Doggies Menu

I just read this in the Dining Times. It is about time that American Restaurants are becoming more doggie friendly and accommodating. Where I come from, you can bring your best friend almost anywhere (Germany. Many upscale restaurants are enticing customers by offering dog menus. Restaurants generally take underutilized outdoor patio space where owners can dine with their dogs. Some have separate menus with special entrees for dogs: anything from lamb stir fry to meat loaf to scrambled eggs with bacon bits. When the pooch needs to take a bathroom break, space is provided at the side or behind the restaurant, complete with waste pickup bags. One Washington restaurant offers a “pooch patio menu” with items like the bowser beer (a nonalcoholic beer) and a frozen raw bone sprinkled with dill. The restaurant’s pastry chef bakes fresh dog biscuits as well. “It’s not trying to profit off the pets. It’s to draw in the customers,” explained one restaurant owner.

I think Bailey Connor needs to develop a doggie menu and cookies.. Some of our happy brides and grooms bring their best friend to the wedding.

 

Top Trend News

Say goodbye to the cathedral veil and hello to the birdcage veil. Accessories such as leaves in the hair and clips with feathers will lead the way this year. Nature and simplicity are back, along with shades of browns, greens, and platinum are in. Black will the new black mixed with the traditional red. Homemade as opposed to bought, personalized instead of mass quantity. These will be the trends due to our economy and green movement. Backyard weddings instead of big hotel soirées will become increasingly popular. Family, close friends and budgets will be the focus again. Recently the trend has been for brides to pick designers and colors and let their bridesmaids pick a style. Not this year, Brides will pick colors and class such as fancy or casual but send their bridesmaids out on their own to find dress, allowing each person to customize their own budgets. This will allow participation for any size budget and relieve a lot of unnecessary stresses for all involved. One person can go to a discount store, while another may choose Saks.

The Cake Balls
The cake ball is the new cupcake tower for now. Just think of the endless combinations of cakes, icings, toppings, and decorations. Chocolate, vanilla, carrot, nut, toffee, caramel, pistachio, red velvet, orange, and the list goes on and on. Whatever combination you can imagine, you can create.

Restaurants join in on eating at home:
Have you looked around the grocery store recently? Have you noticed that more and more restaurant chains are offering packaged foods here? Well the newest contributor of this fad is Burger King. Yes that’s right. ….Burger King has joined the others such as Macaroni Grill, White Castle, and TGI Friday’s in the grocery stores. With today’s economy more and more people are choosing to eat at home instead of going out. So restaurants have decided to go where the people are going….the grocery store. It’s not the total answer in making up lost revenue, but it is a start.

Instead of Mexican, Chinese, and Italian restaurants, you will begin to see more region specific restaurants popping up such as Moroccan, Chilean, Sicilian, and Peruvian just to name a few.

Smaller is better as well as variety over quantity. Come up with fun and exciting menus using portion control. We all want to watch what we eat and or use better ingredients. Instead of planning huge full course meals, make it fun with bite size samples. Shot glasses full of soups, bites of desserts placed on decorative spoons, sandwich bites, steak bites, vegetable kabobs, sushi on a stick etc… This can be cost effective, healthier, and classy all at the same time. Just think how much time your guests will think you spent planning this fast, simple, and elegant meal, not to mention how impressed with your creativity they will be.

My information is from Catersource

What are your thoughts, opinions, and views on molecular gastronomy?
Fun, exciting, a fad, here to stay or over rated?
Available here at Bailey Connor Catering

Wedding ColorTrends

Not quite purple, a little blue, touched with pale gray. Lilac is like demure lavender’s chic, cosmopolitan cousin. Which is probably why we love this shade so much for 2011 & 2012 weddings. Paired with white or cream, it’s a dream for springtime bridal palettes. Add a stripe of black here and there, and you’ve got a winter wedding color scheme to die for. We also love how lilac lends itself both to contemporary and vintage-style weddings with equal elegance. Plus just the word lilac makes us think of the spring bloom’s infinitely alluring scent. Subtle and sophisticated, and never, ever dull–what’s not to love about lilac?

Vintage is in.

Adopted from the Houston Wedding Blog

Top Food and Beverage Trends for 2011
Posted by Ivan Maminta

As our past makes up our future, I have gathered what could possibly be the coming trends. These musings and forecasts come from people I know who are well entrenched in the Food and Beverage industry. Thye were kind enough to share their knowledge and experience. These points are not set in stone, as all trends rarely are, but it gives you a glimpse of what to expect after the fireworks die down.

Food network
Social networking has made the world a smaller and better place. With Multiply, Friendster, MySpace and with the explosion of Facebook, more and more people are reconnecting. Eventually a lot of chefs, cooks and foodies signed up and started exchanging recipes. It is possible now to share recipes, techniques and information with people around the world. It then follows that Food Social Networking will be the next best thing. Foodbuzz.com is currently the leader here with over 3 million users. An upsurge into more efficient food and beverage storage will be noticeable this year as the summer festivities begin. Grocery shoppers will be dependent on social networking more than advertising to help them to decide on where to buy and where to eat. A kind of social currency, as the blogosphere has anchored itself as a major word-of-mouth avenue. Gourmet and gastronomy will no longer be an exclusive club for foodies.

Frankenfood
With the latest technologies in bioengineering, it is now possible to come closer to that utopia of the perfect food supply. We should be expecting more consistent food crops, and therefore better quality ingredients. But this has its own sets of controversies. On the other end of the spectrum, the nutritional aspect of food production and consumption will definitely be looked at more closely.

Green Advocacy
Consumers are now more than ever aware of the consequences for irresposible production practices. Tree huggers were right all along. Now the rest of us are catching up. We now look for ingredients, products, restaurants and food and beverage manufacturing that translates into environmental resposibility, efficiency and cost management. It is expected the demand for produce that are treated with little or no chemicals, safe manufacturing practices and sustainable production will increase. More emphasis will be put on local produce which do not require huge transportation expenses. With this, we could expect the rise of celebrity farmers making headway in local production, as well as the interest to have a home garden. We would now know more about seasonality, about the importance freshness. There will be a rise in kitchen composting. There will be more restaurants trying to get 'green certified' to attract the growing number of clientele who are environmentally conscious.

Healthy convenience
Convenience stores will be packing more healthy options on its menus. Additional channels of distribution will be evident as more and more are adopting the grab-and-go lifestyle and looking for healthy alternatives. Quick lunches that pack the nutritional punch will be readily available, in environmentally safe packaging! Copy cat competition will have independent and chain restaurants to adopt new menu items that have been top sellers at competitors. Donut shops are now going into the smoothie business. The smoothie bar will now be incorporating gourmet burgers. Move over Cupcakes, whoppie cakes, cake balls, smores and more comfort food desserts will be popping up ridiculously in every nook and crany. Soon there will be so much noise, differentiation will muddle out the true identity of the dining experience. Soon the phrase 'jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none' will prosper. Traditional ingredients from Asia are crossing over from food to drinks, bestowing wellness properties.

Back to simplicity
With the recession affecting the globe, what did we discover? Simple sells. Chefs and restaurants now are capitalizing on the power of classic combinations and pure ingredients. Mad Men has tickeled the Baby Boomer's fancy, so expect a return to Mama's home cooking. 'Rustic' will replace 'molecular gastronomy' as the new buzzword. Foodservice operators have been having success with retro menu items—things that people grew up with. From a culinary perspective, however, many operators have been able to add a unique twist to these timeless favorites.

The Offal Truth
In order to control food costs, savvy chefs and restaurateurs are looking at these odd parts to offset the expensive steaks and chops. Expect specials on tongue and oxtail along with beef and pork cheeks, chicken gizzards, tripe, and other innards and odd parts. Oxtail Ravioli? Beef Cheek in red wine reduction?

Tart it up
Restaurateurs are noticing a trend....we need more zing, more pop to what we eat. By next year, restaurant menus will be featuring a balance in sour, salty and sweet sensations, in the form of pickled vegetables, the rise of Ethnic cooking and exotic flavors. Sugar and spice and everything nice will get it's second serving in the spotlight. Extreme flavors will gain ground. Moody Food that make claims relating to improved mood and emotional wellbeing will represent the next generation of functional products.

Retail therapy
Supermarket Steak sales will surge as the avid diner rediscovers his own dinner table at home. Artisan items such as goose liver pate, pickled vegetables and salad dressings will dominate the grocery shelves, each capitalizing on 'home grown'. Private labeling will bring back the desire for personal. We will see the emergence of the personal chef service against traditional catering services. The decline in restaurant sales means that operators will try to reach the clientele through new avenues, such as selling TGIF Sauces on grocery shelves.

I found this posting from Ivan very interesting, and could have not said it any better. All good stuff to know.

Ten Tips for going Green

Ten tips for Going Green!!

1. Change to Fluorescent Bulbs - If every house in the United States changed all of the light bulbs in their house, it would be equivalent to taking one million cars off the streets.
2. Don’t buy Bottled Water- Instead buy a water filter for your sink and buy reusable containers. You will have the same taste without the waste.
3. Be creative when Wrapping Gifts- Use old maps, magazines, newspaper etc. It helps the environment and you can still have fun wrapped gifts. Use shoe ads when wrapping a pair of shoes, or clothing ads for clothes. You get the picture!
4. Turn Off your computer at night- You can save up to $15.00 a year by turning your computer off at night. It much more effective than “sleep” mode.
5. Stop the Junk Mail- None of us need the extra “junk” and it hurts the environment. There are many companies out there who can help you stop bulk mailings, such as, www.DoNotMail.org/StopJunkMail or www.StopTheJunkMail.com , just to name a few.
6. Use Matches instead of Lighters- Lighters just end up in our landfills, whereas matches are made from recycled products and can be disposed of without hurting our environment.
7. Wash clothes in Cold Water- This can cut your energy usage down by 85% when doing laundry and gives your hot water heater a break.
8. Go to the Library- You can find 90% of your books, magazines, and many movies at your local library. This will save you money as well as cut down on the paper and ink used to print new books. If you have to buy new books give them to other people or charities when you are finished.
9. Invest in high quality products- They may cost more up front but will save you and the environment in the future.
10. Buy local products- Whenever it is possible, buy products that come from your town, state, or country. This cuts the fuel usage down tremendously and helps to stimulate your local economy.

By working together and passing along tips, we can all help to keep our environment GREEN!
You can do it, we are trying very hard here at Bailey Connor to do our part.
Because of my German heritage and background it is easy for me. I grew up with three trash cans in our kitchen, I learned early on.

A PLATE OF OF TRENDS

Catering and entertaining have truly become sort of an art over the past ten years.
With the popularity of cooking programs on TV, celebrity chefs, newspaper and media piece written, the public is more educated and interested about their food.
The corporate meeting planner realizes that meeting attendees have become more sophisticated and expect the “Wow” for any catered event, from small to large. The attendee or guest is driving the trend. A successful planner and caterer must follow the latest “in” foods, along with offering cutting edge presentations and unique menus that invigorate the palate.
New trends seem to come to us from the west or east coast. Houston tends to be a bit traditional at times. When the mashed potato martini bar came to Houston (oven roasted garlic mashed potatoes, topped with sour cream, crumbled apple wood bacon, gruyere cheese, and scallions, served in a martini glass) it took time to convince the public, who is used to enjoying their mashed potatoes served on a plate, topped with gravy, to give it a try.
Trends are exciting and take us in a new direction, and here are some more trends coming your way:
Going Green: Today’s consumers are seeking venues and menus that are green and environmentally friendly. People want to know that the food is grown organically and harvested locally.
Small is better: Hors d’oeuvres, tapas, dim sum, and mini-desserts allow attendees to sample more than one item and relates to the clients dietary concerns, It favors more expensive and better tasting ingredients. Much of the hors d’oeuvre and dessert action happens at stations, with duo-or trio tasting plates, martini glasses, shot glasses, and dessert drinks.
Fusion: Blending cuisines remains a popular trend. This involves incorporating foods from parts of the world, such as French, Indian, Southwest Asia, Thai and American cuisines.
Food/Beverage Tasting: Beer, wine, cheese, chocolate testing’s, versions of the same food or beverage, have become very popular.
Edible centerpieces: Wow your guests with great centerpieces made out of baskets of flatbreads, tortillas, pita, Indian puff-fry breads, breadsticks, olive bread, ciabatta, and focaccia, flat breads. This is different and it will save money.
Ethnic and Latin American Cuisine: Caterers are offering a wide ethnic diversity in menus. The Latin American cuisine is on top of the list, combining the flavors of fish, meats, vegetables and fruits from South and Central America and the Caribbean.

Innovative Presentations: The request for extraordinary is the ordinary in a successful catering business. Today’s consumers expect unique menus and the newest and hottest innovations in buffets and action stations. Seated dinners have taken a back seat, while passed hors d’oeuvres and mini meals served on a station or a buffet, and themed events have taken over. Cocktail parties are making a come back, giving the caterer greater flexibility and creative possibilities in food and beverage, and it allows guests to mingle and network in a less formal atmosphere. Signature and seasonal cocktails, wine with dinner are evolving. Décor is equally following this trend and bringing back the lounge look. It involves comfort cushions, chaises, low tables and yes even beds and daybeds.
It seems that once again the classics are the foundation for future trends.

Latest Trends

Stations and Mini Meals:
Because of the economy, clients are looking for value when they choose their caterer. As a result, according to Catersource magazine, new trends are appearing within the catering industry. Formal seated events are disappearing and being replaced with lounge-like settings. An overarching trend is increased interaction among guests and service staff. As a result, mini plates or any other unusual vessels to serve the food on; tasting bars are becoming increasingly popular. Having the service staff wear costumes at each station provides a fun atmosphere and entertainment that clients are looking for. Additionally, new trends also include changes within the food on the menu. We are suggesting to bring more value to the table, by using more inexpensive types of meat such as pork , flank steaks or hanger steak, to accommodate the tight budgets faced by many clients. Comfort foods that include modern ingredients, presentations and flavor profiles are among the newest changes to catering menus. New trends within serving include party rovers. These movable carts are capable of serving four different types of food. Once again, the biggest trend in 2009 is VALUE!