If a rat can do it, why can't you?

The Elemental Catering team recently went to New York, not to sample crazy new restaurants or experiment with the latest gadgets, but just to see some friends. It was hot. Sticky, stupid hot- the kinda hot it NEVER gets in Seattle. We just had to get into the A.C. While most bars & restaurants have A.C., it wasn't cut out to be that kind of vacation. Restaurants & bars can get expensive, especially when you like food & drinks as much as we do. So we headed to a beautifully restored vaudeville-era theater to see the most awesome food-movie that's come out this year, Ratatouille.

While the animation was awesome and the jokes quite funny, the pervasive theme of the movie, "Anyone Can Cook," was quite a compelling one. I've eaten at street vendors that make food comparable to the most expensive meals I've had, albeit rarely. I've had meals at the home of friends and acquaintances that have made my professional palate unreasonably jealous. And some of those were prepared by people who I felt confident would burn water if left unsupervised.

If you have the passion to make something great, very little can stop you from doing just that.

This principle, Anyone Can Cook, really opens up when you rephrase it to Anyone Can Do Anything They Feel Passion For. Cooking, teaching, office management, skating, biking, realty, cello; it doesn't matter what it is. As long you feel passionate about it you can do wonders in your field.

The Right Food for the Right Event

You know that your 7-year-old nephew is probably not going to want Lobster Thermidor for his birthday. And that your mom's retirement celebration is probably the wrong time to showcase your newfound love for freeze-dried ice cream in mole sauce. But knowing what food's right for your business's events may be a little harder.

Here are some steps we have come up with to help you make that decision:

1. Figure out what time of day your event is happening. Of course, breakfast, lunch, or dinner is an obvious distinction. But, a breakfast-time event at 7.30AM has different contextual needs than one at 9.
   
2. Know what else will be going on. Are people paying attention to a presenter? Is there a DJ? Do they want to network with each other?
   
3. Determine how people will get their food. Will they pick it up, all assembled in a box? Serve it themselves onto plates? Be served by an attendant?
4. Know your audience. If your event's going to be attended by a homogeneous crowd, figure out what they'd like, and give it to them. If it's for a diverse group, provide something for everyone, but don't aim for a middle-road no one wants to go down.
   

When you can determine these factors, and take them all into consideration, you can better craft contextually appropriate food for your event.

These are questions Elemental Catering will be happy to help you answer, and come up with a plan that has your event covered. It's our job to know what to serve when.

When DIY is a Don't

Is Doing It Yourself really the way to go when putting together an office lunch? Sometimes. When it goes well, it can save you some money if you're willing to sacrifice some time. When it doesn't go so well, it can hurt more than it helps. Let's look at a scenario recently related to me by a customer who decided to try the DIY thing. The names have been changed to protect the embarrassed:

(The Scene: Thursday afternoon, in a typical office in a large downtown building. The characters: A Boss; Stefan, the Administrative Assistant; and Emily, the Receptionist.)
Boss: We need lunch brought in for 25 on Tuesday. Can you take care of that?
Stefan: Sure. I'm on it.

Then Stefan thinks to himself, 'Hey, I love throwing dinner parties! Surely I can take care of this lunch. I'll save the company some money, and maybe I'll get some sorta kickback...' So Stefan asks Emily whether she wants to help him plan this party. They sit down, Emily volunteers to take care of getting a dessert taken care of, and she'll do all the set up and clean up if Stefan will man the phones for her while that happens. Stefan decides to make his grandmother's famous Italian pasta salad, and he'll get the stuff for people to make their own sandwiches. Then they talk about what's happening on Entourage.

Over the weekend, Emily comes down with a bad case of Strep throat. Monday morning, Stefan finds out that he's going to have to go it alone AND also handle both his regular job duties AND answer the phones. So Monday night, after a long day at the office, Stefan runs to Costco to pick up the stuff for sandwiches. Then he runs to a neighborhood store to pick up stuff for pasta salad. He goes home, starts the pasta salad and realizes he's forgotten to triple the recipe. He has a manic evening in which he totally misses Entourage with all the running around, and goes into work with a pasta salad which is not exactly the perfect medley his grandmother had in mind (he bought the neighborhood store out of basil, and still didn't have enough).

Since it's also the beginning of the month, Stefan's got to coordinate reports, and answer the phone, and 11am comes around like it always does, and he realizes with a shock that it's time to set up the meeting room. He's forgotten to buy plates, and since he hates mayonnaise, he forgot that too, but the breads and meats and cheeses are all there. The attendees will have to make do with mustard and tiny plates that say "happy birthday" or have pictures of snow and holly. Everything gets set up, and he goes, exhausted, back to Emily's reception desk. He realizes with a start that he's forgotten the dessert too! He has an assistant manager cover the phones, runs to the convenience store in the lobby, and buys an overpriced bag of mixed candy to substitute.

Sure, DIY (do-it-yourself) sounds like a great idea - you save some money, get out of the office for a while, maybe showcase your favorite recipes - but is it really? Unless your office has extra staff who are paid specifically to run errands like this one, it's almost always going to hurt your bottom-line. Missed time for employees, who then may have to stay late and get overtime to make up the work they didn't do. Clients who think you're too cheap to do it right.

If Stefan had thought to himself, 'Gee, lunch for 25. Sounds like I should call a caterer,' his reports could have been done on time, the meeting attendees would have been wowed with custom-created dishes, and his boss would have said, 'Good job, Stefan. Maybe we'll finally get you that keyboard tray you've been asking for.'

Elemental Catering at BizJam

Oh Happy Day! Elemental Catering was selected to be the caterer for BizJam - happening Saturday, June 9th. That's great for us, because we get to help a great organization, Biznik, with a great event.

Basically, BizJam is a day-long event for "bootstrapping entrepreneurs" to get ideas from each other, brainstorm how to get their businesses booming, and just energize themselves with the myriad of opportunities out there for everyone to be fabulously successful. There are a score of speakers and many workshops to help fine-tune your business, from choosing a name to effective networking strategies to polishing your business plan.

While we have provided for conferences in the past, Bizjam is our first chance to present our Strategic Catering model to a large section of businesses all at one time. For BizJam we couldn't really customize the attendees' lunches - there are just too many of them, and we weren't able to ask them before hand whether they had a preference for fruit salad or chicken sandwiches, or if they were allergic to tomatoes or wouldn't eat yellow food. So we instead concentrated on providing two energizing lunch options that will allow the attendees some good long-burning fuel to keep them going with a clear head.

We, along with the organizers, Dan & Lara, decided that we'd keep it basic: a Dijon chicken sandwich or a roasted veggie sandwich, with just one side dish - a Southwest bean salad. The side salad option was easy to figure out - it needed to be a low-carb, high-protein option that wouldn't be noisy (like chips) or potentially allergen-ridden (asian-noodle salad). Corn and beans together really pack a protein punch, so even those people who choose the veggie sandwich will definitely get all their lunchtime nutritional needs met.

We're quite sure the sandwiches will be hits. The Dijon chicken was a no-brainer to choose, since it's one of our signature dishes. The chicken takes on the marinade and gets SO juicy. Then we put some red onion and spiced, oven-dried tomatoes. It's delectable. The roasted veggie was harder to decide upon. While a great vegetarian option, it's not vegan (there's provolone cheese on it), but we decided that anyone who was vegan could take off the cheese. It's a little more labor-intensive - each sandwich has sauteed mushrooms, three kinds of grilled, marinated veggies, and fresh basil. Sorry vegans. We promise you that when you outnumber meat-eaters and vegetarians we'll make everyone put cheese onto their sandwiches instead of making you take it off.

Offering sodas for energy and refreshment to your conference attendees may seem like a good idea, but it's just not from a organizer standpoint. All the sugar and caffeine gives people a quick fix and a burst of wakefulness, but that high is very short lived and ends with a sugar crash that can leave people sleepy and scatterbrained. While people will naturally have the option of grabbing themselves a soda from the vending machines, we serve our lunches with a choice of either good-ol' fashioned (bottled) water or seven different flavors of Juice Squeeze by Crystal Geyser. It's a lightly carbonated 70% juice beverage with no added sugars, and all their flavors are quite delicious. They do the job of perking you up just fine, but with the extra benefit of giving you a longer burning energy than refined sugars can give you.

Though it was challenge to pare down our considerable offerings to two sandwiches and a side, we think that it will be worth it - and hopefully the BizJam attendees will want to try our custom-created menus to enhance business events.