I catered a wedding for 80+ in Incline Village on Saturday. It went perfectly fine, even the two days of prep leading up to it. I attribute this two factors: 1) Over the last couple of years I've been acquiring catering equipment which is designed for hauling stuff back and forth. Makes life much easier. 2) The kitchen I rent got two new pieces of ( Read more... )

One of jobs I have as a telecommuter for the restaurant in San Francisco is to maintain the email marketing database. At the moment it has over 14k addresses in it. All of our newsletters have an unsubscribe link at the bottom that goes to Cool Boss's email. In theory, he's supposed to collect the addresses and pass them on to me for removal. In ( Read more... )

I had a wild idea to host what I'm calling a Community Dinner at a local venue. 12 people, $25 a head, four courses, I pick the menu, everything is served family style, bring your own wine ( Read more... )

I had the latest wine dinner tonight. Six courses of goodness paired with five wines. Judging by the reaction from the crowd and the fact that people were requesting seconds, I'd say it went well. Which is good, because it started out kinda rocky ( Read more... )

Back in May, I got an email from a lady asking me if I speak to groups. (The subject line was "DO YOU SPEAK?" My first reaction was to say something out loud to the cat to be sure, the resist the temptation to reply with one word: yes ( Read more... )

So I crawled through the end of my catering blitz last week and realized I have a whole other business sitting around gathering dust. So I'm packing up my Pampered Chef kit and heading back to work ( Read more... )

Thankfully the cooking and the vomiting are only tangentially related.

( Cut for your protection )

Yesterday was my second winemakers dinner at Deer Creek Inn. I had confirmed the headcount at an even dozen on Thursday, got all my shopping and a good amount of prep work done on Friday and was feeling pretty good. On Saturday morning, the owner left me a voicemail to tell me that that the head count was now 16 seated, plus myself and auburnselkie - who was ( Read more... )

My next wine dinner is a couple weeks out and the winemaker has asked to look over my menu. The wine guy at last month's dinner declared my pairings to be "perfect", which was quite a boost of confidence. This one is giving me a little trouble because the Mourvede I have with the salad course is so freakin' good, but doesn't really go one direction ( Read more... )

One of these days I'll post actual content, but in the meantime have a wine dinner menu. This is what I submitted for my dinner in February. I'm kind of excited about making this, I think it will be really tasty.

Amuse Bouche
Champagne
Crab-stuffed mushrooms

Salad Course
Celestial ChardonnaySpinach and Pear Salad w/Meyer lemon vinaigrette - I ( Read more... )