chromedome

Basically what you're asking for is Restaurant Management 101. There are plenty of books and sites to provide that, and resources from the National Restaurant Association and similar bodies. Unfortunately you've already been plunked into the soup, so you don't have the luxury of immersing yourself in learning materials for a month or two before you get started. I still highly recommend that you spend as much time as you can with the best training materials you can find (ask a local culinary school what texts they use to teach restaurant management, for example) but you'll probably have to fit it in during non-working hours, aka "when I'd otherwise be sleeping." Portioning and monitoring those ingredients is a bit of a challenge. The ideal way to do it is with a scale - so many grams of lettuce, then so many of cucumber, of onion, and so on - but that's not usually going to cut it when you're busy. For lettuce, I'd start with a yield test. Take 10 heads of lettuce, weigh them as they come from the supplier, and then weigh the prepped lettuce after the outer leaves are discarded, cores removed etc. You know how many heads of lettuce you purchase per case, so if you know how many grams (or ounces) your prepared salad is *supposed* to have, you can calculate how many salads you can make from a given case. Anything less is spoilage, over-portioning or unrecorded sales (it's possible you have a herbivorous line cook filching lettuce, but relatively unlikely). You can do similar yield tests for any other ingredient. It helps if you specify the size of dice or thinness of slice for each preparation, wherever possible. With cukes, for example, you could specify that they be cut to a standard thickness on a mandoline, rather than being sliced by hand. There will always be some variability with your ingredients, so the target weight of your finished salad will be a range rather than a specific number. That's especially true if your formal recipe (I'm assuming here that your recipes are formalized and standardized, with specific portions for the ingredients...if not, you need to start by doing that). Tare your scale with an empty bowl, then put a full bowl on it and see how much the salad weighs. Record that figure, and do the same for at least another 8 to 10 salads made "to spec" under the watchful eye of yourself or your chef. That gives you your allowable range of weights. During service, intercept a salad periodically and weigh it to make sure it falls within that range. If it doesn't, then someone needs to speak to that particular cook about portion control. It's a PITA, but it has to happen. Another thing you might need to do is scrutinize waste in that department. At one of my jobs, I had each of my prep cooks place their waste in a hotel pan (bus pan, at some stations) as they prepped vegetables, and I had to see the pan before it was discarded. If someone was wasting too much bell pepper, or trimming away half the usable portion from a pineapple, then we would have a talk and I would demonstrate the correct way to do it (*again*...sigh). Lather, rinse, repeat. You do have to count, but probably not every item every day. Those tins of applesauce, for example: You probably use them for just a couple of recipes. If you know how often those recipes are made, and how many tins they call for, you can monitor that one relatively easily. If you prepare those recipes once or twice a week, then you can do a quick weekly count and you're good. Ingredients you use more often must be checked more often. Items like individual sugar packets are problematic, because customers are prone to filling their purses/pockets with 'em, which buggers your inventory. All you can do is limit the quantity that's set out for customers. Having someone to issue the supplies and record what goes in and out is probably not an option, because of labor cost, though it's what larger kitchens used to do before computerization streamlined things. That's a whole masterclass in its own right. If it's still the same menu after 30 years, it'll almost certainly require some updating. Your menu will always contain some higher-margin and some lower-margin dishes. It will also contain some that are very popular, and others which don't sell as well. Make yourself a grid and plot them out on the two axes of profitability and popularity. The ones that are both high-margin and high-popularity are your best-performing dishes. The ones that are low-margin and low-popularity are the low-hanging fruit, when you start dropping menu items to make room for new ones. The in-betweens, the ones that are either popular but not profitable or profitable but not popular, are candidates for tweaking. Specials make a good way to test-drive new dishes. I used to challenge my cooks to come up with new dishes using our existing ingredients and/or prepped items (ie, stocks and sauces). I'd put those on as weekly specials, name-checking the cook on my signboard (it's good to stroke their egos a bit, especially if you're raising their hackles the rest of the week by monitoring their portion control and prepping...). The popular dishes got added to the menu. After a while it gets to be a healthy competition between the cooks, which stimulates their creativity and makes life more fun. That's a solid win, because food and morale improve and you also get to assess the talent you have in your kitchen. That lets you identify the people you want to promote. I can't advise you on specific promotional ideas because I don't know your market and your clientele, but when you're looking to do things on the cheap social media can be your best friend. If the restaurant/bar doesn't already have a Facebook page you should set one up, as well as an Instagram account or whatever the current fave is in South Africa. Have someone reliable post regularly, or do it yourself, and fill it with appetizing photos of the food (especially new dishes you want to promote, or profitable dishes you'd like to push to greater popularity). Solicit "likes" and "shares," and periodically give away a meal or a gift certificate to someone who's responded (some establishments in my neck of the woods do this weekly). You could also use social media as a way to test ideas for events or dishes. Put up a couple of choices, and invite your followers to vote on them and select a winner. It drives engagement, and gives you something other than guesswork to determine whether a dish is likely to succeed. It's not foolproof, but it's at least something. I hope this is at least some help to you. Don't be shy to think of yourself as a "bean counter"...the term is used disparagingly, but if you use beans they do, by God, need to be counted. Margins are tight in the restaurant business, and you can't be giving away any profit if it's avoidable. Passion is all well and good, but unless you have the management skills to back it up it's hard to be successful.

Well...it *is* hunting season... (Whether you drop a buck or some "doe," the pun is equally bad...)

How to resist a band that writes lines like "say I'm the only bee in your bonnet"?

To me it looks like a carpet knife, which would certainly not be out of place in a hardware store. Perhaps it just got mis-placed in the kitchen section by the receivers?

I had the electric pot/fryer, but it wasn't a pressure cooker. I picked it up used at the thrift store and used it at my farmer's market stall for a few years, then passed it along to my daughter. She still uses it.

That still wouldn't work with my son-in-law. His M.O. is to just shrug and fill the cart with stuff he likes (and they can't afford) and then say "I couldn't find the things that were on the list."

Yeah, that's just wrong, wrong, wrong.

It's a staple here at the Home of Chrome.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/20/lab-grown-meat-fish-feed-the-world-frankenmeat-startups?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

I have the de Buyer equivalent, which gets used as much as my three conventional mandolines put together.

When it comes to food, we adhere more closely to American than UK usage. The fresh herb is typically cilantro, as Anna said, and we speak of zucchini and eggplant rather than courgettes and aubergines. Those green things Rotuts abominates are peppers, rather than capsicums, a biscuit is the kind you serve with ham and gravy rather than a cookie, and so on. We even still bake by Fahrenheit temperatures, though the weather forecast comes in Celsius and I have to mentally adjust when I see American weather reports. OTOH I certainly bake in muffin tins and cake tins, so there's that.

The pork is typically brined (ie, "seasoned," and filled with water) at the packing plant, rather than the supermarket. The label from the original packaging probably has to say something about that (I don't know the corresponding laws or nomenclature Stateside) but if it's portioned and store-packed it might not.

To transfer that to the small town where I lived, imagine the neighbours in their pickups, blocking both lanes of the narrow local roadways.

Supermarket pork is often pre-brined, too, which doesn't help.

My worst "spreading cookie" fiasco turned out to result from me omitting the flour. I was a long time living that one down.

FWIW, I keep the dehydrated flakes on hand and buzz them for a second or two in a cheapie blade-type coffee grinder when I want onion powder. Might not be the fix you're looking for, but it works for me.

I don't know how many of you watch "Call the Midwife," a British series set in London's East End during the 1950s (I highly recommend it), but there's a similar scene in one episode. One of the younger nursing sisters makes a salad using olive oil for the vinaigrette, and an older nun comments how odd it feels to be eating the medicine.

Pro tip: A stiff paint brush works very well for that.

Aside from the smartphone, that's me as well. I've enjoyed reading about your Anovas and Joules, your CSOs and BSOs, your Instant Pots and various bits of modernist esoterica, but there's nothing I've felt impelled to rush out and buy.

Mine were just beginning to ripen when the local raccoons stripped my vines completely.

I've never had occasion to try either of these methods myself, but at this point what have you got to lose? http://www.saveur.com/article/Techniques/Removing-the-Bitterness-from-Eggplant

That's good to know. Most of the people I know who have a Ninja love it, but I've also encountered a small-but-significant percentage who complained about their durability. Apparently they have (or once had) a predilection for crapping out 6-12 months after the warranty expired, at least in regular use. Looking at their current Amazon reviews that seems to be receding, though.

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

I'm only a lowly creator of web content, but my editors would rip me a new one if I turned in prose like that. Actually most of them know me, so they'd probably PM me first to ask if I was well.

I dry the whole leaves, and I find they do retain their flavor fairly well. You have to use more than you would if it was fresh, but I find that even one well-grown parsley plant provides plenty. The one I've got this year is so big I can't fit my arms around it, and it grew almost waist high. I've been gathering bunches the size of my head all summer long (and I've got a big head!) and it's still huge.