Vegetables Ahoy

I've been fibrillating about buying a new desktop computer. On one hand, my current has 15g of hard disk space. On the other hand, it has a Motorola chip, which means I can't merely update it to the latest OS, and, more to the point, things are starting to get wonky with it. I was beginning to suspect that the reason things are slow when I'm online is the browsers--which can't be upgraded, because of the OS--rather than my internet connection, per se. (Side note: a new pet peeve is the number of people who spell that "per say.")

Today I hooked up my laptop to the intertubes, and, yes, it turns out, things are much faster with the laptop, which has a newer OS. So I'm torn. I really hate "wasting" a computer that's perfectly adequate for a chunk of what I do--this typing is in TextEdit, and it works just fine, and much of the editing I do is in Office 2004, which works just fine on this OS. (Office 2008 for Mac has gotten nothing but crappy reviews, so I have absolutely no desire to "upgrade" to it.) But getting online is getting cumbersome; some internet-involved tasks become painfully slow; and, of course, this iMac has a 15-inch screen, but the new ones have 27-inch screens (bigger than my TV!), which would give me a whole lot more screen real estate for anything I do. (Just switching to the laptop isn't a great solution; though hooking up the keyboard and mouse to it helps somewhat, the screen is no bigger than the iMac's). I had decided to hold off--spending $2k isn't exactly a trivial decision, unless there are lottery winnings involved--but now the slowness issue is making me re-re-re-think the whole thing again. Did I mention that I hate to "waste" a computer? Most likely, I'll fibrillate a little longer, try to find a place to donate the current iMac (anyone need one?), and eventually get a new one. But I wish I could avoid it for another year or so.

At breakfast this morning--at the place where kstyle and her husband and I had breakfast a few weeks ago--Friend and I were discussing last week's Top Chef. (This week was some bullshit reunion show that I didn't watch so i could watch My Team go down in defeat.) It was the Vegetarian Challenge, and I was as appalled as the judges were at the lame offerings that most of the chefs provided. The Volt brother who did the banana polenta, and Kevin, who did something with roasted vegetables, managed to put together actual meals, but the rest of it was pretty disappointing. (And was I glad to see Mike I. told to pack his knives--before Robin--even though he made all kinds of claims about Knowing How to Cook Great Vegetarian Meals? Oh yes, yes indeed I was.) No one used a grain (except the polenta), or rice, or pasta, which I just thought was bizarre.

I like meat, as my accounts of various meals makes clear, but I don't eat very much of it (almost never, at my own house), what meat I do eat tends to be fish, game (venison, rabbit, wild turkey), or organic, and I'm not usually the one who's actually cooking the meat (Friend does it at his house, or we go out). I am not religious about this, though I have become much less willing to eat commercial beef and pork. I can easily go several days (or even weeks, if it came to it) without any meat and not miss it. In addition, several of my favorite cookbooks are from Moosewood, i.e., vegetarian. What this means is that I've done a lot of cooking without meat over the years, and I have some idea what you can do.

How is it that the admittedly-WAY-more-talented-than-I-am chefs showed up for this competition without a few vegetarian (or even vegan) dishes in their back pockets? Seriously--what do vegetarians at their restaurants get to eat? The infamous roasted veggies? Some boring pasta dish? Why not some farro? Barley? Brown and wild rice? Quinoa? How about some roasted squash, kale, and farro? How about spinach, garlic, pesto, pasta, with some white beans thrown in for good measure? Or a puree of white beans, roasted garlic, fresh rosemary or sage, and some olive oil, perhaps with some grilled or roasted eggplant or zucchini and some rice? (And why did almost no one use beans? And only Eli used them well.)

I was bitching in this vein to Friend, noting that I am not a professional chef and even I could have done better. He quarreled with my claim, however, and not just because of the pastry school education. (Speaking of which, did you see they might do a Top Chef for pastry chefs? Brazen Tart! Get your ass to whatever audition process they have!!) Friend recognizes that many of the chefs on the show would not recognize a pastry chef as a "real" chef, but, he pointed out, I have been interested in cooking good food for two or three decades, at this point, in addition to having at least some professional experience, even if it isn't hot-line experience or even restaurant line experience.

And I do understand his point, even as I recognize that I have nowhere near the knowledge, experience, or talent to compete on the show. I think I could do better than the bottom third, maybe, but I do not have what it takes to go up against people with even moderately serious fine-dining chops. I can even tell you why, and it mostly has to do with (a) not having experience preparing a lot of the proteins, given my quirky experiences with meat, (b) not having a thorough knowledge of a variety of sauces and techniques, and (c) not having the kind of hot-line experience that would enable me to come up with things quickly for the Quickfires.

All of that aside, my point remains: how did they show up without some vegetarian options in their back pockets? Something's wrong when I can come up with a half a dozen better dishes than what those chefs produced for the show.