September 2006 Archives

Along with my new effort to blog more, I am rededicating myself to pie making. It is the autumn, after all, and we all need to start putting on our winter fat by eating more and metabolizing less. Pie is one of the most ideal breakfast foods I can think of, with enough fruit to be nutritious and enough fat to keep you going until lunch. I have a couple morning customers who are privy to this, but I'd like to see more.

Some of you may already know that about 2 years ago, I was fully intending to open up a 24 hour pie shop. I even looked into acquiring the name "Quality Pie," after the venerable Portland institution (it was available, but I wasn't so sure about the scrupulousness of resurrecting a business which actually closed the week before I moved here.) Such dreams. I dove into the wholesale market, and sold my pies to my other favorite coffee shops around town. The idea was, build up a repertoire and a reputation before building the bakery, that way when I opened, I would have my recipes down, and my business model firmly rooted. I never could decide on a name. There are so many stupid riffs on pie that it became difficult to settle on something for very long. In my head and in my computer files, it was called "Pie Bitch." Alas, before I could find that elusive name, the dream had somehow vanished. I discovered that great pie with the finest ingredients is labor intensive and expensive, keeping the profit margins low and the burnout (and carpal-tunnel) factors high. And when it came down to it, I just didn't want to dedicate the next giant chunk of my life to pie. Does that make me a pie bitch?

So, I stopped selling my pies wholesale and now only make them for Half & Half. I make them in a commercial kitchen, where I also bake our cookies and granola. Since I stopped baking wholesale, I have been experimenting more with custard pies, including coconut custard and buttermilk. Buttermilk pie, I have learned, is a Texas "thing," and it's the most tangy and delicate flavors you will ever know. I recommend everyone, who is not vegan, try a slice. That being said, I am not featuring it at the moment. What a pie bitch. You have your choice of Maironberry, Apple Pear, or Chocolate Cream, if you go down there right now. No telling what there will be tomorrow. Oh, and the picture is old, so slices are actually $3. And we are often out of ice cream. Pie Bitch!

I have put this off for some time. I went back and forth, back and forth, wondering if I should blog about this or not. It made me feel defeated when I first saw it, then angry, then I laughed about it, now I just feel like whatever. So I am finally writing about it for two reasons. The first being Justin's intellectual property and the second being the number of customers we have had come in during the last few weeks asking us about it.

The situation: Several months ago, we had Justin do a new ad for us. We enjoyed it so much, that we decided to print it on a beer cozy. I gave them out to a few Stumptown employees (delivery drivers, repair people, etc.). A few months later, Stumptown releases their new coffee offerings pamplet. The first image is Half and Half's, the second is Stumptown's.

So what's the deal? A coincedence? Coffee and trucks with campers always go well together? Or a large company with deep pockets ripping off a small Mom and Pop stand?

We don't know...

There is a strange science to the regular customer. Most 'regulars' come to be from work or home's proximity to the cafe/bar/grocery that they frequent. But for others, it's precisely the departure from an ordinary routine that makes a different kind of regular, the 'visiting regular.' We have a lot of these, and it's a collection that defies any demographic formula (other than "not Republican".) Among my favorite visiting regulars is at the moment is Steve, the ranch hand and marine technician, cowboy-mountain man-horse whisperer.

Steve found us about a year ago. He first started coming in on his trips downtown to meet with his lawyer, over a worker's comp lawsuit. I think. This is what I gathered. I never learned the whole story or the outcome, and if I did, I've since forgotten. We started to call him "the cowboy," for obvious reasons--with his 6 foot plus frame, levis, boots and deep slow drawl, he is just the kind of over 40's handsome, rugged dude you'd expect to see in a Marlboro ad. He drinks 12 oz vanilla lattes and tells us of his adventures foraging for (edible) mushrooms, teaching his horses to pick blackberries off bushes, or fighting with the city over unpaid parking tickets. When he learned that my grandfather was an amateur mycologist, he would come in at least twice a week with samples of white truffles (or false white truffles) and stories of huge crops of chanterelles. I would try to keep up with him and flag mental notes about where the good mushrooms are, where it's now illegal to forage, and how to spot real white truffles, in case I ever make good on my life's goal to carry on my grandfather's legacy, but at a certain point, your attention level has reached maximum saturation and the brain begins to act as a sieve. Because you soon realize with Steve that there's an endless supply of information, but a finite amount of attention on your part.

One day Steve came in to tell us that he got a new job working on a horse ranch out in North Plains. He tends to the land and the horses, getting them ready for the riding ring on weekends and defending them against predatory cougars in the nearby hills. Like his blind luck finding mushrooms, I suspect that Steve has that kind of 'horse whisperer' vibe with animals. He is, in my romantic vision, the stoic ranch hand living a monastic existence in North Plains who becomes Loquacious Cowboy Steve when he steps through our door. It was only today that I learned he has a 'real' job, as a marine technician. I think this is like a mechanic for boats, and he did go into some detail about what he does. So much detail that again, I failed to keep up and instead thought of ways of composing Steve's profile for the blog.

I actually started this post last night and at a point where I was really struggling with what to say, I remembered the airplane bottle of Pendleton whiskey he gave to me before our vacation in August. Uncharacteristically, I was saving it for a special or desperate moment and now it had found me. Only, I couldn't find the bottle. Jeff appeared honest when he said he never touched it, and either he is a better liar to my sleuth, or I had in fact hidden the bottle from him, only to lose it permanently. This morning I told Steve how I lost the bottle hiding it, but he suggested that perhaps I had drank it in a vicodin haze, thus forgetting about it altogether. Really, it's the only logical explanation, but I am going to keep on looking anyway.

Is it a requirement for everyone who blogs to write a blog about being too busy to blog/paralized with nothing to say? Something blog-worthy comes to me at least once a day, but when it comes down to composing, I am always able to talk myself out of it. "Naw, no one wants to hear about the possibly fake blind guy who fouled the bathroom"...what about Steve, the ranch-hand who drives up from the horse farm 3 times a week? Or how the camper van logo on the front of Stumptown's new coffee description catalog is uncannily similar to the one Scrappers designed for our beer cozies and print ads? So many stories to tell, so little discipline to blog...there is, after all, a business to run. But that's why we started this blog in the first place, to create a diversion from work, to have a creative outlet with which to satisfy our need to feel relevant, to make people laugh, cry, and spend more money!

I am hoping to turn a corner this week and get back on the blogging train. God knows I have used up my 'blogging about not blogging' card for the time being, and that can only mean an expressive breakthrough or total failure. Stay tuned!

Another refresher on this weeks happenings.

New sandwiches this week: Smoked turkey breast with bartlett pears, Wisconsin cheddar and rosemary-shallot mayo. A delicious grilled cheese with figs, tallegio and grilled fennel. And a grilled mortadella, fontina and tomato-onion jam. A back to school bonanza.

We have a group show this month by Emily Barry, Brian Slaughter, Anna Weber and Jeffrey Krikscium. Extra thanks to Jeff for getting this one together.

Other news: Amanda is on vacation this week and please check out the I love Portland show at Reading Frenzy .

I've lost count, but I believe we've gone through about as many cash registers as years we've been in business:6. These are cheap, $99-129 cash registers, no POS systems for us. We barely use departments. But there is an undeniable necessity for a machine that adds numbers, holds decimals and subtotals amounts in conjunction with a spring-loaded drawer designed to hold currency in an accessible layout. It's hard to find a cheap cash register, but there are a couple still out there on the market, and believe me, they are pieces of crap. Which is why we go through so many. But when I think about spending more than $300 on a machine that is as likely to meet a fate similar to most of the registers we've buried (beverage spillage), I just can't do it. In fact, I would probably be more likely to spill something on it precisely because of its expense.

Instead of throwing away our last two defunct registers, I stowed them in the garage at home. The first one died when a customer who had never been in before (and surely hasn't been back since) knocked her 16oz mocha over, pretty much filling the machine with espresso, chocolate and milk. The next one, a different model, slowly crapped out, so that whoever was using the register at the moment thought they were going crazy. I was saving this one for Dave H., who mentioned that he would really like to destroy it personally.

I never know the proper way to dispose of electronics so I stow them in my garage until someone takes them off my hands. Earlier this summer, in a brief moment of inspiration, I began the task of cleaning out the garage. Caleb, the 4 year old kid who briefly lived across the street, came over to 'help.' Whilst trying to first open every mysterious box and review the contents and second create a structure to the growing chaos that is facing a project that needs its own production coordinator, Caleb entertained and annoyed me with stories of his dad driving too fast, his next birthday party at Chuckee Cheese, and how Jesus made him. I found the cash registers and put them in the "yard sale" pile, because someone might want some broken registers, right? Caleb wanted to see if they worked, and I told him no, and he asked why, and I said, here I'll show you. So I plugged one in, and it turned on. I typed in some numbers, and hit some departments, and hit cash. It did not go crazy on me. I plugged in the other one and it did the same thing--a year and a half in a garage had some magical restorative effect on these machines. Then Caleb showed me how to run the tape through the machine so that it can print a receipt, something I had never learned myself. Then he asked if he could have one so I sent him home.

Last month our current cash register got a little 'funny' when it came into contact with an iced sweet tea, but after one night of rest it seemed to work fine. That is until yesterday, when it suddenly did not appreciate you using the number "0", so we took to ringing in items for $1.49, etc... Apparently, things have deteriorated since yesterday because I got the call this morning to bring in the backups. I am crossing my fingers that at least one is up to the task, long enough for me to shop around for another crappy register.

Just a quick note on the day to day.

New sandwiches this week: chicken salad with celery, toasted hazelnuts and currants. Mortadella, frissee tossed with oil and lemon, cherry peppers and provolone piccante. And mushroom duxelle with grilled leeks, arugula and california dried jack. We think the turophiles will be tickled.

We give a much belated thanks to Sarah and Daniel for putting on a great August show. Two of the best photographers Portland has to offer.

Our old employee Brian has been a busy beaver as of late. We miss him dearly and look forward to his return.

And I would like to finish by saying so long to the warehouse. I am much depressed by this. To Dave, Adam, Jay, Daniel, Corey, Josh and then Jonnie, Dan and Meg - I will say I feel as though the Half and Half and Half will never be the same.

Toodeloo!