I
was trying to explain to my French other-half what an incubator
was. In America, we don’t use the term just for babies, but we use it to
describe groups that exist in places like San Francisco, where new
ideas are born from creative minds which are often the result of thinking
“outside the box.” There are the tech giants, like Apple, Facebook, and
Google, that started that way, but it also extends to the food
community and you can now find thriving businesses producing everything
from bean-to-bar chocolates to organic tofu noodles, and reviving
heirloom breeds of tomatoes and long-lost strains of wheat, milling them
into loaves of exceptional breads and other treats.
One
of my unrealized dreams, that I’ve been incubating – and perhaps I was
ahead of my time (or I’ve missed the boat…), has been to open up an ice
cream shop. But even before I got the silly notion of my own ice
cream shop into my head (overworked friends who have bakeries always
warned me not to get into the business – sometimes offering to unload
theirs on me…for
free!), I wanted to have a store specializing in
homemade candies.
 Sure,
making candy isn’t anything new; in the relatively small town I grew up
in, we had a candy shop in the center where you could watch the candy
makers working through the white-paned windows inside the store,
which separated the customers from the workers, who were pouring
sugar syrups and dipping chocolates in the back. It had opened in
1931 and lasted until 1997.
Some of the candies and chocolates were stacked up nicely on shelves, and
others were lined up on tables around the store. My grandmother was never
without at least one box of their buttercrunch in
her house. Proof that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment