Lab Mates

Orquidea is a skilled cook. The experience of starting and repeating a project, has put her in the habit of creating a roadmap before starting a bake. She uses her food preparation process as a vehicle to establish an operating procedure that she can generalize to any chore.

Roberta, Orquidea calls her Ruby, and her, are lab mates at school. The lab is a large bright room with plenty of sunshine and ample space for the waist high tech stations, each equipped with a sink, power, and propane feed. Only half of the stations in the lab are occupied, giving the room a cavernous feel. They are wearing white lab coats, sitting on stools, and brainstorming for their science project. Orquidea is taking notes as they talk.

“I am not sure; do you think the professor will go for it? We are supposed to do a scientific experiment. How is cooking a scientific experiment?”

“Let me put on my professor’s hat and do the pitch.”

Orquidea squared her shoulders and got into character. It’s a game they often played in other classes. They took turns acting as professor or student. She found it was easier to remember the lessons that way. Orquidea cleared her throat and with a voice of respectability began reciting.

“What is scientific is the approach, the way you look at it and find the solution. Not the subject of the experiment, the method of the experiment is what’s scientific. A cooking project is easier to investigate than say a lawn-care business. A wooden spoon is more common than a wrench. Most everyone of us has an oven, and cooking supplies aren’t expensive. We need heat, butter, eggs, flower, sugar, salt and water, and extras like nuts and fruit as the variants for texture and flavor. We can get all these things without having to go far, and we can do the rest at home. We do it together once, and then we each repeat the recipe in our own kitchen and document the results, to test and prove the road-map. Our hypothesis.”

Ruby closed her eyes and signaled with her hand for Orquidea to slow down. Orquidea stopped her speech and waited for her friend to catch up.

“I’m beginning to see it now.” Ruby opened her eyes and facing the window looked out into the distance. “Selling it as a bake sale is easier than a generalized road-map, and us repeating the experiment three times will show it’s predictability.”

“Yes Ruby, we need something real to ground it and a clear pattern for the professor to see its purpose.”

“Orquidea, if the goal is the road-map, let’s not lose sight of that. The money will be a consequence of achieving our objective. If we start early and follow a plan with timed milestones, we can do it. Think of the good we will do. We will plan a bake sale and set a goal. We will document every step, from what we are doing now, to the lists, receipts, and a narration. We can write the story as we go.”

“Ruby, not only will we have the money we raise as a tangible, we will also see how our expectations panned out, and we will have a road-map to improve on for the next time.”

“That sounds like a great idea, Orquidea. We will have both, the theoretical, the experimental data and the results for the conclusions.”

“Now the cupcakes,” said Orquidea. “Remember it’s not how many cupcakes we make, but how accurate we are on the details of our road-map. Later it is a matter of scaling. Let’s set our minimum number of cupcakes as one dozen, and we make batches of a dozen. It takes twenty minutes to preheat the oven, mix the ingredients, twenty minutes to bake, and twenty minutes to cool the cakes and clean up. To scale we repeat the same procedure as many dozens as we want. Our limitation is the equipment we have, such as the oven size and how many cooking pans we can use at once, because you may be able to make more dozens, but it will always take twenty minutes to bake them.”

Ruby felt confident she was grasping the concept. She took a healthy breath and said with conviction. “OK, so you are saying that a bigger oven and more cooking sheets will increase the number of dozens you can do at once, but it will always take twenty minutes to bake. I see now, some parts of the process can be simultaneous, and others are strictly sequential. Assuming you have at least two pans and are preparing the dough for the next dozen while the cupcakes are baking, and cleaning while cooling, the first batch takes one hour, but the second batch only takes 20 additional minutes. The baking minutes.”

“Correct, said Orquidea, and now you know how long it will take to make as many dozens as you want. And depending on how many dozens you want, how much you need to invest in supplies.”

“That sounds great. You have given it some thought. I like it how do we start.”

With a smile of satisfaction Orquidea concluded, “the proposal is already half written down. It’s just a matter of editing now.”

W&P:EZorrilla.

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