Saturday, August 16, 2003

I took a break from wedding planning to do a bit of restaurant development. I've just finished a book called The Baker's Trade by Zachary Schatz. He started a successful bakery/cafe in Mendocino. It's a pretty informative and inspiring book. Some days I get really excited about the patisserie, and some days, I just get really nervous and unsure. I've started to look for suppliers of fruit purees, nut flours, equipment, etc. -- built quite a good list so I just need to start talking to these people. Will also do a bit of recipe testing next week, but I think I have to go back to wedding planning soon. I've been slacking off quite a bit.

Garry and I have been house hunting the past 2 weekends. We love Noe Valley, but it's very expensive. Most of the houses we've looked at don't even have garages! I fell in love with the first house we saw, and then the next, and the next. Right now we have to think about how much we can afford considering the investment we have to make for the patisserie. We visited a mixed-use property in Bernal Heights, right on Cortland Ave., it had a retail space on the ground floor, and 2 residential units above it. I thought it would be perfect for a patisserie, since I can just wake up at 5 am and work downstairs! But I can't really jump at the first location I see -- the area has good potential, but right now, I'm afraid it doesn't have enough foot traffic for the patisserie I want to build. It doesn't help that there's a big tree covering the storefront, but I guess you can plow through some bureaucracy to solve that problem. My brother's in town, so I'm going to show him the property and see what he thinks.

Posted by Karen @ 11:13 AM PST [Link]

Wednesday, August 6, 2003

Garry and I spent the weekend in LA. Got this great package from Hotwire for $200/person -- including the flight, hotel, and rental car! Yeah, we did have to get our asses to the airport at 5am, but hey, it's still a great deal. There was a food expo in the LA Convention Center that we went to, and we also visited some of Garry's relatives. I met his grandpa, he's 86, and he speaks French! He can actually speak French better than Chinese now (he grew up in Vietnam back when it was still French). It took a while for him to recognize Garry, and I think he forgot him as soon as he remembered. I asked him: "Avez vous faim?"(Are you hungry?) He said: "Oui, j'ai faim, j'ai soif, j'ai rien a manger!"(Yes, I'm hungry, I'm thirsty, I have nothing to eat!), just like an angry old frenchman. Garry's uncle explained that he always feels hungry and thirsty so he thinks everyone is starving him.

This week Garry and I are dogsitting Erwin and Corey's welsh corgis, Jersey and Riley. It hasn't been as easy as we thought. It's like taking care of newborns! They bark and wimper, and you're left asking yourself: "Are they hungry? Do they want to poop? Do they just want attention?" Garry ended up having to walk them at 2am the first night! The hardest part is when you have to pick up their poop using plastic bags... I did it once, but Garry's taken the responsibility since then, whew!

Posted by Karen @ 03:43 PM PST [Link]