so i was really aggravated last night.  we just had a major reset done in the cheese department, and i was focusing on the case, figuring out what i should cut.  there was some chocolate that i needed to deal with and my big, pretty display i built a couple months ago got pulled down and replaced by rolling racks.

 that was annoying, but because our regional analyst person talked to me about it, i was expecting that.  i was annoyed because i thought it looked good and i had it somewhat organized the way i wanted it, and the new set had stuff mixed together and the tags were all mixed up.  plus there was stuff everywhere.

more annoying, however was when our marketing guy — who was doing a demo in front of really big windows letting in the afternoon sun, came over and said “hey, chris, i thought you should know…your chocolate is melting.”

wtf?  i go over to see the halloween display had been moved in front of the big windows since i last worked, with all my specialty halloween chocolate and, in fact, the chocolate had been melting.  hi, chris, you need to do a chocolate reset.  so i did.  the result looks pretty good, but it was annoying to have to come in and deal with some scruffy-faced nerfherder’s brilliant idea to stick the halloween chocolate in front of the frickin’ window.  i mean, seriously.  whose brilliant idea was that?  so far i’ve had no answers (not that i think anyone would take credit for it to me, considering how pissed i was).  so here’s the new chocolate set, halloween candy included:

beyond the annoyance of having to do the reset, that’s $65 of lost chocolate now, that’s unsellable, and while that could have been a lot worse and we generally make a pretty big margin on most of the chocolate, it’s still lost sales and our department hasn’t been doing fabulous with the change in seasons, the economy, etc.  not to mention the fact that my whole day was spent on that instead of other things.

so i came home and made myself feel better with an herb-crusted fleur de france brie and yummy cambozola (a german cross between the italian blue, gorgonzola and the french camembert brie) on la panzanella croccatini which, in my opinion, is the best cracker for cheese.  they’re big flatbreads and kind of unruly, but they’re awesome and crunchy and not too thick like some other croccatinis.  the cambozola was a bit more -zola than cam- having sat in our fridge for a few days, but still tasty.  the evening was capped with some hornsby’s crisp apple hard cider which, i’ve decided, doesn’t suck.

so, i just checked my wp analytics and the last post, new topic: cheese is my top post and most active.  so, um, i guess i should talk about food more.  ha.

which really makes the ubergeeky theme for the site somewhat unrelated.  so yeah, it’s on the list…

the big boss came (regional pres) today and arrived last night. so everyone’s running around like chickens with heads cut off freaking out about making the store look pretty.  I threw the cheese load as fast as humanly possible, faced up the tea, and then started cutting cheese to fill the holes and…by the time i left he still hadn’t shown up yet.  figures…

i’m excited because i got my login stuff set up so i can officially start talking to vendors and ordering chocolate.  i sent an email today to amano to set up a wholesale account for our team.  i’m excited to bring their product into the store and give it a push.  i’m also trying to set up a field trip to visit the factory.  i’ve never been into a factory, let alone a chocolate factory — even though i lived within walking distance from the see’s factory in south city.

my specialty team is also heading out to logan to visit caffe ibis next week.  that’s exciting, too, cuz, you know, coffee.  and they’re cool and their coffee is the best we sell in the store (though i’m still bummed that we can’t get salt lake roasting company coffee in to sell).  also, the awesome power of sampling was able to sell some of the cowgirl creamery MT TAM i blogged about the other day which we have at exorbitant cost due to not being able to get it from cali.  still, it’s probably the best triple cream we have (it’s my current favorite, anyway), so it’s kinda worth it.

in other news, my decision re: the mac is to keep it at Tiger.  it works, i can use the iSight, it actually opens Photoshop files now and so long as i don’t install any updates at all it should continue to do so, so it does everything i really need it to do.

(posted from a mac)

erin thinks i should write about my cheese exploits.  because it’s at least as exciting as anything else i ever write about.

…she probably has a point.

so.

today i discovered cowgirl creamery.  they’re based in petaluma, ca and we got some MT TAM in (named after mount tamalpais).  not only is it a good triple cream brie, the produce guy came over and dropped off some honeydew melon chunks for the sushi guys who share our little production area with us, and i discovered that it also pairs awesomely with that.  a perfect combination of sweet and bitter.  i was making everyone within 5 feet taste it.  

i took this cheese specialist test my dad sent me a while back from his work.  there was a question in there about pink and red mold on cheese and pretty much all i really knew — having had no real training before moving into the cheese department — is that it’s bad.  well, it’s bad because it’s a sign of bacteria which is icky and can make you sick.  and it’s good i knew that because the other day i ended up having to toss out about $80 worth of gorgonzola that had pink splotches.  and then today, i pulled some more out from the back to replace it, unwrapped it and…eek, more pink spots.  i cut a chunk into it a bit to make sure and, yeah, bad cheese.  so that’s a total of about $250 that i had to toss in the trash in two days.  kind of depressing.

i also cut some salemville amish blue — which at 7.99/lb is the ghetto blue — and some maytag blue, but at that point i wasn’t really interested in tasting because of all the MT TAM i had earlier.

in other news, i met the amano chocolate guys a while ago and they make some awesome single-origin dark chocolate.  they recently perfected their fourth bar, which is super top secret, and i’m anxiously awaiting my samples!

does this mean jazzsequence.com is turning into a food blog??? 

another site redesign is in the works, by the way.