Finally, an entry.
December 30, 2007
It’s not even officially the New Year, and I am taking down potential resolutions one by one. Okay, I can’t lie. I’ve never been into resolutions. In fact I can’t remember any prior resolutions, which is evidence that I just don’t care. My good idea and inspiration to take on the Taza Chocolate journal happily coincides with the New Year, so for selfish, virtuous aspirations, I would like to claim this as my 2008 resolution. With hands rarely covered in chocolate and too much to say, I am the perfect Taza blogger.
Pardon the serious gap our last entry in June. We’ve just been biding our time drinking beers on the back of motorcycles in the DR, eating lavish meals at the MidWest Grill and sleeping in late – hence the lack of entries. I’m partially serious. We have been anything but lazy. We are almost always knee deep in cacao beans, hand-wrapping piles of bars for the holiday madness, dealing with ancient motors in disrepair and welcoming a new production manager from his former life as a professional sky diver. Time to do some catch up here…
Since June in addition to experiencing a serious spread into small markets across the country, thanks to our ever resourceful and wise Larry Slotnick, Taza has been busy growing internally. In November we welcomed one brave man, Mike Schechter, to join the Taza forces as our first ever production manager. Mike and Alex grew up together, doing what all good boys do, including high school drama, abusing Alex’s mom’s car on a road trip across country and nearly not being allowed to graduate from high school for reasons I still don’t understand. Mike has spent the past ten years working as a professional skydiver and following the warm seasons (and skillfully avoiding New England winters) between New Zealand and California. This might sound completely fabricated, but we’ve got footage to prove it – actually there is even a chance that they’ll be a lot of Mike out there on new reality show, called Drop Zone. Apparently drop zones are riddled with drama, which isn’t unlike Taza.
Alex & Mike doing what they do best – building stuff and enjoying a well-deserved beer. Mike is in the box, Alex is not.
If anyone can go from jumping out of planes to making organic chocolate bars, it is Mike Schechter. Mike has mastered our stone ground chocolate manufacturing technique, which is anything but easy, and usually complicated by some minor malfunction resulting from Alex’s habit of acquiring used machines. Luckily Mike is forever ingenuous. I’ve seen Mike and Alex temporarily rig up a motor using a old heavy cast iron heater and some rubber belts. With Mike ensuring that nothing will stop the next batch of chocolate from being poured, Alex is just being freed up to do what he does best, and concoct the next bar – while he is equally talented at figuring out what bar to descend upon, I’m talking about the kind of bar that you eat.
There is lots more to tell of ’07, but I am starting to realize that blogging is not as easy as I thought and that no one’s attention span is this good. More updates later…in ’08.
