A friend lent me The Lean Startup over the weekend, and within two days the Mother Sponge universe has experienced a significant and fundamental thought-shift. The big lesson from author Eric Ries thus far – throw out assumptions, consider what you don’t really know, and find your way through new product development by testing ideas in the real world.

In other words, EXPERIMENT!

OK, experimental science is by no means a new idea, so what’s the big deal?

The big deal is that choosing between assumptions and experimental evidence can make or break you as a startup searching for an attentive audience, a product that’ll sell, a business in the black! And there is no way to really know if your assumptions are true unless you witness actual customers behaving in the way you hypothesized that they would.

Ries is among several current thought leaders in marketing and business discussing relating themes right now (see Seth Godin’s Poke the Box and 37Signals’ REWORK to name just a couple). And for good reason – experimentation is a lost art. Most of us lose the gift at some point in elementary school.

So ask yourself – do you really know there’s a market that will demand your incredible new product? Before assuming anything, couldn’t you start by running very quick, very inexpensive experiments to see who’s out there and what they want? And if you continued testing and learning in short cycles, might you collect a lot of invaluable data in a short span of time?

Maybe. Probably worth finding out.

The vintage travel poster aesthetic is rad… but a trip to Belize for Chocolate Week is even rad-er-er. Email them (chocolateweek@mastbrothers.com) for more info.

Buffalo Trace Distillery started a project over a decade ago to explore the influence of barrel aging variables on their already top notched bourbon. Using 192 unique sections harvested from 150 year-old oak trees from the Ozarks, this Kentucky whiskey house got serious about pursuing a grand experiment.

The project is now in full swing, with tastings at select locations across the United States. Lucky for us here in San Diego, Buffalo Trace included Starlite on that list and we’ll be there for a special tasting next week to kick things off. With a celebrated interior by Bells & Whistles and our favorite Kentucky Colonel in town, we couldn’t think of a better spot for this tasting to go down.

Learn more about the Single Oak Project, and look for a recap of the tasting on the Mother Sponge blog next week!

One of my clients (El Take It Easy) is hosting a special dinner each month in collaboration with local cultural notables who are also vegan. The series is aptly named “Veganized.”

I got to help out with this month’s dinner, which will be hosted by the prolific artist Acamonchi (who painted the pedicab in the photo above). The artist will share some of his latest paintings, and join the rest of us in enjoying a three-course meal featuring produce from Suzie’s Farm. El Take It Easy also has phenomenal cocktails and an extensive list of mezcals.

The dinner is tonight, Wed. 1/11 at 5pm. Hope you can make it!

A COUPLE FACTS:

• San Diego County leads the nation in small family farms practicing organic methods.
• Apparently, the Seeds@City program at San Diego City College is the only high learning institution in San Diego County offering a degree in sustainable agriculture.

Seeds@City wants to add more staff to manage already available land, offer more classes, grow the program, and in-turn educate more future farmers and food entrepreneurs. But with recent cuts in education funding, the program must become more self-sufficient.

THE PROPOSAL:
Become a nursery for urban food producers.

THE PLAN:
Seeds@City aims to build a greenhouse that will generate ongoing revenue through a CSA-style (Community Supported Agriculture) program producing plant starters for urban farmers across the city. With some collective investment from the community, Seeds@City will be able to build the greenhouse and gain more financial independence by which to grow the program.

YOUR PART:
You can support this project at any level, whether you are growing tomatoes at home, selling pickles at a farmers market, or running a restaurant featuring local food. Check out their Kickstarter page to get on board.

Instead of a wild yeasted sourdough starter (A.K.A. the “mother sponge”), I infused the dough with some Trappist Ale Yeast from White Labs.

A lazy pizzaiolo’s best friend, the stand mixer.

Shaping the dough balls. We made three 10″ pies per the Cheeseboard Collective Works recipe… gotta make sure we had plenty of leftovers.

The dough was more dense than my usual sourdough mix… the yeast probably needed more time to get the dough to rise. Next time I’ll make a new starter with the Trappist yeast and give it plenty of time to reach full strength.

Tossing the pies! The dough may have not risen as much as I would have liked, but it made stretching and tossing the dough really easy.

Our favorite family recipe is a “New Mexican” pie, with roasted poblano chiles, corn, pine nuts, goat cheese, mozzarella, and cilantro. Nothing like 70 degree San Diego weather for a camp stove session on the front porch!

We don’t have a wood fired oven (yet!), but a pizza stone helps to finish the bottom of the pie to get a nice balance of crispy and chewy. If you were curious, that beautiful tea kettle was designed by Sori Yanagi, and you can get one at Halcyon Tea in South Park (it’s our workhorse for tea & coffee).

The Cheeseboard usually tops their pizzas with Italian parsley, but the New Mexican pizza calls for something more complimentary to roasted chiles, and cilantro delivers.

Here’s one of the pies, fresh outta the oven. Much thinner and mild than my usual tangy sourdough, but still incredibly tasty. That bottle of Chimay Grande Reserve snuck into this meal through mere coincidence as a stocking stuffer, but rounded out our Trappist inspired Christmas feast beautifully.

The finishing table, where the pies were showered with fresh chopped cilantro, avocado oil (from Bella Vado), and kosher salt.

A big thanks to White Labs for providing the yeast for this experiment! If you brew beer at home (or wine), check them out. We’ll report back when we try a few of their liquid yeasts for more baking and homebrewing adventures in 2012.

From our family to yours… we hope you’ve had a scrumptious holiday thus far. Cheers to a tasty New Year!

Photos courtesy of Stacy Kelley.

While that management style may increase consistency, consider how downright detrimental it can be if used too often or too extensively. Restricted workers create stagnation. Workers become peons, perform the bare minimum, lose motivation, and eventually leave, forcing employers to spend a lot of time replacing them. That’s expensive (and boring).

Staff should be given some freedom to experiment, fail, grow, improve, and if you’re lucky, sometimes innovate! You can see this approach in action at Google, where engineers are allotted one day per week to work on projects that aren’t necessarily in their job descriptions. Low and behold, some of the most successful products at Google started in that sandbox (Gmail, Google News, Orkut, Adsense). That’s profitable (and exciting!).

Also worth considering–inspired people like to talk to other people (who would’ve thunk it?!?) People who love their job will often spread the word about where they work, talk about how great the products are, even recruit others to work there. That’s good marketing.

A couple of our clients racked up a lot of votes in the latest 2011 Readers Poll from San Diego Citybeat, so I thought we could honor them here for their hard work and great food!

MIHO Gastrotruck won Best Food Truck for the second straight year! Juan and Kevin deserve this – they work damn hard to deliver top quality local/organic food at fair prices. And you can’t deny the ability of their inventive & tasty menus to build a big following around San Diego.

Chef Max Bonacci received an honorable mention for Best San Diego Chef for his fine work at The Linkery and El Take It Easy.

The Linkery also received an honorable mention for the Best Contemporary Cuisine category (another nod to Bonacci’s talent).

El Take It Easy received an honorable mention in the Best Margarita category – a good tip of the hat for their extensive cocktail program. Speaking of the EZ, don’t miss their second pop-up dinner with chef Gavin Schmidt this Wednesday!

Congratulations to all the hard working people in both the front and back of the house who make these fine food operations come to life and inspire local eaters to vote for them!

A fine selection of photos from the Autumnal Equinox Dinner held in a sunflower maze at Suzie’s Farm, courtesy of El Take It Easy. Wish we could have been there to delight in Chef Gavin Schmidt’s creations!

When I first opened up shop at The Bakery in Barrio Logan about two years ago, I ate mostly veg. Little did I know that this era would soon come to an end. Within weeks, I was yanked from the world as we know it, only to find myself wandering through another dimension – one of tacos.

When I awoke from this perspective-altering food-coma on a side street in Tijuana watching a few ounces of salsa be flipped several feet into air via spoon, only to land gently into the welcome embrace of some birria, I realized that carne es too bueno to pass up. Many Tijuana and San Diego taco adventures later, I have acquired expert knowledge of the Tijuego Taco landscape.

But during the work week, my favorite taco within walking or cycling distance from the Mother Sponge studio is the taco de carnitas at La Fachada on 25th between Imperial/Commercial. They do it right – very greasy, very succulent, and slightly crispy on the edges. Plus, the roasted green salsa is the best I’ve ever tasted.

It’s also crucial to note that although great for lunch, La Fachada is best experienced at 1am on Saturday night (with or without a few drinks in ya’). A recent late night snack during the middle of a photoshoot had us at La Fachada around closing time (3am!), listening to a band of Mariachi-youngsters performing The Strokes’ Last Night, a Beatles song I can’t recall right now, and a couple traditional mariachi tunes.