Words

Until this year, I've resisted using buzz words to market Patty Pan's products. I'm talking about those convenient short hand terms that consumers use to make quick decisions about whether they want to buy. When customers asked whether all of the ingredients were organic I used to answer, "Anyone who tells you that all of their ingredients are organic is lying." (Really? Organic salt?) Or sometimes I'd respond that I think organic certification is a racket.

I really do think that organic certification is a bit of a racket. Small-scale farmers spend far too much money and time on fees, paperwork, and explaining the nuances of farming to inspectors who don't know how to farm. And agribusiness had too large of a hand in crafting the regulations, so they don't include important considerations such as whether a particular farmer's practices actually nurture the soil and build a healthy integrated ecosystem rather than simply avoiding chemical fertlizers and pesticides.

But a customer who asks whether a business uses all organic ingredients doesn't want to hear a cynical critique of the organic regulatory process. It sounds evasive and dishonest even though it may be the most honest response. But I can be a slow learner and it sometimes take a while to figure out this kind of thing, especially when it comes to marketing.

So this year Patty Pan shifted gears. We began communicating more proudly about the quality ingredients that we use and we began upgrading the handful of mainstream ingredients that seemed like sensible choices when we first started out. And we made a sign proclaiming it to the world. (We call it "the buzz word sign.")

We had an outrageous market season. Sales were off the charts, morale was high, and we felt more love than ever from our clientele. I think the buzz words played a big role. The weather helped, too. We're excited about the future.

Food Ghostwriting

A couple of weeks ago Julia Moskin wrote a New York Times article exposing the fact that (gasp) not all chefs write their own cookbooks. Cookbook authors such as Rachael Ray and Gwyneth Paltrow were quick to point out that they did, in fact, compose their own material, and they felt maligned by the suggestion that they didn't. The controversy has led to plenty of earnest discussion about the role of ghostwriters in creating and producing cookbooks, with plenty of focus--as usual--on high profile celebrities with big names and big egos.

This past winter I've been doing a bit of cookbook ghostwriting myself. I'm finding I really enjoy the process of helping other people to channel their food knowledge into written form. I love writing but I can't really market my way out of a paper bag, so ghostwriting feels like a perfect fit: I get to focus on the part that I do well, and another person has the job of promoting the material. I started out as a fiction writer, and ghostwriting also enables me to go back to chameleon mode, learning and imitating someone else's voice.

I've been working for peanuts so far, thinking of the process as an internship of sorts. If I get some experience, then down the line I may be able to work on more lucrative projects because, after all, a girl's got to earn a living. But reading Moskin's account of the treatment she received from some of the big names she worked with has given me a new appreciation of the type of work I've been doing.

I've mostly been helping non-native speakers express their food knowledge in ways that will be accessible to an American audience. I edited a cookbook for a Russian guy with a thick accent who had been working with voice recognition software: this became clear when I came across the phrase "feel the pastry shells." I worked with a Greek food personality who wants to teach American cooks about the food lessons that he and his compatriots have learned as a result of their country's economic turmoil.

I'm finding this work fascinating. In addition to learning a lot about unfamiliar cuisines, it's gotten me thinking about the role of food writing in the digital age. We all want to promote who we are and what we know. We create platforms, project personalities, and build audiences. But the people with the deepest, broadest food knowledge aren't necessarily the ones who have the writing skills or the tech savvy to communicate what they know.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the ways that new information technologies have been lowering the qualty of food writing and diluting the brands of folks who immerse themselves in the craft and the business of creating food books and magazines. But digital media and the recent innovations in self-publishing have also created a field that is potentially quite egalitarian and food is, after all, a deeply egalitarian medium.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a ghostwriter, I hope you'll keep me in mind...

Reawakening

I own a business that makes the same food week after week, month after month, and year after year. The ingredients change seasonally, but the menu basically stays the same. So it's a big deal when we introduce a new menu item.



This past fall we started selling beef tamales. We'd been selling only vegetarian tamales for years, in fact, our entire menu had been completely vegetarian until we introduced a beef chili in an effort to limit competition at the Jubilee Farm pumpkin patch event. (They were talking about bringing in a burger vendor for the omnivores.) The chili was really tasty, but it was more work than we'd anticipated and it just didn't sell well.

The beef tamales however, were an instant hit. Once we introduced them at all of our markets, we quickly began selling more of them than of both of the vegetarian varieties combined. There were a couple of pissed off vegans, but not nearly as many as we'd expected. Ironic as it may sound, I felt like it was a step in the right direction as far as my big picture objective of encouraging folks to eat less meat. There's an ounce of beef in a beef tamale. If someone chooses to eat one along with a big pile of locally grown vegetables on the side instead of eating a burger or a hot dog, I feel like I'm making a difference.

We began buying our meat from Crown S Ranch, in Winthrop. My household has been enjoying their fine products for years, and they gave us a great deal on some overstocked meat that had been shaped into hamburger patties. We did some mutually beneficial cross marketing.

I drove out to visit the farm in late October. As the author of two vegan cookbooks, I wanted to be able to tell customers that I'd visited the farm that was raising the animals that went into my tamales, and I felt good about using their products.

It was a magical place. Jennifer and Louis, the owners, are both engineers and they've designed a wealth of technologies and systems --some simple, some complex--to make the most of natural cycles and synergies, and raise tasty, healthy animals. At one point Jennifer was showing me around and explaining some of the systems, and she stopped in mid-sentence, gestured at a nearby cow, and said, "Let's move away a bit. I'm talking too loud, and I'm stressing her out."

By the end of the visit, we'd brainstormed all kinds of ways we could collaborate. To start with, I agreed to make tamales using their beef and pork, for them to sell in their farm store and distribute to their wholesale accounts. They'd provide the meat, and I'd charge them a wholesale price that didn't include marking up the most expensive ingredient.

She ordered more than 700 tamales, and I made them and froze them for a pick-up in a couple of weeks. A week later, she sent me an email regarding a much smaller batch of tamales I'd brought to the farm store when I visited. Customers were asking whether I was using GMO corn and she was curious about the answer.

The GMO issue has always been a tricky one for me. On the one hand, I want good, clean food as much as the next person. On the other hand, I have a great working relationship with the Mexican distributor who suppliers my masa and corn husks, and their products make wonderful tamales. I could get a non-GMO masa from the behemoth natural foods distributor, but I have to drive far to get it, and they don't treat me like they value my business. I'm also not as happy with the way the tamales come out when I use that masa.

And yet Jennifer's email was so friendly and non-judgemental that I found myself revisiting the issue. I researched prices, tried thinking outside the box, and made a sample batch. I found myself liking them more.

But I still had more than 700 tamales in the freezer made with the GMO corn. I offered her an out. I'd been using this masa for many years, and I knew I'd be able to sell these tamales. If she wanted to wait until I could use all non-GMO ingredients, that wasn't a problem for me: I'd simply pay for the meat that she'd provided.


She bought them anyway, saying that she'd just treat them as a transitional batch. In the meantime, I went ahead placed an order with the behemoth natural foods distributor for quite a bit of the non-GMO masa. I've even found parchment paper "corn husks" that have the look and feel of the real thing.

Once I got started, I began revisiting all of my other ingredients as well. I've always been comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction, and I believe that incremental change can be as effective as all-or-nothing dogmatism. I use plenty of clean, local, organic ingredients, but I also use GMO masa and cheap, industrial cheese. I've never set out to provide an absolutely wholesome product. Instead, I've aimed to create a reasonably wholesome product that's a great value.

For the most part, the few customers who have called me out about these inferior ingredients over the years have seemed smug and self-righteous, and that kind of attitude makes me want to dig in more than it makes me want to change. But Jennifer's attitude about the tamales was sensible and easygoing, and it really got me thinking.

This Summer

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.

Making Work

These days I often base my decision to vend at a new market on the fact that every vending opportunity creates work, and people need work. My business has built an infrastructure over the years, and it's often not difficult for us to pick up new markets and make use of unused parts of that infrastructure by preparing a little extra food at the kitchen we're already leasing, and using a van and some equipment on days when they would otherwise sit ide. Even if we just break even, we're seeing what can come of this opportunity and we're making work.

There have been raging debates the past few years about whether new markets "cannibalize" existing markets, siphoning their market share and their clientele. The way I see it, they do and they don't. There's certainly the potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to stop at one market rather than another because it's more convenient. There's also potential for someone who wants great tomatoes to buy them rather than not buy them on a particular day because there's a convenient market nearby that hadn't been there a year earlier.

We're picking up a brand new market this year at Willis Tucker Park, in Snohomish. It's on Friday afternoons, so traffic is going to be hell, but I'm excited. Friday markets tend to be challenging. They're not like other weekday markets, where folks come on their way home from work and probably don't have anything else to do that evening. They're also unlike weekend markets, which tend to be more leisurely because folks often go there as a day-off activity. This new market is in a busy park with a swimming pool. I'm hoping it'll have some of the qualities that make weekday markets succeed as well as qualities that make weekend markets work.

We'll see. In any case, I'm be making work for my staff.

There and Back

I closed the cafe last week. As we started making preparations for the markets, it became clear that it would be difficult to keep staffing it and supplying it with our regular summer routine in gear. To make it work I would have had to hire a stranger, and if I hired a stranger I would have had to count the money every day.

It was a difficult location. Some people make restaurants and coffeeshops work at difficult locations, in fact, there's a successful restaurant right across the street. But a place that works in a difficult location either has to be a destination place or it has to really connect with its neighborhood. I really just wanted to have a place that was convenient for us to run and convenient for customers to support, but it didn't happen that way on either end.

I learned that I'm not cut out for the coffee business. There's an appalling amount of waste in the coffee business. You have to pull shots and throw them away at the beginning of each day to make sure the grinder setting is right for the atmospheric conditions. The coffee coming out of the grinder flies all over the place. The machine is set up to pull two shots at a time, so if someone orders a single shot you just throw away the extra one. Everything about the process has to be perfect, from the size of the grind to the timing and the temperature, and sometimes shots don't come out right and you can't even identify the reason. But if the shot isn't perfect you have to throw it away because this is a coffee kind of town.

My employees who had worked in the coffee industry for a long time took this in stride. I've basically built my farmers' market business around strategies for reducing waste, so I was horrified. We used organic, fair trade coffee but I couldn't help thinking about all the coffeeshops wasting all that coffee that was produced at terrible human and environmental costs.

We did have an opportunity to launch the Humble Feast dinners at the cafe location, and we're going to keep doing them there for now and eventually move them to community centers around town. I've wanted to do these dinners for years, and I'm thrilled to have gotten the endeavor off the ground. Maybe that was the deeper reason why I attempted this quixotic venture.

I keep hearing people expressing their condolences but I've actually felt so much lighter since I closed the place. Today is opening day at the Columbia City Market. This is the nature of business. You try things. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. You brush yourself off and you move on.

A Website!

After many years of living off the grid, so to speak, my company now has a website. I'd put it off for a variety of reasons, not least because most developers seemed to want to sell me more than I actually needed.

I finally decided to work with Becky Dobbins after seeing the wonderful site she did for my friends at Farm Girl CSA. I love their site because its content and its design are so nicely in balance. It's not ostentatiously fancy, and it really does convey the essence of the gals' operation.

My major challenge in working with a designer to build a site was to bring together my business and my writing. I wanted the site to promote both endeavors in such a way that someone could come to it being interested in either one, and either find what they wanted easily, or become curious enough to explore farther. I also wanted a format that I could update myself, to tinker with the text and also change the menu as needed.

I love the result. I'm also looking it as a work in progress, because my various endeavors are also works in progress. A lot has changed even during the few short months that we have been working on the site, including opening the cafe and e-publishing Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Week 1 at the Cafe

My little cafe is now just over a week old and I'm pleased to say that I think it has potential.

We offered free coffee all week, including espresso drinks, and that generated some buzz. People tweeted about it and retweeted about it. You don't see free espresso every day.

We met many of the neighbors, who wished us well and said they desperately wanted a business to succeed in the spot, although they also warned us about all the endeavors that had failed there. I'm taking those warnings to heart, though I also think we have a better thing going than our predecessors had. It's easy to look at an operation from the outside and think you know better, but it's hard to look at the remnants of those previous businesses, from scribbled signs to bizarre inventory, without speculating about the reasons they didn't make it.

Customers enjoyed the food and the coffee. There were times when we felt downright busy. Having started several similar operations in the past, I know that it takes time to get established. I keep looking back to our first few weeks in Ballard as reference points. Our sales at this location are considerably higher than they were at the old spot during this period, although we still have a way to go before we break even.

When I opened the shop in Ballard I was having issues with the plumbing inspector, who took weeks to approve the gas line running to the grill. I'd said I was going to open on the 2nd of November, and I was determined to do so with or without a gas line. I cooked on a hot plate and kept food warm with a chafing dish. The first few days it felt heroic. By the time nearly 2 weeks had gone by I was feeling like a loser.

I kept reminding myself of that experience last week when we opened. The new place felt ready and I had plenty of support from my wonderful staff. It's not going to be easy, but I've got a good feeling about this one.

The Coffeeshop

One of the toughest things about owning a farmers' market business is the fact that it's so hard to keep good people when I can only offer them seasonal work. As this season began drawing to a close I started thinking about ways that I could keep some of my employees employed during the off season. It's been a good year, and I felt I wanted to make a small investment in a new venture, ideally something where I could make back most of that capital outlay in a relatively short period of time.

I started browsing Craigslist for opportunities. I called about a food cart, but winter is the wrong time of year for a food cart business, and besides, Seattle still hasn't changed the regulation that forbids selling anything other than hot dogs out of a cart. I could have looked into a full fledged truck, but that involved more of an investment than I was willing to make.

Then I saw an ad for a fully furnished coffeeshop, with the equipment included. I called and went to see it, and I was thoroughly charmed. The building owner had furnished it and tried to make a go of it, but she had no experience in the coffee business. She leased it to someone else who kept it open for a few months, but didn't want to make any investment in keeping it open longer.

The shop is on 23rd and Madison, across from Crush. There isn't a lot of parking, but there are quite a few condos and bus stops in a three block radius, and no coffee in either direction for 4 or 5 blocks. I went ahead and signed a lease.

We're going to serve soups, salads, stuffed breads and coffee. Everything will be homemade. (There's not much kitchen space, but it's half a mile from my big, underused commercial kitchen.) We'll use plenty of local and organic ingredients, including sustainable meat.

It's going to be a tricky location, but certainly not an impossible one. Because it's fully equipped, I'll be able to invest in things I could never afford before, like advertising, signage and decor.

When I signed the lease I didn't have a good feeling or a queasy feeling, I just felt that this venture was inevitable. I've made plenty of mistakes at the storefronts I tried to open in the past. I like to think that I've learned a thing or two from those mistakes, lessons that will serve me well this time around.

House Arrest

This summer I've been working with a teenager on house arrest, signing her in and out at the end of the day and mailing her paychecks to the Department of Corrections. She's a good kid who did a bad thing and she's ready and willing to take responsibility and accept the consequences, but she's also working to manage the situation so it doesn't squelch her dreams and aspirations. Having a job is an important piece of the puzzle because it shows the powers that be that she's making productive use of her time.

This isn't the first time I've worked with an employee with legal troubles. One of my key people was paying for his youthful indiscretions when I hired him 3 years ago, suffering through regular court dates and completing community service hours. With both of these people, I've felt that farmers' markets are a great setting for a new beginning. The work can be hard, but it's a life-affirming environment with tangible benefits other than the paycheck: we're surrounded by fabulous food and we learn more about it every day.

Planet Home

This past Saturday I set up my grills at an event called "Planet Home," put on by Northeast Seattle Neighbors' Sustainability Network. It was a sweet festival at the Hunter Tree Farm, with the space divided into areas representing the different rooms of a house.

When the organizers first contacted me about vending there, my first reaction was that it didn't sound like the kind of event where I could make any money. The health department fee structure makes it nearly impossible for a business like mine to make a profit at an event like this: we're supposed to pay a $255 permit fee to set up even if it's just for one day, even if it's a tiny event. Some vendors don't bother with the permits and they generally don't get caught, but that's not my style.

My second thought when I considered vending here was that there are many reasons to choose an event, and money is just one of them. I knew I probably wouldn't lose money because it would have to be a lethally slow day to not make back the cost of the permit, and I had 4 markets the next day so I'd be able to use any unsold product. All I was really risking was my time.

I ended up doing just a little better than breaking even, and I was glad I was there. One interesting feature of this event (from a business point of view) was that nearly everyone paid with small bills. I always pay attention to the bill denominations because they give information about spending patterns. When lots of people pay with large bills early in the day, it usually means it's going to be a good day. In low income neighborhoods people tend to pay with large bills early in the month and smaller bills as the month wears on. At well advertised special events there are so many people paying with big bills that it's nearly impossible to bring enough change. This was probably the only one-day event I've ever done where I ended the day with more change than when I started. It wasn't about money.

I realized, though, that this kind of sustainability-based event fits my values so much better than a big budget event like the Green Festival. Real sustainability isn't commercial. It isn't flashy or glitzy. It's neighborhood-based. It's reused, homemade, and it's proud of its handwritten signs.

This Winter

About four years ago I started thinking seriously about the future, and I came up with a five year plan to set up my business so I could sell it, and transition to a career writing about sustainable food.

My vision has shifted since then. In the process of setting up my business so I could sell it to someone else, it's evolved into an enterprise that meets my needs so well that I want to keep it. My thoughts about sustainable food have changed as well: I've discovered that nothing is as simple as it seems. I used to think that if everyone could just see the light and eat local, sustainable food, everything else that was wrong with the world would eventually work itself out.

These days I see the problems with our food chain as a symptom of deeper, broader difficulties like greed, hegemony and colonization. I certainly feel called to spread these insights by writing about them, but it's hard to imagine that this will turn into a career that will support me. It's a complex message, not a tidy one that is easy to sell, and my challenge is to work at my own pace to figure out the right way to communicate it. I enjoy writing this blog, though the traffic is nothing to write home about. (And I really do appreciate those of you who read it regularly.)

Working on both of my cookbooks during the spring of 2008 I realized that creating book length manuscripts suits me well. I love immersing myself in a project, and I enjoy the give and take of working with engaged, professional editors. I spent the winters of 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 putting together a book length manuscript that gives a historical perspective on the current sustainable food movement, and this winter I've been sending it around. I got an exciting nibble last week, but sometimes (more often than not) a nibble is just a nibble. So we'll see.

Because the economy has been difficult, and because I'm getting too old to keep saving money over the summer and then depleting it all winter, I decided to try to earn a living this winter doing something other than running my business (which can't support me over the winter anyway.) I taught some classes at PCC. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed that.

I've also been doing some online copywriting for a company that is, for all practical purposes, a content factory. They gather information about key words that folks submit to search engines, and they pay freelance writers to write articles targeted to the search terms. The articles get traffic, the company gets ad revenue, and the writers and editors get paid. Despite my ambivalence, this has worked well for me this winter. I've been working from home, making my own schedule and earning a living. For the first time ever, my bank balance is higher at the end of the winter than it was at the beginning. Not by much, but it still feels like an important milestone.

A few weeks ago, things started to change. The company's editors seemed to change their standards and criteria overnight, demanding scholarly references and extensive rewrites. I don't have anything against scholarly references and extensive rewrites under the right circumstances, but not for the amount they pay per article.

Fortunately, this happened right around the same time my business started getting back into gear. I also got started with a new writing project of my own which has been germinating all winter. Now I wake up in the morning and I get started right away on my own stuff. If there's time later in the day, I generate content.

It feels good. I'm looking forward to market season.