Rural Holiday Inn Express Offers True Hospitality during Washington State's Great Taylor Bridge Fire

The heart of the Hospitality Industry has always been large. No matter where disaster strikes, members of the Industry have always done all that they could to help others impacted by fear and pain, whether harmed by man or nature.

During the tragedy of 9/11 hundreds of hotels and restaurants in New York City stop service and offered everything from food to staff to the thousands so cruelly and senselessly injured.

Now, once again the Industry has shown its heart. Not this time in New York City, one of the world’s leading centers of commerce, but in a much smaller town located in rural Ellensburg in Washington State.

The Holiday Inn Express in Ellensburg is a small hotel by the world’s grand standards. And it’s also located not far from the vast Taylor Bridge Fire, now raging out of control.

Home after home has burned, leaving hundreds without shelter, clothes or lodging. And although over 800 firemen are laboring around the clock to stop this furious Fire, the flames are only 10% contained and now cover an area equal to half the size of the nearby city of Seattle.

Ellensburg’s small Holiday Inn Express, in the finest tradition of our Industry, has chosen to open its doors and, using Facebook, has asked those who could, to bring clothing, blankets, books and toys to the Inn to help the Fire victims.

They have also prepared high protein sack lunches for those in need of a meal.

This small hotel’s courage and true professionalism should be a reminder to us all that no matter where we are in this wide world, from the might of New York City to every small rural town, we are all here to care, to make a difference, to help each other, to serve those in need. 

If you are in the Pacific Northwest and wish to help sort the donations arriving at the Holiday Inn Express or give recovery funds, call 509-962-9400 and see how you can be part of the kindness that is the hallmark of our Industry.  

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012

Massive Indian Power Outage Offers a Wider Lesson to the World

Our hearts go out to the 680 million people in northern and eastern India who are enduring that nation’s largest electric blackout ever. If that number seems too large to grasp, the recent outage has impacted a population group larger than that of the United States, Russia and Brazil combined.

That is a lot of people suffering – hotels, hospitals, restaurants, schools, rail transportation... all stopped still.

The world should take note and learn a very important lesson: we are all interdependent one to another.

Recently the President of the United States was misquoted when he correctly said that no business owner achieves success alone.

Any successful business needs lights, power, roads and healthy employees.

Often that large supportive, and very necessary, infrastructure is built and maintained by the collective effort of government, paid for with public taxes for the benefit of all.

Once during the early days of American history (1777-1789), the U.S. adopted a singular, every state for itself approach and the result was disastrous. Today we should know better.

Working together is always stronger that pulling apart with an “I/we don’t need anybody else” attitude.

No hotel department or restaurant division is successful in isolation.

Each has to be an integrated co-supportive professional community to be a truly successful and creative business. 

India will survive because she is one of the world's greatest nations blessed with an indomitable spirit.

It is our hope that India's recovery will be inclusive, embracing the right of all to the safety of light and an equally bright future for everyone.

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012

Move over Ralph Lauren and Coke, Bouillon Cubes Were First Olympic Sponsor

As the Running of the Bulls comes to a close in Pamplona, Spain, all eyes will soon be turning to the London's Summer Olympics.

And you are correct, if it seems that there are almost as many sponsors for the Olympics this year as there are athletes. After all, the Games, which began in 1896, are expensive and the seemingly endless bills for lodging and arena construction have to be paid.

Indeed, heavy governmental funding for the Utah 2002 Winter Olympics, not to mention that the Olympic torches used were made in Burma, have been very stressful topics for the Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, in the current US presidential election.

So as you might have expected, commercial sponsorship has been a controversial element of the Olympics since its beginning. But did you know that its first official sponsor was the company that first offered soup made from bouillon cubes to tired athletes?

That's right – bouillon cubes, those invigorating little compact squares of concentrated soup.

Even less known is the fact that Nicolas Apperts, who first marketed bouillon cubes, also invented the process of canning as we know it today. A failed champagne producer and an unsuccessful innkeeper and chef, Nicolas Apperts was a man who collected talents to seemingly no benefit.

But when Napoleon announced he would award a huge cash prize to anyone who could develop a method to preserve food for his far-flung army, Nicolas Apperts knew his day had come

As an unsuccessful chef, he well understood spoilage. As a failed winemaker he knew bottling – especially champagne.

As a result, he developed a method so simple, so obvious it had been overlooked by everyone else. Just put the desired food in a bottle, top it off with a liquid sauce, seal the bottle like a champagne bottle and then heat the bottle until the internal liquid boils.

It worked! Nicolas Apperts received the award, got the huge government contracting and built the very first commercial bottling plant.

It was in the research lab of his newly flounded company, that he reduced soup to its most compact form to the delight of weary athletes and hurried chefs everywhere.

And what better place to first demonstrate the "Cube's" restorative powers to the public than at the 1908 Summer Olympics, where Dorando Pietri, the couragous Italian Marathon Runner AND pastry chef, enjoyed its nurturing and resorative powers. (And what chef would not identify with his final push in their own effort to make it through a long and seemingly endless day of effort).  

Video Text by Sir Arthur Conan Doyale, Famed Author of Sherlock Holmes Novels

So let us never underestimate the power of the small, the few, be it a single world-class athlete or a tiny little bouillon cube in the hands of a creative chef who can inspire us all!

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012

Why You Should Celebrate Bastille Day in a Restaurant

July 14 is Bastille Day or “La Fête Nationale” as it is known in la belle France. There will be fireworks, street dances and, of course, parades.

But hidden within the history of this great celebration of freedom is the little-known story of how restaurants first came to be.

Before the French Revolution (which started with the storming of the hated royal prison of Bastille in Paris), dining was largely restricted to the grand estates of the French nobles or around the far more humble hearths of France’s working poor.

Indeed, even the right to cater was an exclusive affair, granted solely to the “Traiteur” Guilds by the King. These select chefs prepared only certain dishes by royal license, serving them only within their own kitchens at a fixed time with a preset menu.

So what was the average diner to do when it came to dining when one wanted to, regardless of time or appetit?

Enter Monsieur Boulanger, who in 1765 opened a “restaurer” or soup shop. He offered a choice of restorative soups (hence the name in French), along with bread and wine to the weary wishing to rest and restore their strength no matter the hour.

As one might expect, the effected Traiteur Guild saw his activities as a threat to their exclusive culinary rights within the capital. Soon Monsieur Boulanger found himself called before a royal judge for violating a royal grant of culinary privilege.

But to everyone's surprise, he was acquitted because the judge, who was a lover of fine food, ruled that the Guild was chartered to serve only ragout, and as he pointed out from the bench, anyone who loved fine food should know that a rich thick ragout is NOT ever a thin restorative broth!

Boulanger’s crowd pleasing shop/restaurant was saved! Soon he opened additional restorative soup shops across Paris. There the average man (and woman) could gather, choose what THEY wished to eat AND so empowered, discuss how the royal government seemed to serve only the wealthy and not the needs of the people, who were the true soul of France.

The final result of such conversations was revolution! And the world would never be the same again, thanks in part to soup and the new social institution it helped to create – Restaurants.

Still to this day, people around the world gather in restaurants to freely discuss life, meaning and the whether their governments serve them well. Once again, we should all raise our glasses and toast France for both the courage to claim the right of individual expression and the innovative ability to create something as beneficial to humanity as restaurants!

Post Note, July 13, 2012: If you still have any doubts about celebrating Bastille Day in a restaurant, just consider a much enjoyed tradition within the Culinary Industry, the Waiters' Race, now run in over 53 countries by the very best with a tray! 

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012

How a Microwave Works Then and Now

In 1945 Dr. Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer working for the Raytheon Company in Massachusetts, discovered quite by accident that a chocolate candy bar in his lab coat pocket had melted while he was experimenting with magnetron tubes, a new kind of vacuum tube developed by the English during World War II.

Besides snacking on candy bars, Dr. Spencer was also fond of popcorn as an afternoon snack. So being a true scientist, he placed a few unpopped kernels next to magnetron tubes and was amazed when they begin to vibrate and then pop.

The next day he and his excited lab associates tried cooking an egg still in its shell.  It cooked and then exploded.

By 1947 his amazing discovery (minus the exploding egg) was transformed into the first microwave test model, which weighed 750 pounds, stood five feet tall and cost $5,000! It also required addition plumbing be installed as the heated magnetron tubes had to be cooled constantly by water.  

At this price range, Raytheon believed only professional chefs would consider purchasing this new cooking tool. In fact, the first field testing was done by valiant chefs in Boston. Thank you brave Chefs.

By the 1960’s the price had dropped to such a low point that microwaves began to appear on the kitchen counter in some homes.

But without the innovative focus of professional chefs, they were initially used largely to reheat and defrost foods quickly.

Then in the 1980’s Orville Redenbacher microwave popcorn packets, along with a host of microwave cookbooks for the home cook, appeared on the market. And the rest, as they sat, is culinary history.

Yet there is a problem, for as much as the microwave is now a part of any contemporary kitchen, few of us actually know how it works, except maybe for Chef Ferran Adrià and his amazing staff.

So here’s a quick tutorial – just remember to enjoy some popcorn while watching, thanks to Dr. Percy Spencer and, of course, Orville Redenbacher! 

Post Note, June 30, 2012: Is it our imagination, or is there a a very strong resemblance between Dr. Spencer and Orville Redenbacher?

Your Culinary World copyright Ana Kinkaid/Peter Schlagel 2012