Updates, Fill-ins, and Pictures!

Thursday, Friday and the weekend were little more than a blur. More insanity. More fun. Thursday, because of a revamped menu (hooray for greater efficiency!), Kindra and Kenny were given a day off... at least from hours on end of baking. Other fun projects were undertaken in the down time, for idleness is does not encourage a better self image.

First was the receipts. Each carefully examined and distributed in the proper piles to await entry into QuickBooks. Then came the recipes. Somewhere around fifty million, give or take ten-thousand-five-hundred-and-seventy-two, strewed the table in Shawna's apartment. Kindra began to dig through them slowly. She stopped on certain recipes long enough to copy them (by hand) onto a piece of paper for more convenient storage. This process would have sufficed, surely, but us baker people are progressive folks—we love technology—so we determined there had to be a better way. So, to the ruling deity of Google we proceeded. There in Google's sacred search pages Kindra found the efficiency tool she need: a recipe database that did everything except tap dance on the KitchenAid. She was excited.

Common recipes are now in the database. When new recipes are developed, they too will be entered. They can be searched, grocery lists can be formed, alternatives found, and convenient recipe cards printed. There are still millions of recipes to be sifted through, but that happens a day at a time. We have what we need and, thanks to Kindra's discovery, have it all in an efficient manner.

After the recipe fun it was requested we develop a grocery list that accounted for current inventory. To do this we first needed to decide what each recipe required of each ingredient. Then we were to extrapolate from there in order to prognosticate approximate weekly needs. This wasn't such a difficult task, it simply consumed time. The next part though, comparing what was needed to what was on hand, was not so simple. The recipes called for cups, but items were purchased in pounds; teaspoons were needed, but items were purchased in ounces—you get the idea. To convert liquid cups to pounds is relatively simple—a set formula is applicable—but to convert dry cups to pounds is quite another task entirely. And who new there were three teaspoons in a tablespoon? It makes perfect sense... if you're a three toed sloth! It was yoga for the mind. We prevailed in time, though, and the process broadened our relatability with others: we now understand the term, "pulled a brain muscle".

Friday resumed baking normality.

Here are a few pictures from the week: