Sharpening Your Knife -- Your Life

Which is more dangerous -- A dull knife or a razor sharp knife? If you guessed sharp knife you are absolutly correct. A dull knife will slip when you try to cut. Whenever I pick up a knife, I make sure I run it over a steel to hone the edge just a little more. For more info on steeling your knife click here.

What about cutting say a tomatoe without cutting your fingers. I learned from the first time I cut something in the kitchen to always curl you fingers under and use your knuckles as a guide. For proper knife handling click here.

What about our lives? Sometimes my life feels dull and needs a good sharpening. But how can I 'steel' my life, what tool or tools can I use when my life needs just a little sharpening. Here's what I'm learning to do.

1. Work-out, ah, the pain of getting up and lifting weights, running or excerising - yuk. Afterwards though, I feel good, like now, two good days of workout.


2. Read, learn something new, exciting. Give the brain a run over the steel.


3. Do something different. Go hiking, take a boat to Catalina, Drive to the Grand Canyon, somewhere different.


4. Give yourself an adrenlin rush. Hanglde, Waterski, Bungee jump, drive a go cart, shoot a pistol -- walk down Avenida Revolution in Tijuana (maybe it's safer to just swim with sharks)

You get the idea. Growth is change, sharpening our lives makes change easier. Well thanks for reading, I think I'll go slice a tomatoe or limes or something...

Laughing and Living -- Longer

You want to live longer?? Then laugh...Yeah just let loose and laugh from the pit of your belly. You want more productive employees? Make them laugh.

Click here to see the Health Benefits of Laughter

How many times have I heard people say, SMILE! With frowns on their faces and a serious tone, THEY SAY SMILE!

It never works. It's like the fable of the wind and the sun.

The Wind and The Sun make a bet. The wind bets he can make the man take off his jacket. The Sun takes the bet and the contest begins. The Wind blows and blows - The harder he blows the tighter the man grips his jacket. Exhausted and spent the Wind gives up.

Now, The Sun's turn. He smiles at the man and turns up the heat. The man loosens his coat, beads of sweat begin to appear on his brow. He takes his jacket off and smiles at The Sun.

The moral is, you can't force people to do what is against thier nature. Soooo, how do you get someone, an employee, a friend, a co-worker, to smile? Here's what I do. I get them to laugh. If a person laughs, he or she can't help but to smile. And in the hospitality industry, as well as most service industries guests and clients return based on the 'Service' they recieve. To me Service starts with a smile.

Here's a joke to get you started:

Doctor my son swallowed my pen, what do I do? Use a pencil until I get there.

Join us Friday's at La Villa Basque as 10 crazy women share their humour and talents with us as they prepare for 'America's Next Top Sketch Comedy Show'. You will laugh yourselves into a healthier lifestyle. More info? Click Here.

Building The Business-Baking The Bread

I used to try new things in the restaurants and lounges where I worked. I would promote them, send out e-blasts, tell people about them and wait....and wait............and impatiently wait... After two or three times of trying, I would throw in the towel. Give up.

As I age, get older, and work in a town where some business have been around for 100 years, I have had a revelation. I haven't given my ideas time.

I love baking bread, especially rye bread. However every time I seemed to bake bread, they never seemed to rise to their full potential. They were too short, too thick or too bland. What was I doing wrong?

I am not a person with much patience or do I follow recipes. I am a man who tends to head off down his own trail, and I often get lost. Like I am with this blog...Back to bread.

I found out my two main problems in baking perfect bread.

1. I used water that was too hot and killed off the yeast. (I thought hotter water would produce quicker rising) Wrong!


2. I wanted the bread now! Immediately. So I didn't let it rise enough.


3. I'll blame this one on my daughter, as soon as the bread came out of the oven, she would slaughter it with a knife, killing it before it had finished cooking. (bread needs to sit for at least 20 minutes before we sink our teeth into it.

I'm older, I'm more patient and I made some excellent 'Honey Wheat' the other day. I used warm water, not hot, and I waited till it rose to perfection. Though my daughter slaughtered the loaf before the 20 minutes. One loaf served perfection.

Anyway, back to Restaurant and Lounges. I have realized that to have a successful ongoing event or restaurant is to find a recipe that works, that is popular. I need to fight the urge to change the basics of the recipe, which is patience, the right temperature and time. Time being the most important.

So as I work on building Lunches, Friday Night Happy Hour and Catering - I am following the principles of Bread Making.

Click Here for that great Deli Rye Recipe.

Or if you read this blog, call me, or e-mail me and I will bake you a loaf. http://www.lavillabasque.com/

joe@lavillabasque.com

Building Friendships

It seems like time is going by so quickly lately. Maybe 'cause I'm getting older or maybe cause I'm getting busier. Days turn into weeks which turn into months and then years. I see the same faces, the same smiles and I look forward to going to work. Not for the job so much as for the community of people I work with.

Many of us have worked with the same people for years and have never really taken the time to get to know them. We get to work at 6, take a break at 9, go to lunch at 11:30, and leave by 3. We get to know our co-workers birthday's, we hear stories of their families, their kids growing up. We share their tears, and their laughter, but only in short time increments.

We are living in uncertain times. Someone gets laid off and it is almost like a death. It isn't the loss of the job so much as the loss of community, the loss of friends.

Now more than ever we need to develop and cement our friendships. We need to get to know each other once more, we need need to celebrate each other's birthdays, retirements, birth of new ones and lifestyle changes. We need to bond as co-workers and grow as communities.

La Villa Basque has a place for that with our Friday Night Community hour, a happy hour to celebrate, unwind, and bond with your co-workers.

The Value of Hard Work

Day after day after day after monotonous day. Will we ever get ahead in this economy? Where's the hope? A thousand sales calls and not one bite? Restaurant sales slip despite our best intentions. HELP! Will someone please bail me out of this insanity? A couple hundred thousand of that stimulus money will do.

Oh well got to get back to work, type this worthless blog, try to shine another light on LaVillaBasque Restaurant. But before I do I want to talk about that vial of gold up there. Yes that is real 24 karat gold. Flakes and dust. Alone it is pretty worthless but fill that vial and it's work close to $1000. For one person it's a lot of work, but the value will go up as the value of money goes down. Which brings me to me point,

..................................................VALUE

............................................UP IN

...................................GOES

............................WORK

................HARD

LIKE GOLD

It would take two people a whole weekend to fill that bottle, four people would take a day and half, but a dozen hard working - dirt digging fools could fill four of those bottles if they knew where to dig.

Lately I've been trying things, testing the waters, prospecting if you will and still haven't filled any vials. Yet I think I may be close, I am beginning to see a few flakes of gold in the dirt I dig and more people are coming on board. People not afraid of getting dirty of waking up with sore muscles. It's time to stake our claim. Our claim is hard work in numbers will equal success. It can't be stopped.

An Entertainment Co-op

The Entertainment Factory
In the 1920’s and 1930’s Hollywood operated much differently than it did today. The movies they produced were created in Factories. These Entertainment Factories as they were called did everything from Writing to Marketing.

They were communities of Writers, Actors, Directors, Producers, and Artists who all worked, ate and often lived under one roof. And they produced Movies, Radio, Theatre and Eventually Television. Movies rolled off their assembly lines like Fords and Packards, often one a week. They were run by insane moguls who owned the talent, and drove them to excellence and quantity.

Those were the Glory days of Hollywood. They eventually died out and the communities eventually dissipated. The Entertainment Factories were tore down and replaced by modern studios, agents and lawyers.

At La Villa Basque, I want to recreate ‘The Entertainment Factory’ and bring it into the 21st Century using modern tools to create Modern Entertainment Products. I want to bring back the community and am looking for well rounded Entertainment Professionals who can help me rebuild an Entertainment Factory which will be open to the public and feature, Comedy Nights, Showcases, Dinner Theatre, Music and Dance nights. I need not only Actors, Writers, Dancers and other Creative Types, but I need a team to take care of guests. I need Waiters, Bartenders, and Hosts.

I know so many talented people in the entertainment industry who are not working. Not for lack of talent but because they never get the opportunity to sell themselves.

At La Villa Basque’s Entertainment Factory we are building a commune of Creative professionals. We will work together, earning money as servers, hostess and bartenders while we develop products we can present and sell to the public.

Friday signals our first Event entitled, The Salsa Lounge.

Bad Economy? Great News!

Some people say that over 75% of all gold is still in the ground.
75%!!!
So lets go pick it up and we can all become millionaires and retire....Right?

The Economy sucks, it keeps getting worse, especially for those hot shots on wall street who were getting million dollar bonuses. The days of easy money are over. They are over for all lazy people who could turn a buck with a few convincing words and a little pressure. These wall street whiz kids now sit in their million dollar condos watching The Simpsons, eating raman and drinking bud light as the bill collectors call day and night.

Great news? For who?

Let's go back to the gold. 75% of all gold is still in the ground waiting to be found.

I went mining with a couple of 'Old Timers' we found a place where they were certain their was gold and we, 'Picked it all up? And went home?'...No we dug....we raked...we chiseled that hard dusty rock in one of the most forlorn places on earth, the Mojave desert. I shoveled and shoveled for hours we processed dirt, dust and black sand. Eventually we began to see the fruits of our labor, specks of gold flake, began to appear after hours of dry washing, (separating the heavy from the light), sifting the larger from the small, washing the heavy sand from the mud and finally panning the gold from the black sand.

After a week end of hard gold mining we found about 1.5 ounces of gold, about $1300. Ten years ago our Whiz kids would drive by in their Porches on their way to Vegas, laughing at a bunch of hard working miners. But now their Porches have been repossessed and they sit wonder how to make an easy buck. I don't think they'll find it -- the easy buck.

So this is great news? You bet! It's great news for all the hardworking Americans who still have the spirit of the west driving them. They understand that there is still a lot of gold in the ground and they don't mind getting a little dirty, working a little harder, for a little less. They know that the price of Gold (hard work) continues to rise and will pay-off with patience, determination and perseverance.

With this bad economy it's the hard workers who dig dirt all day that will eventually prosper. So, instead of giving up, it's time to grab a shovel and start finding the gold.

At La Villa Basque, we are branching out into new areas, Theatre, Motion Pictures, Art, Teaching, Dance, Music and Entertainment. We know there is gold in those areas for those willing to dig.

Are you one of those new prospectors, The New 49's? Do you have an idea? A group? or Know where there might be gold, call us, let's work together -- Let's Create. Joe Eagan 626.202.4251