To honor the birthday of Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, 1000+ people have signed a pledge to profile a woman in technology on March 24.  This is my contribution.

I have chosen to profile my sister, Gretchen Tigner, a computer programmer — certified java programmer.  Gretchen is the youngest of my siblings.  I worked for many years in technology fields; my sister Mary, a teacher, once worked as a systems analyst for the University of Chicago library; brother Bill is an engineer; and our mother was a technology wiz and information strategy planner for the State of Ohio.  Genetics. 

Gretchen took the long route to her profession.  She dropped out of school and ran away from home shortly after entering high school, worked at various jobs, and eventually obtained a GED.  After several false starts she found the right school and the right major, and graduated with honors from the DeVry University in Columbus with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.  By then she was in her 30s.

She went to work for Bank One, later JP Morgan Chase, as a programmer for the Retail Banking division, and stayed there for about ten years.  While there she wrote an application called “Fee Automation” that everyone else said couldn’t be done.  A couple of years ago she and her husband Todd, a musician, following a long-time dream, relocated to Helena, Montana, where she now works.

Gretchen is one of those people who is naturally and astonishingly brilliant.  She tackles the hardest problems and sees her way through the tangled confusion to a solution.  But she’s also an amazingly practical and down-to-earth person.  Her personal life comes first, and work is just work.  She managed to work all of those years in a corporate environment without becoming a corporate drone.  She loves shoes, and has a huge collection.  She loves to dance, to backpack, and to eat out.  She taught my kids to hold a paper napkin in front of their faces, and stick their tongues through the paper.  We worked together on the “Inappropriate Barbie Series.”  She is imaginative and outrageous, everyone’s favorite relative.

Last summer I received a phone call from Todd.  Gretchen had suffered a brain hemmorhage, the result of an aneurysm that burst.  Most people die as a result, and of those who don’t, most have brain damage.  She survived five weeks in neuro intensive care at Swedish Hospital in Seattle, where she had been flown.  And then went home to rehabilitation.  Her speech therapist told her she was lucky to have so much “cognitive reserve,” meaning I guess that she could lose some IQ points and still be smart as heck.  In November she was back at work part-time, still programming, and although she works a little more slowly and struggles a bit with memory issues, she is still smart and funny and lots of fun.  She recently passed an exam on insurance, required by her insurance company employer, so I guess her memory is good enough.

Her aneurysm is growing again, so she’s going to have more surgery on April 1.  She’s going to be “clipped” as Joe Biden was for his aneurysms.  Todd shaved his head a couple of days ago, and next Saturday she’s having her head shaved in preparation for the surgery.  She started a Facebook group called “Gretchen Need a Hat” (join!).  And she’s preparing to start the rehabilitation process all over again.  She’s beautiful, she’s brave, and as she says, “Gretchen, like Keith Richards, cannot be killed by conventional means.”  For that we are all grateful.

Something sent to me by Steve Harris

For several months, with the help and encouragement of many of my Park Avenue neighbors and other folks, I’ve been working on the Park Avenue Prowl.  Well, we made it!  Our website is live, we’ve printed and distributed 1000 brochures, and we’re all really excited about it.  In addition, Georganna Monk and I, mostly Georganna, have finished the history display in the restaurant.  It includes artifacts that were found in the crawlspace: dolls, school papers, and other children’s items, and cooking supplies. 

Check out the website:  http://www.charlevoixparkavenue.com. 

To top it off, it’s Memorial weekend.  People are coming back to town, the weather is glorious, and everyone is in a vacation frame of mind, even the people working 12 hours a day. 

 

Every once in awhile I make a big hiring mistake.  Well, maybe more often than that.  I’ve had great success with servers.  The kitchen is another matter.  I have heard that “restaurant people are a breed apart,” and “kitchen staff are naturally unreliable.”  Surely that doesn’t have to be true. 

On the 4th of July we had two cooks working, one on the line, and one doing prep.  We had other folks doing prep also, but the two cooks were doing the bulk of the work.  The guy on the line was, shall we say, a bit under-motivated.  He kept complaining that his eye hurt, and to be fair, he did have a minor case of conjunctivitis.  Yes, before you ask, he had a doctor’s ok to return to work.  Anyway, at noon — on the 4th of July — he told me that he had to leave, and was going to the hospital to have his eye looked at.  The guy did have a history of leaving work or not coming to work because of illness, and then being seen riding his bicycle around town.  So I told him that if I he left I’d better not hear that he was out riding around on his bicycle.  He left, and half an hour later someone came in to tell me he was down at the beach playing basketball.  Hope he got sand in his eye.

I fired him the next time I saw him, and he seemed quite surprised.  The beach is two blocks from the restaurant; how did he think I wouldn’t find out?

“Sally” left a comment the other day on my Staff page.  It was simply this:  “Good place to meet an old boyfriend for lunch!”  I’m curious.  I’m intrigued.   And I’m wondering …

Did “Sally” actually meet an old boyfriend here?  She was writing from Philadelphia (Internet magic – don’t ask).  Was she in Charlevoix recently?  And of course, if you’re meeting him for lunch, is he really an “old” boyfriend?  Is there any such thing as an old boyfriend, or are all boyfriend connections real, live, and forever? 

Is Sally sending a subtle message to an old boyfriend?  Maybe they periodically Google “old boyfriend for lunch” to find out where their next meeting place is — same time next year, Neil Simon and all that.  

My favorite story has an old boyfriend of mine posing as “Sally” and letting me know he’s going to pay me a visit.  No old boyfriends in Philadelphia, though.  If any old boyfriends are going to meet me, I need to lose a few pounds, quick.  And get my hair done.  So give me some notice, will you?

Maybe “Sally” visits random blogs and leaves inscrutable messages to provoke speculation.  Just for the fun of it.

Well, Sally?  What’s your story?  We are all wondering how that lunch turned out.

The umbrellas are up! It’s spring! The window boxes don’t have flowers yet, but we’re cheating and buying some for Mothers Day. And, weather permitting, we’ll have live music. Marty Beneteau, a local bluesy guitar man will be playing acoustic guitar outside.

You can sit outside, too, weather permitting, and so can your dog as long as he’s on a leash.

Check out our special menu — click the link on the sidebar to the right. Meals are all-inclusive: beverage, sides, and breads are included in the price.

No reservations.

Well, it’s been a funny week. Our new chef started. Aaron just finished his second year at Grand Valley State U., where he’s studying hospitality management with a specialization in food.  He’s doing a great job, and although he has some learning to do in the cooking department, he seems to be fanatical about cleanliness which is making me a very happy boss. On Thursday he was hurrying to grab something from the wire shelves and managed to dump a full container of our dried fruit and nut mix on the floor. (Trash, of course. There’s no 2-second rule in a restaurant. Or shouldn’t be, anyway.) Then I was pouring soup I’d just made into a storage container to cool and dumped half of it on the white cutting board of our sandwich unit. Which means it all runs under the white board, then down into the under-counter refrigerators …

Well, all of that is funny, but not that unusual. So here are a couple I would never have predicted.

I sent Ace to the bank to get some change (small town, remember — it’s down the block, around the corner, and he was looking for a reason to go outside in the beautiful weather), one roll of quarters and two pennies. He brought them back and handed them to Taylor, who was serving. She opened one roll of pennies and the quarters, and then instead of putting the remaining roll of pennies in the section of the cash drawer where we put rolls of coins, she for some unknown reason put them under the cash drawer.  How is that even possible?  Anyway, she shut the drawer, but when it was supposed to pop open when she rang up the next order, it opened about 1/4 inch, and then stuck.  For the next 20 minutes we wrestled with the drawer, and Aaron ended up disassembling it, removing the lock assembly and everything else.  With the help of my handy-dandy Leatherman tool, he shifted the roll of pennies far enough so he could grab it, and then we spent another 10 minutes putting everything back together.  Taylor was so flustered she fell asleep, head down on a table.  ????

The next day (Sunday), Alyssa was pulling a brand-new, just-baked breakfast tart out of the refrigerator unit we have in the serving area.  Somehow it “jumped” out of her hand, but she managed to catch it before it hit the floor.  The platter went down with a big crash.  We sold all 8 pieces of the tart in the next two hours, so it’s a good thing she caught it.  

And then on Monday, Lisa, Alyssa’s mother, was working.  Someone ordered a glass of our wonderful sparkling cherry juice, bottled like champagne and produced in Michigan.  So she pulled the bottle out of the refrigerator and then asked me to remove the top, because she hates doing that.  I was doing my know-it-all thing, and told her to use a clean towel so the stopper wouldn’t pop and fly across the room etc.  Then I got the towel and started pushing around the edges of the stopper only to find it was a fake, covering a screw top.  I felt like a fool.  We laughed so hard Lisa started choking (she has allergies this time of year).

The restaurant is so small our customers get to witness events like these.  Luckily they are good-humored about it.  Maybe we should begin billing ourselves as an improvisational comedy club.   

Here it is, in fewer words and some pictures.  A Margherita pizza and a “traditional” pepperoni pizza.

Grab one of our par-baked crusts.  Drizzle a little olive oil on it.

Do this for all pizzas; it helps protect the crust from the wet ingredients you put on top.

I drizzle it on with a squirt bottle, then smear it around with my gloved hand.

Make the Margherita.  Start by spreading roasted Roma tomatoes around on the crust. 

To roast the tomatoes, you quarter lengthwise, scoop out the seeds, and spread on a  baking sheet.  Drizzle with a little olive oil, sprinkle with herbs de Provence and salt and pepper, then bake until they look like this.  We always have a bunch of roasted tomatoes around.

 

 

Add chopped garlic, torn bits of fresh mozzarella cheese, and shredded fresh basil leaves.  Don’t crowd things, and don’t use too much mozzarella.

 

 

 

 

Top with some shredded Parmesan cheese. 

Bake at 450 for 7 minutes or so.

 

 

 

 

When it’s golden brown, pull it out of the oven.  Let it cool a bit if you have the time (we don’t at the restaurant), so liquids are somewhat re-absorbed and the cheese sets.   Cut it as desired, and serve.  Yumm….

 

 

 

And now for the “traditional” Pepperoni.  Spread a little organic marinara sauce on the crust (after the olive oil, remember).  I use a squirt bottle for this, too.  That way I don’t mix the olive oil and marinara sauce — I want the olive oil on the bottom.

 

 

Sprinkle with herbs de Provence, and top with pepperoni.

 

 

 

 

Top with a generous amount of shredded low-moisture part-skim Mozzarella cheese, and shredded Parmesan cheese.  Bake at 450 degrees for about 5 minutes.

 

 

 

Take it out of the oven, let the cheese set, and then cut and serve. 

What exactly is “traditional” about this pizza?  Sauce and shredded,  stringy Mozzarella.  Fresh Mozzarella is creamy, not stringy.  Still good, though.

 

So Lisa wanted a healthy omelet today — all veggie.  OK, all veggie except for a little bit of Swiss cheese.  No way I could roll it; couldn’t even fold it.  But isn’t it beautiful?

So we think we need to have this as a special.  “Overstuffed Omelet,” I’m thinking.  How does that sound?

Oh, I like mine sharp. I like to be able to slide the knife through an onion or a garlic clove, without pushing, just gliding, and have a paper-thin slice fall off silently. The knife never gets all the way to the cutting board. And I love to get into the groove, just down, up, down, up, slices and slices falling off to the right.

I like my knife so sharp it will cut through a tomato without tearing the skin (you know your knives are dull when you have to use a serrated knife on your tomatoes). And so sharp I can skin a salmon filet in one stroke. You know how to do this, right? Skin side down, left hand on top of the filet, knife cuts from right to left, parallel to the cutting board. If you’re right-handed.

Sharper is safer. If you’re not pushing, just moving up and down easily, then you’re not likely to slip and slice off something like your finger. People who don’t know how to hold a knife, or who haven’t practiced much (young folks!), are clumsy, as we all are when we’re doing something new.

We had a sixteen-year-old dishwasher who was dying to do prep (dying to stop washing dishes anyway), and talked the chef into letting him chop onions. I walked downstairs to get something out of the walk-in cooloer, and he was standing there, kind of gray, with his hand in the air. I asked him what was going on, and found out he’d cut himself. Cut the the nail and tip off his index finger. Should have mentioned that keeping the hand that’s not holding the knife out of the way is kind of important.

I drove him to the emergency room. There is no way that kid should have been wielding a knife. The chef, of course, was angry at him for telling me he’d cut himself (some kind of kitchen machismo I didn’t get and probably a little worried about getting in trouble himself), and angry at me for taking him to the ER! A few weeks later, after everything had grown back and he returned to his dishwashing job, the rest of the guys in the kitchen harrassed him a bit. They would deliberately burn oatmeal in a saucepan and hand it to him to wash. Stuff like that. He ended up quitting, of course.

Kitchen people are like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, showing off their scars. Take burns. I’m careful in the kitchen, but I just looked at my arms, and I have three lines on the undersides of my forearms, each about an inch long, burn scars. Probably from the convection oven.

Last summer, the guys working in the kitchen burned themselves several times a day. It is really hard to avoid being burned when you’re working fast in such tight quarters. It was always the same: they turned white, grabbed the injured arm or hand, and ran for the warm water. Yes, the warm water. “Cool water, not warm!” But each one of them had been told at some time in the past by some chef to run warm water over a burn.

So, I got on the Internet. “Maybe you’ll believe the Mayo Clinic.” Or WebMD. Ha! There is no medical authority, apparently, that trumps a chef when it comes to burns. And for all their machismo, those guys were big babies about their burns. Lots of drama, rarely a blister. The kitchen is a soap opera.

But back to knives … one of the things I catch myself doing every now and again is putting my right index finger out along the top of the knife as I cut. Some kind of childhood thing, pushing on a dull or flimsy knife with little kid’s hand. Once I cut the heck out of myself doing that — pushing down, my finger slipped and ended up under the knife rather than above it. Keep your finger on the handle! You can’t balance a finger on the back of a knife blade while you’re pushing down.

The other thing I do, something that always drove my kids crazy and impressed them at the same time, is peel, and core apples in my hand. I quarter them first the correct way — cut down to the chopping board through the stem end. But then I take an apple quarter, hold it in the palm of my left hand, and cut toward me with a paring knife to core the section, then flip it over and peel it the same way in two cuts. Then a couple of quick cuts, and it’s sectioned.  It’s really fast, and I’ve never cut myself. But you have to have a sharp knife or you end up pushing so hard it’s difficult to stop when you need to. I do this with tomatoes, too — we quarter our Romas lengthwise, then scoop the seedy center out before we roast them. I can get through 20 pounds of tomatoes in about 15 minutes that way.

 

 I quarter the apple the right way, using the cutting board. 

 

 

 Then I slice out the core. 

My cowardly thumb is as far away as it can get.

 

 

    While I’m at it, might as well slice the darned thing.

    Yeah, I’m cutting toward my left thumb. 

 

 

 

      All done — in 7 seconds.  A whole apple in 12.

 

 

Chefs really like their knives. They carry around suitcases with knives, and get knife sets when they go off to culinary school the way the college students head off with laptops. One of my lasted-four-days chefs from last summer came with his own set of knives. He didn’t show up one day (off on a bender), and forgot about them. A month or so later he left me a voice mail asking me to put his knives outside that night so he could pick them up. Didn’t want his paycheck — just his knives.

There was a nice kid who worked in the kitchen last summer, a kid with a couple of years of experience working in restaurant kitchens, who had just graduated from high school and was going off to culinary school in September. He was worried about how he would do — in his knife skills class! He’d heard that students would have to cut things with some ridiculous level of accuracy to pass. Not sure whether that’s true, but it reminded me of my ex, a medical student, practicing one-handed knot tying with hemostats on our dining room chairs. Every profession has these little things, I guess.