Healthy Menus

I was asked at a supper club once: Why don’t we have a “Healthy Menu” for a Supper Club. The answer is we could and we should. We have quite a few friends and family members that have become vegans. I have cooked with and for them and we have had some really amazing meals. Unfortunately, “Healthy Menus” are not all that appealing to a broad group of Supper Clubbers. The truth is that most of us try to eat healthy all week long and we like to splurge a little at a dinner party.

Like it or not, “Healthy” is still a tough sell. Kraft has invested heavily in “healthy” businesses over the years. Good friends of mine ran the “Back to Nature” business for Kraft and the experience was not good. Consumers say they want to eat healthy, but invariably there hasn’t been a large enough volume to drive the growth and margins that large corporations must deliver. But this can change.

I am sure that some readers will disagree with me, thinking that I am a relic of the big bad food processors. I truly hope that we can all eat healthier and what a lot of smaller companies are trying to do is very good. Unfortunately, there is a huge risk in local, organic and natural products. There is a huge food safety risk in products from small companies that make “local/organic/natural” products. “Food Processors” have kill steps in there processes to control pathogens. These kill steps, critical control points and good manufacturing practices provide a level of safety that many smaller companies don’t have.

This irony came home to me while visiting my cousins on Maui. They are vegans and own an organic farm near Hana. They looked at me as working for the evil empire with fear that Kraft is killing the American consumer with processed foods. I saw how they made their tropical fruit frozen smoothies that they sold at their farm stand and I was scared silly. I ran a coconut company in the Philippines so I know too much about bad bacteria in tropical environments. I saw them making their fruit pops in an open air kitchen. In the yard next to the kitchen was Mable the Mule. Mules will do what mules will do. The do attracts flies. Flies can carry bad bacteria. This irony was all too real.

The backlash that Chipotle went through last year is just a small example. Chipotle was trying to do what the American consumers says they wants by sourcing ingredients from smaller local suppliers. Those suppliers didn’t have kill steps or necessary critical control points in their processes. This led to the E. coli contamination and people getting sick. The way Chipotle has addressed the issue should be applauded. They just have to back off their local/organic/natural claims.

But I digress. And yes I will write a “Healthy Menu” for a Supper Club. And yes there are several fantastic vegan recipes in my book – Impromptu Friday Nights – A Guide to Supper Clubs due out from Morgan James Publishing January 30, 2018.

When Communications Go Bad – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

With Supper Clubs there are times when people get their feelings hurt. As with most things in life, the more people that are involved, the more chances for mis-communication. We had an excellent example a few years ago. One of the chronic problems with Supper Clubs is there are cancellations. When people cancel, there can be a chain reaction of difficulties: finding substitutes, changing dates, combining dinner parties, etc.

We had a supper club melt-down caused by cancelations and mis-communication. Our neighborhood Supper Club is quite large with 5 dinner parties going on a given night with 4 couples at each party. So with 40 people involved it can get complicated. Denise is a key leader in our club and does a masterful job of scheduling through difficulties. The rule in our club is that if you cancel it is up to you to find a substitute. We have a list of 30 or more subs so there is usually a good pool of alternates. If you have difficulty finding a sub it initially falls back to the host of the dinner party. When we are hosting and we have cancelations I look at it as a recruiting opportunity. The host can call in reinforcements from anywhere. I have been known to pull people in from work, the gym, golf course, or anywhere. My wife has accused me a pulling strangers off the interstate.

The night of the meltdown was caused by multiple cancelations. Denise as the de facto leader made a decision to consolidate dinner parties, as was the normal practice. An email was sent out explaining that one party was being eliminated. The hostess whose party was eliminated was new to the club and was very offended. Poor Denise thought she was doing the “Newby” a favor by solving the scheduling issue and saving the hostess from all the work involved with hosting. Newby felt that she being arbitrarily picked on. Email nasty-grams were sent and quite simply it got ugly. To be honest it was a case where email was the standard operating procedure, but simply does not work.

Communication rules to live by:

1. Never use email or text if any bad emotion is involved. If you are irritated don’t push send.
2. Face to face communication is best.
3. Direct phone contact is second best.
4. If you have two touches of telephone tag use text message to get a person to person meeting or call scheduled.
5. Voicemail is next best but dangerous.
6. Be really careful what you put in writing. Email and text can be great but you miss out on the chance to read your audience and adapt your message. Plus, they don’t go away and keep hordes of lawyer gainfully employed. The really bad thing about emails and texts is that people will write things that they would never say face to face.
7. Blogging is dangerous. Please note that I have broken just about every one of my “Rules” in writing this blog. Oh well…

At the end of the day it is hard to avoid miscommunication and feelings getting hurt. Common sense and sensitivity go a long way. Sometimes bad stuff just happens.

The Genesis of the Book Goes Back to Lucien Vendome

The book is about Supper Clubs. My wife Susan and I have been in them for years. Just about everyone loves to socialize over a meal and Supper Clubs are a great way to make that happen. But, there are some challenges to Supper Clubs. The goal of the book is solve those challenges and make the idea of Supper Clubs fun. I am targeting millennials because they are coming of age where socializing over a meal is a priority. Supper clubs are a perfect enabler for them (and any other demographic). The book tells you how to organize, entertain etc. And yes there is quite a bit of tacky humor written into it.

The genesis of the book goes back to Lucien Vendome. Lucien was the head of Culinary Innovation for Nestle. (His picture was on the boxes of Lean Cuisine for years). Lucien and I worked together at Kraft years ago and are good friends. He is simply one of the best chefs in the world and a really bright guy. During our years together in Memphis he and I hosted many a dinner party and he was a key member of the original “Impromptu Friday Nights” crew. One night after a particular fun dinner party he asked me: “Have you ever thought about writing about Supper Clubs? Lots people write cook books. Not may people know how to organize a supper club the way you and Susan do”. That planted a seed and when I retired form Kraft I started writing. My plan had been to self publish, but then I hired an editor who actually liked what I wrote and convinced me to try to get a publisher interested. Now the book has been accepted by Morgan James Publishing and gets launched January 30, 2018.

Lucien always brought a certain levity and charm to our Supper Club events. One night our friends Jorene and Steve joined us. Later in the evening Lucien mentioned to Jorene that “Jorene” was a different name and asked her what the derivation was. She explained something along the lines of she had aunts named Josephine and Irene and her parents combined it into Jorene. Lucien turned up his French charm and accent and said: “For the rest of the night I think we should call you Jo-René”. Not missing a beat Jorene’s husband Steve chimed in with “I feel like I will be going home tonight with different woman”. It’s probably been 15 years since that evening, my guess is that the bruise on his arm where Jorene smacked him has just about faded away.

The whole concept behind Supper Clubs is to have fun. I have tried to write in fun way and just hope people enjoy the book as much as we have enjoyed Supper Clubs.