Believe the Best About Everyone We Work With

Our Statement of Beliefs in action

It’s just under a year ago that we rolled out our Statement of Beliefs at Zingerman’s. In the new pamphlet, I share this about visioning: “An inspiring, strategically sound, documented, and communicated vision has the power and potential to be a transformative tool for any organization that decides to create one, and then put it meaningfully into practice.” In my gut, I have the same feeling about creating a Statement of Beliefs.

In these stressful times, when it seems like we have more pressing matters at hand, it might feel like a mere distraction to devote time to do work of this sort. And yet, time and time again, I’ve come to realize that projects like a Statement of Beliefs—seemingly, not at all urgent, but ultimately very important—contribute significantly to the long-term health of an organizational ecosystem. This means that, fragile as the world may feel right now, this could be an ideal time to do one. As Maria Shriver reminded us the other day in her “Sunday Paper” enews, “We are at a critical fork in our collective story. Our mental, emotional, and spiritual health is on the line.” Our Statement of Beliefs, I believe, is helping us keep moving in the right direction.  

While writing a Statement of Beliefs is nice, the most difficult part of the work is making it a part of our daily realities. One of the small ways in which it is being put into practice here in the ZCoB is something the Roadhouse managers started doing last winter. Each week, a manager chooses one of the 34 beliefs on our list and presents it to the rest of the group as the “Belief of the Week.” The person who is presenting generally starts by sharing why they chose the one they did, what it means to them, and how it has helped them in their leadership work and/or their life in general. The dialogue is then opened up to the group for another 15 or 20 minutes. In the process, people share stories of what this particular belief means for them, and how it’s impacted their thinking, their decision-making, and their daily work. From there, the Belief of the Week is shared with the rest of the staff through pre-shifts, postings, etc. The short discussion at the managers’ meeting has proven itself to be both effective and inspiring—a regular reminder to everyone in the group of why we do what we do, how we have committed to doing it, and why it matters. Over the months, I’ve heard many comments like, “This makes me remember why I work here!”  

This past week, Roadhouse head chef Bob Bennett had the responsibility of sharing a belief. He chose this one:

We believe each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life. 

This affirmative statement is an overt organizational declaration of positive intent that, in a quietly powerful way, can change the way we approach our work every day. It’s a commitment to meeting and greeting everyone at work with the belief that they have the ability to get to greatness, and to be an integral participant in our organizational ecosystem. Following that up by doing the work to help them, as best we can, makes that greatness come true. As William James once wrote, “Belief becomes the actual fact.”

Coming back to this belief regularly, with consistency and care, has the power to change everything about the way we live our leadership lives. It gently reminds me that everyone I work with—whether they’re 18 or 80, working just for a few weeks or for 15 years, partner or part-time barista—has the potential to, in their own way, be an Albert Einstein, a Toni Morrison, a Mahatma Gandhi, or an Emma Goldman. Each of these famous folks was, at one point in their lives, just another person struggling to figure out who they were, how to fit themselves into the world in a way that felt meaningful, and working through the inevitable ups and downs of their daily lives. I'm sure that all of them had moments they felt like they were failing, when they wanted to give up. All were surely told by cynics that what they were doing was way off base. At the same time, each had a few friends or family members who encouraged them to hold course, to keep going forward in the belief they had the potential to do great things. 

My hope is that, with this particular “Belief of the Week” in mind, I can be one of the latter. After all, if beliefs are the metaphorical manifestation of the root system of our lives, then everything that happens in our ecosystem will begin with the beliefs. The items on the list of the Statement of Beliefs might likely have begun as small seeds of ideas, but with practices like the Roadhouse managers’ meeting discussion, they slowly grow into deeply-rooted beliefs that inform our daily decision-making and make themselves felt in meaningful ways in our organizational culture. As I described in depth in Secret #40, every action we take, every decision we make, is based—even if we don’t know it or admit it—on what we believe. Positive beliefs lead to positive outcomes. As Osho says, “Those roots continuously supply the juice to the flowers. All the color in the flowers comes from the roots, and all the fragrance in the flowers comes from the roots. All the dance of the flowers in the wind comes from the roots.” 

In what ways do we see this belief—that each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life—making a difference? One of the managers at last week’s meeting talked about interviewing a job candidate recently. The early part of the interview was less than inspiring. She shared how she started having some of those, “I don’t think they’re gonna be good for us” initial thoughts. Remembering that we have a commitment to this belief, she successfully self-managed past the stopping point of skepticism. She asked more questions and kept listening. When she asked the applicant what they were passionate about, their eyes lit up! “The whole conversation changed. My whole impression of his energy changed. I’m just glad I didn’t give up.” He was hired and will start work with us soon. I look forward to meeting him. 

When we consistently act on this belief, we have the power to help people meaningfully alter their self-image. My day was made the other morning when the mother of a staff member smilingly told me how much working in the ZCoB has boosted her daughter’s confidence. Her budding positive belief in herself, it’s highly likely, will stay with her for the rest of her life. This means that, if things play out as I hope they might, many years from now she will be helping others to do the same. The way I see it, this is how social and cultural change happens in a country. As Sam and Gifford Keen write in Runaway Father, Bitter Son, “Nothing shapes our lives so much as the stories we habitually tell and those we ignore.” To that, I’ll add also, the stories we are regularly told by others. 

Living out this belief is a dignity-based commitment to helping every coworker to live a great life, in the belief that when they do, they, the organization, and those of us who have chosen to believe in them, will all come out ahead. Without it, most people will stay with their long-held, self-limiting beliefs. As Maria Popova points out, “Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness.”

Do I, or any of us, get this belief right every time? Of course not. As with all aspirational commitments, the point isn’t to attain immediate perfection. It’s to give ourselves clarity and a framework within which we can fail, but then still recover, probably more quickly and more effectively than we would be likely to do without it. One of the parts of the Statement of Beliefs that I think is most valuable is in the back of the booklet. Pages 14 to 47 list examples for each belief on our list, detailing what it looks like when we’re in alignment, and then conversely, how it looks and feels when we fall short. Like all imperfect human beings, we have done plenty of both over the years. I specifically—and we collectively—fall short regularly. The examples are hugely helpful by taking this work out of the theoretical and reminding me, very clearly, how to make it real. 

In a sense, taking this belief as the starting point can be a challenge. People we hire still sometimes won’t work out. In some instances, I have high hopes, but things don’t play out at all the way I—or the other person—had hoped. Sometimes people I believed would be here doing great things for a long time end up leaving for other jobs two months after they started. In the face of these inevitable shortfalls, letdowns, and slip-ups, it can be hard to keep going some days. I often find myself feeling discouraged, down, or struggling to hold course. Ta-Nehisi Coates said the following about investigative journalism, but I’ve found it to be equally true for effective leadership: “You just have to keep going in all of these moments like that. Where you just kind of want to stop and the impulse to stopping, the temptations to stopping.” The same, I would say, is also true for any caring leader. We get discouraged, but to really make a difference we need to keep doing it anyway. Reminding myself of our collective commitment to believing that “each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life” helps me push through. 

The approach that flows from this positive belief is a radical shift from the realities of most mainstream organizational thinking. It’s absolutely antithetical to the Pyramid of Power and the more typical hierarchies that most of the western work world has come to accept as normal. I was reminded of this while reading about the late Jack Welch, at one time CEO of General Electric, in last week’s New York Times. Back in his era, Welch was considered quite the business wonder. While Paul and I were reading Robert Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership, Peter Block’s Empowered Manager, Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham’s The Great Game of Business, and Harriet Lerner’s The Dance of Anger, much of the business community was drawing inspiration from Welch’s work. Back in his day, Welch was consistently in the headlines, and many other organizations set out to emulate his style of leadership. I’ve never really paid him much attention despite his star status in the corporate world, and when I read the piece in the Times last week, I realized why. Biographer David Gelles writes:

He was a compulsive dealmaker, fueling G.E.’s growth with a relentless series of mergers and acquisitions that took G.E. far from its industrial roots and set in motion a wave of corporate consolidation that would reduce competition in industries as diverse as airlines and media He closed factories and fired employees by the tens of thousands, unleashing a series of mass layoffs that destabilized the American working class. He devised systems like “stack ranking,” which mandated that the bottom 10 percent of workers be fired each year, and took root at other companies. 

Stack ranking is the complete opposite of the belief that Bob Bennett chose to talk about this past week. And yet, Welch’s approach is much the same sort of ruthlessness and race to the top with which Vladimir Putin seems to approach his leadership work. Individuals, other than a select few, are seen as essentially irrelevant. Political machinations, consolidation of power, and money as both a tool to gain power and wealth, seem to be pretty clearly held in higher regard than the fragile hopes and dreams of any individual. Farida Rustamova, a journalist who’s spent years writing about Soviet and Russian affairs, says:

For Mr. Putin, the people in his ward are his property: He can do whatever he wants with them. From time to time, he feeds them—never generously—to ensure his approval ratings remain high. He has a habit of offering handouts, especially in the run-up to elections. One-off targeted financial gifts and benefit payments are a favorite tactic. The aim, of course, is not the material betterment of Russians. It’s to shore up support for the regime and ensure that turnout, in Russia’s strange pseudo-elections, remains tolerably high.

In that kind of organizational context, the individual matters only in service of those who sit at the top of the pyramid. In these sorts of all-too-common constructs, the hopes, dreams, and feelings of individuals on the “front line” are essentially irrelevant. When we believe that everyone is likely to get to greatness, that perspective shifts completely. As I told the 20 people who were in the Welcome to ZCoB orientation class last week, I hope and believe that a couple of them could well become managing partners at Zingerman’s down the road. There’s a lot of work to be done to get there, but it can be done—earlier this year, Jaison Restrick, who started working at the Bakeshop counter 18 years ago when he was still a teenager, became Co-Managing Partner at the Bakehouse! 

The belief that each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life can enrich the lives of everyone involved. We need each other to do this work well, and none of us can do it alone. Biologist Andreas Weber writes, “Only in the mirror of other life can we understand our own lives. Only in the eyes of the other can we become ourselves.” When we do this work, both the believer and the believed in, benefit in a big way. As is true in Jaison’s case, long-time leaders are helped as much as those whose lives and presences are being believed in. When we’re open to it, it’s amazing how many good things will appear. As John O’Donohue writes:

We will be surprised to discover beauty in unexpected places where the ungraceful eye would never linger. The graced eye can glimpse beauty anywhere, for beauty does not reserve itself for special elite moments or instances; it does not wait for perfection but is present already secretly in everything. When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary.

To wit, in one of the small, lovely moments that I’ve come to appreciate enormously, a new staff member—someone who’s working part-time and is still in high school—stopped me the other day to say how much last week’s essay on “Dignity and Dollars” got him thinking in new ways. His comments and observations on the piece boosted my own hope level—for humanity, for our organization, and for him. I will certainly smile and maybe share his story the next time someone raises their hands when I speak from the stage about leadership to ask me how we handle the “disengagement of today’s young people in the workplace.” 

One of the things I love about studying history is that I so often find insights into what I think are modern-day challenges in what already happened decades or centuries ago. Maria Shriver led off her column this week with a quote from her uncle, John F. Kennedy. In late February 1962, Kennedy sent a “Special Message to the Congress on National Health Needs,” in which he said, “For one true measure of a nation is its success in fulfilling the promise of a better life for each of its members. Let this be the measure of our nation.” It is amazingly and wonderfully well aligned with the belief Bob Bennett picked last week. In the moment, I can only smile at the historical rhyme, and the surprising correlation between what President Kennedy said in 1962 and the belief we’ve committed ourselves to here, six decades down the road. 

While there are many things in the news right now that are easy to get down about, this belief can help us go in a more positive direction. It may not make national news feeds, but this kind of quiet cultural revolution could, I’ve come to understand, have already begun without anyone even noticing, since as writer Ezra Klein reminds us, “We are always living through a history we do not yet know.” A few dozen other persistent and well-meaning folks pushing ourselves to do much better on making this belief into an everyday reality can make a big difference. It may start small, but then, ten years later, hardly anyone can remember it wasn’t always this way. We never know when the balance will swing, but we can start now to try to create organizations, communities, and countries where everyone matters, where human dignity is the norm, and all of us—all highly imperfect beings—are pursuing the lives of our choosing. And where the belief that each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life is widely accepted. 

The value of a belief like this is, in the near term, mostly invisible to the casual eye. But quietly, the health of the root system informs the long-term health of our organizational garden. Given everything that we face in our daily work in leadership and life, it would be easy to ignore it. I was reminded of how important it is to do this work once again when reading something from Rebecca Solnit last week. Her admonition is an inspiration, a reminder that simply believing everyone I meet can and likely will get to greatness really does make a big difference. As Solnit says:

Don’t ask what will happen. Be what happens. Today, you are what is happening. Today, your power will be felt. Today, your action matters. Today in your individual action you may stand with a few people or with hundreds, but you stand with billions around the world. … Today you are the force of possibility that runs through the present like a river through the desert. 

Detroit Street Rounds
from the Bakehouse

Sensational seeded sourdough loaves

We’ve been making the “Better than San Francisco Sourdough” bread at the Bakehouse for nearly 30 years now. September will mark the beginning of its fourth decade on our shelves! The Sourdough is as delicious now as ever—maybe better! Chewy, sour, and savory, it’s almost universally appreciated. Even folks who visit Ann Arbor from the Bay area have been known to bring a few loaves of the Bakehouse’s version back home with them. 

This week, I want to touch on a less well-known version of the Bakehouse’s Sourdough: the “Detroit Street Round.” The name is an homage to the Deli, the address of which is 422 Detroit Street. I wrote a lot about the history of the Deli’s building at 422 in the Preface of Part 4. It was the road one would have taken in the middle of the 19th century if they wanted to set out by horse, wagon, or carriage for the big city of Detroit—45 miles to the east. Back then, going either direction was likely a full day’s ride. The train between Ann Arbor and Detroit began running in 1839—the train traveled at about 25-40 miles an hour. With stops, it was a little under a half-day trip each way. San Francisco-style sourdough of this sort would never have been sold in Disderide’s grocery (now the Deli building) when it opened in 1902—getting here from San Francisco would have likely still taken almost a week. 

What makes the Detroit St. Round special here in 2022 is the addition of a generous coating of seeds baked across the top. It’s made with a mix of poppy seeds, sesame seeds, and fennel seeds. I love it. So does Hazim Tugun, the man who’s worked so hard for the last six years to help make our breads better through fresh milling of so many of the grains we now use, as well as a series of small but important tweaks to technique to improve flavor and texture. Hazim wrote to me about the Detroit St. Round the other day:

I heard about this bread when I first started working at the Bakehouse. [Founding partner] Frank said it was going to sell great. It was so good—and still is! All the excellent qualities of the Better than San Francisco Sourdough—sweet, tangy, salty—are like a well-balanced salad dressing. With the satisfying chewy bite of that malty crust and the tender, moist and satisfying mouthfeel of that crumb … How can you top that? Well, literally by topping the dough right before baking with the sweet, licorice-like, super aromatic fennel from Épices de Cru, nutty and savory sesame seeds, and the humble poppy seeds. A feast for the eyes, but also for the body and the soul—especially for bread-lovers like me!

Long before Hazim’s arrival, the beginning of the Bakehouse, or the Deli, sourdough of this sort dates to the middle of the 19th century. It would have been gaining popularity, best I can tell from the history, roughly in the same range of time that Detroit Street would have been getting named. Up until the second half of the 19th century, when commercial yeast was developed, nearly ALL breads were essentially sour doughs; San Francisco Sourdough is a particular style—one that dates to the middle of the 19th century and the California Gold Rush era. 

Slices of a Detroit St. Round are great for sandwiches, morning toast, grilled cheese, croutons, or pretty much anything else! Some seeds will inevitably fall off the bread while you’re cutting it (or ripping, as I like to do)—be sure to save them to toss on salads or soups!

Appleby's Farmhouse Cheshire Cheese

The last traditional Cheshire maker in Britain

It’s been nearly three decades now that we’ve been selling the Appleby family’s very fine farmhouse Cheshire cheese at the Deli. I first visited Abbey Farm at Hawkstone, where Lucy Appleby was making her now-famous raw milk traditional Cheshire, sometime in the late ’80s. Best I can remember, I kind of just showed up at their centuries-old farmhouse. Remember—in that era, there was no email, no cell phones, no websites. Just books, paper maps, and word-of-mouth! Mrs. Appleby, already in her late sixties at the time, invited me in to watch the cheesemaking, and then later that day to sit in the kitchen for tea, a bit of talking, and some cheese tasting. The Cheshire she was making—true to what had been crafted in the county for so many centuries—was exceptional. It was then, and remains now, one of a kind, little known or understood outside of a handful of folks in the know. Far more Americans know it today than back when I first visited, but it’s still a tiny handful compared to the kind of familiarity of English farmhouse cheddar. 

Cheshire had once been the most popular cheese in England, but at the time I knocked on the Appleby’s door, less and less could be found for sale. As Patrick Rance warned in The Great British Cheese Book, published the same year we opened the Deli in 1982, truly traditional cheese was on the verge of going extinct in the U.K. Our friends at Neal’s Yard Dairy, through whom we get these wondrous wheels—selected specifically for us— share the grim story:

By 1717, at least 2600 tons of Cheshire made its way to the capital annually from ports in Liverpool and Chester. Cheshire had become Britain’s first long-distance, commercial cheese, heralded for its crumbly texture and delicious flavour. If the 18th century marked the high-water mark of farmhouse Cheshire cheese production, its descent into obscurity began in the late 19th century. The dramatic growth in consumption of liquid milk, as well as the new railway networks that facilitated its transportation, allowed many farmers to forego the expensive and time-consuming business of cheesemaking. Agricultural depression also precipitated a dramatic fall in the price of cheese. In spite of these momentous changes, there were still around 2000 farms producing Cheshire in 1914.

The advent of the First World War, however, was to have a catastrophic impact. Many cheesemakers were either unwilling or unable to return to their farms once the fighting had ceased, and by 1939 there were only around 400 farms producing Cheshire. The Second World War had equally profound consequences. The rationing program sought to intensify the production of a narrow range of durable cheeses, and grading standards were introduced that forced many Cheshire producers to make a more stable cheese in keeping with government requirements. By the end of the war, only 44 farmhouse Cheshire cheesemakers remained. In view of such challenging market conditions, the story of the Appleby family is quite remarkable.

Lance and Lucy Appleby were married in 1940 and two years later moved to Hawkstone Abbey Farm where their family still lives today. In 1952, they converted the stables for Lucy to begin the same sort of traditional cheesemaking she’d grown up with. In 1982, the Applebys decided to opt-out of the then universally-adhered-to British Milk Marketing Board distribution and decided to sell direct. Instead, Lance loaded a wheel of Lucy’s carefully crafted cheese and took off for London to sell it, knocking, unannounced as I had done at their farmhouse, on one shop door and then another. The first person in the city to buy their cheese was my now long-time friend Randolph Hodgson at Neal’s Yard Dairy, telling me years later, “I had never tasted anything like it before in my life. All the Cheshire cheeses I had been selling just paled in comparison; this was a totally different cheese.” Through Neal’s Yard’s careful selection work, we’ve been buying the Appleby’s Cheshire for nearly 30 years now! 

Mrs. Appleby passed away in 2008 at the age of 88. Her memory, and the cheese—now made by her children and grandchildren—remains very close to my heart! As the Telegraph wrote in her obituary: “She was one of the most accomplished cheese-makers of her generation and took a bold and ultimately successful stand against attempts to have unpasteurized cheese-making banned in Britain.” Today, in 2022, 40 years after she made her first wheels by hand at Abbey Farm, Paul and Sarah Appleby, along with cheesemaker Garry Gray, keep the now-three-generation-long tradition alive. 

The wheel on the counter at the Deli right now—made on November 25, 2021—is as good as any I’ve ever had. Delicate and delicious, tangy with a touch of tongue-tickling flavor in its finish that I’ve loved for 30 years now! Eat it with apple slices, a hunk of the Detroit Street Sourdough, and a glass of good British ale. It’s outstanding paired with the Apple and Onion Jam from American Spoon. This wheel of Cheshire will sell out quickly, so swing by and snag some soon!

New Pecans at the Roadhouse

Tasty new nuts from a 5th-generation farm in Texas

Back in March, as we were approaching our 40th anniversary, I happened to read something about the pecans grown by the Millican family down in Texas. Always curious to see if we can improve the quality of our food, I ordered a few bags. Boy, am I glad I did! I went back to the bag multiple times over the course of about ten days to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and, sure enough, you really could taste the difference! It’s not like what we had at the Roadhouse wasn’t already good. It’s just that the Millican pecans are markedly better still: they’re more flavorful, the aroma is amazing, and the texture is more vibrant. So good I could barely stop eating them! Now, a few months later, we have them on the menu at the Roadhouse. 

The Millican farm was founded back in 1888, by Kristen Millican’s great-great-grandfather, E.E. Risien. His work on pecan breeding and the quality of the nuts he got from it, gained him a good deal of attention in the area. His granddaughter, Kristen’s mother, married Winston Millican in 1938, just before the start of the Second World War, which is why the Millican name (and not Risien) is on the family farm to this day. The nuts are still grown (and shelled) by the family on site—it’s the same land her great-great-grandfather farmed over a century ago, near the town of San Saba, Texas (about 25 minutes northwest of Austin), the “Pecan Capital of the World.” 

Going back many centuries earlier, the word “pecan” is derived from the Algonquin, "pacane," which means "nuts that you need a stone to crack.” Pecans grew wild and were harvested by whoever had access to the woods in the right parts of Texas, Louisiana, southern Illinois, and northern Mexico. European colonists began to replant wild trees more and more widely, and in the early 19th century the native American nut was being shipped back to the Continent. Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried is the terrifically told story of Ashley, a young, enslaved woman in South Carolina who was sold away from her mother Rose sometime in the 1850s. Rose packed a sack for her daughter to take with her. One of the items was “three handfuls of pecans.” Pecans, Miles notes, would have been a costly and rare item in Charleston of that era. “It was a delicacy deemed an ‘exotic import’ in antebellum South Carolina. It was a high-end item that would have been served mostly in “expensive Charleston restaurants of the 1840s and 1850s, [where] chefs served pecans as delicacies.” This was, as is still the case today with so many foods, a contrast with what had been true a hundred years earlier, an era in which, Miles says, “We might conceptualize the wild pecan as a deeply democratic type of tree. Indigenous people who have collected, planted, and prepared pecans seem to have valued the tree in this fashion.” The original horticultural work to domesticate and develop the tree was, Miles writes, likely done by an enslaved man whose first name was Antoine (enslaved people weren’t generally allowed the dignity of a last name) in Mississippi. 

All these centuries later, the Millican pecans are still marvelous! Watch for them daily on the Brownie Sundae, made with one of those stellar Black Magic Brownies from the Bakehouse, and Vanilla Gelato from the Creamery! The pecans are so good we’ve put a “glassful” on the appetizer list—great to snack on while you’re sipping your cocktails and deciding what to order for dinner! And stay tuned for a series of pecan-based specials!

Cashew Brittle from the Candy Manufactory Store

Luscious, toasted cashews in a lovely sheet
of darkly caramelized sugar

Speaking of good nuts, here’s a terrific treat if you’re in the mood for something sort of sweet, a touch savory, and mostly, just really, really good. This Cashew Brittle is, I should warn you, moderately addictive. It’s done in the same dark-cooked sugar, with butter and a pinch of sea salt, as our already famous Peanut Brittle. 

While pecans are native to North America, cashews came originally from Brazil. The English name “cashew” is from the Portuguese, caju. The tree is a tropical evergreen that can grow twice as tall as the Deli’s two-story building. The cashew tree was brought to India in the middle of the 16th century by Portuguese sailors working the spice routes. The nut, or more formally, seed, actually grows on the outside of the fruit, which, in English, are known as “cashew apples.” It’s technically a “faux-fruit” because botanically it has no seeds—the cashew nut protrudes from the fruit. The nuts in their raw state are poisonous, so you and I would eat them only after they’ve been steamed or roasted. In areas in which the cashew grows, the fruit is regularly eaten raw, and used for juice or jam. It’s worth noting that cashews in their nut form have been recognized for their high protein, monounsaturated fats, benefits to the immune system, and reduced risk of gallstones. More meaningfully in the culinary moment, Allison Schraf, long-time manager of the Candy Store says:

Cashew Brittle is my current superfave product in the candy store! Incredible crisp, complex butterscotch crispy candy loaded with fruity, rich cashews, perfectly seasoned with sea salt. It's a real showcase of the confectioner's art. I’m always amazed at how such simple ingredients are transformed by our skilled cooks into a fantastic treat that I never tire of.

The Candy Manufactory Cashew Brittle is both beautiful and delicious. A dark, amber, studded with sections of straw-yellow, gently toasted, cashew nuts. Just putting it out on a plate for folks to nibble on—for a snack, after a meal, with morning coffee—is sure to garner attention and start a conversation. Almost anyone inclined to sweets and nuts becomes quickly enamored of it. Aside from just eating it as is, the Cashew Brittle pairs really well with cheese. It’s super delicious with Parmigiano Reggiano. I had a small piece of the Valserena Parmigiano Reggiano on a plate with broken-up bits of the Cashew Brittle, and it was a huge hit. It’s great, too, coarse-chopped and tossed onto a salad along with blue cheese. The Cashew Brittle is a superb snack—something to stick in your pocket if you’re getting on the plane for a long flight or into the car for a long drive. This time of year, it’s ideal for picnics since it won’t melt in moderate heat. It’s also available in a version covered in dark chocolate (though I don’t recommend taking that one on a picnic on hot days). 

Come by the Candy Store, the Roadhouse, or the Deli to pick some up.

Other Things on My Mind

Listening:
Lorkin O’Reilly is making some magical acoustic music that harkens back to English musicians from half a century ago like Nick Drake, John Martyn, and Bert Jansch. Born in Scotland and raised in Ireland, O’Reilly moved to upstate New York as a young man. His lyrics are poetic, personal, and lovely to listen to.
 

Reading:
Local author Brian Shell has a new book out called Cubicle Cardio. It’s a super practical look at how to make the most of every minute in terms of getting in shape. 

The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber is a fascinating exploration of what Weber calls “poetic ecology,” in which he details how intertwined science, emotion, and the ecosystem are.