It’s not hard to make leftovers into an ultra-tasty pasta dish. If you have anything from a couple odds and ends to a large, frightening buffet lurking in your crisper—it doesn’t matter. Last night I made leftovers pasta (above) with so many different things it looked like my refrigerator threw up. But it tasted fantastic.

I’ve figured out four simple techniques that help make it taste great.

1. Have a Fat Strategy
If you’ve got a bit of hamburger or bacon that’s headed for the dish, cook it first and use the fat for the rest of the cooking. Same goes for an old sausage or salami end. It doesn’t matter what kind of fat you use, just think about how to get it in the dish at the beginning. Last night I had an old jar of peppers that were packed in olive oil. The peppers were long gone. I kept the jar with the oil; it’s perfect for this kind of dish. Also, don’t skimp on the fat. Its going to be the vessel for the flavor and the source of the mouth-filling texture.

2. Think About Salt in Things, Not On Things
I tend to cook on the saltier side but for this dish I didn’t add any salt directly to it. Instead I added things that had some salt in them. This time they were capers, salt-cured limes and harissa. As for the pasta water, it should be salty like the sea. To learn how much to salt your water eat a noodle straight out of the water when it’s almost done cooking. It should taste seasoned.

3. Re-use the Pasta Water
It took me forever to figure out that this was the key to making great pasta dishes (that weren’t topped with tomato sauce). Don’t throw out the water, please! Use it in the sauce. It makes a huge difference.

4. Don’t Finish Cooking Pasta in the Water
Finish it in the sauce. If the pasta is not yet al dente it’s still hungry for liquid. Switch it from the pot of water to your sauce and it’ll soak up sauce, not water—and you’ll have a more flavorful dish.

For leftover pasta, the order I work goes like this:

1. Set the water to boil.
2. Put a big skillet on the burner and start adding things: meats/fat first, then aromatics like garlic, onion, pastes like harissa. Maybe a little bit of leftover sauce—whatever sauce I have. More leftovers next, especially ones that need longer cooking. Spices, too, like a stem of some old herb or a chile pepper. Cook on low, don’t worry about stirring too much.
3. When the water boils add a small handful of salt and the pasta. When the pasta is not quite done, strain it and pour a half inch of the water in the skillet simmering the sauce. Add the pasta to the skillet. Save the remaining water. Cook on high heat till the pasta is done. Add more pasta water if it starts getting dry. You want the pasta to be wet, the water will make the sauce.
4. At the very end I may add things that barely need cooking. Last night it was some frozen peas, corn and a mound of mangy arugula, all added just at the end, stirred and poured out into a bowl.
5. I usually finish with freshly ground black pepper, Marash pepper and a squeeze of lemon.

Practice this a half dozen times and I guarantee your homemade leftovers pasta will taste better than almost any pasta dish you can eat in a restaurant. It certainly helps to use a great noodles like Rustichella or Martelli. If you’re going to spend some money, do it there.

This seems exceedingly obvious, but I’ve encountered a lot of businesses that don’t get it—they seem to think that people ought to buy from them “just because.” But from the day we opened at Zingerman’s we’ve always taken the approach that we need our customers way more than they need us. We’ve always assumed that we have nothing to offer that anyone really needs. And we’ve worked with the knowledge that we don’t sell anything that a hundred (or now, with the web, a hundred thousand) competitors aren’t offering some reasonable facsimile of, often with better parking or lower prices. Instead, we’ve always worked with the belief that we have to give people lots of really good reasons to buy from us.

The answer to the question of what those persuasive reasons are will vary from one business to the next. But if you don’t think the reasons your company is offering are all that exciting, they probably aren’t. If that’s the case, I’d say start working to come up with more as quickly as you can—the risk of offering too many compelling reasons would be what we’d consider a “good problem.”

Twelve Natural Laws of Business:
There are organizational principles that consistently work and, in the big scheme of things, follow a natural order. We call these “Natural Laws of Business.” Our experience here is that the natural laws are applicable for any business regardless of size, scale, age or product offering. Exceptions exist, but I’ll say up front I wouldn’t recommend expending much energy trying to prove these rules to be wrong.

What’s a vision? As we define it here, it’s a picture of what success looks like at a particular point in the future. If you’re starting a business, I’d suggest that you pick a time at least three to five years in the future, and longer might be even better. Your vision will talk about what your business does, and why it’s special. How the people who work in the business feel about being part of it. How your business relates to its customers, and about how it fits into the community. It could even detail what you as owner will do, and how much money you want to make. To be effective the vision needs to inspire the people who will be doing the work. It also needs to be strategically sound—i.e., while your goals should be ambitious, you want them to be realistic, too. To that end, the vision should also have some key measurables so that everyone involved has some sense of what you’re aspiring to: “As big as we can be as fast as we can get there” is NOT a vision. To be effective the vision also needs to be in writing, so that you and your fellow travelers—business partners, employees, etc.—will be literally and figuratively on the same page.

Please note, too, that the vision is NOT a strategic plan—the plan is how you intend to get from where you are to the vision. But everyone has to be in agreement on where you’re going before you can start mapping out action steps for how to get there.

Twelve Natural Laws of Business:
There are organizational principles that consistently work and, in the big scheme of things, follow a natural order. We call these “Natural Laws of Business.” Our experience here is that the natural laws are applicable for any business regardless of size, scale, age or product offering. Exceptions exist, but I’ll say up front I wouldn’t recommend expending much energy trying to prove these rules to be wrong.

Or, Why Ignoring The Natural L
aws Of Business Is A Recipe For Big Trouble

Ever found yourself frustrated, wondering almost aloud:

– What’s wrong with all those employees? Why don’t they get it?
– Why don’t more people start to innovate?
– What’s keeping employees from being more creative?
– What’s wrong with the economy? What’s keeping things from getting going?

I don’t want to overplay the point. I’m not big on telling others what they ought to be doing. What follows isn’t an admonition, merely an observation. By operating in violation of the Natural Laws of Business the country’s workplaces are suffering a very serious energy crisis.

You don’t need to be an expert to see what I’m talking about with this image; the energy crisis is about as obvious as anything can be. Go into most any business other than the really great ones and you know and I know that the place is going to feel . . . flat.

If you doubt my doom and gloom, energy crisis assessment, take a look at this data from a Harris Poll cited in Dean Tucker’s great book, Using the Power of Purpose. Seriously—check this out. Of those surveyed:

Only 37% of employees clearly know the company’s goals
Only 20% are enthusiastic about those goals
Only 20% could say how they could support those goals
Only 15% feel like are enabled to work towards ‘em
Only 20% fully trust the company they worked for

Thanks to Dr. Tucker, I realized it was actually worse than I thought when I read the polling numbers the first time through. He had the deft wisdom and wit to suggest that one translate that workplace data into what it would mean for a football team. Of the eleven players who get sent out onto the field:

Only four actually know which goal they’re going towards
Even more depressing, only two of them actually care
Only two know which position they’re supposed to be playing when they get on the field.
Only two guys on the team feel like their efforts on the field could actually make a difference.
And all but two players would be just as likely to be rooting for the other team as their own.

Hello! OMG! Insert all the expletives you’re comfortable composing, and then add a couple more for good luck. *!@#&*!!! American business is paying people (often with lots of benefits) to work at somewhere between 15 and 37 percent of capacity. They show up, they get paid, they do work, but the truth is that they’re operating as if their batteries were on low.

The good news, though, is that it’s actually fairly easily repaired at, believe it or not, almost no cost.

Here at Zingerman’s, I think the number one reason we’re able to keep our energy up (and, with it, our productivity, creativity, and day-to-day satisfaction in our jobs) is because we work every day to live according to the natural laws of business. We are tapping the full energy of the people who work here, and getting way better results in the process.

I know that, for folks that have been doing business differently for a long time, starting to live the Natural laws might be easier said than done. It’s not just some switch you throw, or a new supplier to simply start buying from. But, emotionally challenging as it may be, I truly believe from the top of my head to the bottom of my heart, that that is the solution to the energy crisis in the workplace.

Interior Nl Jan-feb 2012 Final Web