Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Interview, Hway-ling Hsu, Sweetdragon Bakery

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My friend Nina is always waxing rhapsodic about Barefoot Coffee, which is near her house and which has baristas whose sole job in life it is to make coffee. (And they take that responsibility Very Seriously.) Recently a franchise outlet of Barefoot opened near me, so I decided to go check it out as a possible writing spot (upside: very comfy, many wall outlets; downside: farther away than other cafes near my house).

More important than what I thought of their coffee, however, was the sweet treat I discovered there: chocolate sea salt cookies. I munched on one and thought, “Wow, this is an awesome cookie.” Then I read the ingredients and I thought, “WOW, THIS IS A TOTALLY AWESOME COOKIE.”

Because in addition to being a great balance between chewy and crispy, in addition to being just chocolatey enough, and in addition to being 4 small cookies in a resealable package (making portion control easier)…it was vegan.

The kindest way I can put it is this: the vast majority of vegan baked goods I’ve had, both that I’ve made and that I’ve bought commercially, have sucked. Big time. There’s a company that has their products in the checkout aisle of Whole Foods that look delicious and taste like cardboard. So generally it’s a big turnoff for me. These, however, were awesome.

Which made me try many other of this company’s treats. And they were all really, really good.

I met Nina for a writing date one day at the Barefoot near her house and I discovered the cookies were there too. I bought a pack and stuck one in Nina’s mouth. “Try this,” I said, after the fact.

“Dfaj fajgapto.” Then she nodded.

“What?”

After a quick drink of coffee, she said, “That’s a good cookie.”

I was so enamored of the products by this company I tried I contacted the baker via her email and asked if I could talk to her about her business. And maybe I could get that chocolate sea salt cookie recipe from her. We met at Barefoot in Santa Clara. Nina showed up too, because she wanted to meet the baker too.

Cookies

Hway-ling met us and immediately offered us samples of the products she was working on: a vanilla shortbread cookie made without wheat flour, and a pistachio shortbread. One of these was vegan too, which I thought was a neat trick with shortbread, but I honestly couldn’t tell it was. After she finished dropping off her wares and leaving a few samples of new products for the cafe manager, she sat down with us.

She is very friendly and funny and chatty. I loved talking to her. She didn’t want her picture taken (I tried, but pictures of hands over a face are not exciting), so sadly I don’t have that to share.

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A lot of us have “fans” of our baking, but very few of us decide to make a business out of our baking. How did you decide to go into business? 

No one ever actually said that to me.

After my youngest didn’t need me at home any more, I thought, What would I like to do? I decided to start this business.

(Hway-ling told us that she was a lawyer for many years, both before and after having kids, but she was done with the whole legal thing after the last left her nest. Nina is also a lawyer, and she is always interested in hearing about what other lawyers do after they finish with that.)

What does it take to start a small baked-goods business? I assume there’s more to it than just baking a lot of stuff in your kitchen and putting it into plastic bags. 

You have to get a Food Safety Certificate. Take a class, take a test, get a certification, get a license. There’s the Environmental Health Certificate, $750/yr. Pay a business tax to city of San Jose. If you form a business as an limited liability corporation (LLC) through Nolo, every year there’s a $800 tax, Before you can rent space, you have to have insurance. The agent said to me, “You have no track record and you have no experience.”

And there are things like: Who do I sell to? What do I package in? What are the labeling requirements? I didn’t know about any of that.

There are lots of barriers to entry. There’s lots of requirements but it’s not always clear whose requirements they are.

Do you bake in your kitchen? If so, did you have to get it certified somehow? If you make your stuff somewhere else, what place do you use and how did you find it?

You have to have a business license. You have to cook in a commercial kitchen that’s licensed. I use a rent by the hour commercial kitchen used by caterers, hot dog vendors, all sorts of people. I met a family cooking for their daughter’s shower or some big event.  You could do a sitcom set in one of these commercial kitchens.

In New York, where I used to live, you can get your own kitchen checked out and certified. But not here.

I also saw in that SF Weekly article that you began with recipes and techniques you found on the internet, but you’ve branched out from there. What do you do to create recipes? 

At the kitchen where I rent there were two guys with a food truck. So I asked them, do you need a dessert? They asked for three things I didn’t know how to make. Peanut brittle, pralines, and something else. I got some recipes, I practiced, I gave it to them and they said, “Yeah, we can use this.” From the peanut brittle I experimented with other things.  The stoves at the kitchen are gas and have no marks. You have to eyeball the flame. You have to use different kinds of pots. You have to be aware of the ambient air temperature. In the winter the kitchen can be 50 and in the summers…  To go into a larger production requires more, bigger equipment.

(She makes a ton of different kinds of brittle now, some of which she sells through Ourtisan.com. In case you’re wondering about the packaging there, the company name was Snapdragon and is now Sweetdragon.)

One of the things I love about these cookies is that they’re vegan. Was this important to you when you started or just came about as part of the recipe you used?

I think vegans are hungry.  No, I wasn’t intended to make them vegan. I started with a sandy sable cookie. I didn’t like the texture so I changed it to a soft cookie. Then I said it has no eggs, maybe I could take the butter out. So I experimented with different oils. For these I ended up with coconut oil.

What ingredients do you use? I assume you’re not going to Lunardi’s and buying King Arthur Flour from there.

I shop everywhere. I get a lot of things from Whole Foods. If you buy a case of something there, you get 10% discount. I shop at Cash and Carry. I order online.

How did you pick where to sell?

I read about BF in the paper years ago as a high-quality local cafe. I stopped by the Roaster, near my house. I made a note to myself to go by every week with a sample…then I forgot. I made some candy and took it by, and they were ready tobuy. Now I’ve gotten calls from some local places, like a cafe in San Jose and some shops in SF, like Park & Pond — they only sell local vendors within 100 miles. There’s a new candy store in Bernal Heights — Rock Candy Snack Shop.

How do you find out about things like shelf life?

I test it all myself. Put it in a bag, mark it, put it on a shelf…I put things in the freezer to see what happens. We’re always finding things in the freezer.

I also try something of every batch of products I make, just to make sure I didn’t substitute salt for sugar.

Do you do all of your baking and experimenting in the test kitchen?

I still bake at home. I experiment and my family gets to eat the experiments. I also volunteer at Martha’s Kitchen. There are lots of volunteers there Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and they’re often my guinea pigs.

Is there any chance I could get the recipe for your chocolate sea salt cookies?

No.

 

Interview: Earl T. Roske

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Earl T. Roske is the most successful playwright I know of. I met him in Carol Wolf’s Playwriting class at Foothill College (unfortunately killed due to budget cuts; thanks for your support of the arts, state of California), and he was a little different than the rest of us: to begin with, he was a truck driver named Earl. Trust me, that stood out. Earl’s plays get produced all the time, all over the world, and he’s extremely prolific. (Although…according to one of the answers he gives here, not as prolific as I thought. Seriously, I thought he’d written hundreds of plays now. Image is everything, I guess.) Earl’s play “The Measure of a Man” was also in this year’s Eight Tens at Eight Festival in Santa Cruz (and is not only listed after mine, but was staged right after mine as well).

Earl

So I asked him to answer a few questions about how he got started in playwriting.

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Did you really start writing plays in Carol’s class, or did you do it before that? 

I wrote a play, once, when I was in second grade. It was about three pumpkins on a fence before Halloween. That’s all I remember about it and it never got performed. My hiatus lasted until I took the playwright class with Carol Wolf.

My fifth grade play was about the Hope Diamond. It did get performed but nobody had any idea what the Hope Diamond was, so it wasn’t a successful production. Did you do a lot of other types of writing before you started writing plays?

I did. I wrote short stories infrequently and a rough draft of a rough novel.

Why did you decide to start writing plays?

I took the playwright class in the hopes of improving my dialogue in my stories and just to take a writing class. I figured I’d take it for a year and then go back to writing stories. I got lost on the way back it seems.

So the first assignment was to write a three page play. I brought it that next week to class and I was terrified that people were going to laugh at me and tell me what a horrible piece of garbage it was. It wouldn’t have mattered. Just seeing people standing up and reading my words, reacting to them as they read was instantly addicting.

How did you decide to start sending them out? Lots of people took Carol’s class and never sent their stuff out.

This was Carol’s fault. I had one short play and she said I should send it to Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre’s Eight Tens @ Eight competition. If she hadn’t I probably wouldn’t have and that might have been the end of it. But, the play got accepted and I was like, “Wow! Where else can I send plays to?” So I began looking for places.

Where did you find the places to keep sending them?

I started on the internet. I use Yahoo! because I have a sentimental streak. And just type “ten-minute play submissions.” Then I started clicking through the results and found places that way. I joined the Chicago Playwright Center (www.pwcenter.org @ $60/year) because they have a “playwright opportunities” posting site where places looking for plays post their openings. I purchased a book, A More Perfect Ten, by Gary Garrison, which has about a dozen opportunities in the back. Also, the Dramatists Guild Resource Directory lists opportunities. And lately I’ve been watching a form En Avant Plawrights (http://enavantplaywrights.yuku.com/) Where opportunities are also listed.

You’re 4 for 4 (I think?) with the Santa Cruz Actors’ Theater 8 10s at 8 Festival, and your play “The Fruits of War” has been performed on 6 continents. I assume you’ve had other plays performed in various venues. What makes your plays so awesome in terms of getting produced?

6 continents? You flatter me. But, three continents, 5 countries.

Dammit. Really thought you had the 6 continent thing going.

No other play has been [as] successful [as The Fruits of War]. But most of them have gone on to have several productions. I don’t know for sure, but I think that it may be a simplicity of set requirements in most cases and a universal appeal. Most of these plays don’t take place in a specific place but they touch on values and ideals that exist around the world and the directors and actors can put their local touch on the play. For The Fruits of War, although it’s always the same script, it is seen very differently in Brisbane, Australia compared to Chennai, India to Oakland, California.

How do you go about writing your plays? I assume like most of us you get your inspiration from that small “Writers’ Ideas” store in Madison, WI. How long does it take you? Yes, it’s the horrifying “Your writing process” question.

Depends on the play. In every case except for the first play I spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of the play, what it is that I’m feeling and what it is I’m trying to say. And I try to think of a way to say it that might give it a twist. The Fruits of War is about the stupidity of retaliating against an enemy because they retaliated against you. The concept would pass as a farce if so many lives didn’t pay the cost.

So how do I make people see it differently. Then I write. The Fruits of War was written in a week of mornings as I sat in the truck I used to drive. I wrote furiously until it was time to drive. Then I typed it up and took it to class. I got feed back, rewrote, got feedback, sent it to Short + Sweet and the rest is, well, interesting.So ideas come from everywhere. I listen and allow myself to react to what I hear and read. Then I ponder and sometimes it’s short and sometimes I may ponder on an idea for a year or more. Oh, and I often try to write more than I need since it’s easier – my opinion – to edit out rather than to fluff it up.

I always find the plays that I write the fastest tend to get the best reception. Does it work that way for you, or do you rewrite a lot?

Mostly, yes, I agree. I think that’s because those plays are coming straight through from the sub-conscious straight to the fingers. But bad plays happen like that, too. The real trick is to be willing to abandon the play/idea when it turns out to be a dud. On my computer I have 30 files for 30 plays. I’ve only have 9 ten-minute plays that have been produced. Half those files hold stinkers that I may never work on again. There isn’t any reason to go back when there are new ideas already percolating in front of me.

What about for sending them out? Do you keep a schedule or a checklist? Like, “I must send out 5 plays per month…” 

I keep a submission record for each play in the file with the play. I keep track of when I sent the play, to whom I sent it, and when the production is. Most places don’t tell you you’ve been rejected. So when I go through the file and see a date has passed I know the play has been rejected. You should also not be afraid of submitting to multiple places at once. Everyone wants an unproduced play. I figure that if I hit the jackpot and two or more accept the play at the same time, the table are reversed and it is I, the playwright, that gets to do some rejecting.

Best thing about writing plays?

Seeing the play on the stage. Knowing that I am part of a creative process that includes other people who are compelled by what I’ve written to bring it to the stage and in turn affect an audience. (Or should that be infect an audience? Hm.)

Worst? 

A constant fear that I’m going to run out of ideas. It’s a constant fear that eats at me while I am hastily writing down yet another idea for a play that I won’t be able to get to for a year or more because of the dozen other ideas I’ve already committed myself to.

You’ve clearly done well with your 10-minute plays. Are you going to move into one-act or full-length plays? Or is it simply easier to get produced writing 10-minute plays?

I’ve written three full-length plays and they have gotten progressively less awful. What’s nice about ten-minute plays is that you have a greater chance of getting produced. (In Short + Sweet Sydney they produce over a hundred plays in a five week period. That would never happen with full-length plays.) There’s not much call for one-acts that I can see. I’ve written a couple and they haven’t been produced. But I do submit them when I can. Also, consider my production resume – which theatres ask to see when you submit a full-length play. I have 9 plays and 30+ productions. That looks good and I hope will improve my chances of getting a longer look when my play lands on some artistic director’s desk.

Every screenwriter in Hollywood was first a playwright. (Seriously. First thing out of their mouths.) Any plans to start screenwriting? 

As an evolution of writing I think that would be a step after I have had a full-length play produced somewhere. It’s a different mindset as I look at it. With a screenplay you can literally be in Paris and then in Moscow in moments and jump back again. You can have characters with one line and are never seen again. Frugality does not seem to be a watchword for screenplays. And the formatting is different and the guardians of the gates are different. But, yes, I’d like to try to write a couple screenplays to see how that feels.

On a scale from 1 to 10, how useful is “I’m the playwright” as a pickup line?

I’m married so I don’t have to worry about it. But, I think when it comes to being in the theatre world, in small theatre, to say – and of course casually, as if almost by accident – “I’m the playwright,” will indeed get you attention. I’ve been taken out for coffee and inundated with questions. I will say this, though: if my play was the worst one of the night, I’d keep my mouth shut.

So…has this happened to you yet?

No, it hasn’t happened to me. I have had directors come and tell me that the actors are scared/nervous once they find out the playwright is in the theatre. That makes me wonder what kind of playwrights they’ve dealt with before. I’ve been fortunate so far.Oh, in one of the Short + Sweet festivals my play did get the lowest votes by the audience. But I wasn’t there.