Cooking With Beer

I should really use Cooking With Beer as a tag instead of a title, because it's what I do.

I walk into a brewery, start tasting, and inevitably, the beers I really like are the ones I want to turn into a recipe.

Like right now. I'm drinking a Tripel from Legend Brewing. I'm sitting on the patio in the lovely, perfect warm sunshine, and all I can think is: banana bread. Or truffles. I can totally do chocolate beer truffles, right?

This Tripel hits you with banana right off. If I were going to drink beer for breakfast (what, it has grains and fruit and... okay, never mind. Ice cream is better for you.) this is the one I'd choose for a fruit-forward meal.

But - and yes, this is in the notes but it's totally true - on the third sip I got bubblegum. The kind of bubblegum wrapped in the paper with the comics on them. Or in the fake tobacco pouch.

It's the taste of I'm ten and at the skating rink on Saturday morning again.

I enjoy drinking beer; I really do. But I like cooking with it even more. I like coming up with wacky recipes that use beer and it's why one of these days I'm going to open up a restaurant where all I do is cook with beer.

Strawberry Jam 2017

There are a few rules for canning jam. Make sure your kitchen and your canning equipment is clean. Don't overfill your jars. Make sure your jars aren't chipped or cracked before you dump them in boiling water.

Oh, and check to see if you have the correct size lids for your jars before you start making the jam.

I'm a bit of an absent-minded chef. I toss ingredients in willy-nilly, use recipes more as guidelines, and forget to set the oven timer.

But I'm far more careful with canning, because, well, botulism.

The one thing I can't seem to remember to do before I start the process of sterilizing jars and dumping twelve cups of strawberries into pots to cook is to make sure I have jar lids in the house.

Sure enough, true to form, I started on the first of the two jams I was making, had the water bath boiling, and was ready to soak the jar lids in hot water when I realized that I had just enough lids for this first batch of jam. Maybe. Definitely not enough for the second.

Yeah, I'm the one wandering the aisles of Kroger on a Saturday night looking for canning supplies.

All's well that ends well, right? Two batches of strawberry jam finished, and now I know I have enough lids for at least a few more projects.

The Reason I'm Here

I've been on the hamster wheel of career-ness for 20 years now (well, just over, but let's not get too picky when we're talking about decades here). I've done all the "right" things, and pursued my dreams. I've gotten a masters degree, interned for the right people, and held three dream jobs.

So with 20 years or so left in my professional career life, what's a girl to do?

I chose to take the planned ending of a job (I was out at noon on January 20, regardless of how I felt about it) as an opportunity to shake things up.

Here I am in a new city, trying out a new way of working. Location independent/digital nomad, that's me!

While I've toyed with this blog as a way to practice writing about non-space industry topics for a few years, I never had the bandwidth to commit to it.  Now that I do, this is my space to talk about the local, small business food and beverage world, what it's like to eat out as allergy girl, exploring cool corners of the world on trips by myself and with family and friends, discovering a new city, and writing for work and for fun.

I'm a freelance editor and writer, event planner, logistics whiz, marketing consultant, and all around problem solver. Need help with a project? Let me know.

Want to talk the local food and beverage scene? I'm in.

Have stories to share? Grab a cup of coffee and let's talk.

Who Needs A Whole Foods Market?

Is Whole Foods losing its mojo?

Looks like, yeah.

According to that article, Whole Foods' sales declined 2.5 percent last year, and they're expecting to lose about the same amount this year. Considering that I've never seen a Whole Foods not crowded with people, I'm guessing that's a data point the company is now really worried about.

Whole Foods is rapidly building stores to try and attract customers. From that WaPo article:

"Whole Foods’ challenges are wide-ranging, but one of its biggest hurdles is attracting more customers. According to data from Kantar Retail’s ShopperScape survey, the organic grocer had a 7 percent penetration rate back in 2009 when it had some 273 stores. In other words, 7 percent of respondents in Kantar’s customer survey said they shopped at Whole Foods on a monthly basis. Since then, the chain has been on a breakneck march to open more stores, its fleet now numbering more than 430 locations. So what is its market penetration now, with all those added stores? Just 8 percent, according to Kantar. It’s practically unchanged."

The problem isn't more stores; it's where those stores are located. The chain is clustering stores in the same general location, so they're not adding customers, they're just making moving the existing customer base around.

I'll use my experience as an example. Over the last 13 years, I've lived in three different neighborhoods in northern Virginia. I was in walking distance of a Whole Foods (distinct stores) at two of those locations. The third location now has a store across the street.

I would frequently stop in yet another Whole Foods in DC, which was close to my doctors' offices and the GW campus.

So that's four stores in an area, with no more than eight miles between any of the stores. While I appreciated being able to walk there, when I wasn't in walking distance the drive was no longer than 10 minutes - not exactly a hardship.

I moved to Richmond about a month ago. There's one Whole Foods, and it isn't inside the Richmond city limits.

Granted, Richmond doesn't have as many people as the DC metro area. But with 16 stores for 6.1 million people - that's around one store for every 400,000 people or so. But the Richmond metro area has around 1.3 million people. That's one store for well over a million people.

And that's if people chose to drive (because, yes, that's the only way to get there) 10 or 20 miles to get to the store's location.

I have a feeling I won't, because there is a really nice Kroger much closer (and with less traffic) and a few miles down the road from there, there's a ginormous Wegmans. Plus, Richmond has a couple of other home-grown grocery stores and organic markets.

Lot's of people do just fine without access to a Whole Foods. But if Whole Foods wants to turn around their decline, they might want to try and get access to more of those people.

Let's Do Lunch

It's 6:30. You've just slogged your way through 45 minutes of ungodly traffic (or Metro's latest meltdown, in which case it's been more like 90 minutes), you're home, and although your refrigerator is full of lovely, organic, free-range food, the thought of cooking makes you want to curl up and cry.

Or you just got back from six days on the road and there is nothing in your fridge except six kinds of mustard, a bottle of limoncello, and that weird pack of baking dates that you swore you would use (a year ago).

There are many reasons we might choose to go out to eat instead of staying at home and cooking. Having dinner out - either eating at a restaurant, grabbing something to take home, or getting food delivered - is a pretty normal thing for lots of people.

But what about lunches? According to The NPD Group, restaurants, with the exception of fast food places, are losing lunchtime customers. 

The advent of fast-casual and food trucks is a blessing to the desk-bound office worker who in the past frequently only had access to hot-food bars and sandwich shops. But even these restaurants are seeing a drop in customers.

Are we becoming even less likely to "go out" for lunch?

Data says: yes. It seems that two things are at work: more people are working from home, and people don't consider lunch a good value (prices are too high for what people get or want to get for lunch).

I have something of a tradition for lunches out. If I took a day off from work (mental health day, doctor's appointment, necessary DMV trip), I'd have lunch out at a fancier restaurant. Some place I wouldn't regularly go for dinner because it was too expensive or reservations were too hard to get.

I'd sit at the bar, read a book and have a fantastic, no-pressure meal. Maybe chat with the bartender, maybe not.

That's become a little less of a "special" thing to do now that I'm a freelancer and not generally stuck in an office all day.

But the idea of going out to lunch being an uncommon experience meshes with the data. We don't see going out to lunch as a necessary thing, and so we don't put the same value on it as we do going out to dinner.

That makes a lot of sense for what most of us eat for lunch: sandwiches, salads, easy pasta dishes, burritos, wraps, pizza. If we feel like we could (or should) have made it at home, we attach less overall value to the product because it's an easy thing. We're good paying $30 for pan-fried trout with in-season corn coulis and roasted organic brussel sprouts with bacon, because we're pretty sure we couldn't do that at home (or see above re: time and energy post-traffic/metro).

I still think lunch out has its place, especially lunch out in a non-fast food, non-fast casual place. There's something a little decadent about having lunch by yourself in a nice restaurant during a weekday, a little bit of "treat yo' self."

it's also a little subversive, having a leisurely lunch somewhere with cloth napkins, real silverware, and glasses without straws. While the rest of the workforce is hastily scarfing down a shiny-wrapped sandwich from the deli across the street over the emails they didn't have a chance to read that morning, you've got a cozy leather booth all to yourself and a server who would be happy to bring you more bread or chat about the special of the day.

It feels like you're playing hooky from the world of adult responsibilities.

Frankly, I think we all need a bit more of that feeling.

But back to the data. If people are eating out less at lunch, what should restaurants do? Setting aside the food truck versus brick and mortar places for the moment, because I don't think getting rid of trucks are the answer. People don't think they are getting a good value at restaurants, and that's regardless of food trucks.

Lower prices? Lower quality? If even fast casual isn't seen as a good value, what hope is there for more expensive restaurants? Or, conversely, will those places be okay because customers expect them to be more expensive and only eat there from time to time?

Restaurants are going to need to change their game plan. More people are bringing their lunch. More people are working from home. How can restaurants provide value? Co-working or networking events over lunch? WiFi and roaming business consultants?

Lower prices aren't going to be enough. Restaurants are going to have to get creative.

Do you still go out to eat? At what kind of restaurant and how often? What would get you out there more?