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You know what’s good? Meat and chocolate!
Hell yeah, pork products and chocolate combinged are like the ultimate sin and that’s why they taste fantastic. Last week I made a mushroom truffle and it just happened that we were having roast chicken on the same night. When the mix was still setting I noticed that all the bacon from the top of the chicken was sitting in a big and delicious crispy pile on the kitchen counter while the chicken was crisping up in the oven and I just couldn’t stop myself from taking a bit and then it dipped itself in the melty chocolate mix all by itself, quite simply it was meant to be! I’ve seen the combination a couple times before everyone’s watched Chocolat and there’s zotter’s shop which has the most amazing flavours ever including two bacon bars and which probably gave me the subconscious impulse to dip.
I didn’t exactly forget about it for a week or anything, it’s just that I’ve liked meat and chocolate for a while now and although having the smooth amazing milk chocolate covered porcini melt and the crispy chickenbacon shatter in my mouth was the best chocomeat experience I’ve ever had it wasn’t anything brand new. What makes now a special time in chocomeat fusion history is that I’ve just moved through all the pork products in the fridge (there are quite a lot of those; comes from having a chinese mum) and all the different types of chocolate in the house (there are more than quite a lot of those; comes from being a chocoholic) and I haven’t found a single combination that I don’t like. Pork and chocolate are quite simply sublime! Even though I’m normally a dark chocolate sort of person I have to really give it to the milk chocolate. Milk chocolate and pigbits is really really really good. For me dark chocolate works better with lighter pork things like whiter meat or raw bacon but isn’t quite right for most of the cured ham type things which really are the meats that taste best with chocolate. White chocolate’s pretty good too, but even better with olives.
I’ve been working on a pepperoni chocolate for a while and I really really like it, I’m not quite sure how much other people like it since they’re all weirded out more than anything else. Mushroom was odd enough for some (but only if they were told what was actually in it first) so I’m a little aprehensive about what would happen if I tried to sell meat chocolates in the shop…
“Here! Try these new chocolates, they’re the special of the month!”
“Ooh they look good… do you have a list of the ingredients anywhere?”
“err… you probably don’t want to look at those until after you’ve finished eating.”
Serving suspicious chocolate would probably be pretty bad for business not to mention how much I would accidentally enrage just about every single vegetarian that comes in.
I’m going to try and make chocolate sauce/gravy for roast pork pretty soon, I can sell that as normal whatever in the shop (chocolate spread?) and then suggest to people that they put it on their Sunday roast. Once I’ve got people used to the idea it’ll be time for pepperoni truffles, pork chops in the chocolate fountain and chocolate coated hams!
Then I’ll really start to mess people up!
So yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve actually said what I did today, sadly with no mention of chocolate. The blog was really meant to be sort of like a diary so that you could keep track of what starting up a chocolate shop takes rather than a daily rant, so probably best to get it back on track a little bit (at least for a couple of days until I get all ranty feeling again).
Today was the first meeting with the bank after giving them my business plan and I think it went pretty well. Sha(zam, awesome genie of mystical finacial power), my account manager, is the dude. He’s far too cool to work in a bank and I’m pretty sure that he really likes the idea of the shop. Only thing slowing down the loan now is that the bank aren’t too sure on the location I want to set up in. I think it’s going to be awesome in a year or so’s time, but right now it’s not quite busy enough with rich enough people for the bank to jump at it just yet.
The best thing to come out of the meeting is that they know that I really am serious about this. When I came in I think they thought I was just some clueless bum asking them for a whole pile of cash, but their estimation of me has been steadily growing since I sent in the overstuffed with bullshit and jargon business plan and reached a new and dizzying height when I brought in a new set of very anal looking figures this morning after only having one day to research and write them. Unfortunately I was wearing my very shabbiest coat (the one which leaves little shreds of slowly dissolving lining everywhere I go) and I really dislike using the jargon when I’m talking to someone face to face so the little I gained probably slipped away into the general sludge that is my professional image. Even so, Sha did say how impressed he was with the amount of work that I had put into the business plan and how detailed everything was, guess those two days of writing really paid off.
Since they were uncomfortable about the property I really had to make sure that I could come up with some good reasons to go for the shop I want other than gut feeling, so I spent most of the afternoon trawling round estate agents in the East end to make sure that the shop I had really was the best I could possibly have. Sha did say that I’d be “raking it in” if I opened up in the West, but then I’d end up serving exactly the sort of people I wouldn’t want to be friends with and that wouldn’t be any fun. How I should eplain that to the bank I do not know. At least I’ve got details on lots and lots of other properties now and they’re all wank.
Next up in the list of joy was trying to sort out insurance. Well, actually all I was doing was cancelling what I had done for the insurance already since it’s taking longer than I thought for everything to come together and the coverage was going to start before I actually moved them in. I’m sure Super-safetyman would approve, but Mr. Miser would probably murder me from the inside of my brain… he’s much much stronger than Super-safetyman since he hasn’t been starved for the past twenty years.
There’s only so much admin a body can take so I had to cool down for a bit after that with designing the shop. I’ve thought of a really cute little way to hold price tags and as soon as I get some wire I’ll make one up and post a picture. I love the way that drawing pictures and sitting in cafe with an espresso or three thinking counts as work. Everything’s chugging along pretty well.
Now I know why I prefer rants, writing about my day is seriously duulllllllll. It’s going to be full ranting speed ahead again starting tomorrow, especially since tomorrow is going to be another struggle with my arch nemesis… Tower Hamlets Switchboard. Apologies, but I don’t really feel like deleting my day and replacing it with a rant about how we should all make our own tortillas, but if you’re feeling generous then pretend I did.
I think I’ve just revealed my greatest weakness in business (as well as possibly a secret strength): that although in some ways I’m horribly callous and slightly amoral I’m just not quite an arrogant business gashcheese.
Tomorrow I’ve got a meeting with the bank to talk through some of the bits for my business plan and they wanted me to change the predictions for how much I would sell each month of the year to reflect people not eating as much chocolate at certain times of the year. There’s blatantly no way I can predict that at all, but at least it’s no more pulled out of my ass than the rest of my business plan (please don’t read this Mr. Bankman…. I really have carefully thought all my figures through and believe them with unflinching steely faith) the only thing that really matters is if I can make it look less shitstained by dressing it up as much as possible with references from other things.
In the search for some sort of article that tells me how much more chocolate people buy in the winter or at Valentine’s day or whatever I came across the most terrifying thing ever…
“Are you season-savvy? Celebrate the opportunity to manage seasonal candy sales more strategically.”
Do not read the whole article if you still have any faith in the intrinsic goodness of humanity, it will crush your belief beneath a cold avalanche of marketing.
I don’t mind the commercialisation of some holidays, I really quite like Christmas the way it is now, I love the tack, the consumerism, the relentless in-your-face advertising telling me to buy buy buy and eat eat eat, but to have it revealed as such a horrible soulless enterprise really gets my blood boiling. “Celebrate” your chance to make your holiday strategy more complete? It just brings up horrible images of bunches of executives in pinstriped suits gathered round a pie chart showing increased holiday revenues with party hats and very sombre expressions.
“What are we here for guys?”
“It’s a party Brett, can’t you tell?”
“Oh right, yeah! We’re celebrating our opportunity to manage seasonal candy sales more strategically!”
“Hell yeah we are! This is going to be even better than that time we made spreadsheets in order to take on the preparations for our orgy more efficiently!”
“We had an orgy, I don’t remember that?”
“No, in the end the spreadsheets had already sufficiently fulfilled our joy quota for the financial year and so the orgy itself was cancelled.”
“This year our strategy plans are looking fun enough that we might be able to cancel Christmas too.”
*high five*
Aren’t the guys who write this stuff meant to be advising people on how to appeal to consumers? I’m not going to trust advice from anyone who puts a title that bad on the front of their pitch.
Seeing them slightly salves my pride at having just written the words “how much each holiday adds as a percentage to the non-holiday-enhanced revenue” in my new revised business plan (now complete with 58% more anality). When the words appeared on the computer screen my inner child screamed and took refuge behind my spleen. He’s been hiding there for a while now, I hope he decides to come out.
