Gotham Gal

Apple Pie

I made two apple pies on Saturday for a dinner party.  I find that the most difficult part of making a pie is the crust.  I went with a classic pate brisee but based on the humidity, the amount of water that the crust took, and other variables makes each crust a little different and sometimes more difficult to work with.  Bottom line, making a pie is hard work. 

The key to an apple pie, IMHO, is sauteing the apples and letting them cool a little before putting them into the pie.  That way the apples are a little bit soft before baking. 

Crust:

2 1/2 cups flour

2 sticks cold unsalted butter cut into small pieces

1 tsp. kosher salt

1/4 cup really cold water

In a Cuisinart (makes life easier) add the flour, salt and butter.  Pulse until the flour gets crumbly.  Then add the water and pulse until the dough begins to shape.  Sometimes it is wet but doesn't come together but it will once you use your hands to make a ball.  You don't want to over pulse the flour once the water has been put in.  It is ok to overpulse with the butter and salt mixture.  Take the dough out and separate it.  Make a ball with each section and wrap with plastic wrap.  Put in the refrigerator for a few hours.  Then roll it out between parchment paper (makes for less mess) and make your pies.

Apples:

8 large apples of your choice (I prefer to mix it up with a few different varieities that are crisp) - peeled, cored and cut into 8/10 slices

1 cup white sugar

1 tsp. kosher salt

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. ground cardamon

1 tsp. ground coriander

1 stick unsalted butter

fresh lemon juice

1/4 cup flour

In a large saute pan melt the butter.  Add the apples, sugar, salt, cinnamon, cardamon and coriander.  Saute for about 5 minutes over a medium heat.  Add the flour and mix until the flour is completely incorporated for about 2 more minutes.  Squeeze half a lemon over the top for taste and stir.  Turn off the heat and let this sit for about 10 minutes to cool.

Put the apples into the pie pan that already has the crust on the bottom.  Put the crust over the top, seal.  Brush with egg whites and cut a slit on top and make a few fork pricks.  Bake at 375 for about 40 minutes or until the crust is browned. 

Serve warm with ice cream. 

Hurricane Sandy

We were here over a year ago during Irene.  It was not pretty.  Water came roaring into our basement and holding it at bay was not going to happen. 

Yesterday as we watched all the tracking of Sandy we knew this was going to be way worse.  Although we are located in Zone B, Zone A is literally next door.  Everyone in Zone A was evacuated.  The water began to lap over the Westside Highway from the Hudson river at high tide in the morning before the big storm even hit.  We could only imagine what was going to happen when Sandy came barreling in that evening.  In the end, we decided around 3pm to leave.

We read all the tweets, we watched the videos, we heard from our building.  Our basement was destroyed, our lobby was destroyed, my office was destroyed....and all of Manhattan from about 39th Street and down had no electricity. 

The picture above was taken from our friend and neighbor of our building last night.  It is the aftermath which is going to just be horrendous.  Two major hurricanes in NYC in just over a years time.  In a town that never sleeps and we consider the epi-center of almost everything, it is eerie and humbling to be so helpless against Mother Nature. 

Allison O'Kelly, Mom Corps, Woman Entrepreneur

Being a Mom is hard work.  The balance of kids, family, work and self is not easy.  Somehow most Mom's seem to figure it out but it is exhausting.  I was connected to a woman who was interested in starting a company that helped women, and companies, find Moms who wanted to work but not full-time as well as help Moms get back into the workplace once the kids were at school full time.  I started looking around to see if anyone else had built a company on that premise.  Turns out there are a few. One of them is Allison O'Kelly, the founder/CEO of Mom Corps, a national organization that focuses on flexible jobs for primarily women. 

Allison grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC and happened to go to the exact same high school as me, Churchill High School in Potomac, MD.  That area of the country is an interesting location because many people/families consider themselves more Southern while others Northern.  I went to the Northeast for college, Allison went South.  She went to University of Georgia where she majored in accounting.  She loved the experience.  Stayed a full four years without going abroad because as she put it, Georgia was abroad enough. 

After graduating from University of Georgia, she found a job in Atlanta.  Many of the kids from Universities and colleges in the South end up in Atlanta as it is the urban hub.  She worked for KPMG in the auditing department.  She had interned with KPMG in college so it was the perfect opportunity.  After three years she found that she wasn't a fan of capturing what other people did in business but wanted to be part of making a business happen.  She didn't see her career path to become a comptroller so she decided to make a shift and figured it made sense to go to business school. 

Her plan was to get into one of the top business schools, because she wanted a serious return on her investment.  Allison got into Harvard Business School.  After graduating she went to work for Toys R Us.  In high school and college she had worked in retail and liked it.  There was something about the basics of that business that turned her on.  It was 1999 when she began in the Toys R Us management program.  She was supposed to start working in the brick and mortar part of the business but they asked her to join the new dot com department they were working on. 

Working on toyrus.com from its infancy was an amazing experience.  She eventually got herself back into the store line where she ran one of the stores for about one and a half years.  Personally one of my all time favorite jobs was running a portion of a retail store for Macys.  There is something incredibly rewarding about being able to see the daily affect you can make on a business.  Allison was applying for the district management position when she had her first child....and then everything changed.

Retail is a 24/7 business.  She was working out of the Southeast area of Atlanta.  Her division had eleven districts that were all run by men.  Her regional VP wanted nothing more than to see Allison take over one of the regions, they wanted a woman.  They even gave her 3 days a week working 8-4 while she acclimated herself to the job and motherhood.  She took that opportunity and worked like that for four months until she realized, this was not going to work. 

In order to keep herself working and make some cash, Allison started doing some freelance contract accounting work while she figured out her next move.  That was not the long term goal to go back to accounting but it was easy to fall back for the time being.  She never wanted to stay home but didn't want to jump into the wrong job and freelance jobs kept coming in the door.

Allison kept getting so many jobs that she started to getting friends involved.  She realized there was a market opportunity that was not being met.  People were looking to fill short time projects with talented people.  She knew all these Moms who were thrilled for the opportunity.  Allison realized that for her this was an interesting business opportunity.  She started her own contract company and called it Mom Corps. By the time she launched the business she had two little boys, her youngest being two months old. 

Originally the Mom Corps was only accounting oriented.  Fast forward several years and in 2009 she franchised the organization.  When she did it herself, her own Mom Corps, the jobs that came in were mostly around legal and marketing projects.  What she found is that each franchise tends to be a little different based on the the owner and their contacts.   There are now sixteen franchises across the country in cities such as Boston, Seattle, Texas, NY, Charlotte and SF.  They all share one online platform.  All of the owners use the same backend. Everyone applies and registers online.  The owners use that information to sell into their local markets recruiting staffing for their clients. Mom Corps get a percentage of all the sales that take place.

Allison brings on the franchises by training them, handling the invoicing and payrolls.  She has three boys now, 9, 7 and one.  Mainly women get jobs through Mom Corps although there are a few men.  There are roughly 80,000 people in their data base.  They have placed over 3000 people in jobs which doesn't include the online job board that people pay for.  There is also content research on the site.  Including the years that Allison had her freelance accounting business, she has been at it for nine years. 

Like anything else, she wishes it could grow faster and be bigger but I give her huge credit, she boot-strapped the entire business by herself.  Many of the franchise owners had the same idea as Allison but decided it made more sense to be part of something she had already built.  She is not only helping women work part-time but allowing many of them to dip their toes in the water before making the plunge back to full-time work.  She has also changed the life of sixteen women who own Mom Corps franchises. 

I love this model.  Allison figured out how to make her life balance work by pulling her friends in to jobs that they were happy to get but weren't exactly sure how to get them.  Sometimes you just need one entrepreneur, one leader to make it work for the rest.  Allison was that person.  

 

 

Center for Hearing and Communication

We went to the Center for Hearing and Communication event this past week.  This is our 10^th year going.  It is a great organization doing really good things so we continue to go and support their efforts because this is an organization that has been near and dear to our very good friends.  That is why most of us support non-profit organizations.  There is a community of people behind it that connect to their friends and family to support.

Years past were held at comedy clubs and then they shifted to Pier 60 as they grew.  The event has remained the same every single year since then.  A variety of restaurants that have a table and put out tiny plates for all the patrons to taste including vineyards.  It is literally impossible to find a glass of water.  Then the night ends with an auction where there are tables and dessert is served.  Some video is shown and someone is honored and they get to speak.

It is time for these events to be shaken up.  This event, although a great cause, will continue to get the support every year from the same supporters and maybe a few new ones but the event isn’t fun or exciting.  It doesn’t make me want to come back next year.  This is why I end up sending a check to most friends’ events.

With that being said, I certainly emailed all my friends about the Hot Bread Kitchen event taking place on November 8^th as giving to every friend’s organization, like politics, is a bit of a quid pro quo.  I do truly believe that the event HBK is having is different and will prove to be a fun night.  At least I hope so and more important I am looking forward to HBK to grow into a sustainable organization, or sustainable enough so like MOUSE we only need to do these events every 5 years or so.  It keeps the donors more excited and the events actually worth going to. 

The Way We Cook

I have been getting Saveur magazine since it hit the newstand.  I love the magazine.  In many ways, they were a little bit before their time.  The content is not only about food and recipes but communities and how food is part of each community.  People were not thinking like that 20 years ago. 

Savuer just came out with an absolutely beautiful book called The Way We Cook, Portraits of Home Cooks Around the World.  The book should sit on a coffee table where people can randomly thumb through the photos which are amazing.  A great gift for anyone...particularly yourself. 

Question of the week #7

I am in the process of gearing up for the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival in January.  This year’s theme is “Getting down to Business”.  This question is one that will be one of our panels this year, reinventing myself, which could also be reentry into the workplace.  With that in mind, here is this week’s question.

You often address the difficulty for women/mothers to on-ramp back into the workforce. What/who do you see as the reason for the difficulty? Is it companies operating under antiquated notions, requiring workers be present in the office and work 8-5? Do they envision the time spent at home as an atrophy of skills?

This is such a layered topic.  Many women never want to leave the workplace but find themselves leaving it because the companies that they are working with are not willing to be flexible with their new found family.  For those who can not leave and have to just conform to a companies same expectations prior to having a family, their world becomes even more difficult and frustrating.  Some companies are willing to let women work a 3-day week paying them a significant amount less even though we all know that they are probably doing the exact same job they did in 5 days.  That doesn’t feel good either. 

I believe if a woman wants to continue working through those years when the kids are young or even teens, it is imperative that companies figure out how to create environments that work for everyone.  Happier women and happier workplaces make for happier families, better economies and a more successful outcome for everyone involved.  

I am not so sure that the standard 8-5 workplace is the future of business as we become a more virtual world.  That if you are happy and challenged in your job then you will do what needs to be done every day regardless of punching a clock.  Then there are jobs where we are building products that are more streamlined as 8-hour workdays and those companies need to figure out how to maintain working mothers in a positive way as they physically need to be there.

Then there is the woman who makes a conscious decision to get off the train for a while and stay home to raise a family.  There is a whole different set of issues here.  Even getting involved in the school system there is the “working moms” and the “stay-at-home moms” that creates a weird division.  It shouldn’t but it does.  It is so hard to re-enter the workplace in the same spot where you opted out.  Many of the women who decided to stay home are used to a different kind of job where they have full autonomy using a different set of skill sets managing a household and raising children.  Once the kids are in school full time or even some wait until their kids go to college, many women don’t want to go back to the 8 hour grind.  They want to do something but they want to maintain the flexibility that they are used to. 

It isn’t easy for a woman no matter which road they choose.  Each road has compromises both good and bad.  I am investor in Catchafire that posts a variety of short-term jobs from non-profit organizations that volunteers can apply for through their database.  That is one way to jump into the game slowly.  Certainly starting your own company is another.  Going to Meet-ups that are geared towards verticals that interest you.  You might meet someone who needs your skills.  If you have the means, figure out how to invest in companies that could use your knowledge and your cash.  Go to conferences to learn of possible ways to re-enter a work force under your own set of rules. 

Bottom line, children come at a certain time of a woman’s life and it happens to be in the midst of most peoples career.  Some put their careers on hold, others keep moving forward.  No matter what road you choose, it is not easy and I am not so sure it ever will be.  If companies were more flexible and understanding of families with the desire to retain smart women through those years, then everyone would be a lot better off….and studies have shown that when there is a solid gender balance at every level of management of a company including the top echelons, there is a much higher rate of success.

Broccoli Rabe with Sweet Sausage Pesto

The pasta at Perla is killer.  I do love pasta but rarely eat it.  These days I am attempting to make more meals that work for Josh in particular.  The kid needs calories.  He does not need my low fat meals. 

The recipe in the paper last week was for the Orecchiette with Sweet Sausage and Broccoli Rabe Pesto ( used a different pasta).  One of my absolutely faves from Perla.  Much to everyones  dismay I have actually eaten an entire bowl myself.

I made the recipe and needless to say…Josh was thrilled.

 ½ lb. broccoli rabe – stems trimmed off and tossed

¾ cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

1 cup finely chopped fennel bulb

1 cup finely chopped Vidalia onion

1 lb sweet Italian sausage, casing removed

2 cups chicken stock

In a large pot of salted boiling water add the broccoli rabe and cook about 5 minutes until tender.  Drain and place in a large bowl of ice water to cool immediately.  Drain and squeeze dry.  Put in a food processor with 6 tablespoons olive oil.  Pulse until it comes together.  Fold into a bowl with ¼ cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

In a large sauté pan, cover the bottom with about 4 tbsp. olive oil.  Add the fennel and onion, sauté until soft.  Add the sausage and mash it into a fine crumble.  Cook until the sausage is no longer pink.  Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil and cook until the stock is almost but not completely evaporated.

Transfer this mixture to the food processor and pulse until finely ground.  Return this to the pan and fold the broccoli rabe into this.  Set aside.

Boil up the pasta until al dente.  Drain the pasta and keep about ½ cup of the pasta water.   Put that pasta water into the pesto mixture and reheat.  Now add the cooked pasta until evenly coated.  Fold in the remaining ½ cup of cheese.  Check if you need a little salt and pepper…and serve.

I am making this again very very soon.

 

 

 

 

Boom and Bust; Venture Book Launch

Aaron Cohen, who has been involved in the tech community since the mid-90s has found himself in a new role as a professor at NYU.  He is teaching about the tech industry.  He believes, as I do, that the importance of knowing how to computer program when you graduate college (at some level) is as important as being able to read a book.  It is about literacy of the times.  He is also teaching his students about the history of the tech community.  We have an industry that is not quite 20 years old in NYC where you have the leaders and early adapters able to tell the story to students when the story tellers aren’t even 60 years old. 

Gina Neff, University of Washington, MCC visiting scholar Aaron, INC@NYU director me and Danah Boyd, Research Assistant Professor, Media, Culture, and Communication all sat on the panel which was really created to launch Gina's book, Venture Labor. The conversation turned to the social aspect of the internet including the rise and fall of many of the early innovative companies.  We are seeing change again as consumers are moving to mobile from desktop.  Regardless, the net has always been a social place and that social aspect has been some of the key components in the growth of so many companies in the second stage of the web that we called web 2.0.

There were conversations about risk too.  Truth is, everything is a risk these days.  The jobs of the past where you could feel confident that you could hunker down for 30 years are evaporating.  You might even find your division close down at a large publically traded company such as IBM. 

I was there at the beginning working with Jason Calacanis as his first hire (although I was freelance).  We were the pinnacle of the industry in the mid-90’s because we were the tech industries media.  We wrote about each of the entrepreneurs and their companies.  We put on the events that created community and networking.  I brought in the revenues.  I also had 15 years of experience over everyone.  It was an amazing time and a story that should be written.  Gina wrote a great book and interviewed people who I have not seen since then but it is written for a college audience not beach reading.

I told one story that is only 15 years old and I will tell another one that keeps rattling around in my head in this blog post.  When AOL messenger was launched, I was at the Flatiron Partners office doing work.  A message popped up from Jason on my laptop as I was supposed to meet him in about 20 minutes for a meeting.  We went back and forth on the im and we both were almost gushing about how incredibly cool it was that we were just chatting away on this new medium.  It just wasn’t that long ago and now everyone walks down the street doing roughly the same thing with different tools on their mobile phones.

Here is the one story I did not bring up that night.  There were certainly conversations about when the bubble popped and how everything ceased for a few years.  Silicon Alley Reporter put on a huge parties in the day.  Most of them revolved around conferences we were putting on.  One particular night, we had an event after the Internet conference that Meckler had at the Javits Center.  It was at a place right near there that that has two floors one with a huge roof deck.  The place was packed with so many people, some I knew and others I had never seen.  The place looked like the height of the music industry in the 70’s.  Just too cool  I just felt like too much has happened too soon.  The amount that these companies were valuing themselves at was ridiculous.  We were creating superstars from geeks (although not such a bad thing for a role model).  I remember looking at the room and turning to Brian Cooper (who I have not seen in years) and saying, this doesn’t feel right.  This just can’t last.  You know what…it didn’t but it came back and it came back better. 

Hot Bread Kitchen event

I am a huge fan of Hot Bread Kitchen.  Jessamyn Waldman Rodriguez is the brains behind the entire operation.  What she has created and grown over the past few years is beyond impressive. 

We are having an event this year to celebrate our new store in the front marketplace at La Marquetta as well as raising awareness and funds.  We are hoping that sooner than later we will be a sustainable operation but we not quite there. 

If you are so inclined, feel free to buy a ticket or come to the event.  It should be a winner.

Morra Aarons-Mele, We Are Women Online, Woman Entrepreneur

Morra reached out to me as a fan from Boston. I want to turn the tables, I am a fan of Morra from NYC.  Morras career has been a total dot connector.  She really has always an entrepreneur at heart.  Someone with this much energy has to be.  She wanted to own her own destiny, she wanted to be a mentor and voice to other women who were also looking to own their own destiny. It didn't happen over night but the idea of We Are Women Online evolved over time just like all good businesses do.  Morra is also the founder of the Mission List

Morra grew up in South Orange, NJ.  Her father was self-employed as a labor arbitator and art dealer.  As her father used to say...a direct quote from her father "the best boss in the world is an asshole".  So he was always around and would say "I'm self-employed".  Her mother was a learning disability teacher consultant so also self-employed working mainly in Catholic and parochial schools around NJ. Both of her parents have always been enamored with England.  The took the family on almost every vacation to England.  Both of Morra's sisters live in London now.  No doubt that Morras parents played a huge role in the path that Morra chose.

After graduating high school Morra went to Brown University.  No surprises she spent her junior year abroad going to the London School of Economics.  When she was there she also interned for Warner Brothers.  She came back and finished her senior year graduating with a real job in 1998.  Her parents instilled that in her...get a real job that pays you a salary.  She landed a job at October Films on Bleeker Street working in publicity.  At that time it was one of the last remaining independent film houses.  It was a great job working on films that were shown at Sundance.  At the time, everyone she knew was working in internet start-ups and she thought...I need to get there too.

She had been reading Variety every day and began to pay attention to iVillage.  She read about Betty Hudson who was the head of corporate communications and PR at iVillage.  She composed a letter and faxed a letter over to Betty asking her if she needed an assistant.  Morra got a phone call the next day and was offered her the job of Bettys assistant.  Eventually, Morra became the head of publicity.  It was an incredible time.  She did the first live chat with HIllary Clinton while she was there.  It was 2000.

A job for iVillage became available in London as the senior marketing manager.  Morra grabbed at the opportunity.  She was 24 and thrilled to be back living in London.  She was involved in the marketing department.  Her co-working in marketing ran on-line ad sales and syndication while Morra ran PR off the print and visual stuff and managed advertising with Tesco who was a joint investor in iVillage UK.

It was an insane learning curve and she looks back it with horror.  She was going to meeting after meeting and feeling she had no time to prepare.  Although there were not many people there with her skillset at the time, it was Morras fundamental understanding of the internet that set her apart in London.  She was at a hot start-up which gave her instant credibility by speaking a certain language.  She stayed for two years a iVillage before moving on to eBookers where they offered her the job of Head of Marketing. 

It was a really hard job.  Morra told me she literally cried in the bathroom every single day.  She felt lonely.  She has no mentor, no network, nothing.  iVillage was American company and now she was in a totally British company and she felt out of sorts.  It was a dog eat dog world that was thoroughly quantative and she was responsible for everything in marketing.  There was not another woman there to give her guidance or direction.  She did a great job but then home called.  Her mother got sick and she needed a breather.  With her Mom's nod, she took off for Africa for six months to get her mojo back and then returned to the states. 

When she got home, she worked on Kerrys campaign.  It was 2003.  Then what happened is she got thrown into another intensely stressful situation.  She became the Internet Marketing Director for Kerry and then the DNC.  She has always been passionate about politics.  She then ended up going to work for Edelman where she she built their DC public relations department from scratch.  It was an insane job.  She stayed for 16 months.  Today that department is now quite large and thriving.  She learned that she is really good at at hiring a good team.  She also realized that she was a start-up person.  It was not the first marketing department she has started and she was great at prioritization, delegating and finding talent.  At one point, not exactly sure when, Morra became the founding Political Director for BlogHer.

Morra decided to go to get a degree in social work.  She wanted to build something where she could create mentorship and voices for others women when that was missing in her life for the past ten years.  She wanted to be a womans workplace counselor.  She had these big jobs where she felt unsupported and lost and of course in the tech industry it was at the point mainly male oriented.  She began going to Catholic University at night getting a master in social work while freelancing for marketing departments on the side.  At the same time she had applied to the Kennedy School at Harvard.  She got in, put social on hold, moved to Boston, got married and went to Harvard.

Morra got her degree in masters of public administration at Harvard.  During that time she was also consulting, blogging and helping on TV around the election.  She was making good money doing social media consulting.  She was incredibly passionate about a field called work/life.  It is a discipline where you help companies and organizations implement families and work/life.  She had access to amazing resources at Harvard.  She started doing tons of research on women and work life.   She started doing a lot of blogging around the subject.  Morra wrote about how you don't have to feel unsupported when you show up every day. 

Morra got admitted into Boston College to finish the degree that she started at Catholic University.  She wanted to help companies to make better environments for women.  She was truly an expert in this field.  Then 2008 came and the world fell apart.  She was pregnant and her family had lost a lot of money.  She had the baby and started to focus on making cash.  She wanted to focus only on women, a topic she was passionate about and knew best.  So Morra began to create a practice to take her understanding of work/life and her desire to create mentorships and be a voice for women,  She started to take on big companies as her clients.  It is something she has always been passionate about so this made complete sense. She has taught and spoken at the Yale Womens Campaign School, the Harvard Kennedy School , the World Economic Forum for Young Global Leaders at Harvard and John Hopkins Graduate School of Communication on many of these subjects.  She is also the author of Women and Leadership in the Digital Age. 

She had been at this in many ways since 1999.  So in 2010, Morra incorporate her company, We Are Women Online, and she began to help change the workplace for women from the outside.  She has worked with the American Cancer Society including the Obama campaign and the United Nations creating social media campaigns that mobilize women.  Social media where it meets social good is the exact place where Morra wants to be.  She takes all of this to heart even working with each of her clients on a sliding scale basis for pay. 

Like her father, Morra hated to going to the office but she had to.  She did not want to be working on someone elses terms.  She is an expert on womens issues and that feels great.  Morra is changing the workplace for women from the outside not the inside and getting companies to hire her to do it.  I am a big believer in change from the outside and that is one of the many reasons I am Morra fan from NYC.