Julia, Julie, and Lemons

I finally saw "Julie and Julia" (thanks to my fabulous new Apple TV that I got to go with the fabulous new HDTV), and I am, once again, madly in love with Meryl Streep. Jesus christ on a pogo stick, that woman can act. The "Julie" part of the movie was kinda eh, IMHO. Amy Adams was fine, it's not a criticism of her; it's just that Meryl is so good, and Julia was so wonderful, there isn't enough room for the Julie part. Seriously, I would much rather have had an additional hour of Julia. And Stanley Tucci, for that matter, who was also wonderful.

I'd read the Amanda Hesser article about Julie years ago, and then looked for the blog, and then started at the beginning and read the whole damn thing (meaning I don't have a lot of interest in buying the actual book), and was sufficiently entertained by it. It was an interesting exercise, and, given my love of food and cooking, I am always happy to see someone actually interested in cooking. But, no, it was just way less interesting than the Julia part, and it would have been fun to see more of that part.

Meanwhile, back at Iron Chef: My Place, a bunch of stuff got made, and some of it was pretty good. I made the lemon ginger biscotti for the third time, again adding cranberries and this time adding pistachios instead of almonds, and they're getting better with each attempt. The lemon flavor and scent is really delightful. Not enough ginger this time, though--I couldn't taste it at all. I also attempted some chocolate hazelnut biscotti, and those were a major failure. For one thing, I must not have put in enough flour or something, because they simply didn't hold together: I have big chunks of chocolatey goodness, surrounding hazelnuts, but nothing that maintains its shape or integrity. For another, I really need to chop the hazelnuts; they probably contributed to the problems. However, the chunks taste just fine--very chocolatey. You can only get the barest hint of the barley sugar in them; it was another in my attempts to achieve a malted-milk-ball thing, so there's barley sugar, barley flour, and malted milk powder in them, but it's not all that noticeable, I don't think. I think next time I'm going to grind some hazelnuts into paste, and chop some, too. And add more flour.

For dinner, my task was to use some lemon (because while at the store on Saturday I purchased more Meyer lemons, even though I still had some here) and the kale that was about to become a science project. So I got out the big wok-shaped pan, put some water to boil in another pan (eventually there would be spaghetti in the boiling water), and got started. First, I took a lemon--sliced coarsely, so I could remove the seeds, but otherwise the whole thing--and a few cloves of garlic, and maybe some ginger (I don't remember) and put it in the bowl of my stick blender (I killed my mini-prep awhile ago) and whirred it around. I let it sit for awhile, remembering from Cooks that lemon will mellow out the garlic if I let it sit for a few minutes. I chopped up the practically-still-frozen chicken breasts and threw them into the pan with some butter and olive oil. Sauteed them awhile while I chopped an onion. When the chicken was nearly done, I threw the lemon garlic mixture in. Let it all cook a bit, then took all of that out of the pan. Added a bit more oil and threw in the onion, cooked that down, added the chopped kale (by now the spaghetti is cooking merrily on another burner). Eventually I added a splash of white wine to deglaze the pan.

To finish, after everything was cooked, I dumped the chicken/lemon mixture back in with the kale and onion mixture, added a couple of tablespoons of heavy cream, drained the cooked pasta, threw that in the pan to mix it all around, and served it with some grated cheese. It so totally didn't suck, and it had the advantage of using at least three things that needed using (the chicken, the kale, and a lemon), so yay for that.

Anyway. Lots of meetings this week, too, plus a hockey game tomorrow night and Chuck and CK on Friday, so it's time for sleep.

Random

I only seem capable of food blogging these days . . . let's try something else.

Partly it's because all of the stuff at work goes on, but I've become more wary about going into detail on the 'tubes (not that I've ever had any inkling that any coworker even knows I have a blog, much less has stumbled across it, number one, and, number two, the people about whom I would be most dismayed stumbling across this thing don't have enough internet savvy to find it--most probably don't know what a blog is, much less how to find mine; but you never know). Some things are going quite well--the new middle lord (my direct supervisor) has turned out to be quite good; I like hir personally and professionally, and zie seems intent on finding ways to use my talents to their fullest rather than just letting me continue to do three or four jobs in obscurity. Which, hey, all good. But it's too soon to even try to talk about it here; it remains to be seen what can or will be done.

So I go to work, submit the next thing, come home and provide a lap for the cat (Friend's cat is living with me for a little while, as I think I mentioned), work out, watch the hockey game if there is one, watch Top Chef on Wednesday night, maybe go out for dinner with Friend one night, maybe do some cooking or baking if I'm inspired.

My tile-making class started this past week, and I'm already feeling weird about it. Part of it is that I know that what I need to do is to sit down and do some drawings, start doing something, anything, really, but, instead, I dink around. The one tile I made last year actually came out reasonably well for a first effort, and I'm looking forward to making it even better, but that was a goddamned expensive tile. And now I'm in a class where I'm surrounded by people who are Genuine Artists--or it feels that way to me--and I'm just a schlub with no ideas about what I want to create. And I know that that approach violates the Top Chef Rule--cook your own food and don't worry about what other people are cooking--but my brain keeps going there anyway.

Well, there's only been one class, so maybe I'll get my head out of my own head and actually do the drawings I need to do, and create some fun playful stuff just to amuse myself, and take a couple of afternoons off of work and spend some time in the studios (which doesn't cost anything extra if you're taking a class). I also know that I do my best work when I have the opportunity to just fuck around, play, see what evolves, and I didn't have much of that last spring. I have a ton of vacation time--nearly three weeks, plus five personal days--so we'll see. And did I mention that I want to just have fun with it, fer chrissakes?

This week's other task is to find out what the weird patch on my leg is. I called my dermatologist today and got an appointment for Thursday. I'm perfectly willing to pay my co-pay only to be told that it's just a patch of, I don't know, eczema or something, but it doesn't look like anything I've ever had on my skin before, and it's in a location that isn't a good candidate for plain old dry skin, and I moisturize after my showers, and I've been treating it for 10 days or so with no results, so I figure it won't hurt to have an expert take a look at it. It's probably something stupid and routine--and that would be absolutely fine with me.

As for cultural commentary: Lately I've been reading Eliot Pattison's Inspector Shan series, and absolutely loving it. I've worked my way through the first four, I think, and I alternate with other stuff, of course, but it's way fun. The other thing I've discovered--and, yes, I realize I'm late to this party--is "Big Bang Theory." I've been getting it on Netflix and watching it while I row, and it makes me laugh out loud. I just finished season two (I alternate with the BBC's Inspector Morse series), so I have a few more disks to go. But it cracks me up, and I've always had a crush on both Johnny Galecki and Sarah Gilbert, so it's even more fun. I got a new TV, too--a big-ass sucker--but I'm using the old TV in the back bedroom with the rowing machine, i.e., I only get to watch the little TV while I row, but I have the rowing machine out of my living room. No furniture yet, but the furniture maker was here the week before last, and as soon as I figure out what I'm getting back on my taxes I'm going to order some stuff.

Okay, that's the best I can do without involving food.

Chili with a Chance of Potatoes

As we all know, I lurve me some Top Chef--particularly this season, which has a lot of people who can cook, plus, because they've all done it before (it's an "all-star" season, where all of them were eliminated in their own season but, in most cases, got pretty far, possibly even to the finals, before that), they all know what to expect. We're not seeing as much of the over-the-top stuff as with the Voltaggios and Kevin, but otherwise, there's some talent present.

However.

I've also realized that, in general, other than Top Chef and its spinoffs, I don't like the cooking shows that are competitions. I can tolerate Iron Chef, up to a point, because the chefs are pretty uniformly good. But two of the others--Chopped, and, especially, Worst Cook in America--bug me. Chopped just isn't as interesting as any of the others; rather than eliminate someone for each round, I'd rather see them each do all three rounds and see what the overall scores are. If they knew their scores for each round as they went along, then they'd each know how well they needed to do to win, which would keep it kind of interesting. But the one that bugs me the most (of the ones I've seen--I don't even bother with the cake shows, because they're all a version of fondant plus sculpture, which may be entertaining to watch but sucks to eat) is the Worst Cook show.

Of all the shows of that genre, that's the one that absolutely should not be eliminating someone each week. I do like the idea of having a bunch of terrible cooks, in teams, trying to learn how to cook, but you never really know when someone is going to start to get it. In addition, the whole point of learning to cook, IMHO, is that you have to be able to make a mistake and understand how and why you made it; simply following someone else's directions without truly understanding what you're doing isn't going to provide you with actual cooking skills. So, if I were in charge, I'd keep them all around for at least half of the season, then do a test of some kind and maybe then eliminate some percentage of them--a third, say. Lather, rinse, repeat, then the last third has some more training, and for the final competition, they're each given a selection of ingredients--with some choices they have to make--and they compete that way. THAT would be learning to cook, or a reasonable enough approximation of it, and it even still keeps it a competition of some kind.

But since when has anyone asked my opinion on these things?

I've been working on the biscotti recipe, and it's pretty good. The Meyer lemons really are fun to work with; they have a distinct perfume, and the flavor is very nice. I made a second round this week, using more all-purpose and less whole wheat flour, and adding cranberries and almonds. (I'd intended to use pistachios, because I was sure I had some around, but I couldn't find them yesterday--and then I stumbled across them this morning; too late.) The texture is crumbly but not hard--I think because I've put a bit of butter in them--but that means they can be eaten without dunking them in something, which I actually prefer. The next iteration will have cranberries and pistachios, and I want to do a chocolate hazelnut something, too.

Meanwhile, friend and I tried the chili recipe from Cooks Illustrated, and it was pretty good. We made it with ground venison rather than blade steak; next time I'd probably throw in some wild turkey, too, for different texture. We made a few other chances--black beans rather than pintos; more beans and more tomatos than the recipe called for; added veggies in the form of carrots, celery, and frozen corn--but the basic spicing was the same, and it was pretty tasty. Basically, you toast cut-up anchos, and then puree the anchos and some arbols--all w/ stems and seeds removed--with some chicken broth and . . . something. The spices, I guess, which were cumin, oregano, and cocoa. There's a little molasses in theire, too, as well as an onion and some jalpenos, and garlic. It definitely had a bite to it, but it wasn't overwhelming, and the fact that you puree the chilis means that you don't get a mouthful of one.

We ate it over these potato pancakes I'd made--I grated the last of the farm share potatos, mixed them with salt, pepper, two eggs, and some frozen spinach, and I formed them into patties and baked them on silpats until they were brown and crispy. It was nice to get potato pancakes without all of the grease. They still needed a little somethin-somethin, but the chili ended up being a perfect foil for them. Meanwile, I still have some kale and a head of cabbage to use, so that's the next task; probably not next weekend, though. The current plan has us dashing to Madison for a hockey game on Saturday, then dashing back here on Sunday to attend a hockey game at 11:30 am and then dashing somewhere to watch the Big Football Game between his team and the Bears. It's still not clear whether we're both going to do all of those things, but it's probably safe to say that cooking isn't on that particular agenda.

Anyway. my two remaining tasks today are working out and going out to dinner, and I had better start in on the first one if I'm going to do it before the latter.

It's Not Death, It's Only Cake

Which is one of the most awesome things a judge on Top Chef (or, in this case, Top Chef Just Desserts) has ever said. Sylvia Weinstock, who is a wedding cake maven, apparently, was a guest judge last night, and one of the contestants was getting sniffly (as opposed to last week's full-out breakdown by a different contestant--a breakdown that involved weeping and sobbing, "The red hots were for my mommy") because her wedding cake kept getting worse and worse. It was difficult to watch, because I've had that sensation, where every single thing you do doesn't just not help or not work, it actively makes things a whole quantum level worse. In her case, the cake basically started to fall off the cake stand as she stood there. And Sylvia was tactful, and gracious, and very nice to her, and she also reminded the contestant that hey, it's only cake.

So I think I need to embroider that on a sampler or something, especially as things at work continue to get weird. The new person is apparently going to be making Large Changes, though not all of them have been revealed yet, and s/he's doing a number of things that I suspect are likely to fail, and s/he is definitely listening to some of the wrong people. But you know what? It's another thing about which I can do nothing, so I'm trying to keep my head down, stay calm, do my work and find another job. What the fuck else can I do?

Yes, it's very disappointing, because I like the organization, in large part, and I like the work well enough, and I feel like I'm doing something useful. It's not my life's work or anything, though, and I'm waiting to see how a few things play out (e.g., will my boss lose his/her job? betting says yes), and I'm absolutely not jumping (will I be pushed? hard to say for sure) into just anything. But.

And, of course, it has been unpleasant since I returned from vacation. It's clear that we've been maligned--in some cases, by people with whom we work closely--and it's looking like, if the boss goes, some of the people who have been doing the maligning will be my/our new overlords. But unless the lottery comes through for me, or a new job does, they'll be my overlords and I will need to obey them.

In any case, Sylvia's comments made me think of a running conversation that K. and I have been having (for nearly 25 years . . .). She, like me, buried a sibling (though she was much younger than I was when it occurred). We have realized that, even all these years later, we have a tendency, when things are really shitty, to say, well, nobody died. Both of us being relatively strong people (and I do not pretend to know the direction of the causal arrows on that), that realization is a shorthand for put your grownup pants on and deal with it. And, really, that is a useful bit of perspective.

On the other hand, we have decided recently that we probably need a spectrum of good and bad that is more than binary: somebody died = bad; nobody died = not bad. There really are more gradations than that. For example, when Chuck was basically having a breakdown? That completely sucked, for both of us, and especially for him, in oh-so-many ways. There wasn't a single fucking thing about that whole hot mess that was good at the time. (Yes, sure, in retrospect, he has gotten the help he needs--and is doing quite well; I had lunch with him and CK on Saturday--and so on, but at the time? Awful. As I'm sure you all remember, and you didn't read about more than about 25% of it.)

So, now, at work, I find myself being the calm one. Well, more or less. But in general, I've been the Voice of Reason and Calm, or one of them, anyway, and I find myself thinking, yeah, this sucks, but not only did nobody die, this isn't nearly as terrible as about six other times in my life. Possibly it's age at work, too; when you get to be an old broad like me, especially when you've done the kind of shit I've done, you kinda figure something shitty will happen, and you'll have to do something about it, or get through it, or . . . something. But there's no point in worrying too much about it, because what good will worrying do? Oh; right; none.

So, dinner tomorrow night, then off to Farm Aid on Saturday (back Saturday night), and possibly some cooking over the weekend. At the moment I have two batches of graham crackers in the kitchen--for one thing, I'm trying to find a version of the recipe that I really like. It tastes fine, but is missing something. One of the original recipes called for molasses, and that was fine, but very strong molasses flavor, which I like but not everyone does. So I swapped out some of the molasses for honey, and that works well enough, too, but it's still not quite right. The next attempt will include some malted barley sugar, I think; see what that does for the flavor. The reality is, I have a huge wad of leftover ganache from last week's bake sale, so I'm going to be making graham crackers until I run out of ganache. Yeah, I know, another tragedy. But nobody died.

Scrappy

Well, I ended up doing a version of Iron Chef at my house tonight. The great thing about it was that I was able to make something for tomorrow's potluck at work and I was able to use up a whole bunch of scraps from around the kitchen. The two major things I had hanging around were three-quarters of a loaf of whole-grain bread that had gotten pretty stale and a fuckton of zucchini. I had originally thought to make a sweet bread pudding, maybe with some fruit thrown in, but then I thought doing it as a savory would be a better idea, one that would enable me to use up some of the zucchini. I sliced the zukes in the food processor. I chopped an onion and what I thought was another onion but that was a huge fucking shallot from my CSA share, and put those to saute in the big pan with some olive oil and a chunk of pesto from the freezer. I threw in four cloves of crushed garlic, too--also from my farm share--and then the zukes. I tried not to cook it too much. The bread--more than a pound of it--I cut into very small cubes. I used three cups of milk, six eggs, about three quarters of a cup of cream (basically, I used up some old milk and some old cream; I would have left out the cream if it were just for me, and I would not go out and buy it, but I happened to have a bunch of that around, too).

I mixed the cooked veggies into the bread cubes, then poured the milk and egg mix over it. I stirred it, a lot, and threw in some grated parmesan that was sitting in the fridge, and some grated carrots that I had intended to use for salads this week. I let it sit, stirred it again, and it's in the fridge now. Tomorrow I"m going to bake it in muffin tins, so there will be individual nibbles. I'm going to add some cheese curds (again, in the fridge, otherwise I'd grate some gruyere), and I took some slow-roasted herbed tomatos out of the freezer, which I'll chop and put on top tomorrow before I bake it. (I was a bit concerned about mixing the tomatos in, because of the milk, but I might do that anyway.) I was tempted to make it in a big pan, but I realized that it wouldn't bake all that evenly, or quickly, and would be harder to transport as well, so I think the little things will work better. We'll see how it comes out.

Finally, on tonight's Top Chef, more annoyance. This season has yet to really interest me, in many ways, and a lot of the people commenting at Television Without Pity seem to feel the same way. It may be that the lesser chefs have just taken up too much time and space and it'll improve, but . . .

The people who continue to annoy the fuck out of me: Amanda, oh lordy, she's insane. Not to mention, for someone who said, a few weeks ago, that she was an addict when she was younger, she cooks with an awful lot of alcohol. Having spent a fair amount of time around recovering people--and having been married to one--that just strikes me as odd. I know that alcohol is useful for flavors and sauces and such, but EVERY dish? And Angelo continues to provide adjectives with his dish, which is completely annoying; you provide the food, I'll pick my own fucking adjectives, 'kay? I find it disturbing how much he's treating the whole thing like Survivor: Kitchen. I know there is always a certain amount of strategery, but he really seems to take it to a whole 'nother level, and that turns me off. If you can cook, then your need for that kind of strategizing is really limited.

Finally, I ordered a table from a place I found online, a guy in Arizona who does custom furniture in the Arts & Crafts and Mission styles. It's nearly done--just needs a mail box on top (I asked him to create some kind of box to put on it for me to throw my mail into, but let him decide whatever he wanted to do) and finishing. Here's what it looks like in his workshop:

I'll post another picture when I get it and it's in its proper place.

Get Your Ass in the Kitchen and Make Me a Pie

I've been sleeping for shit lately--waking up early more than having trouble getting to sleep--but I've decided to ignore it. I don't actually feel tired during the day, so I"m going to assume that my brain just is a little wired at the moment. It's true that there's a lot going on, mostly at work, some of it very stressful, but I don't think that's it. I tend to regard these things as random and transient, so whatevs.

Meanwhile, on Top Chef this week: Pie Fail! Partly as a way to introduce the upcoming latest in the Top Chef line of programming, they had a rock star pastry chef to judge the quickfire, which was: make a pie. Seriously--that was it. And the Pie Fail? Was all over the kitchen. The absolute best comment, however, was the person who complained, "I'm not a pastry chef," to which RockStar Pastry Chef said, "My grandmother's not a pastry chef, either, and she can make a pie." Total pwnage.

That's the thing that kind of blows me away. This is Season SEVEN, people! Once you know you're going to be on the show (or hey, live dangerously, when you're still fucking trying out to get on), there are a half a dozen formulas you need to commit to memory:
1. A basic pie crust--this can be used in both sweet and savory concoctions, so it will increase your options for your all kinds of dishes (e.g., a breakfast quiche, anyone?)
2. A basic cake formula (ratio of flour, fat, liquid, leavening), which can be adapted in a number of ways; old Domestic Science cookbooks are full of this shit, because it dates to when women were trying to get into places like MIT by demonstrating the scientific aspects of their household work; if you make it look more like a chemistry task, then it looks all sciency and it "elevates" it, which of course is a whole nother patriarchy-induced cringe moment, but we'll ignore that for the moment. The point is? Cake.
3. Pastry cream. Really not difficult, and it can be used in so many ways it's not even funny.
4. A basic cookie recipe. Sugar cookies cab be flavored with all kinds of herbs and spices, and you've suddenly expanded those possibilities as well.
5. A basic yeasted dough. You can turn this into a whole-grain bread, or a baguette, or sweet rolls. This may be the least important one, but it may give you an opportunity to put an extra something on a plate at some point (restaurant wars, anyone?), and a lot of yeasted doughs don't require much work on your part--the yeast does all the work!
6. A basic ganache. You can go crazy and add a buttercream and/or an italian meringue to this (the latter would be very useful, as the meringue principle could probably be used in savory concoctions somehow as well).

This will get you enough information for just about any dessert challenge, I'd say. BT, whaddya say? What am I missing? What would your list have?

Point being, however, even if you're going to be hiring a pastry chef at Your Famous Restaurant, you should know some basic things to make (not least because you want to have a potential pastry cook know how to do these things, I'd say), and you really want to be able to evaluate the work that your pastry kitchen is putting out the door.

Little of This, Little of That

Okay, let's see.

First and foremost, one of my best friends ever is coming to visit next week. You may remember her; she sang at the wedding. I met her my very first day of college, back in 1977, so I have known her for 33 years. Yes, well more than half of my life. I cannot wait to see her. I'm taking off the whole week (really only four days, because we get off on Monday for the holiday), which will give me time to clean on Tuesday, and then we have most of three days to hang out and sit on the sun porch and drink tea and just talk and talk and talk.

Second, Chuck and I had some intense email exchanges last week, which I hope cleared the air between us a bit and cleared the way for me to see CK again. I have to give him his props: he continues to try to do the right thing, which is all we can ever ask of anyone. I'm still not going to go into detail about any of it here, except to say that I'm glad.

Third, the Crossroads festival was, as expected, quite excellent. The day was very damn long (oh MY how long . . .) and I was about to tip over by the time it was over, but the music was really great. We also managed to stay out of the sun for most of the day, which, given that Friend and I are two of the palest people around, is helpful. Yes, we slather on the sunscreen, but still. We also managed to scam good seats over the course of the day; of the three places we sat, only one was the actual seats on the ticket. The last place--where we sat for the last three hours or so, when the music was even more fab--featured a lot of people with VIP tags as well as a lot of empty seats. The only sour note all day, really, was the fact that this venue had exactly one water fountain. Yes; one. You could BUY water, of course, for $5 a bottle, but can I say no fucking way? At first there was a very long line, but then I think people either gave up and started buying it or started filling their containers in the bathroom sinks (which I kinda doubt, because the water in there was hot--not warm, hot). We, however, being cheap in some ways, saved some plastic beer cups and just refilled those along with the one water bottle we'd snuck in.

Okay, on to the food.

This week's farm share had more garlic scapes, more kohlrabi (to bring the total to three), two beets with greens, a head of lettuce, three mini squash, a little russian kale (those last two, plus some scapes, went into Saturday morning's breakfast scramble), and . . . that might have been it. So yesterday I used up everything: sauteed a chopped onion, then added the garlic scapes (should have waited on those), then the peeled and sliced kohlrabi and a little water, then the sliced mini carrots that needed to be used up, then the sliced beets, and finally the beet greens and some frozen collards (a little bit left in a package). I tossed it with some whole wheat (mostly) pasta and some grated cheese, and we had some grilled wild turkey with it, and it was all good. I threw in a splash of balsamic vinegar, too, and salt and pepper, but that was it for the seasoning. I liked the way the flavors balanced and melded, and it was useful to basically use up all the scraps of vegetables sitting around. In principle I like fresh herbs, but, in practice, I find that it's really, really easy to overwhelm whatever you're cooking with them, so I tend to try to balance the flavors of the other ingredients.

So now I've eaten kohlrabi, and, eh. I mean, it was good and all, but it isn't so good or so distinctive that I would necessarily seek it out, and it doesn't have any special healthy properties, at least not any of which I am aware, and at least not any that, say, broccoli, cauliflower, or cabbage have. (I like the brassica/cruciferous stuff, quite a bit, but I didn't think the kohlrabi was better than any of those three.) I'd eat it again, and I'll likely get the chance with this week's share.

And this season's Top Chef has begun, and, even after two weeks, one person has emerged as a total gaming asshole. Why yes, Angelo, I'm talking about you. Basically, this guy is seriously cocky. He and Tracey won the Quickfire, which meant (a) they had immunity and (b) they could choose the other two people who were going to be on their team for the Elimination Challenge. (Which was that each four-person team had a budget of about $2.60 per kid and had to make a "healthy" lunch for 50 kids--the dollar amount is what most schools have to work with. Some viewers apparently thought it was too preachy, but I was glad to see that theme--and I was completely entertained that Tom's mom was a lunch lady.) Okay, so Angelo and Tracey pick Kenny and Somebody--Kenny being the strongest apparent competition for Angelo at this early stage of the game--to be on their team. This could have been Angelo's way of ensuring that his team won the challenge, but of course Angelo is trying to game the whole system: because he and his partner have immunity, that means if their team loses, the other two people have a greater chance of going home.

So what did Angelo make for his dish? Celery sticks with peanut butter mousse and some kind of tuile. Yes. Celery sticks with peanut butter and a cookie. As a vegetable. The thing is, I think the judges even figured this out, and I do hope this comes back to bite Angelo in the ass. On the Television Without Pity forums, a couple of people who hated various other contestants over the years pointed out that none of those guys would have pulled such a dick move. Seriously, dude; if you think you're all that and a bag of chips, then you should be able to beat anyone else on the show with your actual cooking rather than bullshit games like that.

The other thing that was sort of train-wrecky to watch was the team that had Amanda--the Leah clone--on it. One of the interstitials showed her saying something to the effect that being a team player or taking one for the team wasn't in her vocabulary. Honey, that shit will come back to haunt you at some point. But, more important, (1) one of her teammates was the one who went home, because she made a nasty-ass banana pudding with way too much sugar in it, which she did because there wasn't enough cash in the budget for her original recipe, which included chocolate, and (2) Amanda made chicken thighs with sherry jus. Yes. Alcohol for school children. And a food item that likely broke their fucking budget. (Why did she get to keep her sherry when they were over budget, but Banana Woman had to put back some of her ingredients?) That kind of blew me away. And if I were Amanda, I'd be sending a thank-you note to banana pudding person, because the nastiness of that dish saved Amanda's ass.

I was a little surprised that she went with the banana pudding after she had to change the original conception. And someone on a forum suggested that maybe the bananas weren't quite ripe, which would have explained the trouble she was having with taste and texture. But why stick with that? K and I thought that rice pudding, for example, could have been subbed: brown rice pudding with a swirl of blueberry compote, for example, would have worked just fine, probably been healthier, and surely would have tasted better.

The other thing that that whole thing raised was how the teams split up the budget. Seems to me that you divide the dollar amount in four and negotiate from there. ("Hey, my thing is only going to cost X dollars, leaving me with some extra; who needs it?") It also seems that, if you're going to do something that depends on the condition of the fruit or vegetable, you should have a backup plan. But, hey, it's easy to think these things from my couch, probably harder to do it at Restaurant Depot, when one of the people on your team insists on buying sherry. Still, look at the plate of the team that won: lots more food, and it looks lots more appetizing. I think I want them to make the lunches at my school.

Crime Scenes

Nearly all of my entertainment is crime-related these days: I'm making my way through the Parker and Spenser novels, and my current Netflix choices are the Inspector Morse series and, this past week, the first season of "Hill Street Blues," which is still, IMHO, the best show ever broadcast. Unfortunately, only the first two seasons ever made it to DVD legitimately (I've seen some stuff for sale that I think isn't quite legit that claims to provide all seasons of the show), so I am destined to be left wanting more. Back in the day, when HSB was first broadcast, I made no plans for Thursday night that did not involve being in front of the TV, watching the latest installment. (This was long before VCRs, DVDs, TiVo, Television Without Pity, etc., and you either saw it or you didn't.)

The show hasn't been on television much since then, despite having produced enough episodes for syndication, because the stories overlapped and the threads often ran through multiple episodes, and they'd make no sense if you didn't watch them in order, which, I imagine, would make syndicated broadcast difficult. In the first five shows of the first season, for example, there's some question of whether one of the cops is on the take. If you saw those episodes out of order, they'd make no sense. In the first three or four episodes, the precinct is preparing for a visit from the president, which involves a gang truce that Furillo negotiates. (Most amusing cameo so far: a gap-toothed David Caruso, as the leader of the "Shamrocks," an Irish gang. Which, really? An Irish gang? In which city, in the 1980s?)

The creators of the show never specified what city it was, though I do remember Philadelphia's city hall making an appearance in a couple of shows. I later learned that the scenes of the outside of the precinct house were filmed in Chicago, at the Maxwell Street house. I realize now--now that I've seen the originals, as it were--several other of the opening scenes, most particularly one with an Old Style sign outside a bar, were also filmed in Chicago; I think most of the rest of it was filmed in L.A., even though the city has the weather and the grit of an old industrial city--Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, something like that.

Anyway, one of the things that has become glaring is how technology has changed in the last 30 to 40 years. In the Parker (and Dortmunder) novels, for example, Parker acts and talks like someone out of the 1950s, maybe early 60s. I think, as Robert Parker did with Spenser, the origins get blurred a little in the later novels, so that he can still be doing his thing in the 1990s and not have to be 85 years old to make the math work out. (In one of the early novels, Spenser says something about serving in Korea--which would have been in the early '50s, and would make him around the same age as my dad, who is 79. I remember reading that in later novels, it sounds as though he served in Vietnam, not Korea. Similarly, Parker has a dishonorable discharge somewhere in his past.) But in one of the later novels that I read out of turn, Parker observes that it's harder to find wads of cash these days, where so many transactions happen electronically rather than with piles of paper in hand.

I can't help wondering what would have happened if Parker and Spenser had crossed paths. The reality is, they likely would not have. Both of them operate on the principle that people do stupid shit, and they find ways to exploit that, Parker for his own benefit and Spenser for his clients' benefit, but neither of them does a lot of stupid shit of their own. Parker doesn't mind killing someone, at least not in the early novels (though Dortmunder and Kelp and their compatriots never resort to violence), but he doesn't do it out of pure malice. If someone gets in the way--typically by intruding in some way on Parker's activities, rather than by innocently stumbling into the path--Parker does not hesitate to kill him or her, but in general it's not his preference. He doesn't kill for fun, and he doesn't kill if he doesn't have to do so, which kind of sets him apart from the crime that hits our newspapers, and, most importantly for this what-if, he avoids making stupid mistakes himself; killing someone unnecessarily is stupid.

On HSB, all of the phone calls are on land lines--many even on public phones--because no one had cell phones in 1982. Thus, communication is actually a plot point in many ways: where is this person, where that conversation can be held, what kinds of tracing are possible. By way of contrast, I have conducted about 85% to 90% of the business of buying a condo via email, other than actually looking at the place. I have never met the lawyers in person, though I have spoken with the lawyer and her assistant several times (including twice today, as we finalized the papers that are going back to the sellers). I have met the mortgage guy once. I never met the appraiser, though I have paid them money. Except for some mortgage papers that I signed in person--in part so the mortgage guy could explain things to me in person--I've even submitted a lot of paperwork to him via email. The papers the lawyers have sent on my behalf, for example--i've only seen PDFs of them.

But being so immersed in crime (and hockey and racing) is a little weird, even if the crime is fictional and even if my reading and viewing is on both sides of the line, as it were. It also makes me wonder what it is that makes someone decide that theft is the way to make one's money, and it definitely makes me sure that I have little or no interest in making my living that way.

I haven't forgotten kstyle's comments, either, about baking and cooking, but it's time for bed, so those musings will have to wait.

Wild Turkey Rag(u)

First, the inspection. By and large, it went fine. There are a couple of smallish things, mostly plumbing-related, but I hope they don't derail the thing. My understanding from others is that this isn't unusual; given my lack of experience, I will only be convinced when I take possession of the property. Or, rather, take residence therein; I won't take "possession," per se, until 2040, at which point I would be 81 years old. Which kind of freaks me out a little, so I'm not going to think about it.

I was further distracted/depressed on Sunday by news that a cousin was killed in a motorcycle accident this weekend--he was 54. His mother (who is my mother's first cousin, so i guess he's my second cousin?) and sister are favorites of mine (he lived on the west coast, so I haven't seen him in years and years), and it's just terribly sad. My parents are upset, too, not surprisingly.

Yesterday Friend and I hung out, watched hockey, played cribbage, and finally got around to doing some cooking. He had some wild turkey legs and thighs that he had cooked in his slow cooker last weekend; he has discovered that that method makes it easier to separate the meat from the tendony fibrous bits, and he likes to make gumbo with the meat. But he had more than he needed for the gumbo, so I got to use some of it.

I took two pieces of bacon and cooked them, mostly to render the fat. I removed nearly all of the rendered fat, as well as the cooked bacon, from the pan, and then sauteed a diced onion and several pressed cloves of garlic in the bacon grease. When they were done, I added some onions, shitakis, and wine sauce from last weekend's sauce for the venison steak, as well as the crumbled bacon. That cooked for awhile, then I added the shredded turkey, a drained and rinsed can of white beans, and a bag of frozen herbed slow-roasted tomatos from my freezer that I'd brought over there awhile ago. I added a splash of madeira and a splash of balsamic vinegar and I let it simmer away for a little while. I made some whole wheat fusilli, and, a minute or two before it was done, I added a bag of baby spinach (i.e., just long enough to barely cook the spinach). Sauce on top of the spinach/pasta mixture, with some grated cheese of some kind on top. (I have no idea what the cheese was; I'd brought it over, but quite awhile ago.) Extremely tasty, I must say. For dessert, last week's caramel plus bananas plus walnuts, except this time I had chocolate ice cream and Friend's freshly made banana bread over which to put everything, plus I fucked up the caramel sauce (crystallized the sugar instead of having a nice smooth caramel).

As i worked out yesterday morning in Friend's basement, I was listening to my iPod but also had the Food channel on for visuals (the sound was down). I was guessing that I was going to be able to follow along. One of the shows was something about five ingredients--I think no dish had more than five ingredients? In any case, yesterday's show featured:
1. oven-roasted grape tomatos, with garlic and olive oil
2. creamed spinach (with heavy cream)
3. beef filets stuffed and topped with a butter/stilton cheese mix
4. white chocolate mousse (egg yolks, cream, white chocolate, sugar)

All I could think was how much fat would be in that meal. My arteries ached just looking at it.

And it's not as though I never eat like that--Friend and I had French food Friday night. He had scallops with some kind of creamy mashed potatos and about a pound of butter, as well as a cream-based soup and a shared chocolate mousse for dessert, and I had coq a vin over black pepper noodles, and started with french lentils and carrots in endive, with some kind of wonderful sauce, as well as half of the mousse, and we both had plenty of bread with roasted garlic spread on it.

Both of us were stuffed as a result--I even took some home--despite not having had lunch that day. It was quite good, of course, but I truly don't want to eat like that more than once every couple of weeks. And that's what kind of irritated me about the TV show. It wasn't being presented as "special-occasion" food, it was being presented as everyday food--look, only five ingredients, so easy to whip up! Yes, i realize that grains and veggies and beans aren't all that exciting, at first glance, and don't make exciting television . . . or would they? Actually, I'd like to see that (I'd like to DO that): making quick, tasty meals that don't give you a heart attack. Even better--the leftovers heat for lunches, and/or can be combined to make whole new meals. Wouldn't that be a more useful cooking show?

Random Thoughts Make a Post

I am tired of the smell of burning hair. Whenever I smell someone's hair burning these days, it's a pretty good bet that I'm going to have to be involved in the firefighting, and I am tired of that.

I am tired of our finance person playing the game of "Let's you and her fight." I am tired of asking for someone with different/relevant experience to review the budgets we are preparing and tell us what we're doing wrong, and getting absolutely no response whatsoever. Most of all, though, I am tired of being told that the way to solve problems that are obviously systemic is to throw time, effort, and more time and effort at them, rather than devising a system that fixes the problems.

I am tired of hearing about Tiger Woods' genitalia and what he does with it. I. Do. Not. Care. Really; I don't. If he were telling others what they should do with their genitalia, and it differed from what he is doing with his, then we could criticize him for being a hypocrite, but he is not doing that.

I am peeved at hearing someone disparage Mark McGwire for the "carefully orchestrated" way he revealed that he used steroids. Of course it's carefully orchestrated; did you expect him to blurt it out? He fucked up, and he knows he did, and he kinda hopes he gets to get credit without an asterisk for his home runs. (I don't really know how I feel about that. It's not as though we can go back and test everyone who held a record at some point, so it seems unfair to only punish some people. On the other hand, the Tour de France has been pretty relentless in drug testing and in throwing out offenders, so it can be done. I really think that, players' stupidity or cupidity aside, the message hasn't exactly been clear.)

On a related note, I find it disingenuous, at best, for McGwire to say that he only took steroids to help heal injuries, that he would never ever have used them solely to boost his performance. Look, dude: my dad has been taking steroids to address a rash that resulted from his chemo. When he was on the (legitimately prescribed) juice, his knees felt MUCH better. Within a day of stopping the juice? Back to the aching, nearly-80-year-old, did-physical-labor-for-45-years knees. Even he could tell a performance difference. Also, McGwire's claims that if there'd been drug testing in baseball then he wouldn't have used them kinda conflicts with his claim that he needed them, don't it? If you "needed" them, then the testing shouldn't have mattered, no?

I am pleased that my specific plans to drink more water are resulting in more water being drunk by me. My body seems happy about this, though the "happier" part is subtle and possibly related to the other things I've been doing as well.

I am pleased that I have managed to do some kind of workout for 9 of the last 10 days, for at least 30 minutes a day. It hasn't always been as long or as intense as I would prefer--45 minutes and a bit more intensity would have been nice on a few days--but I did it.

I have practiced at least a little yoga every day for the past 10 days. My specific commitment was to two sun salutations (a version a little different from the classic/standard sun salutation) each day, and I have done that. Yesterday and today I modified that a bit to incorporate a couple additional asanas. As I pointed out to myself, two sun salutations isn't all that difficult to fit in. Friend and I are going out of town next weekend--leaving Friday after work, coming back Sunday--so I don't know what I'll do on Saturday, as we'll be staying with friends of his, but I'll deal with it. Missing one day won't be an issue if it comes to that.

And I have been doing other things to help maintain in this high-stress environment. My back/hip are acting up again--time for more acupuncture!--but whatevs. My goal is to continue to try to work toward solutions. Not everyone is on board with that, but I can't control what other people do. And so to bed.

More Reviews

My personal favorite chef didn't get into the final of Top Chef, and my favorite of the final three didn't win, and the editing sucked in a major, major way. That said, one of the things I liked most about the last two shows is that all of the competitors wanted to beat the others at their best. One of the most telling scenes, for example, was when one of them told another that a sauce was boiling or burning or something. (Sorry; I forget who was involved in that interchange.) One of them--Jen, maybe--even said that; none of them wanted to win because one of the others screwed up.

Side note--one does not "cook" a cake. One BAKES a cake. Yeah, I know, what can you expect from a bunch of people who aren't pastry chefs or bakers. Speaking of which, apparently one of the spin-off series they're putting together is one that's just desserts. (Any guesses on what they'll name it?) Needless to say, I'm looking forward to that one.

The other movie I watched this week was "Imagine Me and You," the plot of which is this woman gets married (to a man) and, at her wedding, sees and falls and love with the woman who does the flowers for the wedding. There's lots of backing and forthing and so on, of what is supposed to be the usual romantic comedy drama, I think, and in the end--pretty quickly, like in less than six months, it seemed--she leaves her husband and goes racing after the florist.

Gotta say, it annoyed the fuck out of me. Let's enumerate the reasons, shall we?

First, I absolutely do not believe in love at first sight, and I say this as someone who arguably experienced it at least once in my life (many many years ago--like, 30+). More accurately, while I think that attraction can be immediate, any real relationship--with a lover OR with a friend--takes time. And it's not the big stuff, it's the everyday bullshit. A thunderbolt of attraction isn't going to get you through the crap. Thus, to me, the notion that she was willing to declare herself sufficiently in love with someone she'd barely met, someone she'd spent fewer than 24 hours with, someone she barely knew, was really pretty appalling.

Second, she seemed to regard her marriage as all but irrelevant. Oh, sorry, darling; I met this person--at our wedding, no less--for whom I'm leaving you, even though I've only been around her a few times, and I've suddenly realized I love her. Some of my puzzlement here is the notion of leaving one person to be with another person. I know that it happens, of course, and I am not judging other people's experience of that. (I do know that, for me, I really could not have lived with myself if I thought or felt that I was somehow leaving Chuck to be with Friend. I think Chuck believes that I did that, but he is simply wrong about it--and not just because Chuck moved out and left me. It's also worth pointing out that, although Friend and I have obviously continued to see each other, "baby steps" doesn't even begin to describe the circumspection with which both of us proceeded, and there's no guarantee at all that we would have ended up still seeing each other four years later.)

I have known other people whose marriages had difficulties in their first year, and it's nothing but agony, no matter the circumstances. If you really think you're going to leave Person A for Person B, mere months after you marry Person A, and you think you're going to live happily ever after, then you are a fucking fool. It's also worth pointing out that Person B should be worried--it means you're just as likely to leave Person B as you were to leave Person A, on some level.

So, third, I think the notion that she was leaving her husband for a woman is merely a senseless plot twist, and one that trivializes the crap that gay men and women have to deal with. I also find it it a bit odd that she apparently had never given any thought at all to whether she was attracted to men or women. I am sure that people's experiences differ greatly on this, and I have known a number of men and women whose recognition of their gayness took some time (and possibly some therapy), but even the people who came out later in life didn't have a whole lot question about it. They may have hoped it would go away; if it occurred 25 years ago, they may have suppressed it; they may have been in denial about it; they were maybe attracted to both men and women, but the notion that, in this day and age, in Great Britain, it would never have occurred to someone that oh, yeah, actually, I prefer to play on the other team, just seems unlikely to me.

I'm still slogging through crap at work. Tomorrow I'm locking myself in my office and chaining myself to my desk so I can write the proposal that's due on the 4th; cross your fingers that I can get 85% of it done tomorrow and thereby enjoy the holidays.

In Training (1)

I'm on my way. The only down side of this particular trip is that I have to switch (in Pittsburgh, at 5:00 am, with a two-hour layover until 7:00 or so) to a coach rather than sleeper car. Given the early hour at which I normally wake, and given that I'm planning on going to sleep early tonight anyway, that shouldn't be an issue. I also have an editing job to do, so once I switch trains tomorrow, I can crank away on that until I get to Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, I have a laptop. a half a bottle of wine (poured into a small thermos), and I've already had a snack (a pretzel from the bakery and some cheese). I'm also a fully-laden swallow for this trip; I expect the return to be somewhat lighter, given that I won't be lugging two stollen from the bakery or assorted other odds and ends.

I've been fighting something off the past couple of days. It mostly showed up in my gut, so I"m not entirely sure whether it's food poisoning or some random virus. Mostly I've ignored it, though I've tried to rehydrate and I've ended up taking some ibuprofen for random headaches. It's clearly caused by one or the other, and it's mostly gone now, but I'm tired.

I'm also tired from work. I'm tired from dealing with coworkers and usual office bullshit, which is a completely different kind of tired.

Our medical director noted the other day that s/he thinks we're seeing a lot of secondary trauma among our providers, and that's probably true. The people our providers see--and our front desk staff, and our cliinical support staff--are people for whom there are few safety nets. WE'RE the safety net. They are homeless or living in a shelter (which counts as homeless). They are very likely to have a mental illness, a substance abuse issue, a history of some kind of abuse, or some lovely combination of the three. They do not have resources or tools, other than the ones that have kept them alive on the streets. Realistically speaking, they are never going to hold a job that will enable them to substantially change their situation. They may qualify for disability at some point, they may get to a better place, but they are not going to become employed, healthy members of the working or middle class.

Mind you, I do not deal with our patients directly. I walk past them as they line up for the health center's opening in the morning, or I see them in the hallway, but I am back in the adminsitrative offices. I don't know how our providers do it.

I'm looking forward to baking and cooking for a week. What I'd like to be able to do is fill my parents' freezer with stuff they can eat. My mom has to have her graft redone the week after next, and my dad is still dealing with side effects from his chemo (basically, a full-body rash; if there's an unusual reaction to a medication, my dad is going to be the person who gets it), so I figure anything I can do to help them not have to cook much in the next few weeks will be a good thing.

Normally I stay with my parents part of the time and my brother part of the time, but this time I'm staying with my parents the whole time. Partly it's because I want to do a lot of stuff for my parents--see the cooking and baking above--but partly it's that I just don't feel like dealing with my brother. Don't get me wrong; he's perfectly happy to have me around, perfectly entertaining and such, but I'm just tired of him.

A few months ago, I was talking to my boss about the whole thing, and I realized, in part as a result of what my boss said, that I really don't feel like having a conversation with my brother about him not bringing my nephews to visit me. The reality is, if he wanted them to visit me, he'd find a way to make that happen. He hasn't done that. Why bring it up? To tell him how hurt and pissed off I am? What purpose will that serve? Right: none at all.

I guess the point I've reached is that I only feel like bringing something up, having a conversation--with anyone, not just my brother--when there's a reason to do so. If someone isn't going to change his or her perspective or behavior as a result of a conversation, then why bother? Why waste my time and why go through the drama? It is what it is. I can try to forge a relationship with my nephews as best I can and go from there.

Meanwhile, on Top Chef, they're down to the final four--and, what a surprise, it's Jen, the Volt brothers, and Kevin. This week was interesting because they had the chefs (the four plus Eli, who got sent home) imitate the Bocuse d'Or challenge. Admittedly, this was wildly different from the actual competition: these guys had four hours to cook their meals, and no opportunity to practice, to refine, to choreograph their meals. (I know from Bossman at the bakery that you practice over and over and over, and then some more, for any kind of competition like this.) The results were really quite interesting.

Kevin produced a meal that was well-prepared, lots of flavor, but not nearly enough Fancy-Ass Technique for the BdO (he's also the one who won). Bryan Volt ran out of time--something that would not have happened if he'd had months to practice. Michael presented a platter that simply didn't hold together, flavor-profile-wise, and, again, that's not something that's likely to happen after months of work. (Bossman talked about how the final products were decided for his competition, and it's not a simple process by any means.) Eli had some parts that weren't cooked (ew). Jen had unevenly cut, and, therefore, unevenly cooked salmon, but apparently she wowed them with her sides.

In other words, no one got all of it, which is hardly a surprise.

However, more importantly, two things stood out that had nothing to do with the actual food. First, without Robin and Mike I.,, there was almost no drama. It's true that Eli had contributed to the drama with Robin, but he is also much more capable than many of the other competitors. (Mike I., on the other hand, mouthed off all the fucking time, but he did not impress me with a single dish.) Without the irritation, Eli just focused on his food. He lost, true, but it was not a bad effort; the only other chef that could maybe have competed in that arena was Ashley, and she was dinged (unfairly, I think) early on, in part because of a fuckup of Eli's.

Second, though, we saw a lot more of what I've experienced (in my limited experience). When Kevin asked, Bryan told Kevin how to sous vide the lamb--even though, in the end, that may have contributed to Kevin coming out ahead of Bryan. (And Kevin still gets props for doing it right: remember the end of last season when Carla tried that technique and it failed?) Jen had an extra half hour to cook because she won the Quickfire, and she ended up helping Bryan at one point ("Tell me what you want me to do," she said, and he did, and, presumably, she did it, which is the sign of two professionals who know their shit and can communicate it). In other words, without the drama and irritations of the annoying ones, the chefs were able to focus on their own food but also able to lend a hand at times.

Bossman was always willing to share formulas with other bakers. He is part of a group of a dozen bakers who meet more or less monthly (they skip December and one other month, I think). Generally, they each bring a sample of some kind of product--either a seasonal product (something for St. Pat's day) or a type of product (a bran muffin). Once when I was there they all made the exact same oatmeal cookie formula. And those 12 oatmeal cookies were really quite different, which is why Bossman was so willing to share. Good bakers will be able to make something that's closer, but there will still be variations. And, really, what difference does it make? If the end result is that people eat better food, how is that a bad thing?

Which is one of the reasons he was perfectly happy to give me the recipe he's using for homemade pretzels. I'm hoping to make it w/ my nephews, but I'm going to make it one way or another.

Okay. I can't actually post this until I get a connection somewhere, but it's also time to stare blankly out the window, watching Indiana roll by.

Competition

Last night, I made some rice pudding, mostly to use up the milk I bought a few weeks ago (one of the advantages of the ultrapasturized stuff is that it lasts forfuckingever). I used brown rice instead of white, and I sliced some fresh ginger in it while it cooked. I increased the amount of rice, to make it have more texture and chewiness. I used honey instead of sugar (you saw that coming, I'm sure), and, if I'd have any, I would have thrown in some orange rind. If I take it to work as a breakfast item, I'll throw in some dried fruit; if I were making it as a dessert, I might make a quick peach compote (or how about figs?) and swirl that in. In any case, it came out really well; next time I'll reduce the amount of honey a bit and possibly increase the rice even more. Maple syrup instead of honey would be an option as well. It's quite tasty. It would not win a competition, but it wouldn't end up at the bottom, either.

And speaking of vegetable-based cuisine, a couple of weeks ago I stopped at a local bakery that specializes in organic stuff, and includes vegan offerings as well. The cakes and cupcakes I've had were pretty good; the laminated doughs don't look like much. So I order a cupcake, and take a taste of this sample square sitting there. I asked the counter person what it is, and he says it's "vegan cheesecake." I point out that if it's actually vegan, then, no, it is NOT cheesecake. Oh, yes, he enthuses, it's made with silken tofu! (Which would explain why it tasted like ass, perhaps.) Look, people: if you want to be vegan, go ahead. But you can't call it "cheese" cake. Go ahead and call it tofu-cake, or even silken-tofu cake, but you can only call it cheesecake if there is yummy delicious cheese in it. (Similarly, you shouldn't call Pringles "potato chips." Go ahead and call them dried-potato-with-wheat-starch-and-maltodextrin wafers, or something like that, but they aren't potato chips in any real sense.)

An additional disadvantage I'd have on one of the competition shows is what happens when they put an unusual ingredient in front of me: snails, frogs' legs, cactus, a pork belly. Those are not, in general, the type of ingredient that shows up in your grocery store (cactus does, if you're in a hispanic neighborhood), and I am not sufficiently interested in learning how to cook them that I'd try to hunt them down. I don't know how to butcher anything, and, while I like the concept of using the whole animal, and am even willing to eat a lot of a given animal, if you put a beef tongue in front of me, I'd have no fucking clue what to do with it. I'd probably try to slow cook it in some way, because I can't imagine it's as tender as, say a tenderloin, but I am not going to be able to do anything creative or interesting with it, and there's a good chance I'd completely fuck it up.

One of the more interesting comments, from a couple of weeks ago, was Laurine's comment, on getting sent home, that she'd realized something about herself, i.e., that she really doesn't want to compete with people. I actually rather admired her for that; it's an important realization. I also suspect that she realized that, while she may be quite good at what she does, she doesn't have the skills that the Volts, Jen, or Kevin have. (I think the rest of them, even if they're still in the mix, don't have that skill set, either. Eli occasionally shows flashes, but he's not there, and his ego may prevent him from ever getting there.) Sometimes that can be very freeing, and really enable you to learn: when i was in pastry school, for example, it was clear pretty quickly that I simply did not have the skills or experience of several other people in the class (the Brazen Tart, for one, and her first partner, for another, immediately come to mind). But that didn't matter to me: I was there to learn, and it wasn't a competition. It was an opportunity to learn a whole lot of stuff that, had i actually been able to open a bakery, would have been necessary, and that even stood me in good stead in the job I got. I didn't care that others were a lot better than I was, and I rather liked the opportunity to fuck up, because I learned a great deal from that, without the danger of losing a competition, or failing out, or even screwing up something for my boss.

I've done a lot of stuff in my life, and it's one of the few times I've been able to engage in that kind of risk-free learning. Right now, for example, I'm basically managing all of the budgets for my organization, with no help, and it's making me very nervous. I talk things through with my boss, and he is really getting up to speed in the overall bits, but what I really need is someone with an accounting eye AND a program-oriented eye to review the whole thing and see what I'm missing. Instead, I have to deal with a controller who doesn't provide any assistance at all--who gets in the way, actually, and seems completely disinclined to learn about the program side of it. (And who is also acting like a complete tool, but that's another story.) There have been several occasions where I realized--rather late in the game--that I missed a big expenditure, or didn't take something into account when I was calculating productivity and revenue. This makes me very, very nervous, especially because the pressures put on me from above (including above my boss) simply are not concerned with messy, complex details. Some things cannot be made simple, and no amount of insisting otherwise is going to change that, but some people are completely impervious to that. Which just adds to the pressure.

Which--in my mind, anyway--leads to one of my biggest beefs with Top Chef: I really, really, really hate that they use up precious time with dramatic music and swirly camera shots before someone gets sent packing. I don't mind some of the outside-the-kitchen drama, because it helps illustrate people's personalities (up to a point, anyway), but we KNOW someone is getting sent home; just do it, already. I also don't like about half of the interviews--yes, we know, you're Still In It! And you Know a Few Things! And you're Here To Win! (Quick; someone come up with a Top Chef bingo card . . .) Sometimes it's useful--like showing Mike I. talking about how his mom was vegan and so he knows all about cooking vegetarian, and then he serves up that slop. Dude, you may be able to run a restaurant, but I could come up with a better vegetarian meal using what's in my kitchen right now (as opposed to the kitchens at Craftsteak, where they all were), than that mess.

Point being, the complexity of the show comes not from the attempts to add drama, but from what the chefs actually produce and how they do it (or how they fail). But the editors want to show the simple story lines--Robin is a pain; Mike I. is an asshole; the Brothers V. are competitive and tense, as well as talented; Jen is falling apart (which I wish she would stop; she's so talented, and she's just tying herself in knots; relax, dude!). Yes, fine, those are useful things to know, but give us more of the food, more of the cooking, more of how they think about and produce the food they produce. I don't want to see how Mike I. produces an undercooked leek that's supposed to mimic a scallop (thereby forgetting Fabio's Dictum: it's Top Chef, not Top Scallop), except in passing, I want to see more of the dishes that worked.

Anyway.

Let's see if I can manage to do anything today other than work out and take a shower (which I haven't done yet, so that's not a done deal, either).

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.

Nothing to See Here

So for this week in food, the c'testants provided more confirmation of their qualities and personalities. The four best chefs are clearly the Brothers Volt, Keith the Pig Man, and Jen. The other four remaining chefs are all pretty mediocre, despite their opinions of themselves. Their failures may have been from execution, but the failures are at least as likely to be failures of ideas, or failures of just not knowing enough to put something good together.

Robin does seem to be annoying, in several dimensions, but Eli and Mike I-for-Idiot are just sexist assholes. Both of the guys seem to think they are great chefs, which they are not; both seem to think they're oh-so-much-better than Robin, evidence of which I haven't seen; and both act as though every week that Robin remains is an affront to them personally, which is getting really quite tiresome. The fourth chef, Laurine, doesn't seem all that super-talented, but she has a pretty low profile on the show, too. She clearly doesn't have the experience that the top four have, or the chops in general, but she's also not running her mouth all the time.

Mike, in particular, is just an ass. He acts and talks as though he is completely the shit, but he doesn't seem to know how to cook in very many cuisines or styles, and he does not seem to have a grasp of many of the basics. Perfect example: he was teamed with Robin last week, and their bag of food was Asian-themed. Mike asked Robin if she knew anything about Asian food and flavor profiles. She said yes, she did; he said that he did not, but that he was going to run the show, he was going to make all the food, he was going to let her make whatever she wanted and then not serve that part. Simple Asian isn't that difficult to do, if you've got the ingredients in front of you (garlic, soy, ginger, and pepper of some kind will get you pretty far), and two of the other dishes failed much more spectacularly, so neither of them was in danger of going home, but it was just so incredibly dismissive. I've run into men like that throughout my life, and they are so very very very tiresome.

I stumbled across Colicchio's blog yesterday--he's one of the hosts/judges of the show, as well as the owner of several NYC restaurants--and it was quite interesting. I don't know if he does his own writing or if someone edits it or takes dictation, but it's quite well-written, and it definitely provides additional insight and commentary on the actual cooking and the judging thereof.

Anyway. Today was another of my exercises in doing everything on public transportation. I woke up "late" (i.e., about 6:30), puttered a bit, worked out for 20 minutes, showered, and left the house at about 8:20. I took a train (where a kid--teenager?--sat down next to me, despite the multitude of completely empty seats, and then proceeded to crowd me, rub against me, and generally try to get a rise out of the White Lady (he was black); when I got up to get off the train, he promptly got up, and sat down next to another white woman sitting alone, and started up with the same shit, which confirmed that it wasn't my imagination; what an asshole), then a bus, then walked about 1/4 mile to the restaurant where I was meeting kstyle (!1!!) and her husband, who were passing through town, for breakfast. We had a fine time until 11:30, then I walked 2 miles to the acupuncture place. Left there about 75 minutes later, took a bus, then another bus, to a shopping corridor. Went to Trader Joe's (butter, nuts, dried fruit, carrots), Bed Bath Beyond (new water purifier thingy, plus two extra filters), the liquor store (four bottles of wine on sale), Peet's Coffee & Tea (four canisters of tea, plus a free cup), then took a bus two blocks to the el, then took the train home (after waiting for 20 minutes because there was some kind of breakdown), then walked about four blocks lugging all the crap listed above. I got home a little before 5. If i'd been driving, I would have left the house at 9:00, and I likely would have been home by, oh, 3:30, and I would have been able to buy a case of wine--and get the case price--instead of 4 bottles.

On most levels, I don't mind this at all; the only time I've had it any other way was when Chuck and I lived together and he could shlep me to the store, but on errand days like today, unless he was coming along for all the errands, I might well have done big chunks of it on public trans anyway. (Of course, I was living downtown then, too, so many trips were shorter.) Some days it does feel like a chore, though. I know that to do anything, but especially to do a full day's worth of running around, I have to allot time in every slot for waiting for and riding on buses and trains, and I know that I have to make sure not to buy more than I can carry, and I have to make sure to plan my route to minimize the distance I'm going to be fully laden. I also bring a book, because there will be waiting and riding; that part is kind of fun, actually, because I end up with plenty of time to read.

Thus, today I started reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and I am absolutely loving it; it's one of those books where I'm torn between wanting to do nothing except read and wanting to slow down and read it only a bit at a time, so the experience lasts longer. (Yes, I know that's weird.) I purposely put Peet's at the end of the list of visits so I could get my free cup of tea and sit and read for awhile, with no agenda and no rush to get home, which is really one of the great pleasures in life.

I also spent a bunch of time tonight on the phone with an old friend from college--someone I met my very first day of school, back in February of 1977--and it was wonderful. We've known each other for nearly 33 years (really? can that possibly be true?), and there's something special about talking to someone who has known you that long but who isn't family (and who knows your family!). I don't have any friends at all from high school or my home town, so it's really my college friends who have been around the longest.

I'm sure I have some Profound Observations somewhere, but they're not appearing tonight, so you've had another lunch post; oh well. I've been fighting off something for about 10 days; I have no clue whether it's a cold, or just side effects from lots of dry air, or just general malaise, but I've managed to avoid all symptoms except an incipient sense of my body doing battle against something.

New Seasoning

So we're several episodes into the new season of Top Chef, and no one who has gone home has not deserved to go, especially in recent weeks, as we've had a chance to see people work over a couple of episodes. It's interesting to see how people's foibles seem to leak out in spite of the editing, and probably a bit because of the editing, but still. For example, it's becoming clear that Michael I. is a twerp who has an incredibly inflated sense of his abilities, in addition to being a sexist asshole--in an early ep, he noted that there was no way a girl should be even with him--hey, asshole, the women aren't cooking with their ladyparts, and you're not cooking WITH your dick, you ARE a dick; there's a difference. The Voltaggio brothers know their shit; they may stumble occasionally, but there isn't a major fail.

They're setting Robin up to get rid of her, or at least I hope they are, but last night was brutal, too. For one thing, they started the episode by having everyone talk about how she's been lucky and she really doesn't belong there. Know what, people? If that's true, then eventually she'll fuck up worse than everyone else. She's been saved so far--her drunken shrimp was hideous, but Mattin's raw fish that made people sick was far, far worse; last night, she managed to win the quickfire, so she had immunity, plus Ron's dish was really bad--but only because someone else has been worse. And one of the cheftestants (sorry, Larry) basically said she won the quickfire by mentioning that she'd had cancer to the judges. Which, seriously, is over the top rude. Does he really think the judges are so stupid that they'd be taken in by that? On the other hand, as the episode unrolls, it becomes clear that she is annoying the shit out of everyone, mostly by narrating everything she's doing, which, yeah, that would make me a bit crazy, too. Also, because she has immunity for the elimination challenge, she claims she's going to just try to do a great job and play with it, but she really doesn't do anything interesting. So, no, I'm not convinced she belongs there; the question is whether they get rid of her or Mike I. first. Or maybe they guy who insisted on bringing his own pressure cooker, and taping it together because the baggage handlers screwed it up, and then it exploded in the kitchen (!!), which, sorry, would also piss me right the fuck off. A chatterer is annoying, but an exploding pressure cooker can maim or kill someone, and that basic disregard for one's fellows is even worse.

Last night's challenge was interesting; each of them had to "deconstruct" a classic dish. On one hand, several of the chefs had no clue what it meant to deconstruct a dish, despite what appeared to be some brief instruction about that. A couple of others--most notably Jen, I think--understood the concept but didn't actually do any of that, because they worked in a place that focused on doing the classics AS classics. Mostly notably, Mike I. had no fucking clue what "florentine" meant. He was supposed to do eggs florentine, and he kept calling it "eggs new-to-me," which is just not very funny. And I think he even had to be told that it included spinach, which kind of blew me away; does he really not know that "florentine" = "has spinach in it"? I suppose I can forgive him for not knowing the back story of that--what with Florence, Italy and the Medicis and all--but to not seem to know that basic fact is more evidence of what an ass he is.

The other thing was how Jen was completely stressing about her deconstructed meat lasagna--as the episode was going on, I was actually coming up with a deconstructed version of that in my head, perhaps because I've made it a million times. I would have had more trouble with some of the others (and, oh, wait, I'm not actually good enough to be a contestant on this show). I was also (probably inordinately) pleased that several of the elements in her final version were in the neighborhood of what I was thinking. Actually, her final dish is also a good example of one of the two reasons I'm not TC material: yes, I would have done homemade pasta; yes, I would have done the meat separately; yes, i would have done a simple tomato sauce, though maybe a different one than she did--but that whole crispy parmesan thing? Not so much, and it sounded as though that really made the dish work. Also, my mom never did a bechamel sauce in her lasagna, but we did do ricotta, so I don't know if that would make a difference.

The other reason that I'm not TC material is that these guys have practically no time to come up with and make this stuff, which, if you're going to work a hot line in a restaurant, you damn well better be able to do. I've gotten much more efficient in the kitchen, but I'm still not a line cook and I'm not well-suited to doing that. Some of the shit that gets thrown on a plate is kinda eh, especially because we're still early in the season, but they have a much wider selection of techniques and recipes (especially sauces) in their heads than I have.

Still, my main criticism of the show remains. I think a dish only comes together after a few iterations, with critiques and notes along the way. The ability of the Volt bros. and Jen to put incredible things out without that is evidence of their skills, for sure; it's a useful technique for separating the hacks from the good cooks. But as the season goes on, I think it would be more instructive to see how they would utilize that iterative process to kick the dish up to the next level.

For the concert report, I have to note that the Bruce concert was one of the two or three best shows I've ever seen; I've seen him 25 or 30 times, and this was incredible. As I'd suspected (and hoped), the people who were most likely to show up were people who were excited at the thought of Bruce playing Born to Run straight through--something he's never done before. (The other night he said they'd done it once, way back in the day, in Red Bank, NJ.) And, in fact, that's who was there: long-time devoted fans, which exponentially increased the energy of the whole thing. Bruce has always fed off of that, too, and this show was hell-bent-for-leather straight out of the box and then all the way through, for three solid hours. So, yay for that.

Sortofa Recipe

If you embiggen the pics in the last post, you can see the lusciousness of the fruit all the better . . . It was REALLY easy to make, too. The cake, such as it is, is a pavlova, i.e., whipped egg whites and sugar (with a little salt, some brown sugar, and some vanilla and vinegar), baked in a very slow oven for an hour, then the oven turned off and everything's left inside for another hour with the door propped open. The original recipe called for three 8-inch pans (buttered, dusted w/ powdered sugar, and then parchment circles on the bottom), which you were then (after baking) supposed to layer with berries and a mixture of heavy cream and sour cream. Okay, so how did I change it?

First, I only did two cake pans, not three (and they may have been 9-inch; whatever I have), and with the rest of it, I buttered and sugared three rings that I set up on silpats. I thought individual-sized desserts might be a nice option, and the rings would make that possible. Second, a few reviewers (the recipe was from Gourmet, but posted on epicurious) noted that it was difficult to cut the assembled dessert without tearing it apart, so I decided not to layer it--which was also useful given that there were only going to be two of us eating it. Third, I have some mascarpone that I wanted to use, and the heavy cream/sour cream mix didn't do much for me, so I beat the mascarpone with a little milk to thin it and some good maple syrup (no brown-colored HFCS for me, thank you).

So Saturday I mixed raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries with a little honey just before we sat down to dinner (grilled vegetables, grilled wild turkey, fresh corn on the cob, and a tomato salad with fresh mozzarella), which enabled everything to macerate without falling apart. I put the fruit on top of one layer, dolloped on the mascarpone/maple mix, and we each took a fork and had at it. Sunday (steak--yes, beef, if you can believe it--grilled sweet potatos (peeled, thick slices, in a buttered foil packet, and sprinkled with some brown sugar), and a morel/wine reduction/onion sauce for the meat, along with more corn and more tomato salad, this time with fresh basil as well) I used raspberries, blackberries, and peaches, and it was even better. I froze the three smaller ones, so we'll see how they do (theoretically freezing them is okay). The only thing I'm not sure about is whether I used the correct amount of egg whites. I scaled out a double recipe of the whites and then the sugar, looked at it, and thought, hmmm, no way is that going to fit in my 5-quart mixer. I distinctly remember removing the sugar, but I don't remember if I took out the extra whites. Guess I'll have to make it again and see!

It's a really incredible summer dessert, while everything is ripe and fresh, but I bet it would work just fine with high-quality frozen fruit as well.

So today I stumbled across Rick Bayless' blog, and the post that was up described the last show (or, rather, the behind-the-scenes part of it); I also found his post about the previous show, and it was kind of amusing how much he echoed some of what I'd said, though with fewer fucks. (Incidentally, until today the site name was root4rick; someone was thinking ahead.) Here's his comment on that show and Spike: "Hubert seemed genuinely excited to work with them, Michael sprouted a side none of us had ever seen in the competition, Anita seemed to hunker down and just want to get through the competition and I was worried about building a team that could do my food (guessing that none of them had experience with traditional Mexican cuisine). There was one thing we all agreed on, though: none of us wanted Spike. He just seemed so cocky, not a team player."

And I've been thinking more about the whole dust-up between Chiarello and the TC cheftestant in the next-to-last ep, and I still think the latter was wrong. Yes, I know the cheftestants are good chefs in their own right, in at least some cases--a few even own restaurants--and I even think that Chiarello was being a dickhead in a number of places in that ep, but that's not the point. Your job is to help your chef win, and you don't accomplish that if you're mouthing off to the chef from another team; no way is that going to work out for you.

We're having a kind of go-round like that at work now. Someone is being a dick, basically, and trying to go after my boss, which is just a very, very bad idea. For one thing, he and another team member and I have each other's backs, and this guy is just plain making a mistake. But I also think he just loses sight of what the ultimate goal really is: i.e., providing services to the people who need them. Everything we do should be with the aim of enabling us to do a better job of that; everything else is a waste of time. Including the endless fucking pointless meetings, but that's unavoidable, I guess.

More Posting About TV and Food

Yes, I know, I should be editing. But I miss writing for my (and, hopefully, your at least occasional) pleasure, rather than writing a grant proposal, or an email, or comment in something I'm editing. This extremely stressful patch has another three weeks to it, but it will be followed by the Month of Concerts (yeah, I know; what else is new). So far, I have tickets for six concerts, and a seventh may be in the works as well. That's not counting last week's Phish concert or the three concerts I'm hoping to see in the next week or so, or the beer festival of last week, or various other activities planned for the next six weeks or so.

But that's not what I wanted to write about.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for background noise while I edited, and I ended up flipping on Top Chef: Masters. Rick Bayless, of local fame, was among the contestants, so I left it on . . . and got sucked in. Of course. Overall, I'd say that the thing that stands out, from the three or four episodes that I've seen, is that there is WAY less drama, and a lot more emphasis on the food, and it is so much more enjoyable. The "cheftestants" do this for a living, they're playing for a donation to their favorite charity rather than for their Big Break, and they're really not going to get their knickers in a bunch or sabotage each other (as least, if any of that is happening, it's all being edited out); on the contrary, they seem to lend each other a hand pretty reliably.

Another thing: there's not a lot of working together, at least on the shows I saw, so more of the individual chef, rather than the working-with-and-against-each-other-simultaneously thing goes on. One of the things that becomes more obvious, in this format, is how stupid a lot of the challenges are (they're using various challenges from regular seasons of TC). The most interesting challenge was that each chef made his/her favorite/signature dish, and then one of the other chefs ended up having to "reinterpret" it.

So Wednesday night they were down to Rick Bayless, Anita Lo, Michael Chiarello, and Hubert Keller. The chefs do a quickfire challenge (identify, while blindfolded, these 20 substances; Chiarello got one more than Bayless & Keller, so got to choose first), then they bring in 12 people who were cheftestants from previous seasons of TC. Given that I have not watched the show all that much except for last year, I didn't know anyone except Jamie and Fabio from last year, and this guy Spike, who showed up in a couple of episodes last year and who always wears a fucking fedora. (Spike wears on my last goddamned fucking nerve, in case you couldn't tell.) The master chefs have two minutes with each candidate, to interview them all and, presumably, make a ranking.

Now is when it got interesting. Keller is shown asking several people whether they know how to do pastry. (Only one says yes; the other two are like, eh, no, not really.) Bayless is asking questions about what they like, what flavors, yadda yadda. I don't remember what they showed Lo asking, but she picks Jamie from last season, because apparently Jamie used to work for/with her. Chiarello is being Mr. Big Man Chef: go find a knife and carrot and show me how you dice a carrot. (Someone--Spike, maybe?--actually refused to do it) What's my name? (to see who can pronounce the last name correctly). What do you call me in the kitchen? ("Chef" is the only correct answer to that question.) Kinda maybe being a dick, hard to tell; it would have been more interesting if there had been more cheftestants than slots, number one, and, number two, Spike was the last one picked; Keller got stuck with him.

So the chefs get together with their teams to plan the meal (buffet for 200 "Hollywood insiders," whoever the fuck they are), go to Whole Paycheck (whose CEO has pissed me off with his health care bullshit enough so that I am going to boycott his fucking stores) to buy shit, and do some prep. The next day, they're in the middle of cooking, and they're told they need to pack up and move everything to the venue (or a different venue?). Which is kinda bullshit usual TC stuff, but it does fuck with the chefs, some of whom are making things that require a certain kind/amount of cooking to develop flavor profiles. There's also a shot of one of the team members (Dale somebody?) screaming at Chiarello, saying, "What are you going to do about it???" and then Chiarello interviews that he's been doing this for 20 years and he has a Dale for lunch regularly. Looked like a lot of dick-waving on both sides, if you ask me, but still: Chiarello is the chef, AND Dale isn't on his team, so WTF? Dude, get the fuck over yourself, go back to your room, do your tasks.

So they pack up and move, and, when they get there, they discover that (a) it's going to be served outside, in the sun, and (b) they each have to cut a team member. The former condition completely fucks Anita, and not in a good way, because she had been planning a raw bar, which is totally not something you do in the hot sun, but also not something you can change two hours before serving time. It's also interesting that the team member she cuts is Jamie, with some not-completely-coherent interviewing about how Jamie isn't that good after all (too slow, I think was the problem). And when Hubert cuts Spike, Spike's comments--that he thinks it's a compliment to be chosen last, because it means the chefs are afraid of him totally RULING with his mad chef skillz--provide further evidence that he is delusional; it's a good thing I didn't watch that season, or I would have reached through the TV to drag him off the set by his balls. Or stopped watching, more likely.

Blah, blah, blah.

The crowd shows up, eats, whatevs. Everyone lurves Hubert's and Rick's food: Keller serves 18 (yes, 18) different food items. Bayless isn't far behind, and, apparently, it's all quite tasty. Anita is totally hosed: no way that raw fish in the sun is a good idea, but she can't do anything about that two hours before service. That is actually the thing that pissed me off most about the episode. Yes, one must always be able to work on the fly, but that's a changeup that's really out of the question, because any chef would tailor the menu to fit the venue, and Anita interviews that she knows it's a bad idea, and she knows she's hosed, but there's not a lot she can do about it--make fish soup? In short, I don't think she would have lost if they hadn't thrown that particular twist, and it highlights the aspect of the whole show that I think does a poor job of representing the fix-it-on-the-fly aspect of any kind of food service work.

Michael's meal doesn't really seem to come together; the swordfish looks like an unholy mess; hard to say what else is there. The judges don't have anything good to say about it, really--but it's not raw fish in the sun, so, hey, he's safe for another week.

The thing that really stood out, though, is that both Keller and Bayless were portrayed as incredible team leaders, people who were, on one hand, completely in charge, but, on the other hand, were completely open to contributions from other people and who expected their team members to perform, i.e., didn't think they were likely to be useless idiots. Bayless openly credits mr. molecular gastronomy (ew) with the avocado ice cream being created tableside. And both of them were just (portrayed as) very calm; no histrionics, no drama, no ego-for-the-sake-of-ego.

It's hard to say whether there's a relationship between their calm demeanor and team leadership and the excellence of their product. I know one of the big chefs in this city--has cookbooks and such, too--has a rep as a dick, but the product there is excellent, I'm told (I've never been, and his politics annoy me sufficiently that I don't feel compelled to go). OTOH, people like Bossman are pretty calm, pretty supportive of the team, etc., and also produce excellent product. What it comes down to, for me, is whether I would have wanted to work with the person, and, personally, I made an effort to avoid places that had bad reps that way. Some of it is just that I'm old and cranky, and I am seriously not up for some guy, no matter how marvelous a chef he's supposed to be (or actually is), being an asshole. Clearly, as Bayless and Keller show, it is not necessary for someone to be an asshole, so why would someone put up with it? But I also recognize that my calculus on these things is different, in large part because of my personality and in smaller part because of my age. (Seriously: I'm going to seek out some 35-year-old superstar to berate me just because he has a famous restaurant? It's just food, people.)

Anyway. I'd meant to describe the two incredible meals that Friend and I made over the weekend, but that will have to wait for another post. However long it takes me to put that together.