And Equipment

Over the past couple years we have been doing a lot of research. In order to get our loan, we had to compile a list of all equipment we would need to purchase for the bakery. And now, since we have our loan (hooray!), we are going to be pulling the trigger soon on buying some heavy-duty appliances.

Churchich Restaurant Equipment has been highly recommended to us by several restaurant owners in the area and so we started there. We visited a few weeks ago and discussed our needs with Debi Churchich. We gave her our list of needed equipment and a few days later she emailed a very thorough price quote, including all specifications of the equipment. After Trilety and I looked through the list we received from Debi, we decided on some major items such as a 3 basin sink with 2 drainboards, a 20 quart mixer, a 6 quart mixer, a stacked gas convection oven, and a big beautiful maple work table.

We also opted to put this super awesome hand sink in the kitchen. It is controlled with knee pedals instead of with handles. Like sensor activated hands free faucets, pedal sinks help to conserve water. They are also more sanitary.

More to come later. Getting pumped!

Meg

A Sneak Peek. . . .

In the last post, Megan gave a sneak peek of the barn wood that will be installed in the bakery. Since then, we've continued to make design choices. Take a look through the knot in the wood to see some of our decisions. . . . 

The style of your clothes says a lot about you. Style is a way to use your body as a palette for blending your creative tastes. The design process of the bakery is a lot like choosing a great outfit. . . . but an outfit that you'll wear for years, not hours. So for months, a group of us (me, Megan, Barbi, and the BVH team of Tom Miller, Nate Adams, and Jeff Davis) have been standing in front of the metaphorical closet trying to choose an outfit. The decisions have finally been finalized, and we're giving you a sneak peek at our wardrobe!

The durable kitchen floors will be a shade called Caribbean:

The floors in the public space will be bamboo, here's a link to the color we chose (it's called wheat, which is appropriate for a bakery!)

The tile in the kitchen will be 4x8-inch ice white glossy porcelain tile, and the bathroom tile will be 2x2-inch hexagonal tile in this lovely shade of ocean blue:

Color above, and Shape Below

We chose pendant style lights with a globe fixture that is similar, but not exact, to the photo below (we are super excited for these!)

Each day, we are coming closer and closer to starting the physical remodel of the bakery. We are a few weeks out from receiving final bids and scheduling the construction start date. . . . which means you are all much closer to the day you'll be able to stop in and enjoy our baked goods!

What's your style?

~ Trilety

Barn Wood Day

We're on our way to a brick and mortar kitchen. Our hope is that the renovation work will start within the next few months. In the meantime we are wrapping up the design work with our architects; making the final decisions about textures, textiles, finishes and fixtures. Fun! One element we've wanted to incorporate from the start of the design process is repurposed barn wood.

A fantastic designer friend of mine, Jil Bunnimit, showed me an image of a staggered wood treatment and thought it would be interesting to consider that for our bakery in some way. At the same time, Trilety's mom and our honorary third bird, Barbi, has two barns that are ready to be felled. And bingo! These birds will have a barn wood wall treatment in their bakery. Below is the design inspiration photo. The wood in our wall treatment will remain raw and rustic rather than painted.

wood treatment inspiration

A few months ago, in November, we (Trilety, Barbi and me) got out our crowbars and hammers and ripped up the side of Barbi's barn. Hard work and so much fun! Barbi bought new tools for this project. I felt so cool with my yellow crowbar!

on location

a pile of barn wood!

Trilety and Barbi

Meg and Trilety

We made a good dent that day but still have a ways to go in order to pull enough wood to cover the wall space in our bakery. Getting there, getting there!

Meg

Tell Time By Dessert

Holiday traditions often involve food. Tastes on our tongues serve as a mnemonic device. Memories form in our mouths before our minds, and then we are transported to holidays of past. 

This year, as in years past (see my December 2011 post), I baked a cheesecake and a chocolate roll. This year, as in years past, I was ocularly addicted to the look of yellow yolks blending with black chocolate, and opaque whites whipped until stiff.

With the right light and wetness, all food can achieve the perfect holiday glisten. Having an annual baking tradition is just as much a blur as the blending of eggs. It's hard to discern yolk from chocolate after a while, and all the years of desserts blur together in one rich mouthful. 

My Grandmother's chocolate roll brings back memories of a long drive on roads that are no longer called "country," cousins in velvet, coyotes, beef and cream, my first Christmas with Craig, the first Christmas I prepared duck, and the desire to make meringue mushrooms and always falling short.

My Step-dad's mom's cheesecake, a recent addition to the Holiday roster, reminds me of a New York I've never visited, Tom's stories of Germany, walking through a snowstorm on Christmas Eve to hunt down cream cheese with Jeremy, my last Christmas with Matilda, the word "mouthfeel," and family.

Here was the dessert table this Christmas Eve: Chocolate roll (top), Cheesecake (left), and Dave's famous berry pie with a crust that would make your grandmother wonder butter! And when we look back at photos, if it weren't for this blog, would I think it was the Christmas of 2012, or of 2005?

How do the holidays land on your tongue?

~ Trilety

Random

There is so much going on with Two Birds lately that our heads are swirling with information. Meetings and advice and requirements and waivers. We're doing a great job, but it is a lot to take in. 

So this time I would like to write about nothing in relation to the bakery. Just for a break, right? Maybe something I learned recently... or something that I like. Something that brings me joy.

Have I talked about how much I love Saturday morning radio? Most people who know me have heard me say how much I enjoy working Saturday mornings. This is because I am able to listen to radio the whole time I work, and on Saturday mornings I listen to NPR. At 9am is Car Talk, at 10am is Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and at 11am is This American Life. That is a stellar lineup! Time goes by so quickly when I'm learning about cars, listening to interviews, and snickering at bantering hosts.

Car Talk has been around for as long as I can remember. My mom used to listen to it in the car when I was small, and she would tell me how much she liked the show. At the time I had little use or appreciation for it, but now I love it. Those guys, Ray and Tommy, are so silly and familiar. What is more entertaining than their quips and puns is that they are constantly laughing at themselves. Two distinct laughs, I can tell them apart. Sadly and also happily, they retired in October 2012. However, NPR is still airing previous recordings at the regular day and time. Although they are gone, they are not really gone, and I am glad.

Four or five years ago I started listening to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, not to be confused with What Do You Know (which I used to do since they both start with "W"). In my opinion, the former is hilarious and the latter is not so hilarious, but that depends on your humor I think. On Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal is the host, Carl Kasell is the judge/scorekeeper, and there is a rotating panel of contestants as well as one celebrity guest a week, who answer Sagal's questions about the prior week's news stories, big and small. They are all snarky and silly. Most if not all are comedians. Now that you know that, can't you just imagine the hilarity?! Huh. This paragraph really doesn't convey how fun the show is, but I think if you listen, you will be entertained!

This American Life consists of essays, some fiction, some non-fiction, from people all over the US. Whosever idea it was is brilliant. Stories range from suspenseful, to scary, to heartwarming, to odd. They are all interesting and lovely. 

Even if you don't work Saturday mornings, you can still listen to these shows at home. Yes you can! Or you can listen to podcasts of them. 

So, you might thing that this whole post has been a major plug but that's okay; it wasn't meant to be. It's just a little bit about me :)

Meg

How Many Bathrooms?

Before we were granted a waiver for the grease interceptor that Megan wrote about in her last post, we had to attend a meeting of the Omaha Plumbing Board to ask for another waiver. 

On September 12, 2012, Megan, Barbi and I (and our team of professionals from Bahr Vermeer Haecker and Alvine Engineering) walked into a conference room on the third floor of the City/County Building prepared to request a waiver to allow a unisex bathroom. Upon entering the room, it occurred to me that this was where all the men in Omaha congregate. Five rows of men wearing heavy denim and Carhart, and suddenly I remembered the men of my past career. . . . as an environmental consultant! Oftentimes we would stand on sites in the center of construction and talk to the men who would be making the intangible tangible. I've always found this type of man comforting, quite like the teddy bear you can't give up.

Section 49-631 of the Omaha Plumbing Code details the requirements that must be in place for an ADA compliant unisex bathroom to be installed, rather than two ADA compliant restrooms. The space taken up for two large bathrooms would've reduced the space needed for our kitchen, and it's a tight fit to begin with. The part of the code that our situation did not satisfy, and thus would've disallowed us from having a unisex bathroom, was this:

Unisex bathrooms shall not be installed in the following facilities. . . . (4) Where food or drinks are prepared or served except in a business where the customer is served food and/or drink only from a drive up window and there are four or fewer employees and the gross area of the building is 600 square feet or less.

While we will have fewer than four people working on the premises, we will be serving food and our area is about 900 sq ft (greater than the allowable 600 sq ft). 

Similar to deciding to remove the bacon-maple muffin from the menu, we decided to remove the limited seating (four stools) we had originally planned for the bakery. This was an easy decision as the space didn't allow for much seating to begin with, and we plan on being a drop-in, rather than eat-in, bakery. 

Megan, Brian Hadfield (Alvine Engineering) and myself were summoned to sit at the table with the 7 folks representing the Board, and explain our case. Within less than 10 minutes, we'd explained our situation, answered questions, been ribbed about not bringing cupcakes, and were granted a waiver that allowed us to have one bathroom instead of two. Here are the Minutes of the Plumbing Board from that day. And, here's Omaha's Plumbing Code. It's a dense read and you can find great ingredients for poetry, like the word roughing-in for instance!

We hope you come and visit us and use our unisex bathroom; it will have a urinal!!

Thanksgiving was a couple of days ago, and here's a photo of my vegan pumpkin pies just before they went in the oven! Happy Holidays!

~ Trilety

Grease Trap vs Bacon-Maple Muffin

Grease Interceptors, aka grease traps (this next blurb is taken from Wikipedia):

are plumbing devices designed to intercept most greases and solids before they enter a wastewater disposal system. Common wastewater contains small amounts of oils which enter intoseptic tanks and treatment facilities to form a floating scum layer. This scum layer is very slowly digested and broken down by microorganisms in the anaerobic digestion process. However, very large amounts of oil from food production in kitchens and restaurants can overwhelm the septic tank or treatment facility, causing a release of untreated sewage into the environment. Also, high viscosity fats and cooking greases such as lardsolidify when cooled, and can combine with other disposed solids to form blockages in drain pipes.

Grease traps have been used since the Victorian days, although Nathaniel Whiting obtained the first patent for a modern day grease trap in the late 1800s. They are used to reduce the amount of fats, oils and greases (FOGs) that enter the main sewers. Effectively they are boxes within the drain run that flows between the sinks in a kitchen to the sewer system. They only have kitchen waste water flowing through them and are not served by any other drainage system such as toilets. They can be made from a number of different materials; e.g. stainless steel, plastics, concrete & cast iron. They range from 35 litre capacity to 45,000 litres and above capacity. They can be located above ground, below ground, inside the kitchen or outside the building.

Well, it makes a lot of sense for food establishments that cook up a lot of grease. However, that is not us. The only product that would produce grease is our Two Strips and a Short Stack Muffin (bacon and maple). Even then, the grease from the cooked bacon is poured into the trash, not into drains. (I had been told that this is the best way to discard the grease from cooking meat and now I have a very thorough explanation as to why!) Anyway, the bacon-maple muffin is our only product that produced grease. So we asked ourselves if spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to install a grease intercepter was worth keeping the sweet and savory muffin on our menu. It would be a massive project that would involve ripping up an already existing patio, amongst other logistical challenges because of the location of the sewer system.

We know how much our customers and loved ones have enjoyed the bacon-maple muffin, and perhaps we will find some way to put it back on our menu in the future (options include purchasing pre-cooked bacon or using a vegan bacon substitute). But for now, we will be putting that recipe on the shelf. It was a bittersweet decision and we hope you'll understand. We feel confident that the remaining muffins and cookies that we will offer will more than make up for the absence of our Two Strips and a Short Stack muffin.

Call it progress, evolution, or just plain practicality! We are learning constantly through this process.

~Meg