Digging deep and growing

I fear jinxing it. I have a slight bit of superstition in me. Don’t pass anyone on the stairs. No shoes on the table (which seems both sensible and wise), no mixing red and white flowers, if I spill salt, over my left shoulder it goes. I grew up with my most amazing and awesome Grandma Renee who was incredibly superstitious, as well as a freakishly accurate tea leaf reader, and some of it rubbed off on me. So, I am hesitant to make note of the bistro’s state of relative calm and goodness for fear of tempting the fates. But I am going to forge ahead and make note: Bistro is looking pretty good.

The past year has been so crazy intense I couldn’t even bring myself to write about it. I felt like I was herding cats at all times: money was bonkers with the reno overbudget and the expense of operating a situation more than twice the size of the old one; staffing hit some huge snags (more about the 120% idea of staff in another post); Alex and I hit some major and near fatal bumps in our relationship; and, I was still pretty grief-stricken for my cousin. All in all, it was the most unpleasant of years.

Over the past few months, however, a slight shift has begun taking place. I am remembering how to run a business, get my feet under me. Alex and I have more good days than bad in our 24-year old relationship. We have some awesome staff who care about the bistro whole-heartedly (as did many of the former staff.) We are busy and the food is good and the service is good. School Nights has evolved into its own delighful situation, hosted so graciously by Talia and Sarah. We have once again created a good place to be.

Of course, Alex and I are not ones to sit for long. We have plans afoot. I believe we function best when stretching ourselves. In December, we did a soft launch of our Bistro To Go line. Over the years, people have asked us for jars of things we make, like fennel marmalade, tomato confit, or bacon jam and we have hunted down some form of container and sent them home with whatever their heart desired. We have formalized that process a bit. Our great day Sous-Chef, Grant, who is meticulous and a very smart cook, has embraced this project, creating jars of beautiful concoctions for folks to take home. December proved to be wildly successful for this project and we plan to expand on it. We will set the website up to sell them, I think. And we’ll see if any stores want to stock them, like our fantastic butcher, Marcello, at Marcello’s Meats (shop there – he and his family are amazing!)

We are also going to expand the Bistro To Go line into meals. Recently, our youngest has added “Hockey Mom” to my portfolio. Given that our eldest is almost 15, I felt that we had probably dodged that bullet. Yet, along comes the youngest and not only is she seriously into sports, she is freakishly good at them. And so my life has the added challenges of juggling a hockey schedule. Which, in turn, has added to my craziness around feeding the family. More than once, I have resorted to a roasted chicken from a grocery store. Not with pride but with a little bit of sadness in my heart. All of this has led me to ponder the plight of the families who are juggling 14 things and want something yummy on the table.

We are going to start by offering pre-made meals. You can stop in on your way home and get some short ribs for 4, or ½ a roasted free-range chicken, or some beef bourguignon. We will offer these with sides like mashed or scalloped potatoes, grilled polenta or some quinoa with veggies. Soups made from scratch by our cooks or homemade stocks to make your own. We are open to requests. Which I think will lead us into the next phase of this project: chef services.

Part of our renovation was putting in a large kitchen in the basement, both for prep at bistro and for our other endeavour Bistro Caters! We started Bistro Caters! a few years ago. Alex and I have always loved catering. It’s this really unique opportunity to push our creativity and hospitality into new places. No two caterings are the same and they all provide some opportunities for us to think creatively. We cater all sorts of events, from 4 person dinner parties, to cocktail parties to weddings for 300 people. Ultimately, I would love to have a party planning service but that’s not yet. For right now, we are thinking about ways to use the space and staff we have. We have two sets of really dear friends whose schedules make ours seem like play time. These friends, independently of each other, have hired chefs to cook for them a couple of times a week. Just dropped off, ready to be warmed up, plated and served. Aha!, I thought. This would be a pretty straight forward service for us to offer. And so, Bistro Chefs! is born.

And so the business keeps expanding and doing its thing and creating its own energy. Outside of that part of our lives, Alex and I have also been keen to expand our horizons. We haven’t travelled as much as we like but have had some great adventures. We fell in love with Gimli, like head-over-heels, mooning for her when we are apart, aflutter on the drive, love. We have both started writing for the new prairie on-line paper The Spectator Tribune (Alex has been able to be a bit more prolific on that front than me but I am hopeful!) And we have all sorts of cool and funky little projects started with some friends so we’ll see what shakes out of it all and will write about it as it goes.

Finally, Alex and I had a really ridiculously great opportunity this year. Alex was invited to represent Manitoba at the Canadian Chefs’ Congress. Possibly the most amazing event I have ever attended: incredible food, brilliant creative chefs, political conversation about food, land, sustainability, resources, and one or two parties. At this event, our creative juices really got going again. We are hoping to host this event in Manitoba in 2014. We got engaged in some great national-level conversations about food. And, (this is the biggie) we finally clicked on the topic for a book. Alex and I both enjoy writing and have for years tossed around the idea of what to write about. Something happened in Nova Scotia at this congress, some sparky alignment of the stars, that had us agree on what we are going to write. This past November, our newly 13yo son wrote a 50,000 word novel as part of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month – look it up!) event. Needless to say, there is some inspiration to be found in his accomplishment for both Alex and I. And so, an outline has been written and we have both begun our work.

Initially, I started writing this post feeling like 2012 was a disaster. And it was certainly a year of challenges and significant unpleasantness but as I come to the end of this writing, I am reframing it to be the murky place from which beautiful things will be born.