→ November 25, 2013
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Gift guide for cooks, 2013 edition.

Back in 2010 and 2011, I wrote a pair of posts offering gift ideas for the cooks in your circle, but never put together a single omnibus post that covered what I use in the kitchen on a daily basis. Here’s my attempt to do so, covering three core categories: Knives, pots and pans, and essential tools. If you think something’s missing, you’re probably right, so throw a note in the comments for me.

Knives

You need three, at least, but might not need more if your cooking needs are basic. Everyone needs a chef’s knife, and as long as the blade is good, the only variable that matters is the comfort of the handle, which is a personal choice. I own a Henckels model I got in the late 1990s, but the folks at Cooks Illustrated have long recommended the Victorinox 8-Inch Chef’s Knife, which is cheaper but just as strong, lacking Henckels’ brand-name and maybe losing a little comfort on the handle. The best value among Henckels knives is this 8-inch chef’s knife, only $12 more than the Victorinox model; I can’t compare them directly but have been very happy with the Henckels knives I own.

You also need a bread knife, which is a long knife with a serrated edge, for slicing bread but also cutting grapefruits and tomatoes and even for chopping chocolate. This Henckels 8-inch model is identical to the one I own except for the handle style.

The third knife you probably should own if you want to cook is a paring knife, great for … paring things. Actually, the main thing I use my paring knife for is hulling strawberries, which is quick and safe work (you rotate the berry, not the knife) once you get the motion down. It’s good for fine work, but I use mine less often than I use the other two knives. This Victorinox paring knife is under $8, a better value than the Henckels model.

If you want to expand your set, the next two I’d suggest would be a slicing knife and a santoku. The slicing knife has a narrower blade, so it’s not for chopping but rather for long, even cuts in something like a steak or cooked turkey or pork loin. You could also get an electric carving knife for the latter, which does make life easier although I admit blades with motors make me somewhat nervous. A santoku is a Japanese knife for chopping and dicing vegetables, with an extremely narrow cutting edge on a wider blade, great for plants but not so much for animal products. Amazon has a two santoku set from Henckels over half off, $22 total, which has to be a temporary sale. I own a Henckels santoku with a different handle and it’s very useful for thin, precise cuts of vegetables, and it’s frighteningly sharp.

The last knife I own is a boning knife, used for basic butchery (breaking down a chicken or a duck, but not, say, a whole cow) where you’re separating meat from bone. The key there is a flexible blade that bends without breaking and is extremely sharp. I bought a Henckels boning knife off eBay a decade ago for $20, under half what they go for now on Amazon. I don’t have a specific recommendation as the Victorinox models all look too thin for the way I use mine – which, by the way, I used to take apart a 13-pound turkey this morning so I can cook the legs (confit) and breasts (roasted) separately.

Pots/pans

I’ve owned some All-Clad anodized aluminum pots for over a decade, but have gradually adjusted to add some stainless steel pieces, non-stick skillets, my trusty 12” cast-iron skillet from Lodge, and one Le Creuset Dutch oven that I got as a gift several years ago. The anodized aluminum pots are easy to clean and heavy-duty enough for everyday cooking, but you don’t need to spend for All-Clad (I actually didn’t pay for them either, getting through a credit card rewards program).

For non-stick, I’ve had good luck with fairly cheap pans from Wearever, who now offer a three-pan set for $23 via amazon that includes both of the ones I own. Treat them right – no metal utensils, don’t let them heat up all the way while empty, don’t put them in the dishwasher – and they should last for years. For eggs, which will stick to pretty much anything, these skillets are essential, but they’re also great for frying a potato rösti or fish fillets.

I tweeted about my Lodge 12-inch cast-iron skillet, which I’ve had for at least a decade and still use all the time. I originally bought it because Alton Brown told me it was the only way to cook proper Southern fried chicken, which was true, but it’s now my go-to vehicle for any kind of pan-frying where I’m using a half inch of oil or more, up to deep frying (which I do in my Dutch oven). I also cook pancakes in here, using bacon fat as the grease. The only issue I’ve had is that smaller stoves don’t play that nicely with its wide base, so if you have a 30” stovetop or just know your burners are small, go for the 10.5” model (found in the same link) instead.

The stainless steel items I use are both from Calphalon’s Simply Calphalon collection, a 2.5-quart saucier and a 3-quart lidded saute pan, although I don’t think either is available any more. Calphalon does offer a ten-piece Simply Calphalon starter set, with a saute pan and two skillets but no saucier, and while I’m sure the skillets are wonderful I’d still want to supplement them with non-stick ones like those I mentioned above.

The Le Creuset Dutch oven is a luxury item, although you can get one a lot cheaper if you have an outlet near you and don’t mind buying a discontinued color. Le Creuset products are made of cast iron but the surface is enameled, so it’s nonstick and doesn’t require seasoning. If you can afford one, you won’t regret the purchase, as they’re so heavy-duty they’re perfect for any kind of braise or stew, or even stovetop dishes like risotto, where you want even eating and a wide opening for steam to escape. It is also by far the best way to deep fry anything, as long as you have a candy or frying thermometer; it holds its heat and the deep sides limit spatter. (Don’t buy an electric deep-fryer; the reviews on those are consistently terrible.) I’ve linked to the size and model I have, a seven-quart version, as the nine-quart is too big for consumer stove burners and is also too heavy for easy transport when it’s hot. The seven-quart is fine for cooking a five-pound pork shoulder or enough short ribs to feed 3-4 people.

The one essential addition to your pots and pans, based on my own usage, is a slow cooker, sometimes called a crockpot. If you don’t like the idea of leaving the oven on all day while you’re at work, or want more precise temperature control over a praise, a slow cooker allows you to program time and temperature and just forget about it until it’s done. I’ve used mine for short ribs, stews, carnitas (braised pork shoulder with onions and some herbs, in which the pork ends up braising in its own fat and juices), even sauces. I own this Hamilton Beach six-quart model and have been very satisfied with it, as it’s big enough for my needs and the ceramic liner is heavy enough to retain its heat for a long time after the cooking has stopped.

Essential tools

One new recommendation for this year is Freshpaper, which you can buy direct from Fenugreen, the manufacturer, and can also buy in any Whole Foods as well as many other health-food stores. The product is amazing: small squares of paper soaked in various herbs that have antimicrobial properties, so fruits and vegetables placed on the paper or in a bin with the paper won’t spoil as quickly. I’ve been using Freshpaper for a year or so, and it absolutely works, even on quick-to-mold foods like berries. I keep one in each crisper drawer in the fridge, one in the fruit bowl on the counter, and one in any clamshell package of berries we buy. The manufacturer also donates a package to a food pantry or charity for every package they sell. The paper is even compostable, if you roll that way, so it’s more environmentally friendly than the ethylene absorbers you’re supposed to throw in your crisper drawers.

I don’t think any kitchen tool has had the impact of the Microplane grater, which is now ubiquitous in professional kitchens and on cooking shows, replacing the rougher cheese-grater style in many applications, including grating nutmeg and zesting citrus fruits. Amazon reminds me that I bought my Microplane classic grated ten years ago this past weekend, which is a little eerie, but it’s as good as new and I just busted it out the other day. I also have their coarse grater, which I use more for grating hard cheeses to finish a dish, since it produces light snow-like flakes and doesn’t tear apart whatever you’re grating.

I’ve previously recommended this Kyocera hand-held mandolin and am actually due for a replacement, as I managed to crack the frame of mine through overuse. The blade never lost any sharpness, though, which is what they promised. It’s great for making very thin slices (with four thickness settings) of vegetables for salads, for quick pickles, or for potato or other root vegetable chips. (Sweet potato chips are my favorite, fried till just slightly colored, dusted with sea salt and smoked Spanish paprika. Way, way better than sweet potato fries.)

The rest of my kitchen tools are prosaic – tongs, rubber spatulas, and wooden utensils, the latter mostly flat-edged spatulas. I mostly use metal tongs, but for working with nonstick cookware or the cast-iron skillet, my OXO nylon tongs is indispensable. Others you can pick up just about anywhere that might make good gifts, especially as stocking stuffers: small digital thermometers, a metal steamer basket, good vegetable peelers (I like Oxo’s Y-shaped and straight peelers, and a OXO Good Grips Serrated Peeler, Black for fruits like peaches), whisks from 10” long to miniature ones (great for whisking salad dressings or hot cocoa), Silpat non-stick baking mats, dishers/cookie scoops (a #20 size is great for dishing muffin batter into tins), these silicone ingredient cups (which I own and love), a Rabbit Corkscrew (I got one years ago on sale for $10 and it’s fantastic), Vacu-Vin wine stoppers to keep wine fresh (I believe they work, but I’m not a wine expert by any means) … I could go on and on. These are just things I find useful on a regular basis around the kitchen, so you’ll have some confidence that the gift you’re giving won’t end up at the bottom of a drawer until the recipients sell their house. At this point, in an era when none of us actually needs anything for Christmas, that seems to me like the ideal kind of gift.

You can see previous versions of this post here (small items) and here (larger items).

If you liked this post, please check out my updated list of cookbook recommendations too.

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→ November 24, 2013
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Little Women.

I’ve been busy this weekend, with Insider posts reacting to the Jhonny Peralta signing with St. Louis and the Brian McCann signing with the Yankees. I’ll continue posting reaction pieces as needed this week. I’ll also post an updated “gift guide for cooks” piece here on Monday.

—

I actually read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women when I was in third grade or so, as it was one of a series of abridged, illustrated classics I’d been tearing through as fast as my parents could buy them. I remembered the basics of most of the plots, including Edgar Allen Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Terror (“The Telltale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Junebug,” and, surprisingly for a book aimed at kids, “The Cask of Amontillado”), as well as bits and pieces of Alcott’s book – enough to understand that episode of Friends when it aired.

I didn’t think that version of Little Women counted for the purposes of reading the entire Bloomsbury 100, so I tackled the adult version last week. (The book also appears on the Guardian top 100 list.) I knew the book would be sentimental and more geared toward female readers, but I was surprised by many elements of it. There’s a latent feminist streak in it, one that at least treats its female characters as independent-minded individuals, equal to the men in spirit if not in the eyes of society, although in the end the women do settle in one way or another for marriage and motherhood. That feminist bent was quickly overshadowed by the rising tide of feminist novels where gender inequality led to tragedy, like The Awakening, Madame Bovary, and Effi Briest, so Alcott’s feminism feels very dated today.

However, the novel also represents a different twist on the utopian novels of the time period; rather than describing a future, technical utopia, Alcott instead presents a version of her contemporary world only tangentially affected by the ills of the age. The four little women of the title are the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and their father is serving as a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, leaving them in tight circumstances but not poverty, which is something they see but don’t experience. Their father is wounded, but returns home and survives, another example of tragedy coming close but not hitting home. Across the two parts of the book – it was published in two volumes, the second coming after the first had proven a resounding commercial success – only one significant tragedy visits the March household, that in the second book and with enough advance warning to the reader that by the time it happens it’s almost cathartic. Rather than depict life as it should or might be, the type of fantastic scenario you’d find in News from Nowhere or Looking Backward, Alcott gives us life as we’d like it to be: Full of love and happiness, without serious setbacks or disasters, where most of our worries end up for nothing at all.

There’s also a coming-of-age element to Little Women that I don’t recall seeing in any earlier novel, at least not in English or American literature, where the subject was female. Boys in literature came of age; girls got married to those boys as needed. Alcott gives her girls life, with distinct personalities and differing aims. Each has some rite of passage in the first book, all of which influences their fates in the second. The one character who stuck with me most when I read the book as a child still stood out today, as Jo was Alcott’s stand-in for herself, a wilful, clever girl, forebear to Dorothea of Middlemarch (who had Jo’s intellectual bent but ruined herself in a bad marriage), and by the end of Little Women its most essential character. I wondered as a kid if the presence of a character named Jo on the series The Facts of Life, which (after Jo’s arrival) focused on four teenaged girls living together at a boarding school, was an homage to Alcott’s book, especially as both girls shared tomboyish looks and attitudes and had the same dislike of societal rules and authority.

Next up: I knocked off H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds last week, having heard the Orson Welles broadcast but never read the book, and am now a third of the way through another Bloomsbury 100 title, Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.

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→ November 22, 2013
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Cookbook recommendations, 2013.

I’ve only made small edits and additions to this post, which first appeared in November of 2012. The most significant change is the inclusion of two new books, including Richard Blais’ first cookbook, which I review towards the end of the post.

If you want the quick-and-dirty shopping list version, here are three cookbooks I am always buying as gifts, especially for newlyweds who tell me they don’t really know how to cook:

  • Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto
  • Joy of Cooking (1997 edition)
  • Baking Illustrated

    • —

    I’m often asked to recommend a cookbook for readers – maybe for a novice, maybe as a wedding gift for someone, maybe for someone changing his/her diet – but I haven’t done an omnibus cookbook post in two years. With a few really strong new ones entering my collection this year, it seemed like a good time to revisit the subject.

    Just for background, I’m mostly a self-taught home cook. I’ve never taken a cooking class. When I was in grad school, I was free every day around 2 or 3 pm, while my wife, a preschool teacher at the time, would get home at 5:30 and be exhausted, assuming she hadn’t caught one virus or another from the kids, so I took over the cooking. At first, I was pretty awful at it, both in terms of the end product and in my capacity to injure myself through fire or blade. I must have really enjoyed the process, though, because as opposed to my usual habit of giving up on anything I wasn’t good at the first time, I decided to figure out how not to suck at cooking.

    My two main sources of early cooking instruction were Alton Brown’s Good Eats TV series and the 1997 edition of the classic American cookbook Joy of Cooking. With Good Eats airing in repeats on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, you can just set up your DVR to record them rather than buying the overpriced DVD sets, but the companion books, starting with Good Eats: The Early Years, are worth owning for the revised (usually re-tested) recipes and the commentary on each episode. Brown’s techniques always revolve around sound science and increased efficiency, whether it’s a faster way of doing something or a way to reuse an existing kitchen tool for a new purpose. He’s goofy – belching yeast sock-puppets are just never not funny – but always educational. And of all of his recipes that I’ve tried (more than I can count), only one, the squash dumplings, didn’t work for me, and that was fixed in the companion book.

    Joy of Cooking is always my first recommendation for people who are either just learning to cook or who are looking for one cookbook to rule them all. There are many editions available and there are some wide variations from one to the next, but the ’97 version has served me extremely well for its tremendous breadth of recipes – that’s still my go-to book even for Italian classics like pesto Genovese or shrimp scampi – and for the clear, logical recipes. For this edition, the publisher hired food writers to rewrite most of the recipes in the book, losing the folksy prose that charmed readers of earlier editions, but ensuring that the recipes were easy to follow and worked properly. Each recipe in Joy lists the ingredients in bold face at the point in the recipe where they’re used, rather than listing them all at the top. If you don’t succumb to the temptation to skip your mise en place – prepping and measuring ingredients before you start any cooking – this makes it much easier to follow the recipes and reduces the odds that you’ll skip an ingredient.

    If you’re interested in preserving fruits or vegetables, I have used Joy of Cooking: All About Canning & Preserving for nearly a decade. It’s out of print but amazon has used copies for $4 and up at that link.

    The new essential cookbook that I recommend to readers of any experience level is Ruhlman’s Twenty: 20 Techniques, 100 Recipes, A Cook’s Manifesto, a book I own myself and have given away as a gift. Its recipes require a slightly higher skill level than Joy, but Ruhlman’s twenty section essays – on basic techniques like poaching, braising, and frying, or core ingredients like onions, eggs, and salt – build up your knowledge on each subejct from the ground up. It’s the kind of book that might intimidate a rookie but, if you try some of the recipes, will leave you impressed with your own capabilities. I reviewed Ruhlman’s Twenty in full last November.

    (I should say I’m a firm believer in the adage that if you can read, you can cook. Cooking is not an innate skill that some of us have and some of us lack. It takes attention, it takes patience, it helps if you understand some basic math and science, but at its heart, cooking is about following instructions. Follow those, and you’ll produce something worth eating.)

    Ruhlman’s earlier book, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, is another must-have but is for intermediate home cooks and above because it makes assumptions about the reader’s experience and comfort level with certain techniques or foods. The book’s recipes are largely presented as ratios that can be scaled up to produce the desired quantity. If you want to make biscuits, you need 3 parts flour to 1 part fat to 2 parts liquid. The specifics are largely up to you, and there are brief discussions of your options, but again, Ruhlman is largely assuming you know how a biscuit or a Hollandaise or pâte à choux and is describing each recipe in terms of its foundation.

    For anyone looking to eat more vegetables, whether or not you’re a vegetarian, I now have two strong recommendations. One is Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty, which I reviewed in September. Ottolenghi isn’t a vegetarian but every recipe in this book is, with vegetables always the star ingredients, often augmented by butter and/or cheese, but mostly prepared in ways that evoke the essential flavors of the central vegetable. Cutting and browning endives in butter and a little sugar before coating them with cheese and bread crumbs and baking them helps bring out some of this chicory relative’s sugars while taming its strong bitter flavors to a point where the cheese (gruyere or talleggio) can at least compete for your attention. I’ve also found his mixed sauteed mushroom recipe, with soft goat cheese used in lieu of sour cream, to be a great hearty sauce over fresh whole-wheat papparedelle for a warm winter main course.

    The other vegetable-centric cookbook is Nigel Slater’s Tender, easily the most beautifully shot cookbook in my collection. Slater is a very famous food writer in England who has just a small cult following here, but Tender deserves a much wider audience for its focus on vegetables from seed to table. His gardening advice hasn’t helped me much because you can’t get a much wider gap between soil types than England and Arizona, but his dishes, many of which do contain meat but still accentuate the vegetables, are subtle showstoppers, turning some very ordinary veg – the more mundane and kid-unfriendly the plant, the more Slater seems to adore it – into warm, glowing, gorgeous dishes. Tender is the book that got me to buy and cook an actual pumpkin (not from a can), a process that, with about a tablespoon of added brown sugar led to this:

    For the advanced home cook – or even the professional – in your life, go for The Flavor Bible, which isn’t a cookbook at all. The authors, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, interviewed dozens of professional chefs about what ingredients went well together, and tabulated the results in this book. Look up an ingredient in The Flavor Bible and you’ll find a long list of good partners, with ingredients that were mentioned more often earning bolded entries. For example, parsnips are in season right now in much of the country, and the parsnip entry first says they should always be cooked, and work well when baked, boiled, braised, fried, grilled, mashed, pureed, roasted, or steamed. When the authors asked chefs about parsnips, the most-mentioned ingredients were butter (including browned butter) and nutmeg, both appearing in bold, capital letters. Bolded entries, mentioned less often than those two ingredients, include apples, chives, cream, curry, garlic, ginger, maple syrup, olive oil, parsley (a relative of parsnip and carrots), pepper, potatoes, sage, salt (duh), brown sugar, thyme, and root vegetables. The entry also includes about fifty other ingredients that work well with parsnip and were mentioned at least once by the interviewed chefs, and then concludes with five “flavor affinities,” combinations like parsnips + honey + mustard or parsnips + butter + cream + potatoes. Some entries have “Holy Grail” pairings, marked with an asterisk and mentioned by a large portion of the chefs they interviewed, like plums and Armagnac or lamb and rosemary, and some entries have “avoid” sections, like parsley and dessert. There are even sections for national cuisines – if you want to know what flavors work well in Afghan or Eastern European cuisines, for example, they’ve got you covered. What The Flavor Bible doesn’t do, however, is tell you what to do with these pairings. There are assorted quotes from celebrity chefs describing specific dishes, but the book contains no recipes. They assume you have the recipes and techniques and are looking for inspiration.

    The best book I’ve found for desserts, and one of only two America’s Test Kitchen books I own, is Baking Illustrated, which has most of the basic desserts you’d want to make, including a pie crust (for lattice tops, like the one in my Twitter avatar, but functional in any pie) that works as reliably as any I’ve ever tried. The writing can be cloying, especially when they go into more detail on failed kitchen experiments than I ever needed (if you’re going to describe something that didn’t work, at least make it funny), but the recipes work and their pumpkin pie is bar none the best I have ever tasted, one I make at least once every year.

    For bread baking, I am an unabashed acolyte of Peter Reinhart and own several of his books, including The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Whole Grain Breads (most of the same breads as the first book, but in whole-wheat, multi-grain, and 50/50 variations), and the more accessible Artisan Breads Every Day. His pizza doughs are pretty foolproof; I add a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten to his 100% whole wheat pizza dough and it’s strong enough to stretch it to translucency without tearing. (Sometimes I tear it anyway because I’m clumsy like that.) His pain a l’ancienne white-flour baguettes from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice are absurdly easy if you have a stand mixer or food processor (this $100 Cuisinart model is the current version of the one I’ve used for fifteen years) and never fail to get raves when I bring them to friends. I’ve made his focaccia, his cinnamon rolls, his struan, his challah, his pitas, and his wild yeast starter, which I kept going for about a year and a half until we packed up the house in Massachusetts. His books even have recipes for international breads like pumpernickel, panettone, hutzelbrot, and stollen, as well as Ethiopian injera and crackers like lavash and graham. Go with Artisan if you’re a bread-baking rookie, or the others if you have more experience or want books that will focus on baker’s ratios and allow for more ingredient substitutions. I reviewed the first two books at length back in 2009.

    Three more quick recommendations:

    * If you’re adventurous in the kitchen, or if like me you’re a Top Chef fan, I highly recommend Richard Blais’ Try This at Home: Recipes from My Head to Your Plate, which I reviewed earlier this year. Blais’ style in his two runs on the show was highly inventive and sometimes just plain strange, but in a good way, and the cookbook mirrors a lot of that style. Our two favorites by far are his lemon-curd roast chicken (which later becomes a pressed chicken terrine, also found in the book) and his sweet potato gnocchi, the latter of which is the only way my daughter will eat sweet potatoes – and which she loves to mix and roll out with me. There’s also an extensive seafood section that I haven’t explored due to my wife’s allergy to shellfish, and Blais also starts with a number of condiments and side items like various pickled vegetables, sauces, vinaigrettes, and smoked items that you wouldn’t normally smoke, including aioli (mayonnaise). It’s a lot of fun but does assume at least a moderate skill level in the kitchen.

    * If you have a slow cooker, go with ATK’s Slow Cooker Revolution. I don’t own the full book, but have a magazine version they sold when the book first came out, including about a third of the main book’s recipes, and they’ve all worked on the first try, including a surprisingly flavorful bolognese sauce that makes enough to freeze for one or two future meals (you lose a little texture, but the flavors remain strong), a beef burgundy stew that gave us about three dinners’ worth, and a white chicken chili that is surprisingly low in fat.

    * I’ve recommended Julia Child’s slim $11 book Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, which does, indeed, include wisdom from the woman who introduced America to French cooking, in the past because Child was so influential and important that she belongs on this list, but her most famous cookbooks are already dated. This book focuses on the bare essentials in the kitchen, including the basic vinaigrette formula I’ve been using for years, mother sauce formulas, simple instructions for roasting or braising major cuts of meat, souffles, breads, custard, and even baking-powder biscuits so you can make strawberry shortcakes.

    * A cookbook I’ve owned for a few months but haven’t been able to use much yet: Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life, by the Persian writer Louisa Shafia. Focused on seasonal, plant-based recipes, it’s more useful for side dishes than mains, and the flavor profiles tend toward the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Persian ends of the scale, although she does include a number of east Asian ingredients including tofu, yuba, and agar-agar. Shafia also includes side notes on gardening, avoiding processed foods, and sustainable eating. If you’re concerned about matters like your carbon footprint or reducing your meat intake, it looks like an ideal book – but with the caveat that I have yet to begin my attack, starting with the Winter section.

    * Finally, two non-cooking books that are about food, written by very highly-regarded chefs: Yes, Chef by the Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised chef (and Top Chef Masters winner) Marcus Samuelsson; and Blood, Bones, and Butter, by self-taught chef/entrepreneur Gabrielle Hamilton, one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read.

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→ November 21, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E08.

I analyzed the Kinsler-Fielder trade for Insiders last night, and answered some questions on that and lots of other subjects in today’s Klawchat.

The stew-room discussion after elimination brings up an interesting note – Patty has only been cooking for three years, yet managed to get almost halfway through the competition. That’s pretty damn impressive.

We also get this exchange between Sara and Shirley:

Sara: I’m starting to think im a gooch
Shirley: What’s that? What’s “a gooch” mean?

Which reminded me that this guy was supposed to be pretty good.

* Quickfire: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Dr. John the Night Tripper is in the house, aged 73 and looking about 20 years older than that, with an outfit that … well, I guess I just don’t get Louisiana fashion. The chefs have to make their own hot sauce in 45 minutes. Dr. John says it needs that flavor “and a hip tang to it,” and, “if it has flavor nicety of the highest order and it has tang nicety that mixes in, killer sauce.” Is that even English?

* Brian refers to the habanero as “ha-ba-NYER-o.” There’s no ~ there, Brian. Stop it. Carlos, who of course says it correctly, is only husing habanero hin ‘is sauce.

* Nicholas had his “first” ulcer at 20, implying there have been more, and says he was very nervous in his 20s, so he’s not a fan of very spicy food. I can relate, although I do like spicy food even though I can’t eat too much of it.

* Dr. John’s least favorites include Nicholas’ sauce with smoked apricots, cider vinegar, and coffee, which was too sweet overall; Carrie’s habanero and green mango sauce inspired by her Trinidadian mother-in-law’s recipe, which was “Trinideadly” hot (okay, Dr. John, that was a good one); and Nina’s “head-slammin’ over-the-top hot” sauce of habanero, ginger, and apple cider, which even Padma, who snorts powdered ghost chilies off a mirror in the pantry between takes, found too hot.

* The leaders were Brian’s green jalapeno/serrano sauce with lime and yuzu juices, which was “verily hip;” Justin’s sauce of half-roasted and half-raw peppers with fermented anchovies for an umami kick, which “clipped mah wings, slick idea;” and Carlos’ habenero, mango, and passion fruit, which “maneuver hit a lot o’ corners for me.” Brian is the winner because his “hit me the hardest,” according to the good doctor, giving Brian immunity for the second episode in a row.

* Padma looks very different during this Quickfire. I can’t figure out why. Still smokin’, just different.

* Elimination challenge: A whole pig comes in on a gurney. It’s boucherie time, with chef and restaurateur Donald Link of Cochon and artist/sculptor Toby Rodriguez, who hosted a boucherie on Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations two years ago. So we’re going snout-to-tail here, with each chef responsible for his/her own dish and the overall requirement that they use the whole animal. I’m not sure they actually did that, as the resulting dishes didn’t include the tail (fatty, but very tender meat if you can get to it) and I only heard pig ears once as a garnish.

* The effort involved in breaking down a whole animal like this is enormous, and they’re doing it with regular chef’s knives. I’ve never seen a whole hog butchered – wouldn’t you use different tools for this? Perhaps a saw?

* Meanwhile Sara is the backseat butcher here, yipping at Nicholas and the others who are breaking it down and seem to have a plan. I don’t have a lot of rules in my kitchen, but “don’t shout at the man with the knife” is one of them.

* Nicholas and Nina split the pig’s head. Nina wants to braise it for a ragu … but doesn’t that waste it? Head cheese, or testina, is a delicacy, emphasis on “delicate.” I don’t understand obliterating all that texture and flavor in a sauce.

* The editors faked me out with a red herring – we see Travis buying prefab dried ramen noodles at Whole Foods, which felt a hell of a lot like foreshadowing to me … but he skates on something that nearly always gets a chef sent home. It’s a competition. Make your own damn pasta.

* That night, the chefs return to their house to find Rodriguez and Link’s chefs cooking an indoor boucherie for them. I have no idea how maybe twenty people could consume that much food. I’m watching them, thinking I might be done after two items, only to see them putting away six or more plates apiece. A meal like that might give me stretch marks.

* Next morning, the chefs are drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee from a Keurig machine. I think I can speak for both Hugh Acheson and myself when I say that I am thoroughly disgusted by this disregard for the glorious Coffea arabica. You’re telling me none of these chefs brings a pour-over setup on the road? Come on. Step up your caffeine game, kids.

* And some drama out in the campground where the chefs are to cook: Justin finds a wood-burning grill, so he sets it up himself, lights the flame and gets it to his temperature, after which other chefs start to try to grab grill space, which he doesn’t want to share. He probably could have expressed that better – at least, based on what we saw on camera – but Nina’s response is “suck a dick, man.” Was that really necessary? Then again, she’s from St. Lucia, where it is actually illegal for a man to be gay, so maybe that’s perfectly acceptable to say in her worldview. Just not in mine.

* Alligator sighting. You gotta catch that and use the tail in your dish, Stephanie. It’s part of the challenge.

* Shirley says the boucherie reminds her of a shā zhū, an annual pig roast her family in northern China would hold every Chinese New Year. I have no comment on this other than that northern China just became far more interesting to me.

* Nina’s dish is “underwhelming” when she tastes it, so she adds adding cayenne at the last minute. That’s what I usually do – this dish is bland, let’s dump a bunch of heat into it so no one notices!

* Hugh’s back! And wearing a white shirt. Rookie move, Hugh.

* The dishes: Brian serves a porchetta (rolled pork loin, terrible for you but so very good) with oyster and shiitake mushrooms; Sara does a pork dim sum with crab and shrimp har gow; Justin serves tacos with wood roasted pork breast, pork liver, and salsa verde, earning some immediate comments that the meat is a little dry, probably from when his entire grill caught fire; Carlos makes his mother’s posole verde with fried chorizo tacos; and Shirley makes a “day-after Chinese New Year’s” jiaozi with pork shoulder, topped with grilled kidney and cracklins.

* Padma is giddy because the food is all so good. The shift in her character over the last five or six seasons has been enormous. When I jumped into Top Chef in the Vegas season, she was stark and often seemed rude. Now she’s at the other end of the spectrum, empathetic with ousted chefs and just generally enjoying one of the greatest jobs in the world.

* Back to the food: Louis does a pork leg with shiitake mushrooms and popcorn, of all things; Stephanie made a cured, grilled, braised pork belly, served in a pork brodo she made in the pressure cooker, topped with a summer vegetable pickle; Travis’ pork bone ramen with collard greens gets all over Hugh’s shirt; Carrie serves crispy pig trotters (feet) with snap peas and pickled onions, possibly with pickled skin too; Nicholas makes a “tête de cochon” (head cheese) rillette style, with lemon grass vinaigrette, wheat berries, and vegetables; Nina uses her pig’s head to make a ragout with mustard greens, crispy ears, and sweet corn spaetzle. I still don’t understand how you could taste the head, especially the cheek meat, in something that heavy.

* Judges table: Tom says it was the most enjoyable food he’s ever had in eleven seasons of the show. While I’m sure some of that is just how incredible high-quality pig meat and offal can be, the chefs obviously (from the judges’ comments) did a great job. Shirley, Nina, Brian, and Carlos all get some praise here, especially Shirley, whose dumpling alone might have put her in the top three. Justin’s meat was dry, and seemed to get drier as the party went on. Louis’ corn was too sweet and had texture issues. Travis’ ramen had good flavor, but the judges ding him for not making his own. Stephanie’s dish didn’t have much flavor.

* Justin is barking at the TV as they watch the comments. Hey Justin, I know you’re mad, but they can’t hear you.

* The top three are Nina, Shirley, and Carlos; Nina’s food must just taste really good, because I don’t know that she’s ever made anything that looked or sounded so good that she’d consistently be in the top three. Shirley talks about traveling three days on a train to her grandma’s house in northern China, to which Tom says, “I would travel three days for those dumplings.” Carlos’ mother made this pozole every Thursday; Hugh is gushing over it, saying the “structure was so perfect.” Tom says if Nina’s pork ragout isn’t a national dish of somewhere, it should be, maybe “Ninastan.” And the winner “by a very slim narrow margin” is … Carlos! Gooooooal!

* The bottom three are Justin, Louis, and Stephanie; I’m disappointed and somewhat annoyed that Travis could buy dried, packaged noodles and not even end up in the bottom group just for sheer laziness. Justin is defensive, but Padma says the pork was bland and two of the four judges said theirs was dry. Tom and Padma go out of their way to say that none of the dishes were bad – these were just the worst of a good lot. Stephanie reveals that she cured her pork an hour, grilled it, braised it, then glazed it, and grilled again to finish. Did she consider shooting it too, just to make sure it was dead? Louis felt like his “meat cookery” was good, channeling Dr. John there for a moment, but Link says the popcorn was unnecessary and Tom said the corn kernels’ skin was too thick. Hugh says it took away from the core idea of “treasuring that pig.” You slaughter a pig, you better be prepared to treasure it properly.

* Justin’s dish even looked dry on TV. I don’t love the lean cuts of pork, like the loin, for this very reason – we have bred the fat out of most commercial pork in this country, even the good stuff.

* Louis goes home. The ladies seem disappointed Louis is going. Stephanie also seemed on the cusp of elimination here; she seems unable to craft a plan up front that she can execute in the allotted time without losing her mind along the way.

* LCK: The two chefs to go French Market, but when they get back Tom cuts them back to just three ingredients. Louis wins despite a gritty, overthickened sauce. Was Janine’s dish too simple or boring? I’ll miss her accent more than her looks, to be honest. I’ll predict, boldly, that Louis isn’t running the table – and won’t be around for that much longer.

* Top three: Shirley, Nina, Nicholas, followed by Justin, Carrie, Carlos, Brian, Stephanie, Sara, and Travis at the bottom. I think Shirley’s far more likely to bust out something crazy in the finals than Nina is.

* Next episode: Restaurant Wars!

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→ November 20, 2013
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Drenge & These New Puritans.

My analysis of the Josh Johnson and David Murphy signings is up for Insiders.

Drenge is a duo act comprising brothers from Derbyshire, England, whose self-titled debut album dropped in the United Kingdom in mid-August and will come out here in January. First recommended to me by one of you, a promo copy Drenge came across my desk this week (figuratively, since it was via email), and it’s promising if uneven, an intriguing blend of rock styles from post-punk to grunge to garage with at least three standout tracks. (If you’re in the U.K. you can buy the album via amazon. Otherwise, you can stream it on Spotify below.)

Although the White Stripes have set the standard for guitar-and-drum rock duos, Drenge have a little more in common with Jeff the Brotherhood, another sibling act that opts for heavier riffs and a chunkier sound for the guitar, without Jack White’s peripatetic musical style. Guitarist Eion Loveless’ rhythm lines are loud and aggressive, with abrupt tempo changes and shifts from the cleaner post-punk of Gang of Four to the fuzzier sounds of early Soundgarden or vintage Mudhoney. You can even hear bits of darkwave in some of the slower tracks, like the latter half of “Nothing” or nearly all of the eight-minute non sequitur closer “Let’s Pretend,” which might also be the result of distant influences from Black Sabbath or Angel Witch.

Where Drenge separates itself from similarly lo-fi/garage acts is in the five-song stretch from the album’s second track, the grim “Dogmeat” (which reminds me of a slowed-down take on Shed Seven’s “Dolphin”), through the pleasantly annoying “Face Like a Skull.” That quintet includes the album’s first single and best track, “Bloodsports,” where the brothers Loveless start to borrow more heavily from UK superstars the Arctic Monkeys in sound and melodic strength. The energy on “Bloodsports” starts with the fast-paced guitar line behind the verses, a la the intro to Nirvana’s “Breed,” but kicks up another gear with the drum-less riff right after the chorus, a trick Jack White has long used to great effect. “Backwaters” is the disc’s closest thing to a pop track, like Radiohead’s “I Might Be Wrong” tidied up for mass consumption yet still sinister enough to deliver lines like “I never seen blood or milk mix so divine/I never seen such beauty so malign,” a line followed by a riff so heavy you think the boys are shifting into mid-80s thrash mode. “Gun Crazy” turns the tempo back up to punk speed, a song to make Mark Arm proud for its first half that adds some complexity with off-beat staccato strumming in its final thirty-second coda.

The remainder of the album is far less consistent, including “Let’s Pretend,” which feels out of place and thoroughly bombastic for clocking in at twice the length of the next-longest song, “Fuckabout,” which is about as intellectually or aurally pleasing as the title indicates. “I Wanna Break You in Half” works as a suitably obnoxious fast-paced sub-two-minute track, but the same conceit flops on the unfunny “I Don’t Wanna Make Love to You” or the opener “People In Love Make Me Feel Yuck.” Eoin seems capable of lyrical subtletly, but too often settles for a sledgehammer to the forehead with a joke that feels like we’ve heard it a dozen times before. That can improve with experience and maturity, but Drenge’s ability to craft memorable hooks and evoke so many different eras in songs typically just two to three minutes long is already plus.

–

I also received a copy of the new album Field of Reeds by another English act, These New Puritans, which comprises twin brothers plus a third member, although the disc includes prominent contributions from over thirty-eight session musicians (per Wikipedia). I’ve previously mentioned the lead single, “Fragment Two,” which is also by far the album’s most conventional track in song structure, although even its music rarely follows the rules of modern rock music. I feel underqualified to talk about the album, given its experimental and highly artistic nature, with only Talk Talk’s Laughing Stalk coming to mind as a reference point (and I wouldn’t even say I know that album that well). The overwhelming sense I got from Field of Reeds was one of vastness, of the attempts to fill enormous ranges of space with haunting sounds that expanded upon release but never managed to reach the area’s borders. There are moments on the album of beauty, and just as many moments where it appears the band is trying to create a form of anti-music. As someone who tends to choose singles over albums, and gravitates towards melody over sonic textures, however, I found myself coming back to “Fragment Two” and the hynpotic “Organ Eternal,” the album’s two most accessible tracks. Field of Reeds is for mature listeners only.

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→ November 19, 2013
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The Portrait of a Lady.

New Insider content from Monday – reactions to the Carlos Ruiz re-signing and the Tim Hudson contract.

My only previous experience with the American writer Henry James was a failed attempt to read The Ambassadors back in 2005, and successful reads of two of his short stories, “Daisy Miller” and “Turn of the Screw,” back in high school. While he earns near-universal praise for the emotional depth of his writing and the quality of his prose, I always thought his prose was too prolix, and avoided him for years as a result.

The Portrait of a Lady appears on the Bloomsbury 100, which meant I either had to end my boycott or give up on my goal of reading all 100 titles, and since this also appears on the Novel 100 (at #29) I figured I’d stop being a stubborn ass about it and give it a read. James’ prose is, still, too prolix, and the novel moves about as quickly as a Yankees-Red Sox game on national television, but I could see that it’s also the work of a brilliant writer, and his central character is among the most memorable I’ve encountered.

Isabel Archer, the lady of the title, starts the novel as a young American woman who travels to visit her aunt and wealthy English uncle at their estate outside of London, where her aunt rarely spends time but her uncle and her cousin Ralph are often in residence, as both suffer from health issues. Isabel’s high-spirited, independent nature faces an unexpected test when she inherits a fortune and no longer has to even consider marrying for money, which leads her into a mésalliance that wrecks her innocence and threatens to destroy her individuality.

James invests nearly all of his time, including some multi-page paragraphs, in building and exploring the character of Isabel; rather than allowing her words and actions to define her, he crafts her with costive prose that I found difficult and unengaging. It is one thing to tell us that Isabel couldn’t feel shame for her mistakes for long because “she had an unquenchable desire to think well of herself;” it is another to talk about this for over two pages without a paragraph break. James’ fustian dialogue still illuminates her character and those of her suitors, the American expatriate Madame Merle, and her friend from Albany Henrietta, so why bury them in mountains of Dickensian descriptions?

Portrait‘s climax was by far its best and most clever part, as James gives us an ambiguous ending where we can easily imagine Isabel choosing either of the two paths ahead of her. By that point, she’s made her bad marriage and realized she’s effectively trapped in it, until an escape route appears before her – but one that would require her to sacrifice image and propriety in the eyes of the aristocratic world in which she travels. Her tie to her stepdaughter, who is growing up under the oppressive thumb of Isabel’s husband, may be a stronger disincentive to flee than her vows to her husband. Has her independence atrophied so far that she would choose a lifetime of unhappiness to save face? I’d like to imagine James writing both endings and opting to forgo one entirely because neither option satisfied him. Or maybe he just got lazy.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, which is also on the Bloomsbury list. Beth’s not doing so well right now, though, so I put the iPad in the freezer.

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→ November 18, 2013
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Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

The cooperative boardgame Flash Point: Fire Rescue is Pandemic set in a burning building. While the setting and endgame conditions differ, the core mechanics are very similar, enough that it should be simple for Pandemic or even Forbidden Island players to pick up the basic rules and move on to the complete game. It’s enjoyable thanks to the same cooperative elements that make Pandemic fun (and stressful), but I don’t see anything terribly novel in Flash Point that advances the cooperative game field.

In Flash Point, the board is a giant rectangular building divided into 48 squares (six by eight), and it’s about to become enveloped by fire. The players represent firefighters who must enter the building and rescue seven victims before the building collapses or before they lose four (or more) victims to the blaze. Only three victims are on the board at any time, and some of the victim tokens turn out to be “false alarms” – blank tokens that can waste your time as you navigate the fire to get to them. Once a player reaches a victim, s/he must carry the victim out of the building to the ambulance parked outside, a slow process that puts both victim and player at risk from the advancing conflagration. When a victim is rescued or is lost, or a false alarm token is exposed, the players add a new token, called a point of interest (POI), to replace it, ensuring there are three on the board at the start of every turn.


When a fire starts to burn, right, and it starts to spread…

On his/her turn, each player gets four moves, called action points, to use as needed. Moving to an adjacent space costs an action point; putting out smoke in the space where the player stands costs one AP; putting out fire in that space costs two AP; carrying a victim to an adjacent space costs two AP. A firefighter can’t end his/her turn in a space that’s on fire, but a player can save any unused AP until the next turn. The basic “family” game has all players operating with the same four AP and restrictions; the full rules give each player a specific role, again similar to Pandemic, with bonus skills (e.g., flip over any victim token for 1 AP to see if it’s a false alarm or an actual victim) or additional AP to use in certain ways (e.g., three bonus ones per turn that can only be used for movement and can’t be saved).

After each player takes his/her turn, he rolls the two dice, one six-sided die and one eight-sided, to spread the fire somewhere in the building. If the space indicated by the roll is empty, and isn’t adjacent to any space with a fire token in it, then the new space gets a smoke token and no real harm is done (yet). If the space is already smoking, or is adjacent to a fire token, then the space ignites and gets a fire token. If the space is already on fire, however, an “explosion” occurs, similar to an outbreak in Pandemic, where the fire spreads out in all four directions, blowing off doors and damaging walls. Each wall segment can take up to two damage tokens before it is destroyed, and if players must place all of the game’s 24 damage tokens on the board before rescuing their 7th victim, the building collapses and all is lost.

The full rules create ways for the fire to spread even more quickly due to hazardous materials and hot spots places on the board at the beginning of the game. When fire hits a hazmat token, it causes another explosion like that described above; a player can carry a hazmat token out of the building for 2 AP per move, although the hazmat just has to be taken to the outer track rather than brought to a specific point as a victim does. When fire hits a hot spot, the player must roll the dice again to place yet another smoke or fire token, which may cause another explosion and hit another hot spot, so the process can continue for several iterations. These advanced rules come with one major bonus for the players, however: For 4 AP players can use the fire engine’s deck gun to spray water into one of the building’s four quadrants, hitting one random square within the chosen quadrant and dousing fire and smoke in that square as well as the two to four adjacent squares. I’ve found this to be essential to beating the game when using the full rule set.

With just two players, we found that limited cooperation was required because we could get victims out of the building quickly enough to avoid the fire. With four players, teamwork becomes essential for that reason: Someone has to control the fire to keep a path clear for the player(s) carrying victims out, and to make sure the building doesn’t collapse too quickly. Choosing where to focus your firefighting efforts is similar to choosing where to head in Pandemic – you’re practicing containment, as eradication, difficult in Pandemic, doesn’t exist here. Even if you were able to put out every fire token on the board, the building will just reignite on a future turn. You have to move quickly and efficiently to beat the game, as rescuing seven victims takes a lot of turns and the fire moves more rapidly as the game progresses.

A full game takes 45 minutes to an hour, depending on how quickly you make decisions as a group and whether you choose to use all or merely some of the full game’s features. It’s essential if you love cooperative games and enjoy the mechanics of Pandemic, but I find the game a little derivative without enough new twists to distinguish it from its predecessor and would always reach for simultaneous global epidemics over the burning building.

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→ November 17, 2013
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Potato-parsnip rösti.

Parsnips are awesome, and wildly underconsumed in the United States (both facts according to me). A cousin of both carrots and parsley, parsnips share the carrot’s high quantity of sugars just waiting to be brought out with heat, but also have a slightly spicy aroma that always reminds me of ginger ale.

On their own, parsnips can be overwhelming, which is why they’re often paired with other root vegetables or tempered with other strong flavors like bacon or maple syrup. (Or both.) Here I use parsnips to kick up the Swiss potato pancake known as a rösti, adding flavor, texture, and extra nutrition* to what is at heart just a good large hash brown.

*Parsnips are high in vitamins C and K as well as folic acid, and have more than twice the fiber per 100 g as a regular potato does.

Potato-Parsnip Rösti

1 russet potato (going for about 12 ounces/350 grams)
1-2 parnsips (about 4 ounces/100 grams)
1-2 tsp vegetable oil
large pinch of salt
2 Tbsp duck fat, butter, or bacon fat

You want to cook these in a saturated fat, as the potatoes will brown better and of course you’ll get more flavor. If you want a vegetarian option, I’d try coconut oil.

1. Peel and grate the potato on the coarse side of a box grater. Wrap the result in a tea towel* and squeeze as much liquid as you can out of it, wringing it tightly and squeezing again after a quick rest. This is key to getting a crispy brown exterior; if you don’t get enough moisture out, your rösti will steam when you want it to fry.

2. Peel and grate the parsnip and toss with the wrung-out grated potato.

3. Add the oil and salt and toss to thoroughly mix. You could add other spices here, but I wouldn’t go much beyond salt and black pepper.

4. In a 10- or 12-inch nonstick skillet, heat 1 Tbsp of the cooking fat over medium-high heat until melted and very hot – at least 300 degrees if you have an infrared thermometer, which you should because then you can tell your daughter you’re actually a spy chef. Add the potato/parsnip mixture and press lightly to create a flat pancake that fills the skillet.

5. Cook about 8-10 minutes until the bottom is brown and crispy. This is a little tricky the first time, as it depends on your stove; you may need to moderate the heat a little to make sure the potatoes cook through without burning the bottom.

6. Flip the rösti on to a large plate, flat pan lid, or a cookie sheet. Add the second tablespoon of cooking fat to the pan, heat until melted and sizzly, then slide the rösti back into the skillet and allow it to cook for 5-6 minutes until brown and crispy on the second side.

* A tea towel … I don’t really know what the hell those are either. I have a couple of thin dishtowels that do the trick, but I also have a few white cotton handkerchiefs that I bought very cheaply a few years ago and that work great for applications just like this one.

If you love parsnips as much as I do, check out Alton Brown’s parnsip muffin recipe – I add a tablespoon of oat bran (removing the same weight of flour) and a teaspoon of vanilla, and I substitute brown sugar for half of the white – as well as the various roast and mashed parsnip recipes in Nigel Slater’s wonderful cookbook Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch.

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→ November 15, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E07.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is MVP-heavy but I tried to take a fair number of prospect questions, and I posted my hypothetical MVP and Cy Young ballots for Insiders on Thursday.

This was in the preview from last week’s episode of Top Chef, but we see Nicholas talking to a doctor and learning he has strep throat (“step thrope,” as my daughter used to call it, not to be confused with “the cold”), so he has to skip the Quickfire and will have to forfeit if he can’t cook in the elimination challenge. Tough break, although there’s not much the producers can do about it.

* Quickfire: There is an actual human being named Kermit Ruffins. He lives in New Orleans in a magical tree and holds the keys to the Land of Pretend. Also, he plays trumpet, sings, and cooks barbecue at his shows every Thursday. The chefs must “improvise” for him, starting at one station but then moving around the kitchen to another station (with its partially-finished dish) whenever Kermie plays the horn. This is all very, very silly.

* I think my favorite part was watching Justin try to roast quail in a toaster oven. I’m sure it can be done; I just wouldn’t want to be the one to have to do it.

* The way it works out, every chef starts at one station, moves to at another, then goes back to his/her original station, and then moves one more time to a new one. I’m not sure what this proves about any of the chefs; it’s great that you can improvise, I guess, but it’s also, well, kind of like judging a hitter by his RBI total: It’s more about what the people before you did.

* Those pants. My God, Kermit’s pants.

* I’m skipping ahead a little because this just wasn’t that interesting – Brian ends up winning immunity with the dish that Sara started, a duck/mussels combo with “Asian flavors.” Isn’t that Beverly’s shtick? I was more interested in Louis’ rosemary okra with rendered pork, confit potato, and frog legs. He seems to be keen on getting the most out of his vegetables.

* Elimination challenge: Now we cook – the chefs split into three teams and must create a potluck meal, after which someone has to explain “potluck” to Patty. The teams: Shirley, Louis, Justin, and Sara; Patty, Brian, Travis, and Nicholas if he returns (which he does); Nina, Steph, Carlos, and Carrie. My money would be on the third team to win and probably the middle team to lose, since at the time we didn’t know if Nicholas was returning and both Patty and Travis are near the bottom of the remaining twelve.

* Louis says he’s doing a dish with charred broccolini and pickled radishes because making vegetables taste good is hard, as opposed to some of the easier items you’d normally find at a potluck dinner. He also mentions that he worked for Thomas Keller, which floored me as he doesn’t carry himself like that.

* Nicholas is cleared to cook. Modern medicine is great. Vaccinate your children.

* Stephanie mocks him for cooking while on PEDs, saying she’ll “call bullshit” on him and won’t put him on her Hall of Fame ballot in ten years. Has she seen his backne?

* Carrie’s hair is getting shorter with each episode. I do not support this trend.

* We see Patty’s team talking about finding chili threads for their watermelon salad. This, kids, is what we refer to as “foreshadowing.”

* Guest judge: Sue Zemanick, executive chef at Gautreau’s, whom I had never heard of previously but who also appears in a Chase Sapphire commercial.

* To the food … Justin serves hominy grits with brown shrimp, roasted okra, fava beans, and smoked bacon. Louis serves his grilled and pickled vegetables with cripsy sunflower seeds and a mustard vinaigrette. Shirley and Sara collaborated on a glazed beef with charred onions, melon pickles, and a pickled ginger vinaigrette on top.

* The grits are very buttery, which is good because grits on their own have all the flavor and nuance of Elmer’s Glue, but the judges seem to feel it’s lacking that certain something. Louis’ grilled vegetables are really good. Shirley and Sara’s beef wasn’t consistently cooked and many portions were dry, although one diner says he “ate it all” anyway.

* Nicholas notices that his barramundi (fish) is sliced so thinly it’s cooking too quickly. This is also known as “foreshadowing.”

* Patty forgot the chili threads. I tried to tell you this was going to happen.

* More dishes: Brian and Travis served a togarashi fried chicken with clover bee pollen, honey, and ponzu sauce, where I assume the togarashi refers to the shichimi spice blend rather than just plain chili powder; Nicholas’ barramundi came over a summer vegetable fricasee with truffle and yuzukosho, another Japanese spice blend, this time using fermented chili peppers and yuzu peel; Patty’s watermelon salad with tomatoes, goat cheese espuma, and Szechuan pepper; and Travis and Nicholas collaborated on caramel-glazed barbecued ribs with dehydrated potatoes and peanut gremolata.

* We don’t hear much on the fried chicken other than that it was very crunchy; that sounded sickly-sweet from the list of ingredients. The barramundi was bland and, shocker, a little dry and overcooked. The rib rub was overcooked, possibly burnt. And everyone kills Patty’s salad for sloppy cuts and lack of spice or heat. You can see this elimination coming a mile away.

* The final team leads with Stephanie’s crispy fried (I should hope they’d be crispy) baby artichokes with preserved lemon and anchovy aioli (which is now just marketing for “mayonnaise”); followed by Nina’s semolina gnocchetti with fresh sausage, and Carrie and Carlos’ summer “tiramisu” with nectarines but, as it turns out, no coffee in it, which is enough to cause the Italian government to collapse.

* The artichokes were nicely cooked, the gnocchetti were nicely cooked, everything was nicely cooked. Just once I want to hear Tom get fired up and say, “They fucking NAILED that dish.” Not going to happen, I guess. The tiramisu was not nicely cooked, however, and was more like an English trifle than tiramisu.

* The interlude has the chefs talking about ambrosia salad, which I have never had and will never have, ever. It doesn’t even qualify as food. Patty, who is Puerto Rican, can only say, “You Americans.”

* Judges’ table – the consensus is that the food was overall pretty good. The green team’s artichokes were beautiful, and the gnocchi was perfectly made, but the tiramisu “really brings everything else down” for Sue. They rehash most of what we already knew here.

* Padma comes into the stew room and calls … the gray team, Patty, Travis, Nicholas, and Brian. She’s flat-out solemn as she asks for them.

* In front of the judges, the chefs say the food was a collaborative effort. The fried chicken was delicious and nothing else was good, unfortunately. The watermelon comes in for the most abuse here – it wasn’t dressed enough and had no spice. Patty said there was a lot of szechuan pepper in the dish – I believe she said she “doused” the salad – but no judge tasted it, and of course, she forgot the chili threads.

* The green team was the overall winner despite the tiramisu. Food nicely seasoned, beautifully cooked. Steph everyone liked artichokes, aioli delicious, fried capers too. Tom asks Nina taught her to make gnocchi, but she seems to say she’s self-taught. I’d like it if somewhere here Nina or Tom or anyone said, “the key is (insert key here.” Don’t work the dough too much? Don’t add too much flour? Chill before rolling? Give me a clue here, folks.

* The tiramisu flop was really a trifle in disguise. Carlos made a pistachio sponge cake, which was good, Sue says the dish needed more layers. Tom says tiramisu needs coffee (and rum, Tom, rum!), and that he would have been fine with the nectarines and the coffee together. And rum. He forgot to mention the rum, but I know he meant it.

* Winner: Stephanie, for the fried artichokes. She looks like she can’t believe it and says she hasn’t won anything at all since high school. I’m more stunned that the winning dish is actually something a little innovative. I’ve never seen crispy fried artichokes, and serving them with preserved lemons and fried capers put twists on two of the most common accompaniments to our favorite thistle.

* Patty is indeed eliminated. No one in stew room seemed surprised either, although there’s a ton of emotional support, with Carlos saying, “we’re all so proud of you.” This is an uncommonly nice group of contestants this year, which might be why the season feels less dramatic. The bad apples were auf’d early, and now the remaining chefs are mostly getting along.

* LCK: An onion challenge: Break down a tub of onions, then do all your prep work before you begin cooking. Janine doesn’t sear pork enough, but her apple rolls with goat cheese, bacon, and caramelized onions carry the day over Patty’s seared pork loin with onions and fried/confit potatoes, because those potatoes were way too salty.

* Projected top three: Nicholas, Nina, and Justin, followed by Shirley, Carrie, and Stephanie. I still think Stephanie is a dark horse here because she has more vision than some of the chefs who execute better than she does, but this was only the second episode where she really nailed a dish. Bottom three: My bottom-ranked chef has been eliminated in the last two weeks, so this is getting trickier, but I’ll go with Carlos, Travis, and Sara.

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→ November 13, 2013
→ By

We.

New Insider content since my last post here – Marlon Byrd contract reaction (hint: not positive) and my NL Rookie of the Year ballot, plus the offseason buyer’s guide for relievers.

I’ve long been a fan of the subgenre of dystopian novels, stories set in an alternate reality or in the distant future in an anti-utopian state, nearly always under a totalitarian regime that has quashed all individual liberty. The two most famous novels in the dystopian oeuvre, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 sit at 74th and 58th, respectively, on my ranking of my top 102 novels of all time, while Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, a novel of social commentary in a dystopian setting, is 32nd, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is 96th. It turns out that most novels in this realm owe a direct or indirect debt to the novel I just read, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 work We ($1.99 for Kindle), a response to the authoritarian Soviet regime that had just taken control of Russia that was banned by the authorities there and eventually led to Zamyatin’s exile to the West.

We is set in the bleakest dystopia I’ve encountered, a world several hundred years in the future where people have numbers but not names, where cities are enclaves separated from all forms of nature by a “Green Wall,” and where all buildings are made of glass so that there is no privacy from the state Guardians. All personal activities are prescribed by mandated calendar, including sex, which occurs at set times of day and for which a person obtains a partner by submitting a pink ticket as a formal request. All physical activities, including but not limited to work, follow Taylor’s principles of maximizing efficiency. Food is petroleum-based, and the Guardians view smoking and drinking as crimes against the state. Math is ascendant over all, rationalism taken to the edge of its extreme, as emotions are dismissed as atavistic tendencies that should already be extinct.

The narrator, D-503, is a drone in the hive but an important one as he’s the designer of a spaceship called the Integral that will take this “perfect” society out into space – until he’s targeted by the rebellious woman I-330, who openly smokes and drinks while provoking an emotional response in him, Pleasantville-style, that leads him to tentatively consider a rebellion of his own. D-503 struggles to deal with these new emotions, with this seeming infidelity to his somewhat regular lover O-90 (who is deemed too short to bear a child under the state’s eugenics rules), and with the emergence of vivid dreams that he thinks are a sign of creeping insanity. I-330 eventually introduces him to a world of drones who are plotting against the state, forcing him to choose between compliance and sedition.

We shares the terrorizing power of Huxley’s and Orwell’s works through its vision of egalitarianism gone horribly awry, Harrison Bergeron-style, under the thumb of an omniscient government apparatus that has removed all personal choice and liberty from its subjects. Zamyatin enhances that fear by putting the narration into the hands of his protagonist, pushing the reader into his mind to experience his emotional/rational struggle firsthand. The technique has its greatest effect when D-503 is confused by this inner conflict and begins to render dialogue in fragments, forcing the reader to interpolate or complete sentences, bringing the confusion off the page into the reader’s mind. Reading a dystopian novel creates an involuntary barrier between the reader and the characters in the book because the situation in the story is often unrecognizable to us; Zamyatin’s trick of mimicking the confusion in D-503’s brain allows the feeling to slip through the barrier and affect the reader the same way that Orwell sowed fear in the reader’s mind with the rats in room 101.

Zamyatin and Orwell were specifically attacking Soviet-style totalitarianism, a topic that has lost some relevance in the twenty years since nearly all of those regimes fell or adapted by embracing economic liberty without political liberty. I’m less afraid of a technocratic, rationalist dictatorship than I am of a theocracy, as we live in a country that can’t accept evolution or climate change but is still fighting to restrict access to birth control or to ban same-sex marriage (which, all moral arguments aside, is about as anti-libertarian a policy as I can imagine). I imagine there are plenty of readers out there who’d take the opposite view, that rationalist-athiest totalitarianism is a greater likelihood or threat to our personal liberty, and for them We might be a more powerful allegory.

While Zamyatin’s tactic of eschewing character names for numbers dehumanizes the characters, it also makes reading the book more difficult than it needs to be; keeping the characters straight isn’t that hard, since Zamyatin doesn’t reuse letters and he reserves vowels for females and consonants for males, but I found the lack of actual names disorienting as I read. We is otherwise a very quick read with strong narrative greed, as it’s unclear what direction D-503 will take and his confusion rapidly becomes yours as you read. Zamyatin’s ending is ambiguous as well, although I believe I-330 foreshadows his intent with some of her earlier statements about revolutions and the mathematical nature of infinity. Given that the Soviet regime didn’t fall for another 70 years, a neater, pat ending would have felt too optimistic. It’s essential reading for fans of the dystopian genre given its influence, but also a tremendous lesson in building emotion in a reader even when your story itself revolves around its absence.

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