I found this great honey from JP, so I thought we could do a honey rosemary soda. Peter said he’d make a recipe. We thought we’d be serving the soda that evening. I think this was Monday…

So, what we learned: rosemary does some strange things when you heat it up.

First Peter tried blending up the rosemary, and combining it with a hot honey syrup. You couldn’t taste honey at all. It tasted like eating a Christmas tree. The next day, we tried steeping the rosemary in hot water and combining that steeped water with honey. It tasted like menthol.

We were about to give up on Friday when Peter had the morning off. He spent the whole morning at the kitchen testing the soda recipe, and brought this to us for dinner service. Pete steeped rosemary in cold syrup, then poured the honey over the top. You get the honey taste first, then a really good rosemary taste at the end. Look for this one and a couple new sodas (cinnamon, brown sugar ginger) at dinner next week.

We’ve been doing a 3pm special the past few weeks. First, fried pickles, then plantains, and now corn fritters. A bunch of you have stopped by to try them. But there was something missing. By the time dinner rolled around, we would be running low on drinks. I told Chris we needed to do a special drink just for the dinner crowd. I thought homemade sodas would be fun. The next day, we made it happen.

Pete went out and got a ton of watermelon, and blended it up to make watermelon soda. This picture is the base for the watermelon – isn’t it pretty? I brought some ginger, and we blended it with brown sugar to make a ginger soda.

This is the kind of thing that’s fun to do at dinner when it’s not as busy and you have the time to mix up the sodas one serving at a time. If you had sodas on Friday, let us know what you thought. We’ll be doing more throughout the week at dinner.

One great quality Clover Truck Managers have, is a well-stocked backpack, like a mom on a road trip, we need to be prepared for any situation.

In our backpacks you’ll find anything from zip ties to secure equipment, a phone charger to reboot our everyday iPhone Clover usage, and deodorant for those long hot summer lunch rushes. Key items in my bag are extra expo markers for our constant daily menu changes and a Re-Useable grocery bag to distribute random odd shaped items on request by Ayr or MIT truck.

This morning I get a phone call stating that a ” wing-nut” is missing from the fry cutter. This .20 cent item may seem worthless but without it means no French fries for you.  I rushed to the North End to the closest hardware store and was led into a dark room that smelled of a high school basement.  I purchased the wing-nut and 6 extra to put in my backpack so that I’d be covered if this were to happen again.

Sometimes when we have two people taking orders and the line is really long, it can be kind of confusing as to who you order from. One order-taker stands in front of the other order-taker. I stand back closest to the truck, so I need to beckon the next person in line. Sometimes I wave. Sometimes I raise my iPod in the air. Mostly I just say, “I can help the next person…down here!”

Apparently the folks at Dewey are way more timid about coming forward than at MIT. Ayr was taking orders and one person ordered from 6 or 10 feet away from where he was standing. He made an announcement to the line. Something like, it’s okay, guys, we don’t bite, you can come closer!

Alright, Ayr, I think I found the worst possible solution. I was at 7-11. They had two cashiers and a pretty long line. The second cashier finished with a customer. Then, to beckon the next person in line (me) he just raised his hands up and clapped loudly in my direction. I couldn’t stop laughing because I knew how he felt. But don’t worry, I won’t adopt his method.

Tony, I think you have some competition in the kitchen. Sara is one of our regulars. One day she said she was going to make seitan at home. I thought…Good luck!

Seitan is one of the most labor-intensive things we make. We knead wheat gluten and barbecue broth into something like a loaf of bread. We cut the dough into thin slices, and simmer them for an hour or longer in barbecue sauce. Then on the truck we bake the seitan with the cheddar and caramelized onions.

I told Sara the ingredients to buy (wheat gluten, the exact barbecue spices from Christina’s spice shop) and gave her some really detailed instructions on a paper bag.

Actually, it took two paper bags. There were some drawings. There were also some warnings…

Like when you’re mixing the wheat gluten with the barbecue broth you have to mix really, really fast, and then form it into a loaf really, really fast, or else, you end up with a crumbly mess, and not a loaf you can slice. And the water: wheat gluten:spices:salt ratio has to be right. And when you simmer the seitan in the barbecue broth you really can’t simmer it for too long, but if you undercook it you’ll get slices that are way too thick.

So after all this, I was really proud when a few days later, Sara came by with a slice of homemade barbecue seitan. It looked great. Thin, held together well, right amount of spice. We even put it in a pita, tested it side by side with Clover’s, and we couldn’t tell the difference. Great job, Sara!

See the bags of carrots that guy is holding? Those are headed to Clover. I went down to Rhode Island to see how some of our food gets distributed. Distribution is an area you don’t hear about much. You hear about farmers, you hear about restaurants. But distribution, ordering, deliveries is something we deal with every day. (I think Brian could could have written an entire post on trying to make sense of the woman who mans the phones after business hours at Russo’s, but that’s another story.)

We get some of our produce, and the Narrangansett yogurt you’ve been eating in the mornings, through a pretty slick nonprofit called Farm Fresh Rhode Island. I worked with them one morning to get a huge volume of stuff from farmers to restaurants.

At 7am, farmers in trucks pulled up to this huge old candy factory outside Providence. We hauled and sorted thousands of dollars of rhubarb, strawberries, potatoes, eggs, and packed it up into trucks headed out to restaurants in Rhode Island and Boston. We held produce headed to the fanciest restaurants in Providence, but also to the Blue Cross Blue Shield cafeteria, Clover, and McCormick and Schmicks.

I got to talking with a couple of the women in charge. They wanted an easy way for chefs to get local food (not farmer’s markets or CSAs). Midnight on Mondays they post up a listing of what farmers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have available. You log on, search by farm, and select quantities of what you want. On Thursday they deliver. It’s a non-profit so they’re not taking a huge cut from farmers, like a lot of the big distribution companies do, and the produce is always awesome.

Maybe it has something to do with Hannah, you can see her there talking to the farmer. She got into this through a college volunteer job and Americorps, but it turns out she’s actually got food distribution in her blood (her grandfather started a food distribution co. in Providence decades ago).

Look out for some more posts on this, including some by Rolando, on other ways we source produce: how we’re getting it now, how we want to get it in the future.

The new folks might not know this, because I’ve tried hard to keep it it under wraps, but I have a nickname. It’s “Bad Looker,” or Bill for short. Jeremiah made it up, and it’s not really that funny. But sometimes, it really fits. Sometimes, I just don’t look hard enough. Yesterday was one of those times.

We’ve been doing an afternoon special for the past two weeks. I love these specials. This week, fried plantains. At 3pm, it was time to start frying up the plantains. We ran through the few plantains left from yesterday, and then I started looking for the plantains that had been dropped off that afternoon in the resupply van. I looked everywhere. Kevin looked everywhere. There were no plantains on the truck.

I called Rolando, I called Chris, I even texted Enzo, suggesting that our truck had been sabotaged as part of the truck-to-truck competition.

Then, a customer came by, saying she’d been thinking about fried plantains all day. We had to tell her we were all sold out. I looked one more time. Right at the front of the truck, hidden under some crates, was a white plastic container, full of plantains. Kevin tried to call after the woman, but she was already gone. We didn’t get your name – but please come back tomorrow. Ask for Bill. I’ll fry you up some plantains.

Those of you who’ve been following us for a while know about the back door on the MIT truck. It is exactly the right height for banging your head when you’re stepping off the truck. Nearly everyone has fallen victim to it at one point or another.

Last week, LJ banged his head really hard and Chris Anderson (who’s just come on full time) decided it would be the last time.

That’s LJ in the foreground recovering, and Chris in the background, attaching foam and bright red tape to the ledge. It’s an ugly fix, but the alternative is worse. Sorry LJ. Thank you, Chris.

Meet Bonnibel. She worked in communications until she realized she loved the world of food. Ask her about farming, composting, or food policy, and you’ll get as excited as she is. Bonnibel’s from Texas but her family is Filipino, I’ve been begging her to make us some Filipino food.

Bonnibel’s been with us for two months, but it was just during the last week that she meandered over to the fryer. And if the rest of us are lucky, the fryer is where she’ll stay. Bonnibel rocks the fryer. Even though it’s hot back there, the fry baskets are heavy, and you can hardly hear because the hood is so loud, everything she puts out is hot, perfectly cooked, and ready before we even know we need it.

Bonnibel might have realized she’s going to have a tough time moving away from the fry station. Tonight she started signing emails as “Fryer B.”

This is Antony. He was our last dinner customer of the night last night. And as far as I know, he is our most shining example of a successful pre-order.

Nearly every day, Antony comes by for breakfast, and while he’s at the truck, he pre-pays for his lunch order – one chickpea fritter and rosemary fries. He comes back at 1pm to pick it up.

The crew, and especially Brian, has gotten really good at having Antony’s chickpeas and fries coming right out of the fryer by the time we see him rounding the corner at 12:59.

Soon Antony won’t be at MIT every day. He promised us he’ll still come by on the days he’s on campus, but Antony, you’ve trained us well! – I think we’ll always have a chickpea and fries waiting at 1pm for you.