This week's goal is to get production up to the thousand-piece level for appetizers. I will probably only actually make 500 of two different things, but getting everything just-so at large scale is critical.

One of the appetizers will be the cucumber rounds with hummus. I score the cucumbers before slicing to get a flashy striped effect. Very attractive, quick to make, easy to eat, everyone likes them, they're vegan, and they're cheap. (The tahini is actually the most expensive part of them - at $10/lb it dominates their cost.) For the other, I'm learning to make profiteroles. Easy to spell, and it's amusing to find that the word is derived from "profit". No wonder caterers make them so often. I'm thinking of filling them with something like chicken tarragon mousse. What terrifies me is the process of mixing the dough - apparently beating air into it is important and I don't know how that's going to scale up in larger batches. I will probably have to do an initial test batch by hand, then an intermediate-sized batch which I can repeat several times to get to a thousand of them. I bet chefxh has some advice... ;-)

A small advance this morning - an improved ironing layout. It turns out that ironing cloth napkins is much faster and gets better results when done on a countertop on top of a towel. In fact, now that I think about it, this is something that ought to be done in the kitchen - where there are already large expanses of flat, clean, heat-resistant counters. Duh.

Of course most restaurant napkins don't need ironing, but the nature of my business is such that nothing so bourgeois as polyester would ever touch my clients' lips. So 100-percent cotton it is.