Did you know cakes could melt?

[philena]

I didn't. But now I do. The walk-in refrigerator died on Monday, the day no one is around, so when I opened it on Tuesday as I opened the bakery I was hit in the face with a blast of warm air, which smelled strongly of freon and of old cake. As I am no dullard, I figured out that something was wrong. When the delivery driver came with the shipment of fresh cakes, I informed her of the problem, and she kindly threw out all the cakes that we had stored in there while I put the fresh cakes in the only refrigerated case we had. Since she is a baker when she's not driving cakes to Oakland in the mornings, I think she got a sort of gleeful pleasure out of seeing the sad end of what she has to work so hard to produce. With every new cake that she tossed in the trash she would behold the floppy, squishy result and exclaim, "Gro-ho-hoss!". I would obediently look and flap my arms and reply, "Ew ew! Make it go away!"

By the time we had to open we had a very minimal display case for the rest of the day, augmented slightly by a fresh shipment from Alamo to replace a few of the cakes we lost. But the small number of display cakes was a blessing, because a large number of things need to be refrigerated, and the cold display case is very small. The repair man, who came around lunch time, said that he couldn't fix the big refrigerator; the coolant that we use is now illegal, so he can't replace it, and we'll need an entirely new system. This will probably take a while to fix, and I am extremely concerned. Mid-week is very slow, so we've had room for everything that needs refrigeration in our extremely small display cases, but come Friday and Saturday, when all the special orders will need to be stored until people come to pick them up, we will simply not have room. Maybe I'll discover on Saturday that the refrigerator has been repaired in my absence, and everything will be nice, but I have severe doubts. Fortunately, an experienced manager from our main store will be opening the store, so I won't have to find room for everything.

Speaking of food, Daniel and I made lentil soup today! We had the most fabulous meal last night at an Ethiopian restaurant near us: eggplant tibbs, which is eggplant cooked with peppers and onions and spiced with tumeric and other yummy things, and then a collard greens dish, cooked with various spices I couldn't begin to identify, along with something involving cabbage and potatoes and something involving chickpeas. However, the most surprising success was the lentil soup we had first, which was truly magnificent: flavorful, spicy, and wonderful. Our soup tonight wasn't really that good, but it was close!

I started by soaking lentils all day. When I came home from work I found they had soaked up all the water I had put in this morning, so I had to refill the pot. Then I called my mother, who told me what to do next, which Daniel and I did: we sauteed some onions and garlic and potatoes, added lentils and vegetable stock and cauliflower (the vegetable stock we had frozen weeks ago after making it from some vegetable scraps we started saving on a whim that came from some New York Times Magazine article on food minimalism), and simmered everything for about twenty minutes. Then we added some cumin, oregano, chopped tomatoes, and a splash of red wine. Mommy would have had us add parsley, but I scorned such a suggestion. I don't even keep parsley in the house, and if I did I wouldn't use it! And the soup was excellent! I will have it for lunch tomorrow and it will probably make dinner tomorrow as well. Yummy. I love successful new dishes, because while we can cook fairly well, we have an extremely limited repertoire, and it's important to have lentil soup on hand in the winter.

Comments

[hythlae.livejournal.com]

is Ethopian an acquired or sophisticated taste? I've only had it once, and the bread was too sticky and kinda gross, and the stew was a bit mealy. Is that Ethopian, or did I just get a bad place?

[philena.livejournal.com]

The bread is not a usual kind of texture, so that bit might be an acquired taste. As for the stewy bits, I've never thought it was mealy. Just yummy. Maybe you went to a bad place. Although if you went to the place in Belmont, where Daniel and I had one of our first dates, and still didn't like it, then you might just not be an Ethiopian type person.