Bringing the Season to a Close

FINAL MARKET MEAL FOR THE 09 SEASON.

Only one more chance to experience the bread&cup Market Meal this Saturday evening. We feature four to five courses, available ala carte or as a prix fixe. We troll the market as soon as it opens and choose what we will serve that evening based on what we find that morning. The menu is set by 9:30am and we then go to work putting the goods we found into an extremely fresh, original menu for you to enjoy.

As the market closes, we will continue to feature locally grown products on Saturday night. We look forward to creating dishes with late season crops, grass fed beef, Berkshire pork and Cornish Rock chicken. The turn in weather leads to reintroducing the Slow Meal, the Bread Class, and celebrations like Beaujolais Nouveau in late Novermber. We have more ideas than we have opportunity, but we will keep you informed via this email post. Stick with us and we’ll get you through another cold winter.

One of those features of which we speak is Oktoberfest, with our friends, the Modern Monks. Mark your calendar for Saturday, October 10 to join us as the Monks release their German Oktoberfest beer. I’ve not sampled it yet, but they assure me it is one of their finest. We are finalizing a distinct menu for that night.

We hope to see you this weekend. Come early to prevent disappointment, because sometimes the late comers miss out due to popular demand.

I usually end my communication with our phrase, We’ll set the table; you bring the conversation. From the looks of this poll, it looks like Lincoln feels that way too.

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bread&cup

find us at the corner of 8th & S Street in Lincoln’s Historic Haymarket

402-438-2255

www.breadandcup.com

Supply and Demand

Maybe it’s due to my age, personality, social background, or just that I got started rather late in this business than most, but I find my biggest challenge in the whole process of being a chef and owner of a restaurant that tries to serve locally sourced food grown using sustainable practices is not the supply of product, but the demands on me.

I don’t see myself as a particularly talented or gifted person as much as one who is willing to make up for what I don’t know with hard work. Growing up, I was never athletically noticeable, but I have completed three full marathons which have served as reminders that I can push myself to do most anything. And when it comes to the kitchen, I don’t have a culinary education or respectable resume of related experience, but I can work my tail off. This is how I approach my work as a chef.

The word sustainable is getting much attention today, and the common agreement is that we should all seek to be utilizing food that is grown more organically and in cooperation with that which is naturally and normally seen in nature. But I see very little I can draw from in the form of inspiration to live a more sustainable life. There seems to be a disconnect if I am boasting about serving you food from a local source, and doing so while working a 70hr work week. At my age, how long can I expect to do that?

I am amused at my vegetarian acquaintances who disdain meat and have a sermon readily available to preach against the evils of ingesting such vile food, and then ask me if they can go on a smoke break. So you’ll suck tar and nicotine into your lungs but not red meat? Makes the same kind of sense as the label on the shampoo bottle that reads, “Not tested on animals.” Are you telling me I can wash my hair with it, but you wouldn’t dare wash your dog’s butt with it? The word is congruence, and it is lacking in the realm of truly understanding sustainability.

I have in mind for a theme of upcoming posts to reflect on what I am learning about becoming a sustained chef with a sustainable life, holistic and not isolated just to the kind of food I am buying and serving. Learning from nature, how do I allow for seasons in my lifestyle? I know how to put my head down and plough ahead and get it all done, but I don’t know how to relax very easily. Recipes for good food, I have, but recipes for a daily unwind come more difficult.

I find myself more comfortable writing as a learner, not as an expert. Over the years, I had to learn how to be a husband and eventually a dad. I had to learn how to open a restaurant. I had to learn how to be a businessman. I had to learn how to put it all together. Now I have to learn to keep it all going for the long haul.

Monks and Chefs

I love how the sunlight offers a different hue in the fall as it penetrates the limbs and leaves of the trees here in my backyard. My garden plants recognize it as their signal to make the necessary adjustments in preparation for their passing from one season to the next, some setting on seed pods, some changing their facial color, others just simply fading away. It’s this reduction of daylight that tells the Schlumbergera, or Christmas Cactus, to begin producing its flower pods that will bloom in November or December. These transformations are the fascinations I hope to never get too busy to miss.

And certainly my life as a chef will always lean toward having more to do than time in which to do it. But I am smart enough to know that regardless of profession, the urgency of that which yells the loudest will get more attention than the quiet, more subtle tasks that are much more important. The lust to keep taking it to the next level will in no doubt overshadow the more centering endeavor of contentment and peaceful work.

For me, the best way to accomplish this is focusing on the task at hand, and finding enjoyment in what is right in front of me. As a futurist, this is a discipline more than it is a reflex. It’s why I wanted a restaurant where making bread was a focal point.

I always say that if I could just bake and not have to wear all the other complicating hats as a small business man, that the daily pleasure of taking the raw ingredients of flour, water, salt and yeast, and watching my hands turn them into food would be satisfying in an of itself. But that is not the case, so I have to become wiser in how I do my work.

Stress is built in the mind, and when I take my daily demands and add them to tomorrow’s unknown affairs, both get turned into millstones that hang deftly from my neck, like a jealous lover preventing my focus from veering away to more attractive, and much more kind and beneficial devotee. When I confuse the two, I have to remind myself the lyrics of the little Sesame Street song,

One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn't belong…

Important is not like Urgent. The Beneficial is not like the Insistent. The Quiet is not like the Boisterous. The Significant is not like the Adamant. And it takes a daily, intentional observation to separate the two and keep them apart.

This attitude may sound more fit for that of a cloistered monk than one of an aspirant chef, but I believe if I am to be serious about sustainable food, I better be just as serious about it coming from a sustained life. Young chefs may be able to cheat for a season and produce great food on little sleep and a steady diet of caffeine, alcohol and nicotine, but midlife guys like me have their bodies slip them little memos regularly written on the joints of their knees and coded in the numbers of their blood pressure. “Take care of me” is the essence of what is said.

I find that living a sustained life doesn’t mean we must take shortcuts in order to reach our destination. It does mean we may have to get there carrying a little less luggage.

For example, have you noticed other restaurants have a multitude of options and we only have three pasta dishes on Friday nights and seldom more than three entrees at a Market Meal? It takes us nearly five man hours just to hand roll our pasta and gnocchi, all from scratch. Why go through all the trouble? That’s just it, its not trouble. We are in the business of serving you OUR food, not opening a Sysco bag from the freezer and plopping it on a plate. I could easily do a dozen dishes or more if some machine cranks the food out and some guy on a truck delivers it. But that’s not where I’m going, that’s not what I do.

I would rather present you three, very thoughtful dishes, that were conceived and created in my kitchen and enjoy the process of getting them to your table than to take a shortcut just so I could have a longer menu. Keeping this in perspective allows me to tell the Urgent to keep quiet so the Important will be heard.

Mild, with a low of 55 degrees

The air has definitely shifted from strength of summer to the calmness of autumn. I’m always amazed at the pleasant emotion evoked from seeing even the most subtle of changes, like the shade of greenish yellow that was just a few days ago a dark green field of soybeans. It’s a feeling of relief, which hints that the earth is cycling into a season of rest, and so should I.

I saw that soybean field, and many others like it, on my drive out to Henderson, NE, to pick up the beef I had processed for use in our restaurant this fall. We purchased a certified organic grass fed steer from Holt Creek Jerseys raised here in Nebraska. Buying the entire animal gives us all the cuts, so we can plan to use oxtail, heart, and shanks as well as the more common roasts and steaks you normally find available.

If you’ve never tried it, you might notice that grass fed beef has a little different flavor than corn fed. It is more noticeable in steaks, where very little seasoning is added to enhance the meat before it is served. Roasts, short ribs and such that are exposed to low, slow heat and plenty of herbs and spice, the difference will be less detectable. I grilled up a couple of T-bones for our staff last night, and they met our approval. I think you will also.

So as fall unfolds, so will our menu utilizing this Nebraska beef. If you would like to get our weekly updates on how we will be preparing it, join our mailing list at the top corner of the page at www.breadandcup.com