By John Paul Khoury, CCC, www.preferredmeats.com, www.preferredmeatsblog.com

Now at Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco, Thiemann thrives on energy and is having fun.

From a kid playing drums in a Sacramento band to just over a decade later being Tyler Florence’s chef de cuisine at the Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco, Mike Thiemann’s journey has been a series of choices that he felt driven to make. He took time out of his schedule to explain:

What drew you to the industry and why become a chef?
Well, it was 1995 and I was a just a kid playing drums in a band when I got a job at Greta’s Café in Sacramento. What a great job, I learned so much under Greta. I started washing dishes and then ended up in the deli, then baking, making soups, etc.

This is where I learned to sweat off mirepoix, and making soup from scratch, building flavors. It was great, like school really, I mean this is how anyone really learns. I was there for five years, until 2000 when the place was sold to Chipotle’s.

By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT

Activities, books and conferences are just three ways to spark your own learning and experience personal and professional growth this summer.

Last month, we discussed using field trips and site visits effectively, and now that the summer months are here, it is time to consider how we replenish our information bank, our instincts and our personal and professional insights. We will discuss the ABCs and the DEF’s of professional development, this month the ABCs—activities, books, and conferences—and next month the DEFs. What better time to think about your professional development when so many of our students are graduating and moving into new phases of their lives. A great time to consider new beginnings in our lives and what we can or want to do to make these new beginnings grow and prosper!

By Kim Reddin, courtesy of the National Onion Association

Onions provide color and texture to a dish, but their flavor is what really makes them irresistible and virtually irreplaceable in the kitchen. From raw to caramelized, the flavor of an onion has many layers.

Onion Production
Commercially grown in 20 states from coast to coast, onions are the third-largest fresh-vegetable industry in the United States; Idaho-Eastern Oregon, Washington and California are the leading production areas.  The National Onion Association estimates that fewer than 1,000 U.S. farmers plant more than 142,000 acres of onions each year. Americans consume nearly 20 pounds of onions per capita annually.

Flavor Factors
Onion flavor is determined by many factors including genetics, planting location, soil and temperature.  While compounds such as sugars and organic acids can contribute to what people taste, a special class of biologically active organosulfur compounds is what actually give onions their distinctive flavor and aroma.

By Anselm Doering

Commercial oven cleaners contain some of the most toxic chemicals found in any restaurant kitchen. What works just as well and is safe on the environment? This tip and nine more will help you be more ecologically and even economically sound.

Coke and Pop Rocks can kill. Elvis is coming back. And green cleaning a restaurant is burdensome, expensive and less effective than the traditional toxic approach.

I cringe each time I hear this. The green-cleaning myth, that is. Elvis, I’m not so sure. He may indeed be alive and well and living in Las Vegas.

But, when it comes to green cleaning restaurants, there are many quick, simple, environmentally preferable procedures that SAVE money and IMPROVE cleaning. Immediately.

Here are 10 easy and effective ways to improve green cleaning at your restaurant:

By Christopher Koetke, CEC, CCE

Are we heading for a worldwide famine by mid-century? Is our very civilization unsustainable? Is it too late to stop the train and turn it around? The answers are yes, yes and no.

Julian Cribb, Australian author of The Coming Famine (University of California Press, 2010), paints the picture of a perfect storm in which a number of sustainability issues will reach criticality and come together over the next few decades to portend a worldwide famine that will change the face of our world.

The concept of “peak oil” is something that we’ve all become familiar with over the last decade. Put simply, it’s a situation where demand outpaces the discovery of new reserves of a finite resource, so supply gets scarce and expensive. In Cribb’s estimation, water and agricultural outputs will also reach their peak in the near-term horizon.

In fact, we’re already seeing some evidence. While the United States, Australia and Europe are awash in food, literally throwing half of it away, the rest of the world is not. For the last half century a billion people in the developing world have been going to bed hungry every night. The resulting “food insecurity” has devastating effects.