A meal that’s easy to make at home in a matter of minutes

I probably shouldn’t be surprised anymore that the best ideas so often start out as silly jokes. The Pimentuna casserole began about a decade ago with a bit of light culinary humor and ended up as a classically delicious, go-to, make-at-home Zingerman’s dish.

The whole thing started when my significant other, Tammie Gilfoyle, had the good idea to mix our Zingerman’s Pimento Cheese with tuna. I tried it, and she was right: it was terrific. This grew into the highly popular Pimentuna melt sandwich that ran as a special at the Roadhouse for a while, grilled on one of my Bakehouse favorites, Roadhouse Bread. 

Making Pimentuna really couldn’t be much easier. Start with a container of Zingerman’s Pimento Cheese, and mix it with roughly the same volume of really good tuna. You can adjust the ratio, of course, to fit your taste. Add salt and pepper as you like, and you’re ready to go. Enjoy it in a sandwich or as a salad!

A year or so after all that, we were still joking around—this time with the notion that we ought to turn our new mix into a Pimentuna casserole. I would be a throwback to, and a takeoff on, the tried-and-true mid-20th-century classic. This sounded a little crazy at first, too, but then it started sounding better and better … and I decided to make it, tossing the Pimentuna with the Mancini family’s marvelous bronze die-extruded, slowly dried maccheroni.

The Roadhouse crew had the great idea to seal the deal by topping the dish with a handful of Zingerman’s Black Pepper Potato Chips to add some crunch. What can I say? Killer! Comforting, compelling, and definitely worth taking a few minutes to make for lunch!

Life lessons from an Alabama folk artist and musician

I suppose it might sound sort of silly to admit, but the truth is that this entire essay—and all the learnings contained within—emerged from the wholly unsought, completely unexpected discovery of a cover version of the classic 1993 Nirvana song “Dumb.” When I listened to it for the first time several weeks ago, I liked it—a lot. I knew nothing about the man who made it, and I had no idea whatsoever where it might lead me. But hey, for a buck, I bought it on Bandcamp. In the days that followed, I listened to the tune multiple times. I’m still listening—and learning—many weeks later. 

The creator of the cover is Alabama singer-songwriter and visual artist Abe Partridge—whom I’d never heard of until I stumbled upon the song. Now I know that the amazing artwork that accompanies his version of “Dumb” belongs to Partridge as well. I’ve begun a journey of studying his life and work, and as I dig deeper, more insights and inspiration continue to appear. I love Partridge’s music and his paintings. And as you’ll soon see, his story is a pretty darned remarkable one. 

What’s so exciting about all this? Well, for me at least, it’s incredibly heartening to remember that at any given moment, I might well happen upon some seriously good learning—and that a mentor in the making might be waiting just around the next intellectual corner. Despite the off-putting title of Nirvana’s song, keeping our mental door open to this kind of learning—learning that could light the way for us as we sort out how to live our lives every day—is actually anything but dumb. 

Like Ruth Adler Schnee, about whom I wrote a whole lot last week, Partridge has shown me how much wisdom I can glean from someone I wasn’t even aware of until recently. Whereas Adler Schnee, who passed away in January 2023, was a mentor from the past, Partridge, who is younger than I am and very much alive, illustrates that this sort of mentorship is not tied to age. Insight can come from anywhere. When I feel down, anxious, uncertain, or overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world (all of which can come up within about 18 minutes of each other), I’m lifted up by folks like Partridge and Adler Schnee—inspirational leaders who remind me of what is possible in the most positive of ways. And although figures like Partridge may not (yet) be widely known, they’re out there, telling us, in his words, “You’ve gotta put your antennae up. There’s stuff going on all around you.”

“Antennae” makes me think of outer space, and sure enough, Partridge has a song that’s a pretty perfect fit for that subject. In the chorus of his rousing “Alabama Astronauts,” he sings with courage and enthusiasm, “I’ve been waiting for those aliens to come.” He’s loaded up and ready to hold his ground! The rest of us, I believe, can stop waiting, though. Partridge is a more than suitable stand-in—a little bit of an alien, something of an “inner space” astronaut, an artist with the ability to transform his life into wonderfully weird songs and paintings. His work has had me laughing, crying, and learning all at the same time. Like that of Adler Schnee, it’s wholly unique and a reminder that any of us who put our minds to it and put in the required effort can make great things happen.

Both Partridge and Adler Schnee demonstrate how creativity can be brought to life in meaningful ways, and how one can effectively access the unique essence that is deeply ensconced in each of us. Adler Schnee did so in a cultural milieu I can pretty easily relate to—namely, formally educated, middle-class Jewish immigrant families making their way through the American Midwest in the middle of the 20th century. If someone told me my mother had met Adler Schnee, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least.

Conversely, I’m very confident that my mother did not ever come into contact with anyone from Abe Partridge’s family, nor sit in attendance at their church. In the Northern, urban Jewish immigrant world in which I grew up, the idea of a close-knit Baptist community in Mobile, Alabama, would have been as alien as the otherworldly folks Partridge writes about. And yet I love breaking down these silos and opening up to new connections—as different as they are, learning from Adler Schnee and from Partridge is an equally deep experience! 

At the end of his song “What Good Is Art?”, Partridge sings, “What good is art if you don’t know how to use it?” He, it turns out, is quite adept at using art to produce learnings that have changed the course of his own life—and the lives of others—into an avenue for good in the world. 

It wasn’t always that way for Partridge. Here’s one version of his life story he often includes when performing his great song “No Teacher Blues”:

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where we moved to a new school every year.
I left Mobile when I was 18 years old to become a Baptist preacher.
I went to four different Bible colleges in four years, and I married my wife on the day I graduated.
When I was 25, I started pastoring at a little Independent Baptist church in the mountains of Kentucky.
Then, when I was 27, I lost my mind.

During this period of “losing his mind” and questioning his path in the church, Partridge encountered music he’d never known about before. As he told The Bitter Southerner:

When I was 27 was the first time I had high-speed internet. And I started hearing all sorts of music for the first time. When I heard Townes Van Zandt singing “Waiting Around to Die” when I was waiting around to die, I could totally relate. …

I started writing songs while up there losing my mind, still in the ministry, and that’s when I started painting. That’s when I started all my art. It was an avenue, a way I could get all of it out because I didn’t have anybody I could talk to. I had no friends. …

For years I just played them at home, to my wife. But then, in 2015, I decided to play them in public at a songwriting contest in Mobile. And that changed my life.

Partridge’s story does not, of course, end there. But I want to segue for a moment because it’s actually a near-ideal example of a phenomenon that ethicist and essayist David Brooks described in a 2019 New York Times Op-Ed entitled “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy”:

Many of the people I admire lead lives that have a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career, started a family and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb—I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a doctor, a cop. They did the things society encourages us to do, like make a mark, become successful, buy a home, raise a family, pursue happiness.

For Partridge, the “first mountain” was, of course, his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become a Baptist preacher. As Brooks explains, the first mountain is almost always some sort of significant but finally unfulfilling pursuit:

People on the first mountain spend a lot of time on reputation management. They ask: What do people think of me? Where do I rank? They’re trying to win the victories the ego enjoys.

These hustling years are also powerfully shaped by our individualistic and meritocratic culture. People operate under this assumption: I can make myself happy. If I achieve excellence, lose more weight, follow this self-improvement technique, fulfillment will follow.

While Partridge doesn’t use these exact words, the model clearly fits his trajectory. Pastoring did not work out well for him. Brooks, though, opens our minds to the second part of the story—the part that Partridge’s life illustrates so beautifully: after the despair, after the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and hollowness, there is still an awesome and inspiring “second mountain” for us to climb. 

This is one of the most powerful messages I take away from studying Abe Partridge’s fascinating life and art. As my friend Gareth Higgins, the Irish author and activist, taught me, “You never know when a story is over, especially when you’re in it.” So when things look grim, don’t give up—there’s a positive story still waiting to play out! For Partridge, that second mountain is the magic of painting and playing music, of being a storyteller. As Brooks writes,

In the lives of the people I’m talking about—the ones I really admire—something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.

This “interruption” in Partridge’s existence came in large part from enlisting in the Air Force after leaving the ministry—and being sent to fight in Iraq. The experience changed him, and pushed him to put himself out there artistically:

I saw a lot of stuff over there that I had suspected before. But when you’re looking at it right square in the eye, and you see the B-2s [the stealth bombers], and you see six of them in this 12-hour shift come and go and come and go, I realized that basically, the only thing I had ever done with my adult life was brought negativity into the world through the type of preaching I did, and bring violence into the world through the military. …

In the meantime, I was making this art: I was writing these songs, and I was painting these pictures, and I told God that if He’d just let me get home, that I would do my best to try to bring beauty into the world.

The war, it seems, was one of the last low points in the valley before Partridge began to climb the second mountain. He put the pain of this ordeal into a bracing song called “Undisclosed Location in Southwest Asia Killing Floor Blues.” 

Each of us, of course, has our own personal version of life in the wilderness before the second mountain. I describe my own period of struggle, and the accompanying emotional challenges I faced, in Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves. In many ways, those were the hardest years of my life. But it’s also clear to me now that without that struggle—and the deep reflection and learning that emerged from it—I would not be who I am today, doing what I do the way I do it. I see a strong parallel in Partridge’s story, as expressed in his artist statement:

When I was 27 years old, I became acquainted with a horrible depression. I left the ministry and turned to Art. I had written songs and made paintings like these for years. Only after joining the military and going to war did I decide to begin sharing my art with the world. I never took a songwriting class, nor have I ever had an art class. I always just thought I was weird …

Partridge effectively figured out how to turn his strangeness into specialness—to use art to, as he says, convert “what was really chaotic into something that was really beautiful.” And that, I suppose, is one of my key takeaways from all this as well. Why? Because any of us can learn to do it. No matter the form it takes, making art—or, indeed, doing anything creative—can have the same transformative effect for any of us who are willing to work at it, and to do the kind of self-reflection and reassessment that Partridge undertook. And when we create from the heart, with passion and skill put together wisely and well, the results can be truly astonishing. 

These principles from Partridge’s artist statement frame his work—and they could, for that matter, frame mine, too:

Rethink preconceived notions.
Question authority.
Create new methods of survival.
See beauty.

As much as Partridge may have struggled in life, that was only the dark before a new dawn. He found focus, purpose, connection, and passion; he discovered his vocation, and it worked out. His painting, his music, his podcast—all he does, to my eye—are disarmingly down to earth and equally excellent. And he makes his points in the process. As he exclaims partway through “No Teacher Blues,” “Somebody’s gotta stand against the mainstream.” He’s in. So am I.

Partridge is not alone in this antiestablishment position. Eve L. Ewing, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and the author of Electric Archesandthe epically stirring poem “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” writes,

We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid—not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again.

Along similar lines, Partridge says, “To endure as an artist is my act of resistance.” So if, as I write in “The Art of Business,” everything we do is art—life and business included—then simply being true to ourselves and making the “art” that is uniquely ours is some seriously solid resistance.

As I move toward wrapping up, I want to return to the fact that my engagement with Abe Partridge—as with Ruth Adler Schnee—began completely by chance, through an accidental encounter with a cover of a Nirvana song. Life is almost always like that. Straight lines sound great, but they don’t really exist in nature. Another example of this unpredictability: I was recently reminded of the true story of a Deli line cook back in our first years in business who made a well-intentioned but not very sound decision and almost burned down our building—and who today is the beloved Episcopal bishop of a major American city! 

Strange things connect in unexpected places, paths unfold, shit happens—and the next thing you know, a random mention or a seemingly insignificant tangent turns into artistic mentorship worthy of deep reflection. Such inspiration and insight can come from anywhere: Southeast Michigan or Mobile, Alabama; the Bauhaus or a local dive bar. 

Developing this piece, I started to put together a whole new list of life lessons drawn from Abe Partridge’s life’s work. But I realized halfway through that they were pretty much the same as the dozen I detailed last week from studying Ruth Adler Schnee. Still, I’ve found over the years that there’s often great value in repeating important messages—especially ones we can go out and apply ourselves. Here, then, is a variation on last week’s learnings:

A Dozen Life Lessons Inspired by Ruth Adler Schnee, Effectively Echoed by Abe Partridge

1. Find joy. Just listen to Partridge sing or speak—he exudes joy everywhere!

2. Live your values. Don’t do work you don’t believe in.Partridge has said, “I can’t listen to the radio, dude. It just doesn’t feel like reality. It’s written by people using artificial intelligence to tell them the right words to put in a song. I’d rather listen to someone who isn’t that talented sing something they feel passionately from the heart.”

3. Go where you want, but start with what you have. This is the very definition of folk art. Partridge paints on a piece of board he’s smeared with tar pitch—can’t get much more basic than that. Simple origins, outstanding results. And when it comes to ideas, he says, “I cherish every idea because I feel like they’re gifts. They’re like a spark. … I don’t know if they’re coming from within or without.”

4. Pursue your dreams regardless of what others tell you. I can only imagine the dissonance Partridge encountered as he began to shift his life’s focus from religion to art.   

5. Don’t get caught up in limiting beliefs that society has set for “people like you.” Partridge had long been on the path to becoming one kind of person—namely, a Baptist minister—but he had the courage to depart from it to find his deeper calling as an artist. 

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Partridge puts it, “Beauty lies outside the rules.” And giving credit where credit is due, he adds, “I learned that from Sonic Youth.”

7. Align with essence. “I don’t put on any masks,” Partridge says. “I don’t do anything fake. I just am who I am.” In other words, he’s true to himself and his soul’s essence. 

8. Learn from the edges. When he left the pastorship, “for the first time in seven years, I was outside of that echo chamber,” Partridge explains. “I had the mental space to realize that I didn’t know everything. I didn’t have all the answers. When you’re in a belief structure like that, where everything is based on certainty, and doubt is a sin, as soon as you admit that you’re uncertain, it all comes crumbling down.” But outside that rigid structure, the edges—the periphery, the “alternative” spaces—have so much to teach us. (It’s a whole ’nother essay unto itself, but Partridge has dedicated a great deal of time and energy in recent years to documenting the rituals, beliefs, and music of the snake-handling churches of Appalachia. You can learn a lot more from his podcast, Alabama Astronauts.)

9. Push for greatness—but within your own framework, not as society defines it. Partridge may be a so-called “outsider artist,” but the art he’s making is reaching people in profound ways. If that’s not greatness, I don’t know what is. 

10. Find ways to turn your vocation into a living. This Partridge has clearly done—just check out his website to see everything he has going on. 

11. Design for both medium and means. Partridge doesn’t talk about anarchism a lot, but to me, it’s spiritually embedded in his freewheeling, freethinking work. And as he sings in the stunning “Abe Partridge’s 403d Freakout,” “I found hope in anarchy.”

12. If you love what you do, and you don’t want to stop, don’t! Partridge is just in his 40s now, but there are certainly no signs of him letting up anytime soon. When you love what you do, doing it is fun—I can absolutely relate! 

I need only listen to a few minutes of Abe Partridge’s singular music or sit with a couple of his compelling works of art to increase my personal level of hope. For me, people like Partridge are proof positive that we’re going to get to the other side of our current tenuous national situation.

The Black Mountain College artist I quoted last week, Kenneth Noland, says about making art, “You can say after the fact what you’re doing, but, believe me, you can’t project it ahead. … It’s a search … it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.” And that restless search, to my eye and ear, is exactly what Abe Partridge has spent the second part of his life committed to. Or, as he sings in “No Teacher Blues” (which, to be clear, is about how he learned to play without a teacher, not about a dislike for teachers):

 I’ll just play it like I feel it
 Let it come from soul
 Cause you don’t need no teacher
 To rock ’n’ roll

Perhaps my favorite Partridge song right now remains “What Good Is Art?” from his album Suwanee. It sort of sums up this entire essay. “They don’t teach our kids to create; they’re taught to follow the rules,” he sings. But we don’t need to take that instruction passively. Again, “Somebody’s gotta stand against the mainstream.” And the tune’s closing line brings us back to the dual personal and political value of artistic practice: “What good is art if you don’t know how to use it?”

(Oh—and if you’re curious what Partridge’s music sounds like, I can offer a whole list of folks you might consider if you were constructing a sonic collage: Vic Chesnutt, for sure, and definitely some early Bob Dylan. A little Loudon Wainwright, and some Tom Waits, too. Maybe a bit of Lou Reed here and there, and some rocking Southern band, like the Red Clay Strays or Drive-By Truckers. In Partridge’s songs, humor and pathos exist side by side. As Cracked put it, “This Dude Is Either the Funniest Folk Singer or the Most Serious Humorist I’ve Ever Seen.”)

In closing, don’t forget to keep those antennae up! Inspiration may come from a cover of a now 30-plus-year-old song, from a painting or collage or comment, from Ruth Adler Schnee or Abe Partridge—who knows where! But the last words here must, by rights, belong to Partridge, who encapsulates all I’ve written this week (and last week), and, for that matter, all I’ve endeavored to do for my whole working life. I’m fully and passionately aligned with him when he says, 

I’ll paint whatever my heart needs to paint, and I ain’t scared to say anything that my heart needs to say. If anybody says I can’t say what I feel, well, it’s not their heart in my chest, it’s mine. I just have to be true to myself.

Turn life and business into art

P.S. If you pay attention, I’ll wager that you, too, will find an unexpected mentor or two to help inspire you in the days and weeks to come. Let me know what you discover!

A lovely, gentle “green minestrone” to make at home

As the seasons change even here in Southeast Michigan, I was reminded of a wonderful fresh vegetable soup that my good friend Rolando Beramendi, the Italian fine food importer, cooked for Tammie and me at his Florence apartment in the winter of 2021. We were a year into the pandemic, but things seemed to have calmed enough by March for us to make the trip to Italy. A highlight of the whole experience was visiting Rolando—and this soup! (It was also during this trip that he turned me on to the amazing IASA peperoncino, now a staple at our house, the Roadhouse, and hundreds of other spice-loving houses around town.)

Many Americans have an image of minestrone as a standard-issue vegetable soup of little culinary importance, often made to use up veggies that are about to go bad. What Rolando has written up in his fantastic book, Autentico, is actually the opposite of that sort of stereotypical minestrone. Instead of being thick with beans and vegetables, it’s a lovely, light, brothy way to feature the season’s best veggies—in fact, the quality of the vegetables is what it’s all about! 

The soup really is remarkable. The freshness of the flavors makes it so delicious that it’s been on my mind ever since I first tried it in Florence. The recipe for “green minestrone” is in Rolando’s book, and I recently made it in just a little over half an hour. It was so good, and so easy to prepare, that Tammie decided to make it again two days later! 

In Autentico, Rolando does the soup in two steps: making a quick vegetable broth (which you can freeze if you like), then simmering it with an array of other fresh vegetables. I brought the two parts of the process together, simply starting the soup as soon as the broth was done. 

The broth is made with large tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, parsley, garlic, basil, scallions, and sea salt. Since there are no good tomatoes to be found in the spring in Southeast Michigan, I used a half dozen terrific canned Italian plum tomatoes. 

To follow Rolando’s recipe, start with six cups of fresh water, then add the tomatoes, herbs, scallions, and salt. (In his book, he writes about learning to toss in fresh tomato leaves to enrich the broth, but then again, he lives in Florence … and most of us do not!) Bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for about 10 minutes. I added the cherry tomatoes—which I sliced in two to release their juices—about halfway through. You can strain and freeze the brodetto at this point if you like, to have it on hand for future cooking. Or, as I did, you can push ahead and prepare your dinner!

To make the soup, you’ll want a wide range of fresh seasonal vegetables: celery (if it’s local and really good), fresh herbs, plenty of flat-leaf Italian parsley, zucchini, etc. Here’s what I use: a lot of very coarsely chopped fresh parsley; chopped fresh, tender spring turnips and their greens; fresh basil; fresh thyme; fresh spinach; a little local lovage; some broccolini (the stems went in before the flowers); and, naturally, asparagus when it starts coming in (any minute now around here). Plus some sea salt. Rolando likes scallions, but I pass. 

You, of course, can add anything you want. The key is the quality of the seasonal vegetables and, as per Rolando’s recipe, a relatively short cook to highlight their freshness. Rolando writes that the only “rule” is not to cut everything to the same size before boiling until tender in the brodetto. It’s all about the “textures and surprising bites with every spoonful.” 

As soon as the soup is ready, add a bunch of freshly ground Tellicherry black pepper and serve it in warm bowls. Garnish with a good bit of full-flavored, fruity Tuscan extra virgin olive oil—which is an important ingredient, so be generous! Put the pepper grinder on the table, too, for those (like me) who enjoy a lot of it. Rolando recommends serving the soup with focaccia, which is easy for us here since the Bakehouse’s has been really lovely of late. The soup also does reheat pretty well, so don’t be afraid of leftovers. 

(Rolando’s recipe for this spring minestrone uses no cheese, but I have seen many others—including one from Rolando’s and my friend Elizabeth Minchilli—that do suggest either adding a piece of rind to the broth while it’s cooking and/or grating some Parmigiano Reggiano atop each bowl when you serve the soup. It’s good that way as well, but I prefer the fresh simplicity of Rolando’s approach—great vegetables simmered slowly with water and sea salt, and dressed with full-flavored olive oil.)

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Lessons from a woman who created exceptional design well into her 90s

The artist and master colorist Kenneth Noland—whose 112th birthday would have been last week—studied and worked at the remarkable Black Mountain College in North Carolina for a number of years. Noland was a native of Asheville, the next town over from Black Mountain, so it was geographically easy for him to decide to attend, as well as artistically and ethically appealing. Black Mountain College was the place in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s for freethinking spirits like Noland (and me—I’m 80 years too late, but I’m ready to enroll!). There, Noland was greatly influenced by the color theories of the brilliant German American, Bauhaus-trained painter, sculptor, poet, and teacher Josef Albers. While Noland is hardly a household name, within the world of avant-garde art and thought, his work is most definitely noteworthy. The New York gallery Yares Art describes him as “one of the 20th century’s most radical and influential American painters.” (As we come to the end of the month, here’s a link to one of his best-known pieces, April.)

Reflecting on his personal journey as an artist, Noland once said, “For me, context is the key—from that comes the understanding of everything. … Context begins with other artists—seniors and mentors.” In other words, context gives us the historical and social framing for what we’re doing, and seniors and mentors allow us to see what is possible in the long run. Coming before us, they open doors to what we might decide to do with our lives moving forward. We try things, we make discoveries, and, slowly, we figure out our own unique paths. The middle element in that list, it turns out, is especially important. Noland affirms this, commenting about art, “If it isn’t a process of discovery, it shows.” 

Noland’s contemporary, the remarkable American textile artist Sheila Hicks, now 91, also trained with Albers at Black Mountain College. Like Noland, Hicks may not be well known in the wider world, but in the places where people pay attention to thoughtful and thought-provoking art, it’s acknowledged that she has had a transformative impact on sculpture through her innovative work with yarn and string. “In the world we live in,” Hicks says, “with so many hard things that we touch, we’re crying for softness. We’re all yearning for something that is warm, welcoming, and soft in the hard, hard world.” Coming to this understanding was part of the discovery process that has made Hicks’ life and art what they are. As she asserts, “To be alive is to discover.”

Discovery is certainly a key aspect of what makes my life so interesting. Not too long ago, I discovered another incredible artist, Ruth Adler Schnee. Of course, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, what I “discovered” was already very well known to others; it was new only to me. Adler Schnee is, after all, hardly a secret figure. In fact, although I wasn’t aware of her until very recently, she remains one of the most highly regarded modern designers. Having spent the past few weeks studying her life and work, I’m so inspired that I’m now intent on adding Adler Schnee’s upbeat, insightful, creative, and caring voice to the “huddle in my head.” 

Backing up a bit: Ruth Adler was born to a German Jewish family in Frankfurt in 1923—this coming May 13 would have been her 113th birthday. Her father, Joseph, was a well-known and respected antiquarian book dealer; her mother, Marie, was an artist who’d attended the Bauhaus in its original German home. The Adler family later moved to Düsseldorf, where a young Paul Klee, the renowned artist, was both their neighbor and Ruth’s babysitter! During the Nazis’ Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, Joseph Adler was arrested and detained at Dachau. Understanding what was at risk, Marie went to the camp gate and, calmly and firmly, talked her way into getting her husband freed. The Adlers had seen enough; there was no reasonable life left for Jews in Nazi Germany. They began the process of immigrating to the United States and eventually came to Detroit—what would now be about an hour or so east of the Deli. 

As a teenager, Ruth Adler attended Cass Tech, and then she traveled east for college to the Rhode Island School of Design. After a few years in Providence, she returned to the Detroit area and earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1946. Two years later, she married Edward Schnee, and in September 1949, the young couple opened a consulting business and a retail design shop in Detroit. Like most startups, the store faced struggles in the beginning, but over time, it moved into a former factory location and developed into a retail jewel of the city. Through the years, Adler Schnee got to know designer Minoru Yamasaki, the man who made the original World Trade Center what it was. Sure enough, Yamasaki called her for help with the color palette of the building’s all-important lobby.

What makes me so intrigued by Ruth Adler Schnee? In large part, it’s the unexpected but exciting alignment between our values—and our parallel approaches to engaging with the world in what I’ve come to believe are the most wonderful of ways. Studying Adler Schnee’s life story, looking at photos of her prolific work, and being exposed to her energy—indirectly, of course, since she passed away in January 2023 at the age of 99—I realize that, for me, she fits well into Kenneth Noland’s category of “seniors and mentors.” 

Oprah Winfrey writes that “a mentor is someone who allows you to see the hope inside yourself.” Through her example, Ruth Adler Schnee does that for me. Below are some life lessons I’ve drawn from her legacy. You can, of course, take away your own—and there’s a whole world full of seniors and mentors to glean even more lessons from. Some, like Emma Goldman, have come to me through reading and reflecting—others, like Peter Block, through writing, conversation, and long-standing friendship.

A Dozen Life Lessons Inspired by Ruth Adler Schnee

1. Find joy. Adler Schnee was seemingly very happy to work hard, to create great design, and to find joy in her work all the way through to the end. How can you argue with the names of some of her most famous patterns: “Fission Chips,” “Slits and Slats,” “Pits and Pods,” “Slinky Shadows,” and “Bugs in Booby Traps”? Granted, most of these names came from her husband, but Adler Schnee let them be released to the public when she could have easily objected to their “unseriousness” and said such “silly” names were unworthy of her good work. Over and over again, whimsy won the day. I love it.

2. Live your values—don’t do work you don’t believe in. Rip Ripson, writing in a retrospective on Adler Schnee’s life for the Kresge Foundation, says that Adler Schnee’s “story speaks to the value of inclusiveness, to the entrepreneurial spirit, and to the profound role the arts play in nurturing our souls.” Indeed, these were her values, and she embodied them each and every day. 

3. Go where you want, but start with what you have. No matter where she was, Adler Schnee found ways to create and design from virtually nothing. She never wallowed in whatever hardship confronted her, and she didn’t get stuck on what was wrong. Instead, she poured her energy into constant creativity. As she said, “Patterns, colors, textures, furnishings—everything had a necessary role to play in the larger architectural environment of a space.”

4. Pursue your dreams regardless of what others tell you. It’s deeply moving to read how, at the age of 14, Adler Schnee had the courage to attend the Nazis’ so-called Degenerate Art exhibit in Düsseldorf so she could see the modern art she was already obsessed with. “I just loved what I was doing, and I wasn’t scared,” she told the Detroit Metro Times in 2000. “My parents absolutely did not want me to go to that exhibit.” (This dynamic may sound familiar to any parents of teenagers.) But yes, she went anyway! 

5. Don’t get caught up in limiting beliefs that society has set for “people like you.” Stereotypes are an obstacle that can keep us from achieving what we’re truly capable of, and Adler Schnee overcame them time and time again. As a young, freethinking Jewish woman in Nazi society—and as a woman in a world that was, like so many then and still now, dominated by men—she never let the barriers halt her progress. She shared later, “When I studied architecture, the field was not open to women … and I found myself, all the time, to be the only one that was interested in that. But that didn’t seem to stop me.”

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Adler Schnee reminds us, “We all make our own environment in which we are comfortable, and beauty is a great part of it.” She also emphasized that finding beauty is much easier than many of us have been led to believe. “You just have to look at things. Everything is designed. My biggest criticism of American education is the schools don’t teach children to look and to see things, because design is all around us. You just have to go outside and look.” 

Nancy Villa Bryk, assistant professor of historic preservation and museum practice right here at Eastern Michigan University, writes of Adler Schnee:

I learned she drew her designs from the life she saw around her. She could see beauty in the most ordinary things: layers of sediment rocks, cordwood stacks, a field of weeds, railroad tracks.

7. Align with essence. Adler Schnee was, it seems, very assuredly herself throughout her long life. She brooked no bullshit, but she did so from a place that was always joyful and true to who she was. As Ana Gavrilovska writes in the Metro Times, “Adler Schnee’s radiance has never dimmed. Asked during an interview what inspires her, Adler Schnee answers simply: ‘Everything.’” She said this something like 25 years ago, but I’m smiling now as I read it again for about the 18th time in the past few days. This sense of being inspired by everything is pretty much where I have arrived myself. 

In a 2017 post on Adler Schnee, the blog Fishink wrote:

Now at 93, she continues to work most of the year from her studio in Southfield. She still designs custom fabrics for Knoll Textiles, where she holds a 20-year contract, and with Anzea Textiles, an upholstery company. “I do the work because I love it.” … She believes the best lesson to learn about creativity is being observant. “You have to look at things, see things,” she says. “Everything around us is a design that can be put on paper.”

8. Learn from the edges. Remember that Nazi art exhibit in Germany that Adler Schnee’s parents didn’t want her to attend? When she went as a 14-year-old, the experience altered her entire sense of the world: 

The exhibit was supposed to back up the Nazis’ claim that modern art was degrading German culture. Once I got to see the art, I was beside myself. I had never seen colors so brilliant and so unusually put together as in the Kandinsky paintings. It was as though I had been introduced to a new world. And I came home just totally transported by that.

9. Push for greatness. Never settling or falling into complacency is another lesson I take from Adler Schnee’s long, productive working life. She “could spend several years on some designs, reworking until she was satisfied to the best degree,” Gavrilovska writes in the Metro Times. “How did she know when a design was finished? ‘Well, you’ll probably laugh at this, but somehow it sings to me,’ she says. She laughs when I tell her I find that wonderful, but it even makes a kind of aesthetic sense; some of her patterns have a decidedly musical quality to their appearance.”

10. Find ways to turn your vocation into a living. Adler Schnee’s store gradually developed into a Detroit institution for those in the know when it came to modern design. In an artist’s statement for a commemorative monograph published by the Kresge Foundation in 2015, she writes of how she managed to transform her personal passion into a viable career: 

Good design is my life. It must be discernable to the observant eye. But recognition comes slowly. … Sixty-eight years ago, when I first thought of designing abstract-patterned drapery fabrics in brilliant colors, there was great opposition by purist architects and the public. This pursuit did not provide a living to support our family. I returned to architectural design, my other love. Within the heart of my clients’ culture, I could create aesthetic unity, which addressed their human need for space.

11. Design for both medium and means. Anarchist philosophy has taught me that whatever I (or you) want to do well, our ends must be aligned with the means we use to make them an effective reality. For example, yelling at people to be kinder is, of course, incongruous and doesn’t work. To her credit, Adler Schnee lived and worked in harmonious alignment with the kind of caring, creative, useful design she was crafting.

12. If you love what you do, and you don’t want to stop, don’t! In the Kresge Foundation monograph honoring Adler Schnee, Gerhardt Knoedel, director emeritus of Cranbrook Academy of Art, writes:

The miracle of Ruth Adler Schnee is that at 92 years young, she is a beacon of inspiration to all who refuse to accept a notion of “retirement.” No doubt that is because at an important moment in her life, the road forked and she took the less expected alternative, leading to future happiness and fulfillment in the field of textile design.

If you know me at all, you already know how driven I am by her example of continuing to work rather than retiring just because it’s what you’re “supposed to do” at a certain age. 

As I’m sure you can tell by now, Adler Schnee is, for me, a source of both inspiration and aspiration—a practical artist and businessperson who showed you could do great work and enjoy life enormously at the same time. Someone who, in Oprah’s words, helps me see the hope I have in myself.

The British writer Paul Kingsnorth says in a 2021 essay, “This is our faith: that breaking boundaries leads to happiness.” Ruth Adler Schnee certainly broke a lot of them. As a woman, she succeeded as an artist and a businessperson in a male-dominated world. As a German Jew, she overcame anti-Semitism and escaped Germany—though many of her extended family did not and instead died in the concentration camps. Having lost these relatives in the Holocaust, she still remained impressively positive, engaged with the world and its most urgent challenges. 

By sheer coincidence, I received an email Monday morning from a former ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses) staffer that, to me, affirms what is possible when we allow people—like Ruth Adler Schnee, like you and me, like anyone we just hired in the last couple of days to work the summer—to grow fully and successfully into themselves. We’re always better off for it, and so is the world around us. Here’s a small part of what I thought was a mind-blowing note: 

Hi Ari, I am a former ZCoB employee and someone who spent lots of time in Ann Arbor. I’m sure you’ll remember me but I still wanted to make sure I introduced who I am as I’ve added to that. I am now set to graduate from Michigan State University this coming Friday, May 1st.

I wanted to reach out and say thank you. During my time at Zingerman’s I received words of wisdom and support from yourself and many others. I honestly don’t know if I would have made it this far without the Zingerman’s community. I had an opportunity to learn from intelligent, creative, driven and confident individuals. I spent just under four years of my time learning so, so much. I just want to say thank you for being a part of it and most importantly continuing to be an inspiration for me. I hope you’re well and I look forward to seeing you again soon. 

As I said in my response, yes, of course I remember her! Like Ruth Adler Schnee, she was and is an inspiration to me and many others, and I’m honored that we contributed in some small way to helping her see the hope inside herself. 

Finally, Dor and Tay of Good Food Jobs, one of my favorite weekly e-news reads, write: 

There is … a spiritual energy in the world that tells me something I believe is true: that everything is in balance. When we see the too-muchness, or the not-enoughness, at any given time, it is rightfully distressing. I think that’s our call to notice where we may be able to play our own small part in the balancing. 

I would suggest that the story of Ruth Adler Schnee demonstrates this balance—a life filled with joy, beauty, hard work, and so much more. Now I feel ready to really get down to work myself; there are so many great things still to be done. I’m going to start by having someone more skilled than me make “Fission Chips” my screen saver! A little joy will surely follow.

Explore the art of business

P.S. Anyone looking for the beautiful Apricots for Dignity and Democracy T-shirts, tank tops, hoodies, hats, etc., can find them all here thanks to the good folks at Underground Printing. And you can learn the backstory of why the apricot became a powerful symbol here. A great gift for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, or really any day!

Why better questions matter more than most of us might believe

While researching vulnerability for last week’s essay, I stumbled across a directive from Ocean Vuong—the celebrated poet, novelist, and teacher—that urges us to “learn to question the questions.”

I’ve been thinking about his statement ever since.

Along similar lines, my friend Peter Block, the remarkable writer and philosopher, posits, “A good question works on you.” Here are a handful that have been working on me all week:

• Why does the quality of our questions have such an impact on the quality of our work?
• How can I learn, as Ocean Vuong advised, to better question the questions?
• What can I do over time to get better at asking better questions?
• What happens when an organization can collectively improve the quality of the questions it asks?

In his exceptional book Community (which I’ve read something like six times), Block writes that a great question is “ambiguous, personal, and stressful.” This has certainly been my experience with each of the four questions above. That said, I’m striving every day to accept that there will be no easy or quick answers to any of them. In fact, I have the feeling I’ll be at this work for the rest of my life.

What follows is an exploration of my own curiosity about questions, and about the impact of having an organization that learns to ask them ever more effectively.

To be clear, this is not the kind of essay that will arrive at a finite set of conclusions. My emphasis, instead, is my imperfect effort to better understand the import of asking better questions. The essay is only an entrée—a beginning—for a curious human (namely, me) who, in the spirit of vulnerability, has spent a lifetime both asking and being asked questions, yet has given relatively little thought over all those years to the craft of asking them well. If some clarity arises in the form of answers, that’s awesome. If not, then I’m working to align myself more closely with Peter Block’s wise words: “Questions bring us together. Answers divide us.”

Avoiding my own impulse to offer immediate answers is anything but easy for me. As the oldest kid in my family, I grew up feeling as if I was “supposed” to have an answer to nearly anything anyone asked. It’s not hard to see why, then, as an adult, my instinct still leans toward coming up with those answers. Undoing decades of conditioning will not, I know, be a quick process—but I’m committed to doing the work!

Why is it so important to take on this challenge? Nationally known speaker, leadership coach, and author Tony Robbins puts it pretty succinctly: “The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.” Which means, then, the more effectively I can learn to bring better-quality questions to the fore—and come up with them when I’m feeling pressured and on the spot—the better my life and leadership are likely to be.

In the context of what I wrote about beliefs a few weeks back, what we believe has a huge influence on the kinds of questions we will ask. The insightful writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry demonstrates this well in his classic work The Unsettling of America, drawing the distinction between a person who comes to exploit the land and another who arrives instead as a nurturer:

I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) 

Berry’s framing helped me see clearly how changing the question can completely alter the way things unfold. Two different approaches, with very different questions, driving diametrically different outcomes. Not surprisingly, I see our organization as a nurturer. As Berry explains, 

The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.

In another of his wonderful books, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block writes that a question that begins with the word “how” “looks for the answer outside of us. It is an indirect expression of our doubts.” With that in mind, Block offers a very helpful set of half a dozen questions to stop asking (I have certainly asked them all many times over the years), and also, for each, a more effective way to ask a comparable question.

How do you do it? becomes What refusal have I been postponing?

How long will it take? becomes What commitment am I willing to make?

How much does it cost? becomes What is the price I am willing to pay?

How do you get those people to change? becomes What is my contribution to the problem I am concerned with?

How do we measure it? becomes What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?

How are other people doing it successfully? becomes What do we want to create together?

While each of the six original questions has some merit on its own, they are not, per Peter Block, anywhere close to optimal. The “how” questions, I can see now, all seem to lead in impersonal directions. The answers may be interesting, but soon enough, they almost always invite disagreement—even argument. They’re not the kinds of questions that can bring together disparate views to cast things in a whole new light. 

All of which now leaves me wondering: How many times over the years have I and others here fallen into exactly this kind of rut, asking the narrow, controversy-causing “hows” that Block is trying to teach us to avoid? 

By contrast, the questions he suggests in place of the “hows” drive us to dig deeper—to explore our hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities. In this spirit, he challenges us:

If we could agree that for six months we would not ask How?, something in our lives, our institutions, and our culture might shift for the better. It would force us to engage in conversations about why we do what we do, as individuals and as institutions. It would create the space for longer discussions about purpose, about what is worth doing. It would refocus our attention on deciding what is the right question, rather than what is the right answer.

I can’t help but smile imagining the response I would get if I were to propose that everyone at Zingerman’s avoid the word “how” for half a year! So rather than propose this, I’ll start by practicing it. At the very least, I can explore how well I do with this challenge personally before I try to take it to the next, collective level. The work is about reframing and rethinking—building new intellectual habits and better question-asking discipline.

Writing about his longtime friend Peter Koestenbaum, the business philosopher and writer who died in 2024 at the age of 96, Peter Block says,

It is [his] willingness to reframe, turn, and even invert a question that creates the depth and opening for authentic change. Questions take on an almost sacred dimension when they are valued for their own sake. This is in stark contrast to the common need for answers and quick formulaic action.

Reflecting on all this, I realize that from the get-go back in 1982, we were already asking questions that were quite different from those of the mainstream business community. Looking back, here’s a list of what it seems we were asking of ourselves—and the world—when we were preparing to open the Deli 44 years ago:

• What if we didn’t try to grow our business as large as possible, as fast as possible?
• Why do so many other food businesses assume that customers can’t tell the difference between truly great food and only so-so fare?
• … And what makes them believe that people aren’t willing to pay for higher quality?
• What if, instead of settling for what’s working well enough to get by, we continuously pushed ourselves to make everything better?
• What if we treated everyone with dignity and care, rather than acting as if they’re just another interaction/transaction on the way to making more money?
• What if we committed to creating uniqueness—instead of the replication that has become so common in the Industrial Era? (Or, as Wendell Berry pithily puts it, “plopping a cookie cutter down on dough.”)

As organizations evolve over time, and the greater ecosystem around us does the same, the questions we pose need to evolve as well. Moving into the present moment, I find myself thinking about the questions I and others here have been asking in recent years:

• When it comes time to consider succession planning, what do you do with your business if you want to keep it local and within the community that made it possible for you to stay in operation for so many years? Our answer was to create the Perpetual Purpose Trust.
• Do you have to consolidate ownership the way we read about over and over again in the business pages? Our answer: you don’t. We now have 18 Managing Partners and over 300 staff members who own what we call a “Community Share.”
• Do you need to think and make decisions hierarchically? Our answer, again, is you don’t—hence, we have been running the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses by consensus of our Partners Group for 31 years.
• What if you decided to engage with everyone—regardless of position—as if they were a partner? (This is the idea embedded in Peter Block’s superb Stewardship.)
• What do we do when autocracy is on the rise all around us and we continue to try to be more and more democratic in the way we work? My answer is in the “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet.

In the coming weeks, I’ll keep reflecting on other questions that have been unconsciously driving our work over the years, while also exploring tools to help us ask better ones. I believe this could become a meaningful part of what we do.

In this context, the work of a leader becomes to help reshape, reframe, and rewrite the suboptimal questions that so many are stuck with. Peter Koestenbaum shares more:

People come to me because they want to make more money. I ask questions like, “Who are you?” “What are you?” Ultimately, the toughest question is, “What kind of a person are you going to be?”

The latter strikes me as a better question to ask in an interview or a performance review—or, really, any difficult conversation—than the more typical, “How do you handle stressful situations?” 

Questions, I’m seeing now, can be a critical means of accessing new insight. When we’re faced with a challenging situation, it’s important to turn away from the anxiety of arriving at quick answers and, instead, to get more curious about the questions themselves. As Ocean Vuong writes,

You’re working on a poem or a story, when you’re hitting a dead end, when it’s not going, take it with you. Get away from the desk. Now you have to work with your body. Maybe there’s questions you’re not asking. 

Jacqueline Rose’s most recent book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, explores this subject in intriguing ways. In The New York Review of Books, Christine Smallwood writes,

What has the most force in Rose’s thinking are not her conclusions but her questions. “What, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next?” she asks in a chapter on Rhodes Must Fall. “What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves?” … The question “What do we not want to know about the past?” has no single or definitive answer, and no book can resolve it. But we must keep asking the question.

Rose’s question regarding what we don’t want to know about the past seems apt on many levels—certainly in the context of the vulnerability I wrote about last week, and my own understanding of the way my personal past influences how I show up in the world every day. It’s also vitally relevant for all of us in this country. Until we can come to agreement on what happened in the past, it’s hard to imagine being able to effectively move forward together into a positive future.

It comes as no coincidence that the most creative people—the people I’ve learned the most from over the years—are those who are themselves asking better questions. One of them is On Being’s Krista Tippett, who has been doing this for decades now on her award-winning podcast, and who offers some great insights into the power and significance of asking better questions:

I also find a question to be a mighty form of words, and I have learned a few things about questions. I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness—that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all experienced it. It’s very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. It’s almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true: it’s hard to resist a generous question. This is a skill that needs relearning, but I believe that we all have it in us to ask questions that invite, that draw forth searching in dignity and revelation. There is something redemptive and lifegiving about asking a better question.

Better questions, I’m realizing, create more authentic engagement and more thoughtful answers. They call for the kind of purposeful reflection Peter Block believes is possible, rather than the rushed action of simply pushing for an answer. Exploring the ethics of a situation becomes more important than mere effectiveness. Block reiterates his core point here:

The right questions are about values, purpose, aesthetics, human connection, and deeper philosophical inquiry. To experience the fullness of working and living, we need to be willing to address questions that we know have no answer. When we ask How? we limit ourselves to questions for which there is likely to be an answer, and this has major implications for all that we care about. The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts. The challenge is to acknowledge that just because something works, it doesn’t mean that it matters.

If “how” has such a narrowing effect, then what word opens us up to new possibilities? Block says,

Yes is the answer—if not the antithesis—to How? Yes expresses our willingness to claim our freedom and use it to discover the real meaning of commitment, which is to say Yes to causes that make no clear offer of a return, to say Yes when we do not have the mastery, or the methodology, to know how to get where we want to go. Yes affirms the value of participation, of being a player instead of a spectator to our own experience. Yes affirms the existence of a destination beyond material gain, for organizations as well as individuals.

A poem I love by singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer offers an artistic perspective on all this. These are the opening lines (and you can read the whole piece here):

“A Box with No Sides”

I have never written a song because
I had an answer.
I write songs because I have questions.
I write questions because
An answer presumes an ending,
This is this and that is that.
An answer alone has very few open spaces
With no room for returning to the well
For checking the map
Maybe retracing my steps
To walk the same path
But to see with new eyes …

Newcomer’s framing is, indeed, aligned with this exploration—and also, I recognize now, with my two most recent pamphlets. Both are based on, and built out of, questions that were very close to my heart—questions that pushed me to research and reflect for months and years before arriving at enough clarity to put something in print. “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace” emerged from a question that was essentially, “How do I deal with despair over the violent, heartless act of an authoritarian leader over whom I have no influence?” Similarly, “Why Democracy Matters” arose from my struggle to deal with the coming apart of the rule of law and the democratic constructs that I, for one, have taken for granted for far too long in our civic life. I can say now that although there was no clear answer to either question up front, over many months of study and reflection, I truly learned a lot. Those learnings have already influenced my own thinking enormously, and they’ve begun to sink roots into our organizational culture as well as the keynotes and training work I do through ZingTrain. 

I’ll close with the beautiful, inspiring words of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Letters to a Young Poet, written in the early 20th century. I’ve read this passage countless times before, but in the context of all I’ve gleaned working on this week’s essay, I see it now in a much deeper and more meaningful light. 

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

It’s clear I have many new questions to consider throughout my days, and I will need to remind myself regularly to stop stressing out when I don’t have an immediate answer. (To the eight-year-old, answer-focused child in me, I offer Peter Block’s sage words: “There is always something that cannot be explained.”) Instead, I will lean lovingly and gently into the questions, and I look forward to all the compelling, curiosity-driven learning to come. 

Lean in. Live the questions. See what comes of it. Let me know what you learn!

Find some answers

P.S. All this reminds me now of a framework I developed for helping new leaders to succeed. It’s called “Twenty Questions for Managers.” I haven’t used it in ages, but now I’m wondering if I ought to bring it back! Email me at [email protected] if you’d like a copy.

Baguette, hand-cut prosciutto, cultured butter, and Emmentaler

If you’re looking for a remarkable sandwich you can whip up at home in minutes, something so tasty you might well be thinking about it many days after you eat, try this. I’ve eaten it four times in the last few weeks. Terrifically tasty!

As with pretty much all the food we make and eat around here, the key is the quality of the ingredients. Each of these four is world-class on its own—together they really make for a magical symphony of flavors.

The French Baguette from the Bakehouse is the base of the whole thing. When I teach the “Welcome to ZCoB” new staff orientation class, we do a quick product tasting to demonstrate to folks how much difference there is between what’s typically sold in supermarkets and what we do at the Bakehouse. It really is night and day, and the tasting quickly makes an impression on everyone! Sweeter (even though no sugar is added), butterier (even though we use no dairy in it).

Hand-cut, three-year-old Prosciutto di Parma at the Deli right now is from the family-owned and run Pio Tosini. The hams are all made by hand at the Pio Tosini plant. Carefully hand-salted, turned regularly, slowly matured as they have been for 150 years, and checked closely before they’re shipped. Delicate, a bit nutty, lovely finish. Because the Deli staff still hand-slices, the texture and flavor are protected right up until you buy some.

Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter has been a hugely positive addition to our food in the last few years here in the ZCoB. The cream, all from local farms, is allowed to ripen as it would have done centuries ago. Be sure the butter is at room temperature so it’s easily spreadable and its full flavor comes to the fore.

Last but not least, the Emmentaler Réserve cheese. This is the real thing, and man, it is really good! The current wheel we have at the Deli is especially delicious. Over 19 months of maturing, it’s got a lovely nuttiness, a sprinkling of those tyrosine crystals that develop naturally after the sort of long aging this cheese has. It’s a particularly dense and delicious batch of the cheese, so even if you aren’t going to make this sandwich, it’s still worth checking out!

Putting all four together is pretty straightforward. Slice the fresh baguette horizontally. Spread both sides with a generous amount of butter. You can decide how much, but for context, this is a European-style sandwich, not a Deli Reuben, so the amount of butter you use might seem like a lot. Then add a few slices of ham and cheese. Great with a salad of spring greens!

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