WalkingElephant

More Than [at a loss for] Words

Yesterday I went over to More Than Words on Moody Street in Waltham to present them with their $3,144.14 Benefit Restaurant Donation check as our July beneficiary. I'd been in as a customer a couple of times before, but this time I got the Royal Tour. It blew me away.

From the customer's viewpoint, More Than Words [MTW] is a casual, urban bookstore/café - complete with a full-service to-order beverage counter, a rich selection of used books and music for sale, comfy couches, and free wi-fi. Staffed by earnest, friendly young adult baristas and booksellers, the experience is akin to a compact, well-loved Barnes and Noble.

But my tour guide, the very impressive MTW Associate Marceline Josile [pictured below with the equally impressive MTW Founder and Executive Director Jodi Rosenbaum, and me], by ushering me down the back stairs, lifted the veil on the sophisticated and finely-tuned machine occupying the enormous basement below.

More Than Words' business is books. Made up of row-upon-row of bookcases loaded with painstakingly catalogued books for sale - some openly sorted, others in plastic bins - shelves packed with a hundred or more boxes of un-sorted fresh donations from individuals and businesses, and the enormous commercial laundry basket-fulls of rejects, the MTW "warehouse operation" is a model of data-driven efficiency.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a book you donate to a used book reseller? Well - after thanking you - the smart ones [like More Than Words] enter your books' ISBN numbers into a deep database of current statistics on the popularity and pricing of titles available from myriad online used book resellers.

Hey, it's nothing personal, but you can bet that a significant percentage of that beloved library you painstakingly collected and that you finally screwed up the courage to edit simply won't make the cut.  - More Than Words is a business. And one that's outgrowing its space. They simply can't accommodate dead inventory. So they are forced to cull, and they do so with ruthless precision.

But it's not just their organized workflow or their scientific methodology that impressed me. They post up-to-yesterday sales data parsed against sales-forecasts-by-profit-center [yup - they track seriously granular data] for the entire staff to see. They've got personal performance objectives quantified and posted for every co-worker to see. [Their level of transparency would - and should - embarrass the Obama Administration] Their level of operational efficiency and business savvy and acumen embarrassed me, quite frankly. I was so stunned and impressed by all Marceline and Jodi were showing me that it was easy to forget for a while that...

The REAL mission of More Than Words is to help shape and direct the precious lives of all the challenged young people they can. To quote from their excellent website, " Youth at MTW are in teh foster care system, court involved, homeless, or have dropped out of school. These subsets of the youth population face tremendous barriers to employment and there are few training programs that are designed to empower youth to develop the skills, experience and self-efficacy critical for a safe, meaningful and successful transition to adulthood."

I've seen it first-hand: More Than Words sells coffee and books to the public; but far more importantly, More Than Words delivers the goods to challenged young people when it comes to building self-respect, self-confidence and character, teaching real-world job skills, and an awareness of what it takes to make it in the working world. I met about a dozen of their current associates and graduates yesterday and have never been more impressed with the confidence, carriage, and professionalism of young people growing into their grown-up shoes.

I can't believe I did it...

...all by myself! - I've been in the restaurant business nearly 19 years, and the food business over 27 years, including my ice cream daze... But I really don't cook very much. Such is the blessing of living with women all my life who have been gifted with superb palates and a love of indulging them!

But of all the amazing things my mother or my wife have ever prepared in our home, none has ever been cereal. I'm cereal obsessed, frankly. I have it for breakfast 5-6 days a week [over my wife's protestations that I ought to better balance my diet]. No one other than my father - an equally marginal cook - has ever enjoyed cereal even close to as much as I do. And yet, all my life I've treated cereal as more-or-less a commodity that comes in a box - or a bag - and that I was locked into what "Megacorp" or "Micrograin" might decide was worthy of taking to market.

In fact, it never occurred to me until a couple of weeks ago that I could make my own cereal if I wanted... But an outstanding brunch at Craigie on Main opened my mind to that very possibility. 

With all the delicious choices on their eye-opening menu, never did I think I would choose to order granola... but I did. What made me do it? Coriander. "Coriander and cashew granola." I get a lot of coriander - seeds, stems, and leaves [think cilantro] - in my diet eating Cambodian food several days a week. Never did I think it would or could be an ingredient in my breakfast cereal. But it was. And it was sublime. 

Realizing they made it themselves, I Googled granola when I got home and up popped some recipes that looked shockingly easy, even for me. A week later, shopping at Bread and Circus [I know, it's been Whole Foods for years, but Bread and Circus has to be the best supermarket name ever killed; I won't let it die] I bought a half dozen dry organic ingredients, determined to try to make my own. 

One Sunday passed. Then another... Why so tentative? Was I nervous?... Finally this afternoon I printed out a recipe and got to work. Oats, sunflower seeds and wheat germ as a traditional foundation. Then a little improvisation, omitting coconut and substituting pistachios for almonds. 

The wet ingredients were built on the amazing Wood's Cider Mill's Grade B maple syrup [when did the world become convinced that Grade A maple syrup was best; if you've never tried Grade B, you owe it to yourself to make the effort to find some Grade B and tasted the difference: It's more rustic, earthier, with more "mapley" flavor]. My reading convinced me that most people felt the recipes as-is yielded results too sweet, so I cut the dark brown sugar in half. Then a little salt and a little canola oil and a basic granola was coming together...

But wait: What about that coriander?... I couldn't believe it: The jar was empty! I thought about cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, even ginger... but no, too trite. So in the end I reached for Garam Masala - and got an unexpectedly tasty result. So, late this cloudy afternoon, under a sprinkle of golden raisins and dried mango , cranberries, blueberries, and cherries [hey, what do you expect when you grab a bag of mixed, dried fruit from Trader Joe's?] I treated my wife to my first of what I am convinced is the first of many homemade cereals at my one hand... Now, if I can only figure out how to make wheat flakes and corn checks, then I'll really be on to something!

I can't wait for breakfast tomorrow morning! - Want to make your own? A simple Google search'll turn up a recipe like this. Consider a few tweaks to make it your own, and you're on your way!

Dith Pran: stirring memories

We certainly hadn't planned to begin blogging on a solemn note, but so be it. Dith Pran died today. I'm a little bit shocked that his passing has hit me so hard.

I hadn't seen the De Monteiros - my partners in and co-founders of The Elephant Walk - since the summer of 1978, and Nadsa and I hadn't exchanged letters or phone calls in perhaps a year or more when "The Killing Fields" hit Boston theaters in November of 1984. Although I had in many ways gone on with my life since the end of our fairytale high school romance, every appearance by Cambodia in the local news stirred up the adolescent memories. The effect of Dith Pran's story told on film on me was profoundly jarring.

While Nadsa and I held hands, falling silly-in-teenage-love between classes at Taipei American School in the spring of 1977, forming the bond that brought us all together many years later to create the restaurants you know today, Mr. Dith  - and many of Nadsa's aunts, uncles and cousins - was enduring the unspeakable horror that was the Cambodian autogenocide imposed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. We had no idea...

In late 1985, a year after that film came out I would meet the De Monteiros again, this time in France, and this time - thanks to Dith Pran - with a little bit of perspective, understanding for the first time something deeper about who they really were and what they had been through - and continue to live with - as a family and as a culture. No, notwithstanding romance and many other happinesses and worthwhile celebrations, life is no fairytale.

I'd like to add my voice to the many who today are appreciating the courageous life of Dith Pran.