Long Live the Salmon King

The canulier received the news that the salmon king had died.  She heard it from the scone man, who asked the Latvian sausage maker and the Japanese salad dressing specialist, then the fiery Italian pesto girl until he finally got an address. I knew you’d want to know, he wrote.

For years they worked the weekend farmer’s markets together, sharing the Brotherhood of Waking Up Before Dawn On Weekend Mornings, rewarded by an eyeful of sunrise as they drove to the market,  shivering in light jackets and hats as they unloaded their trucks in the early morning chill, breath pluming as they traded gibes and offered each other help erecting their tents with the fairground peaks. The salmon king would direct others to help the canulier, who was small.   His muscles are younger than my back! he’d laugh as the jerky man would scurry to lend a hand.

Getting set up is a 30 minute endeavor unless you are the salmon king, who kept his crab cakes and wild Alaskan salmon steaks in a cooler, which he sat on, behind a table: voila, a market stall. Within five minutes of driving up and calling out his halloos to the canulier and the sausage maker he’d be open for business, chatting up the line of customers who seemed to apparate from other dimensions to queue up in front of his stand before his market mates had rung their first sale.  The not inconsiderable cost of fresh, wild caught Alaskan seafood is not a deterrent to the crowd at this market, one of whom once left a Tesla key fob among the canulier’s towers of pastry boxes.  She really knows how to barter, the Salmon King could be heard remarking.

The canulier could be seen slipping behind the salmon king as he gabbed with his customers, leaving behind a crisp white bag of pastry – usually vanilla, though he favored pineapple and lemon too. In between waves of customers the salmon king would hold up the depleted white bag and call out to the canulier (“Thanks, Canelé Queen!”) then  turn to talk  back pain with the gruff, grudgingly friendly sausage maker. When he joked with the pretty salsa girl with her long hair dyed mermaid colors, their laughter would invariably bring the young pickle man, something the canulier suspected the salmon king of planning, though he would never say.

The rules of the market are clear: all tents must stay up til the end of the afternoon, but the salmon king has been there the longest of anyone and when he’s sold out he’s sold out, what’s the sense in waiting around? He’d spend five minutes loading up and before noon he’d be making his rounds to say goodbye til next weekend. Often, he’d save back a package of salmon or crab cakes for the canulier and drop them at her stall when she wasn’t looking, then  drive off with a honk and a wave of  his suntanned arm out the window of his old Datsun.

The last time she saw the salmon king, the canulier didn’t know it was the last time, and neither did he.  She returned his wave, packed up her truck that just rolled over 250,000 miles and made the long trek home. She would be up before dawn the next day, but for now the window was cranked down to let the eucalyptus-scented air rush through her hair, and there was the happy  surprise of the salmon king’s gift of crab cakes on ice resting in the passenger seat. Barter anything good? came the husband’s text, and she sent the delicious answer All hail the salmon king. The end of the weekend beckoned with the jewel-like flash of sunset on a glass of wine.

The canulier’s fine husband prepared the crab cakes for dinner;  they opened the window and talked and ate with the mild California air breathing its fragrance into the room. It was such simple perfection the canulier felt her heart expand until it threatened to escape her chest, like light leaving a star.  They watched the sun’s slow descent into the Pacific, lighting up the distant blue of the water with a glittering red shimmerlane that stretched  like a path you could walk straight to the edge of the world itself, a sight the canulier would immediately remember when the sad news reached her that the salmon king had died.

RIP Dave

All That It Takes Is Your All

I am reading “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Silicon Valley legend Ben Horowitz.  I picked it up because I knew I would learn something, but also because I just liked the title.  Horowitz is good at the pithy tautological truism (“The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company.” )

Also, it must be said, I rather enjoy hard things (ultramarathons;  climbing Shasta; hiking the AT; making French pastry).

Launching a business is most definitely one of life’s hard things.  It is not enough to have a good product.  In fact, a good product is what we social scientist researchers call “a necessary but not sufficient condition”.  You can have the greatest product in the world, but you have to bring all kinds of other competencies to the table in order to get it noticed, bought, liked, and bought again.  If these things don’t happen, you don’t have a business, no matter how wonderful your product is.

I hear people talk about entrepreneurs being their own bosses and I say that’s all well and good but you *also* have to be your own employee, and then you have to decide if you’re going to be a good one, or a great one.

You also  have to be your own accountant, marketer, saleswoman, IT support staff, shipping and receiving…. and of course, your own labor. Until you can afford to hire someone to clean the bathroom…someone has to clean the bathroom.  And you better be much much better than average at all of it, or you won’t have a business.

I called the garbage collection company because they didn’t come out two weeks out of four last month, and our garbage situation reached crisis levels.  I called them and we worked it out, but when the monthly bill came, I noted that it reflected four pickups when one – and nearly two – were missed.  When I called them, the service rep said, Oh we don’t take anything off the bill if we miss.  You just gotta let us know.

So you get paid as if you’re doing the job, and rely on us to tell you when you’re not? I asked, and the customer service rep agreed, yes, this is the way it’s done.

You always hear people talk about passion in business but the real thing that succeeds is perseverance. Last week it was trouble with the credit card account, which for some reason doesn’t show up on my online account activity. Also the dishwasher, which has been life changing (hours spent on cleaning can now be spent on sales, plus my fingernails no longer peel off like decals) but has come accompanied by the most amazing flurry of invoices with strange codes and impossible-to-decipher commercial dishwasher insider lingo (4 THX SPL for X800 Mod SP 60 OZ, for example, means “case of soap’).

This week it’s the blast chiller door which is not closing properly and though the box remains an icy 25, cold air seeps out in little vapor trails shaped like dollar signs.  The vents in the ceiling aren’t venting because the painters painted over the ceiling screens, so we had to crawl up to the roof and fix that because summer is here and by 11a every morning the place feels like the devil’s own furnace, especially when you are scalding milk to 180 degrees plus for the batter, or once we get the big rotating convection ovens fired up.

Another guy who liked difficult things.

There are other things, too – things with the accounting software and the air compressor, and my first attempt at an income statement and a business plan. I tackle and retackle these tasks, feeling as if the ground is constantly slipping away underneath me.  (Everything is hard when you don’t actually know what you are doing, Horowitz writes understatedly).

On the other hand we have three new customers carrying our canelés so clearly freeing up time from washing dishes to sell more delicious is working.

People raise their eyebrows when I tell them the plan for Cafe Canelé.  Friends tease me.  “Baking, eh?” said one.  “Seven years of post-graduate education, shot down the drain!”  I tell him, baking is what I do…it is not what I *am*, but he just snorts.  You probably don’t even remember how to do a conjoint tradeoff analysis, he sneers.  I tell him I employ the principles of price elasticity modeling all the time, but he just stares pointedly at my apron, which has chocolate stains on it.

In other news the investor platform Circle Up tells us we are not a good fit at this time, but we are welcome to appeal the decision. I do, though I know it’s probably futile and will likely only earn me another opaquely worded rejection, which it does.  I keep reading how investors are all jumping on the Lean In bandwagon, but so far have yet to see any of that love result in actual women’s businesses actually getting funded.

“These guys are at home coding with no social life,” one VC was quoted as saying when explaining why hoodie-wearing twenty-somethings were the safest investment bet.  “You know what you’re getting with these guys.”

I can’t blame them for wanting only to invest in Zuckabees….most of us do what’s easy and safe and then build all kinds of complex ex post facto edifices to prop up the logical inevitability of our choices.   When in fact, people more often than not hire, invest and trust on their gut, their hunches, and their first impressions all the time.  I have been the beneficiary of such, myself, hoodie or not –   it’s how I got my coveted job at the most famous beer brand in the world, not because of my Ph.D. from a Big Ten school, not because of my SAS coding capability, and not because of my 3.96 GPA, but because I went to school on an athletic scholarship. The hiring managers at this famous beer company had a soft spot for jocks, and just like that I was in.

I tell my employees about the Circle Up rejection and have to fight only a little to keep the shine out of my eyes and the shake out of my voice. You can’t take no personally, I say. Especially not the impersonal form letter these guys tossed off, I think but don’t say.

The Starbucks guy pitched more than 200 times before he got a yes, one of my employees reminds me chirpily, and I briefly consider pelting her with canelés but decide that is ultimately too much like a reward.

Besides, she’s right – an entrepreneur has no choice but to look at the word no as just another stepping stone to yes. And anyway, it may not matter…with more and more customers coming on line, it looks like the bootstraps might, just might, get long enough and strong enough to hoist us up the ladder to positive revenue flow, no outside investment help needed.

Then the battle really starts, as King Arthur found once Camelot was built.  In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Horowitz seems to agree, saying “by far the most difficult skill I learned as a CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology…it’s like the fight club of management: the first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown.”

I laugh when I read this because talking about the meltdown isn’t necessary….all my employees have to do is wait for Cryday Friday, as I’ve come to call it.  The end of another Sisyphean week sometimes (well, often) finds me emotionally threadbare. I used to castigate myself fiercely for crying “like a girl” but I’ve found it’s surprisingly commonplace.  The two London School of Economics grads who pay me rent to incubate their business (they are launching a raw almond milk company) laugh merrily when they tell me about crying parked on the side of the highway on their way to JFK after an investor meeting in which the investor failed to even show up.

Building a multi-faceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard, says Horowitz, and though this seems incredibly elementary-my-Dear-Watson obvious it cheers me immensely to read it.

I am further cheered when I find it is not too late to register for the Vermont 50 ultra marathon race in the fall. I ran it once before, in pouring, icy, driving rain.  At one point in the race, officials told me, you need to make up 8 minutes between here and the next aid station, or we’ll have to take you off the course, we’re closing it because of weather.

I hadj just completed mile 30 when I received this ultimatum – drenched and shivering, I’d already run one whole marathon and  here they were telling me (and smiling laconically while they did it) that I had to run *another* marathon, even faster, with wet shoes and socks to boot.

Eight minutes is a lot of time to make up in a five mile stretch, and this particular part of the course was mostly uphill and so muddy my shoes kept getting sucked off.  I figured I probably would end up getting taken off the course, but a funny thing happened as I hammered up the trail, warm tears mixing with the cold rain streaking my face: I found I *could* go faster, a little. And then, a little faster still.  Until I made up not just eight but a full ten minutes;  the bike escort with the walkie talkie that they’d sent to monitor my probable demise kept pounding his handlebars in excitement and hollering at me  “Now THAT is what an ulramarathoner LOOKS like!”

It was the strongest performance I’d ever turned in at a race, and it came just after the absolute worst performance.

I didn’t know I had that in me, I told one of the officials milling around after the race, and he smiled.  It’s amazing what can happen when you just keep going, and don’t quit, isn’t it?  he commented, and I agreed. Keeping on going is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for being a successful runner.  According to Horowitz, it’s the quality that separates great CEOs from the meh ones, as well.

“Whenever I meet a successful CEO,” he writes, “I ask them how they did it.  Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.”

Keep going, friends.

Destined for Greatness

At our annual Sunday-after-Thanksgiving brunch, my neighbor described a sub-standard canelé he recently had.  It was chewy! he said. And short! His indignation would have been funny if not for being so sincere.

That’s because they used the wrong flour, and probably warm butter, I told him.

It’s so cool that you know that! he says, to which I shrug. Put a less than perfect canelé in front of me and I can tell you not only exactly what went wrong, but when where and how.  It’s my job, after all.

If names are destiny then I suppose it’s no surprise that I ended up being a Miller with a bakery.  Though of course I’m not sure one can claim the title of baker if one bakes only one thing, which in my case is the canelé, which makes me a canulier, which is French for “obsessive personality that can only get interested in things as difficult as humanly possible“.

I kid!  “Fluted” is the actual meaning of “canelé” after the design of the traditional copper molds used to make them.

So what is a canelé is a question I hear weekly even after all these years of pumping thousands into the pastryosphere.  People say it’s a small world but it’s large enough  to keep all those poor cupcake eaters in the dark about canelés, a situation we are striving to correct because if you’ve tasted a canelé then you know that by all rights it should be at least as plentiful not to mention as celebrated as the much more ordinary (and often disappointing) cupcake.

I have no doubt that it will be, as soon as it can get past the not-insignificant-detriments of being hard to say and even harder to make. Most bakers will not even try because the chaos and bloodshed would be sure to put them out of business, if the constant canelés shortages did not.

Like anything worth mastering, canelés (pronounced can-uh-LAY, rhymes with yay) take practice.  Do not be fooled by the simplicty of the ingredients, which make for a nice mis-en-place picture that is totally misleading.  The picture above, courtesy of ChefSteps, seems to be saying: let’s whip up something delicious with these simple whole ingredients!

But if you are really paying attention you can detect the pathos inherent in any canelés making endeavor – for example, the rum for this recipe is only a few scant tablespoons, yet this cook has the entire bottle on the table.  That’s because he’ll be doing shots by the third ruined batch and chugging directly from the neck of the bottle by the fifth ruined batch.  In fact I’ll bet if you look under the prep table  you will find an entire case of rum.

Notice also that this photograph is clearly of a man.  “Pastry so easy – even a guy can master it!” they seem to be saying.  But note that his face is not visible, and that my friends is because it is  tear-streaked, red-splotched and distorted with rage.  You can sense the tension in his hands, which are ready to curl into fists.

Once you  know what you’re doing , making canelés is not that difficult, as long as you are willing to show due respect to the most important ingredient, which is time.

The sugar, butter, milk, flour and vanilla will always reliably give you a great taste, but ultimately, the ingredient of time is what gives the canelé its contrasting textures of tender custard inside and crusty caramelization outside – the heart of its caneléosity.

If you are new to making canelés the bad news is you will make many mistakes and they will  be ugly.  Some will be caved in, some will lean drunkenly.  The exteriors may look rough and pebbled, the crowns lack crisp defined peaks, the center may be collapsed and broken.  You will feel humiliated by their hideousness, until you eat one…then the full despair will wash over you because it will be delicious. Totally unservable, but otherwise really excellent.  Too bad after all that work only you will know.

French pastry making is unforgiving but the penance of eating your sins and starting over with a clean slate could make a religious zealot out of anyone.  With that in mind, here are a few tips to help you avoid the most common errors in pursuing canelé perfection:

Tip One: Don’t use melted butter, or even room temperature butter.  Use cold butter, which minimizes absorption into the flour, thus helping with gluten formation and the development of structure. The end result is a better texture – custard that is dense and moist but at the same time light and fluffy.

Whether to use salted or unsalted butter depends on the humidity, frankly. You’ll have to experiment and decide for yourself.

Tip Two: Use the right flour type.  Super chewy exteriors herald the wrong flour.  All purpose should really be renamed All Purpose Except For Pastry, which requires pastry flour except when it requires cake flour.  For canelés, a pastry, use cake flour, or live to chewily regret it.

There is only one brand of flour to use if you care about texture, and that is King Arthur flour.  You may be tempted to use another brand and think you got away with it but by the texture of your custard your substandard flour shall be known.  I can tell a canelé made with Giusto’s flour from a canelé made with King Arthur flour just by looking at it.

Tip Three: The milk must be heated to a precise 183 degrees Fahrenheit.   Use a thermometer. Don’t let it get hotter than 183.  If you step away to get a glass of water or to gaze out the kitchen window at the pigeons setting up their annual nest in the downspout of the house next door, and then come back and the thermometer reads 187,  and you just go ahead with the batter making as though a colossal error has not just been made, you may think you are getting away with something but  but you are not.

Canelés are patient, far more patient than you can ever hope to be. They will not reveal the too-hot milk mistake until the very end.   You will watch their bottoms brown evenly and your mind will whisper yes, you got away with it.  They will fall out of their molds beautifully and you will feel even more confident that you did, indeed, get away with it.

Then you will bite into one and your fecklessness with the milk will be revealed, immediately and incontrovertibly: those four extra degrees will manifest themselves as a cakey like texture which in and of itself isn’t the end of the world but let’s be frank: cake-like when one is expecting custard-like is like naugahyde when one is expecting leather, like wool when one is expecting silk.

Tip Four:  Use baker’s sugar, also called caster’s sugar.  NOT powdered sugar, not granulated sugar, not sugar in the raw.   You want the ultra fine granules of baker’s sugar  – the  tiny consistent grain size mixes, blends and melts more evenly, for a more consistent and beautiful caramelization.

Tip Five: If you make a chocolate chunk canelé and use Ghirardelli chocolate,  your canelés will develop a waxy sheen on the crowns after about 12 hours, because the chocolate in question has a higher paraffin content.  If you want your canelés to stay elegantly shiny in any temperature, use French or Belgian chocolate.

Tip Six:  Purists will try to tell you otherwise but I’m here to tell you silicone molds can produce a crunchy exterior, as long as you bake in a convection  – preferably rotating – oven.

The REAL Secret
The secret of making a perfect canelé is a  combination of the right ingredients, the right equipment, and the right amount of time….and most importantly of all, the willingness to spend that time in the pursuit of perfection.  Most people cannot find or make the time, which will make an accomplished canulier all the more dear!

Things I Learned at the Bakery This Month: Notes From Entrepreneur Land

 

1. Garbage blows around, so contain it. The very best way to contain it is to keep a lid on it. This applies equally to garbage that resides in dumpsters as the detritus that resides in human minds.
2. Complaining about the heat, no matter how irrefutable, doesn’t improve one’s ability to bear it.  Better to just turn on some tunes or an e-book, keep a bottle of water handy at all times, and forget about it.
3. Everyone needs a quality vacation.  If you think you don’t chances are the people around you need a vacation from *you*.
4. Your success as a manager is apparent in how your employees act when you are around, your success as a leader is apparent in how they act when you’re not.
5. It’s often more expedient to be pleasant than right.
6. Optimism is fine but make decisions with clear-eyed facts.
7. “The customer is always right,” my dad liked to remind me. When I was a kid, I thought this sounded pretty unfair – I always felt sorry for the clerk at the other end of dad’s complaint.  Even if he wasn’t exactly yelling, the threat of yelling was there, like an odor, and everyone cringed away from it, me included.  I didn’t really understand how customers could act like dad and  be ‘right’ about anything, much less always be right.  But the business owner who treats every customer as though they are not only right, but valued for being so, is gong to have far more customers than the business owner who keeps score.  In fact you should go out of your way for customers as often as possible. It’s not enough to say you are passionate –  words are easy.  You have to actually be passionate. And active passion requires you to get your hands dirty. For me, this month, it has meant….
   • Getting ready to go for a run  and then instead jumping in the car to run down to the bakery to meet a customer who wants to have a tasting for an upcoming wedding but is only in town for the next two hours.
   • Getting a text from a customer who has pre-paid but won’t be able to pick up due to a sick husband, so after working farmer’s markets from 5a to 5p, driving to that customer’s house to deliver the order myself, along with a get well pack for hubby too.
8. Learn to control your stress or it will control you.  Even in the most difficult circumstances, you can choose to be happy. It’s a much better state of mind in which to find solutions to problems.
9. Music makes everything better.
10. It always takes twice as long and costs twice as much as you think it will.
11. One of the great benefits of being a vendor at a farmer’s market is the opportunity for barter.  June is the season of stone fruit, cherries and avocados and plums shine darkly from the stalls.  I remember our plum tree in the backyard at the old house. So many plums, we couldn’t keep up. We were plum full of plums but still didn’t like it when three raccoons came to feast on them at night. The raccoons were really fat, and sassy.  They knew, even then, that the best plums are stolen plums.
12. Our experience of fun is not unique to humans.  All animals have fun.  if you don’t know that you just aren’t in a place where you can look, and see.  On a recent trip to Norway my daughter accompanied our hostess to buy milk.  They bought milk not from the store but at the store, you might say – directly from the farmer who’d recently gotten it directly from the cows, and they’d been waiting for Sophia and Ingilvde to arrive to witness the annual rite of releasing the cows from the barn in which they’d weathered the famously long and dark and cold Norwegian winter.  The farmers  waited as a form of barter – because they get their herbs and blueberries from Ingvilde – but also, mainly, because they wanted to share the rare joy of the cows tasting springtime freedom.  The cows emerged nose first, sniffing then smelling the air deeply. Then they did something that can only be called dancing. The cows felt the springy ground beneath their hooves and the green spring air in their nostrils and they kicked up their heels and danced around.  Their joy and pleasure were  evident and unmistakable, just as it was unmistakable that experiencing it together, as a cow community/family, made the joy that much greater. In other Animals Experiencing Joy news, I have seen the following videos on the internet: a small wren inside an airport, flying to the start of the escalator, perching on the movable handrail and riding it til the end, then repeating the process. I have a seen a crane playing with a golf ball, bouncing it on the paved cart path to see how high it would go; I have watched a baby hippo running down the road with a baby goat, hilariously trying to imitate the springy little jumps. Joy is everywhere, when you look for it.
13. It’s never a good idea to start a sentence with “Like I said…”. It’s passive aggressive, whiny and defensive whether you mean it to be or not.   It says “You weren’t listening to me, I shouldn’t have to repeat myself.” When in fact, maybe  you should – maybe it’s your own darn fault you weren’t heard or understood the first time.  Like I said…don’t do it.
14. It can all – and will, at some point – change in an instant. Stroke, heart attack, the headache that turns out to be a brain tumor, the stomach ache that turns out to be cancer, the unseen pancreas diseased, ceasing to perform it’s unseen job.  Losing control of the car, an oncoming driver texting and losing control of their car, a hospital acquired super infection.  A sinkhole opens up beneath your house in the middle of the night. A black bear strolls onto the trail.  You could be living your last normal day right now, and not even know it.  If you did know it – would you keep doing what you’re doing? If the answer is yes, you have passion.  If the answer is no, maybe it’s time to go find your joy.

French Pastry Sampling as Human Laboratory

How can you tell which one is which, your customers ask, looking at the rows of shining canelés, rows of vanilla with their yellow crowns, rows of deep chocolate with their semi-sweet dark coronas, rows of green tea with their dusting of imported matcha like dehydrated dragon’s breath, rows of shining hazelnut colored, cocoa-scented Nutella, rows of darkly caramelized pecans wobbling on their uneven base of knife-chopped toasted nuts.

You just know, after a while, you say with a grin and sooner or later they come back enough times they know their favorites by looking, too and everyone has a good laugh.

After two years in business there are all kinds of things you just know, in addition to the flavor of the canelé at a glance; there are so many things to know when you make the making of something your actual business.

Some of your customers know this  – you know them by their sudden, warm smiles and sincere exclamations of congratulations when you tell them you’ve just celebrated your second year in business.

Most customers will not know anything about your business except the taste of your product, and that’s ok, because their choruses of mmmmms and ohmygods will more than make up for their blessed ignorance of the agony and the ecstasy of being an entrepreneur.

You know after two years of farmer’s markets what customers are likely to like; it’s not something you knew right away, but rather something you’ve learned from interaction after interaction, week in and week out, in rain, sunshine and  the damnable wind.

You know that the older your customer, the more the customer has been through, the more they are likely to, in one taste, recognize the effort, quality and value of what they just sampled and shoot you a sharp, considering, approving look that warms you right to the core, though no words are ever said, other than a brief “Good!” with maybe an even briefer nod.

You know that men over the age of 70 almost always prefer the Classic Vanilla; the flirty types, like the type that wears a homburg, will go for Caramelized Pecan.

You do not know why men stopped wearing hats but you wish they hadn’t. Those pictures from the 50s of men in hats in the street headed to Yankee Stadium are cool.

You know that almost all Asian women between the ages of 25 and 39 will probably like the pineapple because apparently it is similar in texture to a traditional Chinese dessert, and that very elderly Chinese men and women will stick with vanilla and maybe tea.

You know that the pretty Germanic-sounding woman with the dancer’s posture and the robust young son will never not get chocolate pecan, it’s been two years now.

You know that most people will want to buy the little ones, unable to resist the cutness, which you don’t mind because the little ones are 50% more profitable than the big ones though you know the big ones taste better.

You know that delivering by 5a Monday morning means catching the Wall Street crowd which means bigger orders from your wholesale customers which means less than 5 hours of sleep tonight and that’s only if you can get home from the bakery and packed up by midnight.  Which has never happened.

You know until you replace your driver, Monday deliveries will be an oddly contemplative part of the day, the streets not yet snarled with delivery trucks and Uber drivers. You know that while you drive, NPR droning int he backgrounded, you will be obsessed with thoughts on how to find wholesale customers  large enough to scale to your considerable production  capacity.

You know that you will end the morning pleasantly jacked on caffeine, accepting all proffers of a beverage, it is good business to let your customers do  favors for you, and besides you love them all, the pour overs and almond milk chais and iced mocha lattes and cortados, even if you hands are trembling uncontrollably by the time you are finished with the sixth delivery.

You know you will get nervous when actual French customers from actual France taste a sample, even though you know, with the same certainty you know your bank balance at all times, that they will praise it and invariably ask you if you are French before ordering vanilla (and only vanilla, never any other flavor so help them God, or butter).

You know it’s hot and getting hotter and  you are staring down the oven-heated throat of a red-hot summer that is just weeks away.

You know that you have $4900 in outstanding invoices due to come in over the next 2 days. It’s nice to look forward to the mail.

You know summer is a time of big sales especially at the farmers market and you plan your pre-packaging strategies to boost sales by as much as 30%. People, you know, like and often even prefer to be told what to buy.  Especially if it’s delicious.

You know your electricity bill will be  60% lower this year than last year because you went to the Department of Energy website and learned to negotiate rates, because when every penny counts you learn to find savings in every facet of the business.  You feel a satisfaction in knowing this though no one you know will ever appreciate your penny-pinching ways.

You know when sampling that it is hit or miss with some kids, in the way that you know that the custard texture is not a common occurrence in a young American diet, in the same way you know that nearly all European and Chinese kids will love the texture and prefer chocolate, hands down

You know there will always be a dozen or so parents who buy their waddling toddler a single mini-canelé because the baby always holds the pastry triumphantly aloft, delighted at the perfect size for baby hands and generating many photographs and coos of isn’t-that-cute including from yours truly who sometimes manages to get our cancan girl stickers right on their chubby little arms, at the child’s own insistence and to the grinning proud delight of the parents.

You know there is no marketing like baby marketing and cheerfully hand out stickers to hundreds of kids, who toddle the market with your brand name adorably affixed to their noses, hats and sunglasses.

You know that after being up at 5 and working the market til 2p, a long evening of baking and cleaning at the bakery still lies ahead.  You know that your much-anticipated evening with your husband and your dog will include a perfect dinner of bartered farmer’s market food (crab cakes and artichoke hummus with snap peas in exchange for 8 vanilla canelés and 16 mini chocolate pecan cancans) and only 3 of the following: a nap, a walk, a run, an hour of writing, an hour of accounting, conjugal relations, yoga, meditation, closet cleaning, or desk cleaning.

You know your lower back will start to ache by tomorrow afternoon but you’ll need to suck it up and get some sales calls in.  No crying in baseball – you know that too, because you actually played it (well, fast pitch softball) and you can’t remember a single instance of any player crying, ever, even injured teammates never cried.

And while you agree business is not the place for tears, you also know that crying every once in awhile because you care is not something to suppress, and being in touch with your emotions means you’re less likely to be ruled by them, and so you embrace crying when it happens though you know it shouldn’t, or at least not very much.
You know the cardinal rule of being an entrepreneur is  you can’t take No personally; you also know you don’t always have to take No seriously. Even and maybe especially when the No comes from a famous vc guy whose name is on the building and who the husband calls a friend, though he doesn’t seem much interested in being a friend, failing to interrupt his monologue about his acquisitions and club memberships even once to ask the husband a single question about his family or his life.

You know you should say something when the vc invariably mentions his wife and what a busy woman she is in that “aren’t you little ladies a hard working  bunch!” way some vcs have,  something that is polite and admiring and that certainly doesn’t mention that the vc’s wife doesn’t actually have a job, much less a business or a payroll or taxes or FDA inspections or a grease trap to clean every 3 months…but you keep quiet, because he isn’t really listening anyway, and because you know from experience the mention of the wife is merely the gambit of men who – even if they are surrounded by women –  do not actually work with women and have no intention of starting now.

You had low expectations but still you thought the vc would at least have some decent advice and could perhaps make an introduction or two but who instead delivers his no in his living room in a manner so droningly oblique that it actually isn’t til after the meeting  is over you realize the lack of a no was, in fact, the no.

Just as you know you shouldn’t take it personally when the vc makes odd, fragmented statements  that are so irrelevant to the details of the business you just outlined that you wonder for a split second if he has, in fact, been sleeping with his eyes open while you outlined your two year plan.

You know as you escape the stuffy manse into the bright spring air, that this no is one you will let go of as easily as a balloon, sending it sailing off into a bluebird sky.  You know this no is just another brick on the road to yes to your grand vision (something you see as clearly as the beauty of the day) and the thought makes you want to start running and get there, already!

But mostly you know that knowing all of this does not guarantee success, and that the most important thing to know is that which you don’t.  Which is why you better have fun….for after all,

what is the point if
when it is all said and done
you didn’t at the very least
have a lot of fun?

 

 

 

 

Crashing and Burning and Hooking Up: Just Another Day at the Office

not the weekend hook-up of preference

Sales are way up and so are deliveries and therefore more driving is happening and so it was bound to happen – SMACK went the truck behind me right into the rear-end of my truck, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, there he stuck, hung up on my trailer hitch, for the better part of an hour while six lanes of rushing traffic flowed all around us.  The clack and roll of skateboards on concrete could be heard from the under-freeway skate park that sits on the corner at Division and Mission.

The two strong looking Latino men inhabiting the truck gone amok were polite and compliant but it must be said, not offering any insurance or license information until I  asked for it.  I can’t say as I blame them, I would be taking my cues from the rammee, too, if I were in the rammer shoes.   I snapped photos and saved to Evernote and we stood around watching as different configurations of men attempted to unhook our trucks from their unholy connection.

“You guys hit me pretty hard,” I said to the passenger. We watched as his companion, the errant driver, used the tire iron my husband keeps under the seat  to  do something that involved a lot of clanging but changed the hooked-together nature of our vehicles not a bit.   Personally I think he was avoiding dealing with me,  because he did know in fact that their truck hit me pretty hard indeed, as he was driving  – accelerating, even – at the time of impact.

“You sure did,” volunteered a skater boy who’d ventured over to watch the proceedings.  “Can I help?” he asked me, and I shrugged and indicated the hitch hitching the trucks together and he said “If you remove the hitch the bumper will be released?”

I looked and he was right and  both of the Latino men busied themselves removing the hitch and freeing the trucks and then very nicely restoring my trailer hitch (but upside down).

“Your truck looks ok – you’re lucky.  How about you, are you ok?” asked the skater boy. He is looking at my exposed right forearm with a frown.  I can’t blame him, the forearm in question is a hideous landscape of purple and peeling skin.

“That didn’t happen just now, did it?” he asked with some alarm.

We stare at the second degree burns on my arm, which actually look much better than they did earlier in the week, when a hose popped off a faucet and doused me with scalding water that instantly bubbled my skin into strange jellyfish-like shapes and colors.

Different accident, burned myself, I say to him with a smile.  He smacks his narrow fist into this palm with a meaty thwack and I jump a little at the sound.

“SMACK!  We all heard it. Thought sure someone would be hurt.  You were LUCKY!”

He drops  his skateboard onto the narrow median and slides away, a river of  traffic no more than twelves inches on each side of his bony tattooed arms.  To myself I think, huh, officially -literally – crashed and burned this week.  And survived to laugh with a skater boy over it.

The truck is not much damaged – at least, not in any obvious, see it with your eyeballs way, for which I am grateful.   As soon as the hitch is successfully removed we shook hands all around and off I went, figuring that was that.  I think no more of the incident other than to remind myself to turn a report in to the insurance company, not even the next day when I wake feeling as if I’d run an 18 miler the day before.

Man how far did I go yesterday, I think sleepily before realizing I haven’t run in more than a week (and I haven’t run long enough to make me sore the next morning in months) and I haven’t re-started yoga or weight lifting or rock-climbing or tennis or fast pitch softball but I *feel* as if I’ve done all of them, very recently, and with no rest.

When I try to pop out of bed and feel the weird new intractability of my lower back, I remember the crash.  The aches and pains follow a path from my lower back to my neck, with about twenty individual super achy points in between. But still, skater boy is right, I am lucky. I can walk, I can stretch, and most importantly… I can work.  No time to whinge!

Embarcadero crowded with SuperBowl visitors

Traffic is insane in the city this Superbowl weekend  but with only 6 hours of nonwork in the past 72 hours I need to be out and about., so we mount the motorcycle and zoom down to check out the gladiatorial crowds which were claustrophobically dense, even spread all along the Embarcadero.  The motorcycle ride makes me exquisitely aware of my spine in a way that I wasn’t, pre-rear-ending.

The throngs of out-of-towners strolling the broad palm-lined boulevard remind me of the Italian tradition of the passeggiata, an easy going stroll that starts just after sunset, everyone strutting about in their finery and checking up on who needs to be gossiped about.

The men appear to be in uniform in their team hats and jerseys, but many of the women were dressed for a night out, in sparkly party dresses and sky high heels.   The sound of high heels clicking on concrete made my feet in their sensible motorcycle boots shiver with happiness. Some things about getting older are great, like not giving a rats ass how cool you look walking down the Embarcadero in a huge sweaty heaving mass of humanity.

Wandering the crowd I recall walking with my friend Sue one evening to a chorus of hissing, the charming flirtatious device of the men of Sicily when they see an unaccompanied woman they find attractive.   I sniff ten different kinds of perfume and am tempted to put my helmet on so I can flip the visor down but then I would have missed this awesome picture of the flag, backlit by the setting sun against the bluest sky in the world,  so I’m glad that I didn’t.

We think about stopping somewhere for a beer but it quickly becomes clear there will be no ‘just’ stopping anywhere and so we flee the madding crowds and twenty minutes later we are buzzing down Columbus Avenue which is equally throngy on this beautiful day.  We decide to buy some coffee at the local roastery.  We chat with the owner Luigii for a bit and then head up the avenue to Cafe Greco, where we snag an outdoor table and share a pressed tomato and mozzarella sandwich, a beer and a Greco Grande and watch the crowds flow by.

In the coming weeks many things will happen, things that will make second degree burns feel secondary, things that will make crashing seem like a wake-up call.:  an employee will get word that her father has fallen ill and race to make his hospital bedside in time; a friend of my husband will take a freak fall on his snowboard, suffer stroke and a heart attack in rapid succession and  be removed from life support on his 50th birthday.  But all of this is still unknown to me.  There will be time for tears later, but on this day, the sun is warm and the breeze is mild and my husband sits smiling across from me.  Sometimes the small things are the big things.

The air cools noticeably and car headlights are coming on and the neons flicker to life as we start up the motorcycle and head home, yelling to each other in the slipstream for maybe the millionth time how it’s a shame we can’t find a good local stage and hear some music or a reading or comedy.   We’re not quite ready to go home yet, but nor do we want to hit a bar or go out to dinner.  BUT I’M FIXING THAT I shout to Herb, resting my helmeted chin on his shoulder.  And I am – I have made it my business, in fact, to fix it.  

DO IT HONEY! he yells over his shoulder and I give a whoop. We’re motoring up Broadway now, the part called Billionaire’s Row.  We pass the Getty house, the CEO of Oracele’s house, the house with a giant robot that gets a giant robot erection whenever the Oracle CEO is home (true story! I’d post a picture, but then deny you the pleasure of seeking it out  yourself on your next trip to San Francisco, which is akin to New Orleans visitors seeking out Anne Rice’s house in the Garden District). *

My whoop of enthusiasm startles an old couple walking a dog up Lyon Street.  They do not recognize us without our dog, Jake, but of course we recognize them – they do not approve of Jake, a chocolate lab who is affable to a fault and insists on approaching their dog for an enthusiastic greeting each time we see them. 

“He’s not friendly!” they invariably warn, yanking the leash of the nervous dog, who is meanwhile growling and frantically straining toward  Jake (who cares not one bit for showy displays of anxiety and wags in welcome).

The dog barks as the motorcycle sputters past and I give it the thumbs up and for a wonder, his master responds in kind, a smile splitting his face and making it look a million times kinder,  something my sweet husband must notice too because he beeps merrily as we sail up and over the hill, turn right, and head due west, the barking fading behind us as we head directly towards the ocean where the sun is setting in a fiery ball, suffusing the entire sky in such a beautiful pink and golden light I find myself  wishing like a child that the ride will go on forever.

 

*However if enough people leave a request in comments, I may post it after all.

 

 

Ratasushi

You land three new customers in one week, one of them an illustrious name in Bay Area catering, and you want to be happy except that all of your employees are on vacation, in the hospital, or on a plane, which means you have to do the prep, baking, packaging, delivering, and clean-up on your own, in between sales calls and accounting and pitching to investors and the occasional cat nap.   You’re not one to complain but the fact that you’re only halfway to break even is like hearing “You’re more than halfway there!” at mile 13.2 while running a marathon with the first half downhill.  You are not cheered by such realizations, but at least you no longer cry.  Much.

You make your delivery and are cheered a bit when the executive chef hustles out to meet you, all smiles though he is typically kind of assholey.  He opens the big white bakery box and beams, “Beautiful!” he says, and you feel bad for thinking the word assholey, when in reality he is probably just socially awkward in which case, you realize, you are the one that is kind of assholey. Two purchasing managers crowd around and tell you how they are just flying off the shelves, and you feel like a rock star and the feeling holds until you get back into your car and catch a glimpse of yourself in the rearview mirror: ponytail half undone, sleepless eyes red as a ferret, smudged mascara, a streak of flour on one cheek.  You bare your teeth and at least there is no kale waving at you, so there’s that.

At the end of the day you circle the bakery with your checklist: refrigerators in the green zone, oven breakers flipped, dishwasher powered off, pest traps uninhabited, bathroom clean, trash receptacles empty, shades drawn, lights off, alarm on. Your phone is dead which makes the BART ride home about rest instead of email catchup and you’re not sure whether to curse the loss of efficiency or be grateful for the chance to lean your head against the cool plastic window and close your eyes.

Not the Civic Center

You jolt awake sticky and disoriented when the recorded voice announces “Civic Center”.   The escalator is broken so you haul your tired legs up the 73 steps.  It is your favorite time of night, what the poets call the gloaming, a word that always makes you think of misty castles. The Civic Center is bustling with junkies, homeless, and the mentally ill; they huddle and mill about, hundreds of them, many of them talking to themselves in loud voices.   You try to steer clear of the ones that look the most dangerous but this is an exercise in futility, so you just plow a straight line through the unkempt mob. There are a few remarks about your ass and a few requests for a dollar, and you are followed twice, both followers melting away at the appearance of a uniformed police man strolling the plaza.

You start walking while looking for a taxi and twenty minutes later you are still walking, sweating and swearing, wondering where all the taxis are, aren’t they supposed to be mad about Uber and Sidecar and Lyft taking away all their business?  Finally you spy one at the light, headed the wrong way, and wave dispiritedly, and for a wonder the driver rolls down his window and yells  “Hold on, I am coming! Wait for me, miss!”  In the indigo twilight, his musical accent, the grand scale government buildings all around, his words sound like something out of a rom-com starring Kate Hudson (if Kate Hudson was a sweat-stained baker with purple streaked hair, tattoos, and flour on her face).

Home, you discover there are visitors that are waiting for you to join them for dinner.  There is no time to change clothes so you wash your face and wish you didn’t look so tired or your hair so scraggly and then it’s a quick walk to the sushi restaurant that is only five blocks away but due to close in half an hour, so it is literally a race against time to eat.  There is a small crowd at the door and you put our name in and head next door to the burger place for a beer where you figure the owner is happy to get your cash but probably also pissed that your party is using his place as a way station rather than a destination.

Your party is called and you happily sit at a table whose top is crowded with miso, wakame, garlic edamame.  You order everything spicy that the menu has to offer; one dish actually arrives at the table on fire.   It’s going on an eighteen hour day but you are mellow from beer and feeling pretty good, the sushi is spectacular as usual and you don’t pay any attention to the nudge on your foot; the tables here are tiny and crammed in, you figure it’s someone’s shoe and move your own.  The nudge comes again and you shift again and forget about it until the nudge comes a whole lot higher up, not your shoe but your lap, and now you can feel distinct little claws even as you look down in time to see the rounded ears and long tail that belong to the rat that has just crawled up your leg and onto the white expanse of your napkin.

You feel the blood not so much drain as drop from your face as you shove the napkin blindly away and luckily (if that word can be used in this situation) the rat dives down to the floor and not up to your face or over to your daughter.  What’s wrong, everyone at the table asks you at your sudden movement and pale face and you don’t have to answer because the people at the only other occupied table in the establishment all do it for you when they see the escape artist scampering past them and scream “RAT!!!!.”

The waiter gives your table lots of free beer and half off the not-inconsiderable bill which is good but on reflection maybe not enough to make up for a RAT IN YOUR LAP.  You tell your friends because how can you not, the story is just too shuddery good, and everyone vows if they were you they’d take to social media at once and take the restaurant out, take it down.  You are shocked at how quick the torches came out, how quickly these nice liberal progressives have become a social media mob.

You do not log onto Yelp, in fact you are inclined to be sympathetic to the restaurant because you know, like other non-food-business-operators apparently do not, that a rat doesn’t mean the place is dirty, a rat doesn’t mean the food is contaminated. There are three restaurants adjacent to the sushi place and if one of them gets a rat, they all get a rat, as a kitchen operator your place is only as rat-free as all of the places around your place.

Home again, you stand in the darkened kitchen looking at the bright sliver of moon framed in the window over the sink while drinking a glass of water. The dog is at your feet hoping even at this late hour for a rawhide chew when a mouse strolls out from under the stove, glances at the dog, and continues on its way to the laundry room.  You (and the dog) watch this little tableau with no reaction whatsoever.  You finish your water, put the glass in the dishwasher, and head to bed and you do not dream of Ratatouille which is as good of an end to the day as you could expect.