Sorry this is a bit late, but I spent the entire workday Friday on the phone working on the top 100 prospects package, which will run right after the big hand-egg match in early February. I missed the Lazarito workout because my daughter had pneumonia (she’s better now), but it sounds like it wasn’t a great look for the 100+ scouts who were there.
* Quickfire: Dates! I miss Arizona Medjool dates. The natural-foods grocer Sprouts was my go-to spot for Medjool dates, which are just … better, I don’t even know how to describe it. I carry dried dates with me on the road a lot because they’re so good and high in both fiber and sugar. I also love them Firefly (Las Vegas)-style, stuffed with almonds and wrapped in bacon, with a balsamic glaze and a little sprinkled bleu cheese (although I could skip that last bit). Anyway, the chefs can choose from three specialty varieties here.
* Chrissy Teigen is introduced as the guest judge (did someone really call her “John Legend’s wife,” as if she has no individual identity?) and is showing award-show level cleavage.
* Teigen says, “Dates are sweet and succulent and sticky,” to which Padma offers the forced-risqué line, “Like you.” Slutty talk from Padma seems to be an ongoing thing here but it does nothing for me, sorry. The chefs’ challenge is to tell a story of the best date each of them has ever had in a dish that highlights dates.
* As much as I love dates, I don’t think I’ve ever cooked with them, because pitting and trimming them is among the bigger pains in the asses in the kitchen. Olives are up there too, as are gooseberries (did that once – never again).
* Giselle is somehow struggling with burners, but it’s not clear if it’s her fault or she’s getting edited to look the fool because they’re trying to offer us some #foreshadowing.
* We get a bunch of stories from the chefs, with the longest story coming from Jason, but overall these people had some boring dates. I don’t think I could do any better, though; my other half isn’t a foodie and hates dates (the fruit, that is).
* Angelina has no date story, apparently, saying, “My boyfriend is the restaurant.” That’s … hot.
* Worst dishes: Chad’s pan-roasted halibut with orange salsa verde, pine nut, and zahari date froth, because the orange was bitter. Phillip’s tuna crudo with peaches and zahidi dates didn’t have enough date flavor. Carl made a date milkshake, which I’ve had at Joe’s Farm Grill out in Gilbert, Arizona. They’re really good, but not exactly the kind of thing to win a Top Chef challenge.
* Favorites: Jason’s roasted baby carrots with Deglet Nour dates, brown butter, cumin, lime, and pine nuts; Padma loved the char on everything. Isaac’s chicken ballontine (hey, Ruhlman has a recipe for that!) with medjool date sauce thanks to crispy chicken skin. Giselle’s date salad with pork sausage, arugula, watercress, and spiced walnuts showcased the date particularly well. The winner, however, is Jason, which they kind of foreshadowed with long story about the date he went on with his long-term partner.
* Elimination challenge: Art Smith, who appeared on Top Chef Masters a few years back, is the guest judge, and will be renewing his vows with his partner as one of 25 couples getting married in a mass wedding ceremony. Yeah, it’s a gay wedding, but do we even need to say that any more? It’s not like it’s an alternate-universe wedding. A gay wedding is just like a straight wedding, amirite?
The chefs will prepare the entire meal as one team, but will be judged individually on their dishes.
* Padma got ordained that morning to officiate the wedding, which … um … okay.
* Kwame is making sauces for two different dishes, which seems ambitious, although he has been the most impressive chef so far.
* Giselle is struggling to understand a dish in the discussion on the way to Whole Foods, so they’re clearly setting her up for elimination in the editing. When she says she doesn’t like the sound of Wesley’s idea for their dish, saying, “for me it doesn’t go (together),” Wesley mansplains her down with, “It doesn’t matter, it’s unbelievable.” I get defending your own recipe, but to say that to another professional chef’s face is beyond dismissive.
* Isaac is buying peeled garlic? What?
* A yoga instructor comes to the house to do yoga with the chefs in the morning, other than Isaac and Wesley, who do what I would likely to and go laze around in the shade instead. I’d probably have a book, though. I have nothing whatsoever against yoga, but don’t namaste me, bro.
* The editing of this episode makes Giselle look both incompetent and hapless. She may be below the others in skill – although even assuming that seems like a stretch – but she can’t possibly be as bad as she looks here, or she wouldn’t have made the show in the first place. She’s squabbling with Karen, her partner on the vegetarian dish, but we get Karen’s perspective on their disagreement without Giselle’s. Is Giselle too needy, or is Karen just not communicating well? I feel like a defense attorney this season.
* Angelina doesn’t seem to grasp Jason’s dish (they’re working together too), which, again, would be his fault as much as hers. They’re not on the same page, which means he didn’t adequately communicate his vision to her. What isn’t helping is that he keeps calling it “capunet,” which I think means capuns, a Swiss-Italian dish that sort of looks like what they’re making but usually contains dried beef and/or sausage in the filling, not braised chicken, and is finished by boiling in seasoned milk. What these two are really making turns out to be more like niños envueltos, a dish with which I was not familiar before this episode, a sort of stuffed meat roll but here wrapped in a chard leaf like capuns would be.
* Phillip is making what he keeps calling “mashed potatoes” but is spraying it out of an iSi canister to try to create a foamy sauce, which I can only imagine will make it gummy by overworking the starches. Maybe (this is pure speculation here) he could have whipped cream and folded it into loose mashed potatoes? I don’t know if this would work but it would avoid the gumminess.
* Isaac semi-brags that, “I should probably come with a warning label that says ‘does not play well with others'” yet everyone likes him, so I think he’s all bluster. He’s just crazy, but he doesn’t seem to be getting on anyone’s nerves.
* Padma is dressed almost demurely as the instant minister, although she did have her one look-at-me element with hot purple lipstick.
* Has anyone heard how many heterosexual marriages across the country fell apart after this episode was aired? I feel like the entire institution has been undermined here.
* Enough of that – let’s talk food. First up is Amar/Chad: Sherry-glazed pork belly with smoked orange marmalade, pickled fennel, onion, and smoked salt. It’s a huge hit and of everything in this episode, this is the recipe I’d most want.
* Jeremy, working solo: Citrus roasted carrots with harissa yogurt, shaved radish, and baby kale. He got some kind of color on those carrots, unless my television was on the fritz. Tom and Art both rave.
* Wesley/Kwame: Pickled shrimp with cucumber onion salad, citrus vinaigrette, cashews. Kwame’s nuoc cham, a Thai fish sauce-based dressing that must have been in the vinaigrette, is an immediate hit.
* Angelina/Jason: Niños envueltos – Swiss chard rolled up and stuffed with braised chicken, pancetta, cauliflower, and a sauce made from braising liquid and caramelized honey. Angelina called it “like a dolma,” and Jason gets pissed off and very condescending because it’s not dolma at all. (Dolma are Greek or Middle Eastern dishes of stuffed vegetables or rolled grape/cabbage, which Wikipedia says can also be called sarma.) leaves Judges love it.
* Isaac: Dirty rice and smoked chicken and jalapeno sausage. Tom says it’s “right.” I’m a bit surprised they didn’t ding him for making something in his comfort zone.
* Karen/Giselle: Charred eggplant puree with asparagus, smoked mushrooms, citrus vinaigrette, and kumquats. The asparagus is undercooked, the farro (I missed that in the description, apparently) is underseasoned, and the mushrooms were soggy. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
* Phillip/Kwame: Center cut NY steak with potato “cream” and tomato-eggplant relish. Shockingly, the potatoes suck: they have a gummy texture and a raw taste. The relish is good, of course, and Padma says it “saves Phillip’s dish.”
* Tom and my sister were married on the same day in 2011. Not to each other, though. That would be weird.
* Marjorie/Carl: Grilled apricots with cherries, mascarpone, and hazelnuts. (Stop calling it “mascarpone cheese,” and please stop calling it “marscapone.” It’s “MAHS-car-POH-neh.” It’s like cream cheese, but good.) Apparently this whole dish is fantastic, which will be totally forgotten the next time someone is eliminated for dessert and people start talking about a “curse.”
* Judges’ table: “Today was a proud moment in Top Chef history.” Okay, okay, don’t hurt yourselves patting your own backs. The winner was Wesley and Kwame’s shrimp dish. Kwame added tangerine and ginger juice to the nuoc cham, and used all of the juices in the sauce to pickle the shrimp, so it had big flavors but was very cohesive. The individual winner is The Man We All Know and Love, Kwame.
* Worst dishes: Karen/Giselle and Phillip/Kwame. Kwame acts like he might actually be eliminated, which is positively Swiftian (Taylor, not Jonathan) in absurdity. Phillip explains his dish to the judges as if this was the result he wanted, but then Jason chimes in, “I don’t think that’s how the dish was described to the team.” Marjorie piles on with, “you said mashed potatoes,” so the editors didn’t mislead us here – everyone thought he was doing steak and potatoes. No one is talking about the steak, by the way, which is in and of itself odd since that’s the main component of the dish.
* Giselle said the dish did not include “her” flavors, so Karen retorts that she found it “hard to collaborate” and, more insulting, “at least I was trying.” Will nobody ever learn that these arguments in front of the judges do nobody any favors? Suddenly, Giselle says “it’s shocking that Phillip doesn’t recognize his flaws,” while she and Karen understand what they did wrong … which is sort of like saying the apology is more important than the mistake. Phillip defends himself by saying that was indeed the dish he wanted to make, but Tom says he was “going for something we didn’t care for.”
* Jason is really pissed, even after judges’ table, which might make sense if he were directly affected by the elimination decision.
* Giselle is eliminated. While she was the weakest chef up for elimination, Phillip made gummy potato sauce and I kind of have a hard time with him staying – as if perhaps he stayed on reputation. The only good thing on his plate came from Kwame.
* LCK: Chefs have 20 seconds to look at the cart of ingredients, then have to write down two dish ideas they can execute in 20 minutes. Tom picks one for each to do – Giselle has to do lamb, fig, and pistachio, while Grayson has to do shrimp and jalapeño – but the women negotiate and end up doing their first choices, Giselle’s chicken with summer polenta and Grayson’s lamb with fig and mustard. Tom is having way more fun in LCK this season, and the women both seem to join in by acting a little goofy. The main show could benefit from some of this silliness. I also love how Tom comments on specific cooking times (Grayson’s rack of lamb should take twelve minutes max) or plating (he tells the camera Giselle is plating too soon, with five minutes left, so she changes her plan). He’s a highly successful and respected chef – I want more of his commentary.
* Grayson’s lamb rack comes with a fig and port sauce and a take on aligot potatoes (a French dish of mashed potatoes blended with certain low-fat cheeses). Giselle’s chicken comes with a corn and tomato salad and polenta. Chicken appears to be perfectly cooked but the polenta might not be hot enough. Grayson wins although it appears to have been very close.
* Rankings: Kwame, Jeremy, Jason, Marjorie, Isaac, Carl, Amar, Wesley, Karen, Phillip, Chad, Angelina.
, both for background and for the sheer pleasure of the experience. The novel has much dry wit that can’t translate to the screen, as well as copious footnotes that mostly add humor to the story, and Clarke’s prose sparkles in ways that will never come through on film. But the adaptation here is so thorough that I believe any viewer could approach it without the background of the book and still follow the entire story without any trouble, which, for a work this dense, is a major achievement. I know in the time of “peak TV” there’s tremendous competition for your eyeballs and nowhere near enough time to watch everything you want – I might see a tenth of the series I’d like to see – but if you’re going to binge anything this offseason, put Jonathan Strange on your list.
, a high fantasy work that seemed to me to have an extraordinarily strong religious or spiritual component, but one that was fully integrated into the story rather than one that beats you about the head like a certain large feline, sorceress, and armoire may have done.
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(co-authored by Jennifer Thompson) for half price at Changing Hands in Tempe during my annual AFL trip, I picked it up without a second thought. The book covers a little of the same ground as the Einstein bio, but is primarily a history of superstring theory and the search for a “grand unified theory” (up to 1995, of course) that would bring together the four fundamental forces of physics, building the reader up from the mid-19th century forward through various stops and starts that included the proposal, discarding, and resurrection of string theory from the 1950s to the 1980s. 
for that – but it gave me more than just a superficial explanation along with plenty of the mind-bending stuff that makes theoretical physics seem fun to someone like me.
, winner of the Hugo in 1989. 