Thursday, February 24, 2011

Part 1: Corn Chowder on the Brain

Melissa's delightfully pink kitchen.
Posted by Amy Baranski
It all started one day when I was, as I usually am these days, hanging out in Melissa's pink kitchen chatting away about this and that. Melissa was making this AMAZING corn chowder for a friend's mother's memorial service. I had brought down my immersion blender for her to use because surprisingly between the two of us we didn't have a food mill (which, as we confirmed, performs and entirely different function). As Melissa was painstakingly working her chowder through a mesh strainer by hand I stole a little taste, and it was so good. So, good that I could have some right now for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

A few days later we were hanging out watching the NFL playoffs. I was flipping through a magazine and found an article about food entrepreneurs in Portland, Oregon. Several things flashed in my mind: Melissa's corn chowder, the pink kitchen, corn chowder, Melissa's love of cooking, corn chowder, bicycles, corn chowder, not working in front of a computer for the rest of my life, corn chowder, and how I could get Melissa to make some more corn chowder. So we started talking about going into business: the soup business (and in my mind that was the corn chowder business). Both Jaime and Bob were super excited about the idea.

Superbowl weekend was upon us and Melissa and Jaime threw a great party which included homemade soft pretzels! (among other delectables) which were devoured almost immediately after they came out of the oven. Sometime later that day, (or was it the morning after?) Melissa said: Soup and Pretzels. The sounds of cheering and laughter, applause and party noise makers, reverberated around us as though it were the the stroke of midnight on New Year's eve.

by Amy continued in Part 2: Enterprising.

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