Monthly Archives: November 2009

Pay it forward, and help a sistah-mom out

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My friend Julianne Applegate recently launched her own line of gorgeous, super-environmentally friendly handbags.

JULIEAPPLE ON ECOUTERRE

Julianne is a former VP and designer for LeSportsac,  but with the launch of JulieApple – her very own, start-from-scratch company – she’s kicking it up a notch!

JULIEAPPLE IN STUDIO - Photo from 11/09 Knoxville News Sentinel feature story on "Sustainable & Stylish JulieApple -> http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/nov/10/creative-career-is-in-designers-bag/

(Photo courtesy of the Knoxville News Sentinel)

I am in absolute awe of Julianne’s boldness in getting JulieApple off the ground in this economy, including handling all design, manufacturing and distribution for her bags by herself. Plus, she’s dedicated to running her business in ways that are consistent with her values as a person, so all of her bags are created and produced using innovative green technology, and she adheres to equitable trade and labor practices. Last, but not least, Julianne is a very busy, hands-on mom; she and her husband Toby have three terrific children, ages 8, 7 and 2.


JulieApple is the American dream, done right.

I am a huge JulieApple fan, and having been lucky enough to actually see and touch her beautiful new collection firsthand, I KNOW her bags will be a big hit – and her start-up company will be a success – if we can get enough people to see JulieApple products and tell others about them.


So that’s where y’all come in!

    I would like to ask all of my blogreaders, whether you are a daily visitor here or just stopped by for the first time today to consider doing me a personal favor; please help me get the word out, guerilla marketing style, about JulieApple.   If all of us spread the word to our own online networks of friends, followers and fans, Julianne’s mom-run, bootstraps startup can get some traction. And truly, she deserves it. It has been an inspiration to me watching her throw everything she has into something that many people told her wasn’t possible, going out on her own and turning her passion into a business in a very challenging economy.


What can YOU do to help, you ask? Well, here are a few options:

  • Use your Twitter and/or Facebook account to let all of your friends and followers know about this great contest that JulieApple is running at the moment (and more of these contests and giveaways will follow in the weeks ahead).  Basically, everyone who tweets about @JulieApple or becomes a JulieApple Facebook fan before noon on Tuesday is entered to win a beautiful JulieApple Hardworkin’ Hobo bag, a $128 value, shipped free straight to the winner’s door. On top of that, EVERYONE who gets 50 or more retweets of a @JulieApple Twitter post during that same time frame gets  a $50 gift certificate toward anything in the JulieApple Online Store. It’s a supereasy way to help the word out about my friend’s company and her handbags, plus, you may win a beautiful JulieApple bag yourself! You can read all the details on the contest at the JulieApple Blog. Please join in, and let all your friends know!
  • If you have a blog yourself, please consider writing up a little post about JulieApple, asking your own readers to help spread the word. Feel free to cut and paste any and all of what I’ve written here, and just copy it on your own blog, or you can write up something new. You could tell your readers about the contest, or mention the cutting edge ways that Julianne is minimizing her company’s impact on the environment in her design and production process. Or you could simply direct folks to the JulieApple Flickr feed, where they can get a look at dozens of her gorgeous designs and fabrics for this season.
  • If you are a member of the media or a blogger, and you would like to do a story on JulieApple or interview Julianne yourself, send me an email (katie.granju – at – gmail.com ) and I will get you set up with a digital press kit right away.  I’ll also get your interview scheduled at a time convenient for you. This is an inspiring story about a passionately determined female entrepreneur and mother of young children working to start her own company in a highly competitive industry – fashion.  Not only has Julianne Applegate managed to launch her startup in this down economy, she’s walking the walk with unique and forward thinking green, sustainable and fair trade practices.  Julianne would be a terrific guest for your TV or radio show, as she’s articulate, poised, attractive, and funny.  So if you are interested in covering the JulieApple story,  let me know how I can help you.
  • If you are a blogger with a significant readership,  or you host a TV or radio show, and you would like to request a comped JulieApple handbag or yoga tote to review or giveaway to your audience, send me an email (katie.granju-at-gmail.com) letting me know what you have in mind.  Julianne is very happy to offer bags for review and legitimate promotional purposes.  Each request will be reviewed on a case by case basis to make sure it’s the right fit for all involved, but please ask!
    YOGA-A-GOGO JULIEAPPLE BLOSSOM NAVY

  • If you own, manage or buy for a boutique, store or catalog – online or bricks & mortar – please consider carrying some or all of the JulieApple line for your customers.  You can contact Julianne directly at Julianne – at – JulieApple.com to talk about her line and how to carry it in your own store(s) or catalog.
  • If you live in Knoxville (or even if you want to come into town for the event), please join Julianne for the Official JulieApple Holiday Launch Party,  starting at about 8:30 pm on December 4.   The party will be a First Friday event, held at KnoxIvi on historic Market Square, and will feature tasty food and drink, plus an afterparty ’til 1am with a DJ.  Guests will be able to meet Julianne, check out the JulieApple collection for themselves, and be entered for the chance to win a JulieApple bag at a drawing during the party.  It’s all free and open to the public, although if you let Julianne know that you plan to attend with an RSVP via the party’s Facebook invitation,  that would be great. Let your friends, coworkers and family know about the JulieApple Holiday Party, and even if you can’t attend that night, you can keep up with all the fun via the LIVE blogging, photoblogging and twittering that we’ll be doing from party central. It’s going to be a lot of fun!
  • And last, but CERTAINLY not least, SHOP JULIEAPPLE! Consider buying a JulieApple bag for someone special on your holiday gift list, or as a treat for yourself.

Thanks to all of you who are willing to help with my totally volunteer (Julianne is not my client and isn’t paying me), shoestring, word-of-mouth-marketing initiative for my pal.  Consider it good karma if you take just a few minutes out of your busy day to let your friends, family and coworkers know about JulieApple, and about what makes this wonderful, family-owned startup truly special.

Thanks, y’all!  – KATIE

Bean there, get to do that (this week)

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This week I will be part of a panel discussion on branding, marketing & digital media held at the Bush Brothers & Company campus. Bush Brothers is an incredibly successful, 4th generation-family run business, with a history dating back to 1867.   Although they produce and sell a variety of foods, Bush Brothers  is primarily known for being a company that sells one heck of a lot of beans, all over the world.  In the southeast, where I live, Bush Brothers beans of all kinds have been a much loved culinary tradition for many families over many decades.

Today, the company is widely recognized for the thoughtful way in which it’s still run by the Ethier family, 100 years later.

From a Knoxville News Sentinel story on the company’s recent history:


A $25 million research and development center at its Knoxville headquarters was added. Some $170 million was spent in Chestnut Hill, projects that automated and streamlined production while increasing capacity to ensure the jobs of its 330 employees and then some. The Wisconsin plant also was upgraded.

Investments were made in employees, with an internal Bush University offering a range of seminars including “bean counting,” or how to read the company’s annual report, published for shareholders and employees. A generous tuition reimbursement was launched, as was a profit-sharing plan.

And family members took steps to ensure that A.J. Bush’s descendants would continue to serve as good caretakers.

Family retreats hosted experts to advise shareholders on governance, estate planning and other financial issues. Family members and their spouses also have attended courses on family business at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and continue to do so..

The Family Senate was reconstituted and is working on a policy that rewrites and adds to the family employment guidelines adopted some 25 years ago. The policy requires that family members who wish to take on a leadership role have a college education. Post-graduate work is encouraged, as is career experience before joining the family enterprise. The new proposal “in essence, says again, we love to have the family employed, but in terms of ascendancy in the company, they don’t get any special treatment. This is not an aristocracy but a meritocracy.”


The event in which I will be participating this week is part of the company’s ongoing plan for including all of its employees in regular educational and conversational opportunities related to various areas of Bush Brothers operations. The audience will include everyone from top Bush Brothers execs to maintenance employees, and each person has the same opportunity to ask questions and throw out ideas. I love this. I think it’s a fantastic way to get everyone in a company engaged in areas beyond their own job descriptions, and to identify and grow future company leadership from the inside out.

I am one of five invited panelists; the others are Steve Knox, CEO of P&G’s Tremor, Susan Ashley of Resource Interactive (Bush’s new Digital Agency of Record), Jim Price, VP of Media Innovation from Empower Media Marketing and Jeffrey Kissinger, VP of Interactive Marketing for Scripps Networks. and I am really looking forward to the opportunity to listen and learn from each of these smart and accomplished folks. It should be a fun day, and I appreciate having been asked to join the conversation.

Cook Without a Book: Sausage is Tasty

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I am pleased to welcome blogreaders to a new, semi-regular feature – “Cook Without a Book” – in which my dear friend, Jay Pfaffman, PhD will be sharing his adventures in cooking.

Jay is an AWESOME and creative cook, and I have been telling him for several years that he needed to start a cooking and food blog. He has resisted,  but I’ve finally talked him into guest blogging here at my blog. You can leave questions for Jay about his recipes and blog posts in the comments below, and he’ll respond regularly. We will also be adding some “Cook Without a Book” video blogging very soon.

So, without further ado, I give you Dr. Jay Pfaffman! – Katie

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This weekend I made sausage with some friends. At least 25 pounds. I got home with 13 pounds. I split it in half with friends, fed some to other friends on the way home and had what I think was 13 pounds when I weighed it.

This is the third time I’ve made sausage. It’s incredibly good. The first time we made it we assumed that it would be just OK, since we hadn’t done it before. We were wrong. It was out of this world. We couldn’t believe it. So tasty.

jay

Now, I’m generally a low-tech-just-make-decent-food-that-you-can-enjoy kind of guy, but making sausage, though it seems fairly crazy, is not that hard, and pretty darn fun. And if you make sausage yourself, you know what’s in it. I didn’t include any snouts or toenails, so that makes me feel pretty good.

Basically, it works like this: you grind up some meat, usually pork, add spices and some liquid and mix it up. Oh, and you add fat. Yeah, you add about 1 part of fat to 3 or 4 parts meat (depending on how much fat is in the meat). That part, the fat part, can be a bit disturbing, but fat is tasty.

Here’s what you need to make sausage. First, you need this recipe book: Aidell’s Complete Sausage Book. When I lived in San Francisco, I used to buy their sausage at the farmer’s market. Now I can buy it at Big Box stores. It’s a great primer and has tons of sausage recipes and a whole other section of recipes that have sausage as an ingredient. It’s a fine book.

The “hard” part of making sausage is the equipment. You need something to grind meat with. I have a grinder attachment for my Kitchenaide mixer. It works very well. You cut the meat up small enough to fit down that tub and it comes out the other end ground up. You can probably get by without this by buying ground pork and chuck, or by cubing it and sticking it in the food processor in small batches.

If you want you sausage in casings, (and who doesn’t?) the other piece of equipment you need is a sausage stuffer. The one that fits on the end of the Kitchenaide grinder that I like so much is entirely unsatisfactory. Save your $15 and just make loose sausage or apply it to the $50-$75 that a sausage stuffer costs. I don’t have one yet, but that seems like the way to go.

If you go to the Big Box store and buy pork butt (aka shoulder) you get about 15 pounds of meat. You need about 5 pounds of fat back to go with that to make sausage. It’s really hard to find fat back. Fat back is fat, from, uh, the back of a pig. We found some other fat scraps at a Real Butcher in Small Town.

So what happens is that you mix up the meat, the fat, some spices and some kind of liquid (like beer, wine, vinegar or an egg) and you have sausage. If you can stuff it into the casings, it’s even better, because the casings hold in the fat while it cooks, and, fat is tasty.

The casings can be a bit tricky to find, but you can get them from a decent butcher or a big sporting good store (because they think you’ll be killing animals to make into sausage). They’re usually packed in salt. You soak them for an hour or so, hold them up to the faucet to run water through them, and then stick them onto the stuffer thing. They’re really cool, or a little disgusting because they are, after all, intestines from animals (different animals have different sizes of intestines). And they look a lot a lot like, well, those “natural” condoms. One of the fun things about making sausages with friends is that there are plenty of opportunities for off-color jokes.

I’ve talked to people who have made sausage using “kits,” that are just bunches of spices that someone else has measured and then charged you lots of extra money for taking decisions away from you. I’d say mix your own spices.

It’s lots more fun, and a bit more tasty, to get the sausage into casings and to grind the meat yourself, but I think you’ll be surprised just how good it is to buy 3 pounds of ground pork, a pound of hog jowl (or fat back if you can find it) that you chill in the freezer and then grind in a food processor, add spices, mix it up and eat it. You’ll be amazed.

If you don’t buy the Aidell’s book, don’t worry. Here’s an outline for a recipe.

3 pounds of ground pork (preferably butt).
1/2 pound of ground back fat, hog jowl or bacon
4 teaspoons of salt (maybe less if you used bacon)
4 tablespoons of flavorings like garlic, fennel seeds, red pepper flakes, paprika
1 tablespoon of spicy stuff like ground black pepper and cayenne
0-1 tablespoons of other spices like sage, oregano, basil
0-1 cup of cilantro
1/2 cup of liquid like vinegar, liquor, or beer

Remember, you’re making sausage. Don’t get hung up on ingredients.

If you don’t have a meat grinder, buy the meat ground and then cube the fat into 1″ cubes, put in freezer for 1-2 hours and then process in the food processor until it’s finely ground.

Mix the meat and fat. Mix in the spices and liquid. Cook a small test batch to check the seasonings.

If you are going to stuff into casings, do so. If not, make it into patties, or roll into a log, freeze for 1-2 hours, cut into slices, separate with wax paper and freeze. You’ll be glad you did.