Persona Non Grata...
Well, here we are in the third week of January and I must issue a formal apology to my least favorite month: January, you haven’t really been as bad as expected and I’m sorry for my harsh opinions about you. Maybe it is time for me to find a new least favorite month? Personally, I find March to be rather lackluster…but professionally, it is one of our biggest sales months of the year, so how I can I pick March when March is always kind to me?
At any rate, here is a catch-up of marginally interesting items:
For YEARS, we wanted to own our own metal folding chairs for pie tastings to avoid the hassle of renting them for one evening a month. We purchased 30 chairs in January 2020 and were VERY excited about it. We used them for January Pie Tasting and February Pie Tasting and then rolled ourselves right into a global pandemic. So now we are selling them because I couldn’t begin to guess when we will ever have the clearance to assemble 30 pie fans in one space again to eat pie communally. They are standard black metal folding chairs. Used twice. Ahem. If interested, email us and we can chat about a good deal.
We need to move them out because we continue to run into a significant space issue at PJP Nifong. Our foray into purchasing sugar by the pallet turned out to be such a win - both in terms of pricing and in convenience - that we just reordered a pallet of sugar and decided to also order a pallet of flour.
Sidebar - sometimes I think about how much we’ve progressed from our earliest days of ordering 200 pounds of flour for the week to now, ordering 2,500 pounds of flour at a time and I’m a little self-satisfied.
Our other big project is installing a stackable washer/dryer in the back and becoming the crew of people who wash our own aprons and towels. We currently spend over $600 a month on linen service and routinely struggle with having enough clean supply for the entire week. I absolutely REFUSE to spend more money on more laundering, so we are going to investigate the protocols for our morning and afternoon crews to share laundry responsibilities. I will probably be persona non grata at PJP soon, don’t you think?
And finally, our dishwasher ghosted us right after the holidays (the person, not the machine, before Ecolab charges me a million dollars for a runaway dish machine). Perhaps we just broke his spirit with our massive December baking schedule and he decided he could never look at our faces again? After a fair amount of interviews wherein people who have worked at various restaurants in town told us more sketchy information about dirty commercial kitchens than we could have ever guessed, we are happy to have a new dishwasher join us tomorrow. I hope he is ready for Jeanne’s five step SOS pad tray cleaning tutorial. And to likely fold his own aprons in the future.