My silence the last few days is merely a reflection of a rough schedule, combined with relatively uninteresting eating.
I did my usual supermarket demos on Friday and Saturday, one of which was a long stretch away in Beaverton. I think I’ll be doing one more Portland area demo this holiday season, then maybe one in January. It’s still painful to go down there because of high gas prices, but someow I got decent mileage on the last trip.
My dragon beard candy has been selling at a fairly decent clip, presumably due to holiday demand. I restocked the Seattle Uwajimaya faster than I expected. I hope that keeps up. But for cost reasons, I’m not doing anything dramatic this year; last year, I brought the candymakers to Seattle, Portland and the Bay Area to run some promotional events. I can’t quite cost justify that this year, because my available resources are too tight, and unless I do something larger in scale, maybe in New York or very dense urban outlet, this kind of promotion only just barely pays for itself.
Last night I had a decent dinner, but I just haven’t been eating well lately. Today I had no time for lunch. I don’t like to eat “out” right now because it doesn’t save much time and even at the low end of the cost scale, is more expensive than making the equivalent food myself, but I’ve caved in and grabbed a burrito, slice of pizza or similar pretty much daily recently.
I wanted to make nabe-yaki udon for dinner last night, and I realized I had no udon, or even soba. So I settled for some thin “glass noodles”, turning my essentially rustic Japanese dinner into an accidental pan-Asian fusion dish. It was comforting and fairly healthy, consisting mostly of vegetables, shiitake, and tofu. I hope it made up for my slice pizza, eggnog latte and cookie lunch, which was quite the opposite.