Closing Back to Basics Kitchen Meals July 15 2021

This was not the week I expected! 

The short story is a number of factors aligned for this meal service closing, the most immediate one being that Melissa and Stacey did not want to run the kitchen with me out of town without more hired help, and there is no hired help to be found.

Melissa and Stacey quit the day before I was supposed to fly out, which changed everything.

I am so sorry for the abrupt end, particularly for all of you regular customers that have been depending on our food for years. 

My kitchen lease is also up in November and the landlord did not give me the option to renew. 

I have spent the year looking at options for selling the business and organizing my accounting, moving to another kitchen, and just continuing until the lease was up. I even had a business meeting about merging our service with another this weekend, but it was not to be. 

And, of course, I had a baby, and I can't be as efficient in the kitchen or drop everything to work as much as needed anymore.

 I have postponed heading East to be here and say goodbye to our cooking and our customers.  

I anticipated exiting the business this year somehow to spend more time with Lark, but not so soon or without passing off the service. 💔

So, thank you SO MUCH to our volunteers this week.

 Sarah answered my email for volunteers when I thought we needed them to support Melissa and Stacey. Instead Sarah has come in already twice this week to help make all the final meals for you all and is  totally rocking it her first time in the kitchen.

And my friend Sheela came in again on short notice on Tuesday to help stock up our cookies. 

And HUGE HUGE thanks to my sister, Janet, who is here from DC and has jumped in helping with baby watching, lots of food prep, and even customer service on the fly.

HUGE HUGE thanks to Amy, who has returned last second, using our bat signal, to support us in the kitchen finishing up the meal service, even though she has another job too. 

I am so grateful to have her to share in the experience of ending the meals as my employee and friend who has been along for the whole wild ride, including jumping into all the kitchen prep when I was eight months pregnant with Lark when Melissa quit the first time back in December with her arthritis challenge.

So grateful too Melissa came back and that with Stacey and Amy they were able to cover my maternity leave.

So, this week has been a ton of last minute cooking, and we are not done yet!

Thanks too to baby Lark, who has hung in there with all this working and chaos. She is 5 months old today 💜

I will send more updates as well as photos of BBK throughout the years in future emails. 

For now it's time to get you all ordering. 

I hope to see as many as possible of you this weekend . Especially those of you who have been ordering every week for years. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you for a crazy and wonderful ten years!