Beth Edelman Appreciation Dinner at Zahav

Beth Edelman or "Mother" as she is known to Night Kitchen staff has retired from the world of retail baked goods. Beth is a wonderfully generous and hard working person who is always willing to lend a helping hand or opinion. We will miss her but wish her luck in her new endeavor of working for the Barack Obama campaign. (voter registration forms are available at the bakery)
We celebrated Beth at a dinner for her at Zahav Restaurant in Old City. The food was beyond amazing and our server Zach was the most professional and gracious guy.
The title to this post will get you to a set of photos of that dinner on flickr. We love Beth, wish her well and know that we will see her often as she has a standing order for cake anytime she wants. Hey, Mom Rules!

Election Confections

Night Kitchen Bakery political cookies are back!

Kicking off the Democratic National Convention this week our iced shortbread Obama and McCain cookies are now available. Choose the Sweeter Leader by casting your vote with a cookie purchase. The winner will be evident in November.

For more information contact Amy Edelman at chefamybeth@nightkitchenbakery.com or by calling the Chestnut Hill shop at 215-248-9235.
nightkitchenbakery.com

Peri's wedding cake!

Our lovely Pastry Chef Peri (formerly Abramsky) Anderson pipes a bit of decor on her 7 tiered wedding cake at her wedding! She decorated each tier at the Night Kitchen and John and I drove it to her reception site in New Rochelle, NY on Saturday August 9th. The dress (and cake) were fabulous. We had a great time and all the girls swooned when hubby Brian performed a new song that he wrote for her. So romantic! More pictures will follow soon......

"green" ideas we are implementing at the bakery

By recycling we have reduced our garbage from 8 to 6 cans per week! Plus the City of Philadelphia is now taking cardboard with the rest of the recycling. Kudos to Mayor Nutter for making "green" initiatives a priority.
We have stopped using plastic bags. Yes, there is controversy about paper vs. plastic but plastic bags, biodegradable or not, choke marine life. Plastic is also a petroleum by-product and we are trying to get the oil monkey off our back.
We planted a garden this year with heirloom tomatoes, herbs and peppers. John has been using the bounty for pizza toppings this summer. The most beautiful of the lot are the Slow Food(slowfoodusa.org) Ark of Taste heirloom tomatoes. Some of these varieties are prized for their beauty and taste and were near extinction. We need to grow them and eat them to save them! Irony can be delicious.
Laurel Hill Gardens in Chestnut Hill will be building raised veggie beds for us for the next spring planting. In addition to veggies and herbs we will plant native plants and flowers to attract bees and bugs. Bugs are good food for baby birds in the spring.
And lastly we are saving coffee grounds for gardeners who want them for their alkaline loving flowers like Hydrangea. Just ask!

Consultants

We get many questions about our cakes, cookies, pies, tarts and other treats at The Night Kitchen. Most often the questions are about the taste or the ingredients but sometimes a person will ask about how we get our ideas. The answer to this is many layered. Some recipes came with the bakery and we had the good sense to keep them. Some recipes were gathered over years of trial and error from working at the many jobs we held previous to owning the bakery. Not often but sometimes we find ourselves at a loss and we must call on an expert even more knowledgeable then us in the world of sweets. Pictured here are our favorite consultants and they have never steered us wrong.

John wonders about low flow

Tonight I watched a cable channel about refitting ones house so that one uses less energy and I noticed that a solution that came up was to get rid of your old toilet and replace it with a low flow toilet. It seems to me that one can take a water bottle of an appropriate volume (one quart or one gallon) , fill it with water and put it in the water hold tank at the back of the toilet to displace said volume of water thus turning your toilet into a low (less) flow model without the waste of putting your old toilet in a landfill or the energy needed to transport it to another location for reuse. Any thoughts on this idea are welcome.

John

7/6/2008
Ok, me again. I left one comment but I figured I would continue the experiment in thought here. Ok, so, I put some Gatorade bottles in the holding tank and we have some issues with buoyancy. I believe the bottles move about a bit because they are not tall enough to support a significant mass of water above the refill line to keep the bottles stationary. This photo shows a most general working situation with a buoyant bottle becoming lodged in the flow hole (happened once with countless gallons lost) only once but that is bad enough. I figure that replacing the 3 right bottles with one plastic half gallon of water will solve this problem.

Then, I thought "mmmm, bricks?". I am taking a certain amount of water out of the cycle of nature and that water might be needed in some way beyond my mind. A brick allows that water to go on it's merry little way. But, a brick? Even if clean wont it have sediment gradually released from it? And what of the energy to make a brick? Is it more then the energy to make the bottle or clean the water to tap specs?

Well, I like my water bottle idea so I will continue with that for a while. Besides a brick I have not.

How The Cookie Crumbles

Check out How the Cookie Crumbles website for home bakers. Chef Eileen mentions the Night Kitchen cakes she ordered for her son's graduation party!