Nightingale : It's Fall, the Greatest Season!
And I don't even have my Halloween lawn decorations inflated yet.
Dear readers,
A very fine afternoon to you all. I thought I would make you aware of some pertinent information regarding the bakery.
We take our annual fall recess next week. We’ll be closed the entire week that begins Sept. 29, and we’ll plan to reopen on Wednesday, Oct. 9 with the usual hours (Wednesday through Saturday, 8am - 2pm).
Since we’ll be closed you’ll have time to attend to your bucket list. There are some new hoagies we’ve released in the past couple weeks and they’re pretty nice. The Fancy Cowboy features bresaola (think beef prosciutto), a nice bleu cheese spread with thyme and lemon, a dash of walnuts, handful of greens, and freshly grated horseradish. And the El Capitan is a toasted vegetarian hoagie with eggplant caponata (think ratatouille but italian and very delicious), marinated zucchini, provolone, red onion, vinaigrette. Sometimes I swear it has meatballs in it, but it doesn’t! You can, however, add turkey and capicola for a slight upcharge if you want to swear it has meat and be right.
Actual Hoagie May Differ From Photograph Some questions about Thanksgiving orders have begun. I’ll plan to release that menu and order form the first or second week of November.
Our old friend Joel Kromer continues his pizza pop-up at our shop on Sunday and Monday evenings. Check out pizzariaco.com for info.
Allow me a brief moment to elaborate on these apparently hedonistic tendencies toward vacation we seem to have at the bakery: a week off every quarter, and three after Christmas!—and we’re only open Wednesday through Saturday?!? Sometimes we are asked what we do with all our time off. Do we have other jobs? Do we volunteer at local nonprofits? Do we sit around and watch Brady Bunch marathons or see how many times we can drive up Pikes Peak in a day? Do we shim up the floors in our old creaking houses so they’re level for the first time in sixty years?
I assure you, we do not watch Brady Bunch marathons! The truth is that there is a great deal of preparation necessary for a bakery such as ours to go about its usual business. Mondays we have a crew of five here for about eight hours laminating all the croissant dough for the week, grocery shopping, ordering from suppliers, handling administrative tasks such as payroll and various taxes, fixing the refrigerator that wants to keep freezing into a giant block of ice, and navigating the mind-numbing bureaucratic maze of agencies which demand from us various signatures, account registrations, form-filings, and telephone waitings-on-hold accompanied by the zombie-pop tunes of the electronic regime. And that’s just Monday!
Tuesday is our big prep day, when we assemble the quiche of the week, make the salmon spread for the sandwiches, shape hundreds of scones, dozens of hand pies, prepare hundreds of loaves for Wednesday’s bake, mill hundreds of pounds of grain for the next mix, and slice and dice and roast and chop and mix in preparation for hoagies. It takes six of us from 7am till at least 3pm, and then Wednesday we begin much of it over again to take us through the week of service. The following statistic may shock you, but I tell you the truth: it takes 380 hours of labor to be open for one week! Not to mention many of those hours are quite early.
Thus, long ago I instituted these regular breaks as a way of maintaining a measure of sanity amidst a demanding work week. We must work to live, yes, but we needn’t live to work.
I guess a week off of bread here and there keeps it special too. What would it be it it were just one big all-you-can-eat bread buffet all the time, with free delivery to boot?
The world may never know.
My best to you all. Thanks for everything.
yours truly,
david the baker
