Paella Party

As part of wedding season (have I mentioned I have 5 this summer?), I've also had a lot of showers and bachelorettes to go to. Last weekend my friends John and Jess opened up their new Kenwood home for a a co-ed shower celebrating our pals Tracy and Carl's (shown here - aren't they cute?) upcoming nuptuals. It was great. Our hosts hired chef Gerard of Paella y Tapas (shown below) who's paella-making is pretty well-known in wine country (and beyond).

It was delightful. He cooked the entire thing in front of us on an authentic paella pan and filled it with all sorts of delightful goodies: chicken, peppers, prawns, octupus, garlic, mussles, clams, rice and lots of saffron. Mmmmmm! Apparently he's has one coming up at winery featuring a 9 foot paella pan that will feed 1000 people. Now that would be fun to watch!

I suspect guys aren't too thrilled about this new trend in pre-wedding festivities, but I certainly prefer having them around. Now they're finding out how much cash we girls typically shell out when our friends get married - not only do we have 3 gifts (shower gift, bachelorette party lingerie, and the wedding gift), plus at least one new dress and the cost of the bachelorette party, as opposed to their one gift and bachelor party. I'm sure the guys probably spend much more than we do on booze, gambling and stripers on their Vegas trips, but that's their choice whether they want to spend hundreds of dollars on lap dances, not part of wedding etiquette.

I think with the addition of men the not only does the food get stepped up a level, but now the wine seems to be flowing much more liberally. Not that I don't love my girl time, but for some reason, I've found showers tend to be rather both in terms of food and conversation. I can't count the number of light bruches featuring salads and quiche or sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and possibly a glass of champagne or cheap Chardonnay. Now that the men are invited, I'm seeing killer paella parties with great food and lots of wine (typically the good stuff). Moreover, these coed showers are no longer focused on watching the bride open gifts for an hour while the guests are required to ooh and ahh over how great each present is (zzzz!!!).

Gentlemen, you are most welcome.

Getting Beer Smarter

Last night I finagled an invite to help some friends bottle some of their home brews. I’m bummed I missed the initial brewing process that took place about 3 weeks ago, but the bottling certainly was fun. After a few false starts getting the siphon to work, we had a nice little production line going (this picture is Eric and Mark filling the bottles – Jen thinks it looks a bit like a meth lab, but I assure you it’s beer).

I had “Lavern’s” job of inspecting the bottles to make sure they were capped properly and packing them in their case – an important role for sure (or at least one in which I couldn’t screw anything up). From what I understand, home brewing is a bit tricky and takes some patience. The key apparently is to keep everything super clean, which results in getting a bit wet during the process. But I think it’s well worth it. We tried a few sips of the brew, and it was scrumptious, and will certainly even be better after a few weeks in the bottle so the carbonation can occur. I can’t wait to try the final product.

If you’re interested in learning more about home brewing, our friends at Beer Beer & More Beer and help you get up and running in a snap.

With BeerSmarts coming out in the next month, I’m getting inundated with opportunities to taste yummy beer and learn more about beer and beer making, which has been pretty eye opening. I’ll admit, for quite some time, I’ve had a slight aversion to beer. I suppose it all started during my grad school years in St. Louis where the beverage selection at bars and restaurants was less than enticing. To quote a typical waitress response to my query on what type of beer they had: “Oh, we have all types: Bud, Bud Light, Michelob, Michelob Light, Busch, Busch Light. All types.” And a potable glass of wine certainly was not an option. Which makes sense, Anheuser-Busch rules that town. After moving back home to SF, I steered clear of beer altogether since I had so many great options in the wine area.

But I now admit this attitude was rather short-sited of me. There are some absolutely wonderful microbrews out there doing really cool stuff (21st Amendment’s Watermelon Wheat beer is my current summer fav), and I’m finding quite often beer is as good if not better complement for certain foods than wine (consider beer with your cheese selection next time – yum!). I’m even told from a trusted authority that the image of beer having many more calories than wine per serving is a myth (I’m still going to do some more research on this one and will let you know).

In the meantime, bottoms up.

Wedding Cupcakes Take the Cake

So my oldest and dearest friend / sister Wendy got married this past weekend. The wedding was a blast, held in the back yard of her next door neighbor from childhood. What made this wedding particularly special is that Wendy catered the whole thing herself!!!! Now how's that for a superb wedding caterer. The food was delish and the setting idyllic.

As bridesmaid / best friend / sister, I felt it my duty to pull out something special for this one, so I undertook creating a wedding cupcake cake (or at least I assembled a committee to do it all while I supervised). What a fun and tasty treat for everyone involved (plus a lot cheaper than those thousand-dollar wedding cakes that taste like cardboard).

The first step in the cupcake challenge was baking the cupcakes. Since I was in NY the week before, I had to rally the troops to assist - and rally they did. What was great about the "Cupcake Committee" is we could make a variety of different flavors so everyone would find something they liked. Jenny made 50 red velvet cupcakes (yum!), Suzanne (or more specifically her mom) pumped out 50 chocolate one, and Carrie, the real trooper made 75 carrot (always a hit) and 50 lemon cupcakes. And I pulled up the rear with 30 Magnolia Bakery white cupcakes (mmmmm).

Next step was icing them all, which was the best part. Carrie kindly opened her home to the frosting party / day care for about 8 kids between the age of 1 and 9, that was managed by Suzanne, Becka, Carrie and myself (we think we scored as our other option would have been setting up tables and chairs at the wedding site). The kids were very helpful in helping ensure that all the icing was up to par - thanks kids. Once we iced them all, we popped them back in the fridge and freezer and then put them out at the wedding the next day.

Finally we displayed them on a tier that Wendy got. Since we were a bit busy getting all dolled up for the wedding, we had the staff do this. As you can see from the photo, we decided to take the minimalist view on the tier and then put out tray of cupcakes on the buffet. I think it ended up looking quite beautiful.

My words of advice on making a wedding cupcake cake:
1) make sure all the cupcakes rise to the same level - test out 1 or 2 (versus a whole batch) to determine the right level (we went just to the top of the paper)
2) make sure the recipe you use does well with icing (the one that faired worse for icing was the boxed kind)
3) you can bake them a week in advance (or more) and freeze them
4) make sure you have plenty of tupperware or other trays to transport them
5) make about 1 1/2 cupcakes per guest to deal with "oops" and people who eat 2 - 3 cupcakes
6) icing - we used the butter recipe off the back of the sugar box - worked out great

Swiss Alps ice and wine

I just got back from a trip to Zermatt in Switzerland. This little town, with no motorized cars--just electric vehicles--has spectacular views of the triangular Matterhorn, a moutain that seems to rise by itself out of the valley and lower mountains. I was on a family trip with lots of nieces and nephews, hiking everyday, playing Ghost, and getting to see glaciers, valleys, and not one traffic light.

One of the best aspects of hiking in Zermatt is that an all-day hike can be planned with a stop at a tiny mountain village of one to ten little wooden houses, one with a fabulous restaurant. You can get Rosti--delicious fried potatoes--great salads (gemischt salat), bratwurst, carpaccio, excellent coffee, delicious and refined pastries, and unbelievably good coffe ice cream. Yum.

Order a Cafe Glace (either with or without rahm--whipped cream), and you'll get a huge sundae glass, filled perhaps with Movenpick coffee ice cream , which has tiny shavings of chocolate in it, or with locally made ice cream. Either way it will have a drizzle of coffee on top, or coffee syrup. The taste is unbelievable, whether you've been hiking all day, or just hanging out...rich & creamy, with intense coffee flavor.

I did some research on Movenpick's ice cream, and it turns out it's owned by a New Zeland company, which makes sense because New Zealand ice cream is some of the best I've had--especially the Hokey-Pokey, a vanilla ice cream with sweet cruncy toffee bits. Apprently New Zelanders are the largest per capita ice cream eaters, and hokey pokey is the Kiwis' 2nd most popular flavor.

But back to Switzerland... the local white wines we had were generally whites from the Chasslas grape: light and acidic enough to pair well with some of the more oily foods such as rosti, fish in butter sauces, smoked salmon, etc. The wines tend not to be too expensive and it feels right to be drinking wines made nearby. Robin Garr's Wine Lover's page has some more information about this grape.

Big SmartsCo News!

So we're super giddy right now as we found out this week we won Make Mine a $Million Award from American Express OPEN, Count Me In and the Women's Leadership Exchange. This is a pilot program through Count Me In (women small businesses - I highly recommend checking them out for micro loans) which includes a $45,000 loan from American Express OPEN and a "Dream Team" of business coaches from the Women's Leadership Exchange to create specific business plans to reach $1 million in annual revenue.

The coaches and mentors include: Nely Galan, CEO of Galan Entertainment and producer of The Swan series on Fox and called the "Tropical Tycoon" by the New York Times Magazine and named "one of the most powerful young executives in Hollywood" by Entertainment Weekly; Dresdene Flynn-White of Action International; and Vivian Shimoyama of Breakthru Unlimited, and many other successful women entrepreneurs. It's really quite cool and I can't wait to get started on the whole thing.

But we almost missed it all, as last week during our move to an awesome new office in SF's SOMA district, we had a series of Murphy's Law incidents from a technology perspective. First, the phone company canceled the DSL order for some strange reason, then our phone guy went on a bender and disappeared mid-way through the project, then apparently our email server when down, and finally our phones got forwarded to a disconnected line. So we didn't get the message that we were finalists for the award. After making one last call on Monday afternoon that actually went through, we learned that we did make it and were supposed to be in Long Beach at that very moment and the presentation was the Tuesday morning!

So I hopped on the next flight to Long Beach (so glad Jet Blue now has that route), and got quick run down of what was involved: telling the entire SmartsCo story in 4 minutes. I can't even describe what I ate for breakfast in 4 minutes, much less talk about the last 3 years of my life, but somehow I was able to convinced a packed room and panel of judges that we deserved the award. Well, actually all the six finalists were also able to do so as the panel could not pick just three winners from the strong group of finalists and in an unprecedented effort were able to raise additional capital from Microsoft and Merrill Lynch and sign up three new coaches at the conference. I'm really thrilled to share the award with 5 other great women who are venturing out with a wide variety of cool and creative businesses: Cha Cha's Doggie Day Care; Bonnie Plotkin Bail Bonds; Little Twig, personal care products for children; a music learning system company; and Marian Farms, a biodynamic farm.

I now take back every four-letter word I've uttered about Microsoft in the past. They tell us that just 3% of women-owned U.S. businesses generate more than a million dollars in annual revenue, compared to 7% of men-owned businesses in the same category. This program is designed to grow winning businesses into sustainable million-dollar enterprises. I know we're going to get there (and far beyond that) in no time.

My faith in corporate America giving back to the community is renewed. Stay tuned for entries on this blog about our experience in the program - who knows maybe we'll be on Nely's next reality show.

Yippy!!!