Goodbye For Now Baking
So throughout my whole life, I've always enjoyed baking. There was just something about serving something comforting to people I cared about that always brought me joy. Over the summer I stopped baking and realized I wanted to bake one last incredible thing before I left for school. After going through countless cookbooks I finally found something that would be my last creation for the next couple of months. This book called The Brown Betty had a recipe for a ginormous pound cake with tea buttercream, and within that exact moment of reading the description I knew it was the one.
And the final result:
Overall, it was pretty much a success. You can probably tell I'm not the best with presentation, but I had a ton of fun making this. If you want to try out this masterpiece for yourself, here's the link.
breakfast restaurant around the corner from his house the next morning, and it would be the first time that I was going to a restaurant without my mom to help me translate the menu into German. I was honestly so worried about the next morning that I barely slept that night. When my first few friends woke up, we all got up and got dressed, and headed out to the breakfast place. My legs were totally wobbly the whole way there, and even more so once we sat down. The waitress passed out the menus and I was already dreading the struggle that lay ahead of me, as I was a picky eater, but as soon as I opened it I was surprised that I could understand what the menu said. A smile cracked my worried look, and I remember reading the entire menu from cover to cover even if I had no interest in the thing just because of how excited I was about the ease with which I was breezing through the menu. I ordered my own food, got exactly what I wanted, and remembered how proud of myself I was as I walked out of that restaurant. This was definitely one of my most impactful moments that I can remember with my friends, but there were many other small moments where in hindsight they definitely had a big influence on me. We were all very close, and spent as much time together as possible. A few weeks after the “breakfast breakthrough” I got a test back in English class, and was absolutely shocked that I had gotten a B- on my test. I was so excited that as soon as the bell rang to let us out, I ran through the door as fast as I could to my mom. She was just as shocked as I was about the grade. We were both ecstatic and celebrated with my favorite meal for dinner.
ReplyDeleteThat night I lay in my bed and thought to myself what did I do differently this time? I was totally confused. How did I get such a good grade? Then it dawned on me. By surrounding myself with English speaking friends, and exposing myself to the language more than just from books and flashcards the more I could understand them and the better I was doing on my tests. The key to my success had been lying at my feet all this time and I had been approaching the situation from the wrong angle the whole time. By exposing myself not only to textbook language but also the common vernacular and language of daily conversation I was able to learn English. The combination of all the structured things I was learning from the books, and the free flowing style of language spoken on a daily basis I was able to progress much faster than just learning by the books. Since then, I have embraced every social aspect of life. I realized that the only way to become fluent was to jump into the deep end without floaties and sink or float.
As I embraced the social factors of my life I joined as many clubs as I could. I had soccer on Monday, basketball on Wednesdays, and band on Thursdays. The more things I did the more I felt confident with my language. Shortly after I also joined Lego Robotics and a RC car club. Within a few months I was back at the same level as all of my classmates, I was scoring well on tests, and my writing became much better. As I went through middle school and high school I tried my best to stay involved in things like swim team and band. Along with more schooling and social experience my English level started surpassing that of my parents at around the time I was in ninth grade. One specific memory I have of this was one evening after dinner, I was sitting at my desk in my room, doing homework, when my Dad knocked on my door. He came in with his laptop, and had a question about an email that his colleague had sent him.
To say that I was nervous was an understatement. I felt like a wet noodle. What if I forgot the answer to a question a customer asked me? I didn’t want to look like an idiot and quite possibly be the cause of someone never coming back to our establishment. I sat on my stool waiting. Even with the promotion that we ran the entire week it took a bit over an hour for our first customer to walk in.
ReplyDeleteMonths went by and we began building our clientele. I got better at talking to customers and no longer sounded like a nervous wreck when talking to them. That’s not to say that there weren’t many cases where a customer intimidated me from what they told me. Being the first person that a customer sees when they walk up also means I’m the first person to take the heat if they had any criticism. I had to learn how to deal with that and it was not easy at first. Everything that was said I tried to not take personal however when someone is in your face yelling at you about how they messed up their order it is hard not to when they insult you. My personal favorite (or worst?) is when you can barely hear what a customer is ordering and you have to lean in unconformably closer and ask them, “Sorry, could you say that again please?”. Sometimes I have to ask this question three or even four times and it is quite possibly one of the most awkward things ever. One of the worst interactions I ever had was in our second year of business, where a man came up to order a chicken burrito. We quickly finished his order, gave it to him and he came back yelling at me that he didn’t order chicken and instead ordered Al Pastor, or marinated pork. He was quite upset for this, so upset in fact that he cursed at me and threw the unfinished burrito at my face and left. In the moment, I could not comprehend what had just happened but I felt helpless. I could not believe that what occurred just happened but in the heat of the moment I was quite upset. All that doubt came back to me and I thought to myself if it was something that I did that caused his reaction.
During all of this time, I was still of course going to school. I would bring my backpack with me to the restaurant to do my homework while it was slow. Once it got late, my mom would take over my duties and let me go to the car and sleep. I was extremely cramped in our 1999 Honda Accord but that was my bed for about 2 years. I learned to make myself as comfortable as possible against the old, fraying leather seats. There were times throughout these years where I felt completely out if it, sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over every single day of my life. I had lost all of my free time, I could barely hang out with my friends anymore. I felt that I had no time to myself and that I was “wasting” my time there. I became bitter, however, every single time I had to remind myself that there was no alternative to my job, it was something I had to do for survival as it was what was providing our family with food on the table.
As the years went by we began to hire employees as the business grew. No longer were we a mom and pop shop but we had hired a few people to work for us as the demand for our food increased. I no longer had to be there every single day from open to closing. My perspective over the restaurant began to change. It may have not felt like it but when comparing our sales to when we first started to a few years down the line there was a tremendous difference. It got to the point where we felt ready to open up a second location, an actual indoor restaurant this time. And so we did, El Tacontento #2 was up and running in no time. Today in 2018, we still have both locations up and running but now both my father, my mother, and I no longer have to be there to make sure the business is up and running on our own hands, instead, we have 15 employees to do