Category Archives: Cooking School

Pre- Faux Trade Show

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in Cooking School, Happy Owl Baking and tagged with

For those of you who don’t know — and by that I mean all of you except for my first two followers (thanks KM and AC!) — I am in the Culinary Arts Entrepreneurship program at my school of choice here in Maryland. This mean that half of my classes are in cooking and baking, and half of my classes are business classes geared towards those of an entrepreneurial ilk. I’m also taking Italian language classes, but that is neither here nor there. These entrepreneurial classes are designed to help prepare people who want to start businesses, i.e. entrepreneurs, focus on their ideas and prepare their business plans. This semester I am in the Sales and Marketing portion of the program. We have been working on developing our marketing plans (target market, demographics, value proposition, etc.) and tomorrow we have our fake Trade Show where some faculty, some members of the local business community, and some unfortunate students who need to earn some Extra Credit points will come and check us out. I have been, as I am wont to do, taking this very seriously and have been pulling rabbits out of my hat for the last few weeks trying to pull together as if the business that has been in my head for the past ten years was actually getting ready to launch. So I needed a logo, a tagline, and marketing materials, pronto. Of these skills I have none.

Fortunately, what I do have is a friend,  who also happens to be a cracker jack graphic designer, the illustrious Ms. C.N., within driving distance of me. So, for the price of the Harbor Tunnel toll and some brownies that were basically just chocolate bits held together by butter, this Jane of All Trades cranked out, in short order, a tri-fold color brochure-cum-mailer-cum-menu, a killer postcard, and about 300 photographs of me in my chef’s coat to get that one, useable image. Oh, and she threw in a business card image, too. Done, done, and done.

The trade show is tomorrow, bean pie and olive oil brownies for sampling are baking, and business cards are ready to be picked up on the way to the show. Happy Owl Baking is born.

By Jove, I think she’s got it!

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in Bean Pie, Cooking School, Good Eats, Happy Owl Baking

Bean Pie

I’ve decided that bean pie would be one of the things that I would demo at the faux trade show we are doing next week for my sales and marketing class, so I needed to get on the recipe, pronto. I had tried a few recipes in the past, but hadn’t settled on anything I especially liked yet. So, I played around with the recipe again last week, but it still wasn’t right. Also, I wanted to develop a savory bean pie recipe, so I made one up on the fly and tried that out on unsuspecting friends. The results were mediocre, at best.  I consulted my baking chef. We brainstormed. It was decided I would bring a bean pie in next class and have my classmates sample it. I tinkered with the recipe again last night, baked it up, and waited to see what would happen.

They liked it!

This is exciting to me.

I like it when people like bean pie.

So, it looks like I’ve got the  regular recipe nailed down. The sweetness is right, the texture is right, and, even more pleasing to me, the crust is right. I haven’t liked any of the crusts I have tried and I have secretly suspected that the answer is a vegetable oil crust, but no one talks about vegetable oil crusts so I just kept pushing the idea aside and continued working with butter and shortening combinations. But, last week I went back to the vegetable oil crust idea, tinkered with it, screwed up a good handful of batches, and then hit on one that I think I like. It even has some whole wheat flour in it, which doubles my pleasure.

All in all, a good night. Now, back to the drawing board for the savory bean pie.

Burning the Midnight Oil

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in Cooking School, Happy Owl Baking and tagged with , ,

Night classes are hard enough, but night classes that are 5 1/2-hour cooking labs take it up a notch. And having a 9:00 a.m. class the next morning takes it up another notch. And doing it all over the next day? Whew.  For the past two nights I’ve had about 10 hours of sleep total, so my edges are a little frayed. Even so, I am working, rather feverishly at this point between classes, on writing a Value Proposition for a college-sponsored competition called The Big Idea Elevator Pitch.The idea is to pitch your business concept by defining your product as the answer to a perceived problem, and then discussing its viability in terms of target market, competitive advantage, and potential for profitability. I’m pitching my bakery concept. The prize is worth $500, due tomorrow, so I guess I can handle another night of little sleep. Just don’t let me handle sharp knives in lab tonight.

Welcome

Posted by Bean Pie and Baking in Bean Pie, Cooking School, Good Eats, Stories About My Life

Welcome to Bean Pie And Baking.

This is a story about bean pie, and being twelve, and growing up on the fringes of Berkeley in the mid- 1980’s.

I was twelve when I came to California. My mom, Sandy, had moved out there a few years before with my brother, Frank. She had met a younger man, married, and bought a house in Emeryville, CA. The summer after 5th grade I joined my largely unfamiliar family. I looked out the window as the plane flew into Oakland and thought I had never seen such ugly, brown hills. Nothing but brown, bare hills to the right as far as I could see from my window seat. And to the left? Cold, dark water filled with metal cranes and stack after stack of enormous ocean shipping containers, all of it covered in a thin, hazy, dirty looking fog: the Port of Oakland.  Anyone who knows summer in California’s Bay Area knows it runs counter to everything you think you know about summer: it’s not green, it’s not hot and it was certainly not like anything I had ever seen in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Mark Twain once said “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.”

There were still free-boxes in Berkeley then — beat up cardboard boxes dropped off on sidewalk corners filled with used clothes and random discarded household items. There was a huge free-box at the Ashby BART station and it still soldiered on long after the other free-boxes died out. That was the spirit of Berkeley then — passionate, freewheeling, community-driven, and disarmingly odd. Berkeley-ites were a strident people of visceral politics and liberal social policies. Some had money; many had not but they all seemed to rub along together under the shared conviction of quality food: cheese, bread, coffee, lemons.  People who couldn’t afford cable t.v. made space in their wallets for freshly ground peanut butter and hot cups of Peet’s coffee. Sandy was one of those people; we ate bologna sandwiches on home baked bread, but she ground her Peet’s coffee beans fresh everyday.

But we didn’t live in Berkeley. We lived in Emeryville, a place a ripple or two outside of the concentric circles of local demographics. Emeryville was full of warehouses,  some deserted, some still  limping along. The railroad tracks ran through Emeryville. In fact, most things ran through Emeryville, but only to get to other places. Despite its proximity to the Bay Bridge — literally five minutes from the toll plaza — Emeryville was an odd, scraggly, semi-depressed place. Perfect for people like Sandy.