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How do I come up with a new recipe? I’m not really sure. I just go to the stove and I light it and I put a pan on there and then I guess the culinary ancestors whisper. I don’t know what it is. It’s really weird. Maybe it depends also on, on which cuisine we’re doing, whatever we’re feeling.
If it’s Asian, we’ll go grab all the Asian ingredients we have and we’ll throw ’em together. There’s really no rhyme or reason. Obviously oil, and then you put your aromatics in, you know, velvet your meat, cook it just for the, just for the Asian food, I guess. It all just comes together. Recipes that I have created. I have to write down really quick because I’ll never do ’em again. And if I do ’em again, it’ll be completely different. But in my mind, it’s the same, but it doesn’t taste the same. So they’re different. I guess that’s the joy of it. That’s what the cooking spirit is, right? So you just light the stove and whatever just comes to you.
It comes to you and you just cook and you just, you’re just in the minute, you’re in the moment and you feel, you know, just the love of the food and you’re just like, yep, that’s done, that’s not done enough. Wait, and, you know, timing is just automatic. There’s no, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. I guess it’s just, it’s just a passion for the industry or just for food in general.
But the recipes I have created, I have no problem sharing. There’s a ton of them. A ton of them. For example, I don’t even have names for ’em. We did a really good, Mexican, we’ve done Jilo. We, I have 20 different kinds of chilies. We have Peruvian chilies, we’ve got Mexican chilies, all different kinds of chilies.
For example, we just take, whatever meat that we’re gonna cook with and we just begin. I created over 20 different types of moles. I did plug the ingredients into the internet and, no search results came back. So, they’re all original.
Asian cooking. We’ve created like a vampire hunter, which is really good. We’ve created our own spin on General Tso. It doesn’t, we only say General Tso because that’s what people relate to it. It tastes nothing like General Tso, but it’s better than General Tso but we’ll just call it that.
A lot of seafood. Brazilian, we did the Brazilian. Carnival. That was really good. We did our own take on the Ranchero. That was also a really good one. It wasn’t spicy, but it was full of flavor. But I guess that’s what it’s all about, right? Use of spices, it’s gotta have flavor, bold. It’s gotta be bold.
It can’t be mellow because if you’re mellow, then you, then you just don’t even know you’re eating. You’re just like, Hmm, that’s normal. Right? So when you bite into it, you’ve gotta have the heat from the stove number. It’s gotta be hot. Number two, it’s gotta smell great.
It has to smell great. So when you’re cooking, if it’s not filling up your house, it’s probably not worth cooking. Throw it away, start over. And that lures you in, right? So you get the smell, the beginning smells of the aromatics that kind of draws you in. Draws everybody in. Oh, what are you cooking? And that builds up the anticipation.
So even if you do kind of muff it up a little bit, people will be like, you know, they’ve been smelling it and now they see it cooking. So even if you’re like off base by one or two degrees, they’ll be like, oh my God, it’s so good. I mean, you know, that’s right. Right. God, that’s a secret of the trade. But if you do the recipe on point, then, then you can get whatever you want.
Right? Because even the most callous soul, even if for a brief moment is soothed. buy food, good food, not processed food. Processed food’s terrible and it’s bad for you, so don’t do that. What are the recipes? Um, now that we’re actually recording, you can’t think of any, but my whole menu was full of ’em.
Everything in that restaurant I created and it took, like, I gotta tell you, it only took one time for each of those recipe. I wish I could tell you that I labored and labored and I slaved and I perfected. I didn’t, I’m just like, you know, this is what we’re gonna do. And I didn’t even really think about it.
I kind of just, it just kind of did it right. So beautiful. But that’s usually how it goes with cooking. Light the stove, you feel what’s around you, , what’s not around you. Um, and then it’s just, So it’s a beautiful thing. We did get, we do our own now. You know, we have our own recipe for teriyaki and all that stuff, but that’s already proven.
I mean, you can find that anywhere. We do recipes. When we create recipes, we create ’em when there’s nothing there. So you can’t find it on the store shelf. You can’t find it, you know, anywhere else. And the mole. It’s not even a real mole, it’s just a sauce we created. I mean, you can call it like, you know, a jilo ancho pasilla sauce, but that doesn’t sound good.
So we just call it a mole because it’s made, it’s, it’s not even really made in that way anyway. It, the name mole is more recognizable and that’s what people would associate it with. A lot of people don’t like new, but they’ve eaten mole. So you tell ’em it’s a mole and they’re like, oh my God, this is really good.
And you’re like, yeah, it’s not even a mole, but we don’t say that. Yeah. But I will gladly share the multitude. I’ll definitely share The San Diego Taco Factory’s red rice that I just created. just like, oh my God, 20 minutes before we opened.
I’m like, red rice. Oh. I’m like, I completely blanked out. You know, I forgot how to make, um, it’s not that I didn’t forget how to make it, you know, when you’re so, your mind is in a hurry and you’re opening the restaurant and the people are outside waiting and it’s your first day open and you’re like, we don’t even have rice.
I’m like, you know, I’m not gonna think about all the families we visited or all the recipes that we’ve gathered. I just kind of went to, oh my God, I need a rice. Like, what am I gonna put in this rice? And um, yeah, so we did it. So it does take a little time because it’s got like four separate steps before you get to the actual entree of rice.
Um, but it’s well worth it. The Teresa Jilo pinto beans, we can share those cuz those are really good. Um, never said it was healthy, so just throwing that out there. But they’re delicious and that’s all that really matters. Um, I mean, you know what, so you’re not gonna eat bacon fat and pork fat, and then you’re gonna say, what? Live like two years longer? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense. Why would you wanna live two more years without any delicious fats? You know what I mean? So, and then what else? We can share the green. So the green, and you know, in The San Diego Taco factory we had. It started from green and it went all the way up to black and it went through the, through the spectrum of the green-ish colors.
Right. So you went, green is mild, yellow is medium, orange is hot. I mean, just, I love it. But you know, and then we go to black. So the green we can give. That’s good. and then, you know what, just like a, like, so we, I developed this oil. We had some people that just, oh my God, it’s not even hot enough. It’s not hot enough.
And I’m just like, okay. All right. Everything I’ve done in traditional food right, is it’s not hot. It’s not hot enough for ’em. And I’m like, okay, we’re all right. Okay. It’s not hot enough again, huh? All right. We’ll see. So I broke the mold, scorpion Pepper, Carolina Reaper Pepper. Arbol Pepper cuz you know that had actually has flavor and I’m just like, okay.
And then I got some capsicum extract, put it in oil with a whole bunch of other stuff and some spices. Yeah, it was hot. They never said they wanted it hotter. Never said they wanted it hotter, so that was good. I’m like, is that hot enough? I didn’t get an answer and I’m like, I’ll take that as a yes. And they never asked for it again either.
So we went , and I’m like, well, this escalated quickly. We went from, you know, black, which was our hottest, and then I did a double black, you know, like, you know, no, no, reference to Polo Ralph, Lauren Cologne. And I’m just like, you know, okay, either this is a game, or, you know, they’re just trying to, you know, whatever.
I’m like, all right, I’m gonna make something hot. Yeah, I did. I did. Um, they never, I’m assuming they were appreciative. Of course, I then, I never saw ’em again, but I kept the recipe, so I’ll share that. delicious. It is a hot oil, so I’ll definitely share that one. what else? I’d probably like the Brazilian, oh, that Brazilian carnival is really good too.
I want to keep it, but it’s so good. Oh, it’s so good that fresh lime and we got some chimichurri and the chimichurri. When you get dried chimichurri, you know this is not a paid advertisement, but , cuz you know, these people don’t even know I exist. but you’ve got to get the spice ology. Chi Cherry is the only one that works and I’ve tried hundreds of brands.
It’s the only one that works. It’s. Really intense flavors. I mean, they really, that’s some spot on. Oh, and then we, I created Indian dishes. Yep. Created Indian dishes. I can give you some of those and believe it or not, we had the Bombay!
So Bombay is no longer now, it’s a different city name, but that was a really good taco. . Yeah. And then I can show you some, anyways, yeah, I’ll get those out. I mean, don’t, you know, it’s not going to be tomorrow, but, we, we can start filtering them in maybe like, you know, well, I’m not even gonna give you a timeline cuz if you know me for the past 10 years, I ain’t given timelines, but they’ll be up soon.
What else? Yeah, so I guess it all comes down to, just loving what you do. A lot of people out there are in jobs they hate, in jobs they don’t like. Maybe they did it for the money, maybe they did it for whatever reasons, it doesn’t matter, but they hate it, right? I cannot say that I am one of those people.
Very fortunate. I love what I do. So what we’ll do now, is, we will start going through for all of the caterers out there, for all the caterers out there, times are tough, right? So we all know that. And what, what I want to do is, helping the struggling caterer. So let’s start a series called The Struggling Caterer.
And what it is is, I mean, this is right down to the brass tacks this is for the caterers that have a passion for food, but you just, you don’t have the a hundred thousand or the 50,000 or the 20,000 and you know, I know that when you’re looking at stuff to purchase and it’s just like 4,000 and people, you know, obviously the bigger companies and stuff, they just write checks and not even think about it.
But $4,000 is a ton of money when you don’t even have any. So we’re. I think we’ll start a series called The Struggling Cater. And this is gonna be a bare bones structure, right, with no frills. You want to cater, you love the food, you wanna do it, but you’ve, for some reason, you think you need like a million dollars and although there is some money up, , licensing regulatory agencies and all that other stuff, even that can be, you know, spaced out in anyways.
I think that’s, I think that’s, that’s where we’ll start. And I mean, there’s, we’re not gonna be a real timeline for it. I don’t think that that would be helpful. I know that. , you know, we will get it prioritized. So as they come out, they might be on different subjects, but when they go up online, , they’re, they’ll be, you know, like step one, step two, step three.
But then again, you probably have to listen to the whole thing because if you know me, I go left and then I’ll go Right. Sometimes I don’t even come back to center. But that’s okay. That’s okay because if you’re like a caterer and you’ve seen some struggles, you know exactly where I’m at. If not, then well, you know how that goes.
Yeah. So stay tuned. Let’s start the struggling cater. I think that’s gonna be good. Good for a lot of people. Good for you. Good for us. and then, yeah, we’ll open up some q and As and. , um, any questions, comments, concerns, anything like that? You know, you can just plug ’em in and then we’ll get to you.
Maybe we’ll bring it up as a topic, but I, but this is gonna be good. So for all the caterers out there, don’t give up. Don’t give up. I know that sometimes the market that you’re doing is probably, you know, saturated with the long-term people. But that doesn’t stop us, and it shouldn’t stop you either.
So we just gotta, you just gotta find your niche, you gotta find your lane, and, uh, we’ll help you find it. All right, until next time.
– Kevin
