→ December 5, 2013
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Top Chef, S11E09.

If you’re here, allow me to plug my updated guide to gifts for cooks. Also, I held an hourlong Klawchat today.

We get a glimpse of the inside of the chefs’ house’s fridge, which is full of Philly cream cheese, probably because no one with any kind of taste wants to eat that crap.

* Padma is wearing … a kimono? I’m not even sure what that is. I approve, though.

* No Quickfire this episode because it’s Restaurant Wars (woot). The guest judge is David Chang, who says chefs should “plan on everything that can go wrong,” making it clear that he at least has watched the show before. There will also be a table of Chase Sapphire cardmembers, whom they’re calling VIPs even though it’s likely these people are just as excited that Olive Garden is going to start serving hamburgers. They’ll be sitting with Danny Meyer, though, who knows a thing or two about opening restaurants – and about good hamburgers.

* Nicholas says his team, which includes Travis, Carrie, Stephanie, and Brian, is like “the Bad News Bears,” compared to the Green team, which has more challenge wins under its belt with Nina, Shirley, Justin, Sara, and Carlos. We’ll see about that.

* The Green team has an eclectic bunch of styles, which would be fine if any of them was willing to listen to anyone else on the team. Sara is making financiers and is handed front-of-house duties by acclamation. Justin volunteers to be executive chef, then congratulates himself on his courage for doing so. The team seems far more focused on things like flatware and decor than on its menu, though.

* The Purple team (the Bad News Bears) actually discusses its menu, unlike the Green team, with a seafood focus. Nicholas takes executive duties. Travis offers to do front-of-house duties, saying “gays belong in the front of the house. Duh!” Okay then.

* The Green team is still discussing décor. If the food sucks, decor won’t save you. Has anyone ever survived just on look and feel? Or lost Restaurant Wars because of it? The car can be beautiful but if the brakes fail, you’re still gonna die.

* Meanwhile, Carlos points out that, you know, this being Top Chef and not Top Design (which was an actual show, and not a good one), they should maybe talk about the food, at which point Justin shuts him down in front of everyone. If Carlos had stood up in front of Justin and called him out on it, he would have been right – and Justin probably would have backed down. That was bully-like behavior and it was chickenshit. Carlos made an actual point, that you can’t pick your dishes if you don’t know what you’re cooking – this is known as “foreshadowing,” kids – but Justin pulled non-existent rank on him.

* The teams split up to go to Restaurant Depot and Whole Foods. Sara wanted ring molds from Restaurant Depot but her teammates say there weren’t any. I’ve been in a Restaurant Depot once and I am pretty sure I know where ring molds and things like that were. Sara’s wondering if her team didn’t look hard enough … and she’s probably right.

* Justin pulls the same stunt again when Sara questions whether a 12-cup coffeemaker will be enough for 120 diners, saying that she should just “be positive.” Hard to say this might just be editing – his tone and body language are both terrible here.

* Brian got xanthan gum instead of agar agar. I may have missed when he picked that up, but I know Bob’s Red Mill makes xanthan gum and it’s sold at Whole Foods – and the bag says “XANTHAN GUM” in hard-to-miss lettering. The right move here would be to make something different, no?

* We see Travis and Sara training the wait staff, and it was interesting to see the contrast between this and the results. Sara seemed to command attention more, to be specific in what she wanted, to keep her posture up and project her voice, and so on. Travis was kind of goofy, swinging his arms, joking about how the restaurant wasn’t set up yet … but he ended up with a much more disciplined and organized service than Sara did. He did lead by example on the floor far more than Sara did, which could have been a major factor.

* Shocker: Justin doesn’t have the bowls he wanted and is yelling at Shirley about it. Carlos is wearing his best “I told you so” face in the background.

* Danny Meyer is sitting with the Sapphire people. I wonder if they realize what a big deal this is. This is the man who brought the world Shake Shack; he’s an icon.

* David Chang on order in the kitchen: “You can’t run it like a democracy. It needs to be a totalitarian state back there.” What’s the kitchen equivalent to a prison labor camp? Chopping onions?

* The food starts to come out to the judges on the Purple side … Brian made a scallop crudo with purple corn gel and a corn and squash relish. Chang says the gel is “too snotty.” Well that was an evocative description.

* Steph, in the confessional, offers maybe the highest praise I’ve ever seen a contestant offer a competitor: “Nick has such a handle on expediting. However he’s doing it should never ever change for the rest of his life.”

* Meanwhile, on the Green team’s side, it’s a hot mess, first figuratively then literally. The Sapphire table (with Meyer) didn’t get menus. The waitstaff is turning in tickets that look nothing like the format Justin described. Food is going to the wrong tables. They’re not just going down in flames. This is Krakatau.

* More food – Stephanie made a linguini with oyster cream, caviar, and fennel. Everyone loves how she cooked the pasta and Gail loves the salty/briny kick from the caviar.

* Carrie does a sauteed gulf shrimp with chickpea puree, lemon, oregano, and shrimp butter. Her shrimp were overcooked and the butter sauce may have separted, leaving an oil slick on the plate.

* Nick’s dish was a roasted black drum (a large, bottom-feeding fish found along the east/southeast coast) with king trumpet mushrooms, oxtail ragu, and a kale and hibiscus reduction. Chang loves the flavors. Gail praises him for using a local fish and pairing a meaty fish with a bold sauce. I’m just wondering what a kale and hibiscus reduction would taste like.

* Travis’ dessert is an olive oil cake with greek yogurt, pistachios, and cherry coulis. His gel turns out way better than Brian’s, but I don’t think they told us what he used to create the gel. Other than the cake perhaps not being moist enough, this gets high marks too.

* Meanwhile, the Green team’s runners are confused, Sara is busing tables, and when she greets the judges she looks like she just went a few rounds with Laila Ali. The Sapphire table is actually still eating there, having just gotten their entrees at the time they were supposed to be leaving to go to the Purple team’s restaurant.

* Padma asks Sara for their first courses, never a good sign. Sara never wrote out their tickets, calling them out to Justin et al instead. This would be more foreshadowing.

* Sara serves the starters without explaining the dishes! Has she never seen the show before?

* Carlos’s starter is a red snapper crudo with avocado mousse, pickled baby carrots, and fried platanos. The fish is cut poorly, which kind of ruins the whole thing.

* Justin’s agnolotti with roasted parsnip, mississippi rabbit, and collard green broth is awful (per Tom) and was served on a flat plate when it should have been a narrow bowl (who saw that coming?).

* Shirley made an olive oil-poached cobia (a firm-textured, warm-water fish also called black salmon), blanched ong choy (water spinach) fried in shrimp paste, and salsa verde. David says it’s delicious and that the star of the show is the shrimp paste. Tom agrees. So she ain’t going home.

* Nina made a pork tenderloin with sunchokes and trumpet royale mushrooms. Really nice, nicely cooked, crispy pancetta on the outside, yata yata, we knew she wasn’t going home either.

* The literal hot mess occurs when Sara’s mascarpone emulsion broke in the heat of the kitchen. I don’t get this: One, don’t you keep any dairy emulsion cool, such as by sitting it in a larger bowl of cool water or a towel soaked in cold water? And two, can’t you restart the emulsion by whisking it bit by bit into a bit of cool water?

* Sara’s dessert is, predictably, a disaster: a nectarine brown butter cake with moscato nectarine salsa. Gail calls it a “weird greasy cookie.” The five-spice mascarpone was on the menu, so Padma asks for it, and Sara has to admit she botched it.

* The stew room fakeout was just cruel. Padma says, “Both teams got psyched out by restaurant wars.” Come on. If the Purple team screwed up anything major, we didn’t see it.

* So the Purple team was the winning restaurant, of course. Tom praises Travis, and Padma says his was the best front-of-house ever on Top Chef. You’d think chefs considering going on this show in the future would save this episode and rewatch it a few hundred times. He didn’t do anything (on camera, at least) that couldn’t be replicated. Yet someone next season will pull a Sara and forget to describe the dishes (except her own!) to the judges.

* Pretty much all praise here except on Brian’s purple corn gel, where he had a chance to admit the ingredient error and instead clams up. I’m not a big fan of that – it was a simple mistake, and a potential learning experience, so just own up to it. He clearly wasn’t going home anyway since the team won.

* Nick wins the overall challenge as the executive chef and author of a dish the judges loved; it was clearly him or Travis, whose dish the judges also liked. I would imagine the judges, especially Tom, were impressed by how tightly the team worked with each other. Nick’s leadership ruled the day. And I don’t think he ever yelled at or bullied anyone.

* Then the Green team comes in and Sara is just floundering in front of the judges, denying that anything went that wrong and apologizing as her pat, disinterested answer to every criticism. She and Justin start sparring over the systemic breakdown in the tickets; her verbal fire of the judges’ orders seems to be what sinks her here. Justin is going to skate on all of his own errors here, clearly, even though his dish was also a mess. He and Sara agree that one of them has to be the eliminated chef.

* Padma says “that was pretty illuminating” after the Green team leaves, to which Gail adds, accurately, that it was “depressing, actually.” Did bad service cause the kitchen breakdown? Gail says the food was bad either way. I don’t know how you could sort any of this out if you were at that judges’ table.

* Sara is eliminated, of course. She says she focused too much on everything but the “culinary side” … but she didn’t do any of that non-culinary stuff well either.

* LCK: Louis against Sara in an amusing if very silly challenge: They had to use mascarpone in a savory preparation, but for the middle third of their thirty-minute cooking time, they had to turn over the cooking to a sous chef from the peanut gallery and give orders while blindfolded. Louis seemed to win handily by using the mascarpone in an unusual way – he poached fish in it and used it to bind a vegetable side – while Sara just put it in polenta, which can be delicious but isn’t creative at all.

* The rankings, one through nine: Nick, Shirley, Nina, Carrie, Justin, Brian, Stephanie, Carlos, Travis. Nick moves up to the top spot on a strong week and a general upward trend over the last few weeks. Carlos takes the biggest tumble; his execution is a consistent issue, and the fact that he has no formal culinary training may be hurting him in a competition that so frequently asks chefs to show breadth of ability as well as depth.

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→ December 4, 2013
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Bora Bora.

I published a lot of content for ESPN Insiders the last 48 hours, including:

That’s all on moves that have already occurred, but I’ll continue posting this week as more stuff breaks.

One of our favorite new games of the past few years is 2011’s The Castles of Burgundy, which is one of the few games we’ve come across that brought an entirely new approach to the somewhat stale game styles like worker placement. The rules are lengthy but gameplay isn’t complex, and the game works a lot of decision-making into under an hour of playing time. It’s been a modest hit, rating very highly at Board Game Geek (12th overall) as well as with me, so it’s unsurprising that we’re now seeing other games with similar mechanics come along, such as the brand-new Ravensburger relase Bora Bora, a beautifully rendered game that borrows much from Castles of Burgundy but adds a new setting and a few minor twists.

In Bora Bora, two to four players set about building huts on the five islands on the game board so they can collect resources from the land and hire natives to perform various tasks, all with the goal of acquiring victory points to be tallied after the game’s six rounds. There are numerous ways to rack up these points, such as converting natural resources to buildings on your player board, placing priests in the central board’s temple, completing a task tile at the end of a round, buying jewelry with shells, or gaining status points in each round. Most point acquisitions come through a series of moves; for example, hiring a female native gets you shells, with which you can buy a piece of jewelry that is worth from 1 to 9 victory points at the end of the game, or that can be used to fulfill certain task tiles. Gaining natural resources helps you place a two-space building on the twelve-space building area on your player card, a move that is worth 10 points in the game’s first two rounds but just 4 points in the final two rounds.


The central board during the final round of play.

A round in Bora Bora comprises three phases: Rolling dice to place them on action tiles; using your natives for actions; and a scoring/roundup phase where the main board is refreshed with new native and task tiles. Your moves are dictated by dice rolls, as in Castles of Burgundy, although Bora Bora offers fewer ways to manipulate the dice. In Bora Bora, each player has his/her own set of three dice and can place those dice on any of five (for a two-player game) to seven (four-player) master tiles that allow actions like hiring a native, expanding to a different region on the map, or placing a priest in the temple. The wild card of those actions is the “helper” option, where the number on the die you place there converts into points you can use to gain shells or status points from workers, resources without having to expand your territory, or god cards and offerings to let you do more with your dice. Two players can use the same tile in a round, but a player may only place a die on a tile if the die’s roll is lower than all dice currently on the tile, creating a trade-off between using a high die roll on a tile to get more powers or resources and using a lower die to block your opponent(s) from using the same one.

The one way to tweak the dice in your favor is through pleading with the gods using god cards and offering tiles. There are five god card types, two of which allow you to change the way you use the dice: You can play a die normally but treat its face value as six for your move; you can place a die on a master tile even if it’s not lower than all dice currently on it. Other god cards allow you to score points for expanding into a new territory on the map, to employ additional natives during the action phase of a turn, or to help you complete a task tile on your card for which you just fall short of the requirements.

The task tiles turn out to be more significant as the game goes on because they offer additional bonuses of four to six points for things you may already have done, such as expanding to all five islands or having certain combinations of natives or resources already on your card. The end of the game offers even more bonuses for achieving the maximum number of something, like completing nine tasks, buying six jewelry tiles, or filling all twelve spaces on the building area on your card (called the “ceremony spaces” in a confusing bit of nomenclature).

Bora Bora suffers a little from its similarity to Castles of Burgundy, but also from pushing too far in the same general direction as its predecessor – players have so many options that gameplay can drag while you try to sort through them all. It’s easy to become paralyzed by all of the options before you because of how long-lasting some fo the effects can be; Castles of Burgundy doesn’t have that same depth, and it means Bora Bora has more in common with games like Agricola or Le Havre, where a decision in an early round can filter down through the rest of the game. It’s an ideal game to pick up if you love Castles of Burgundy but want something different or more complex, or if you are partial to games with great-looking components, since Bora Bora has bright colors and strong artwork. The extent of possible options for players and constant references to the rule book to explain the pictograms on certain tiles stretched the game out for us to the point where we’re going to reach for Castles of Burgundy first, but this represents a solid change of pace.

I wanted to slip in one more game review before posting my updated rankings later this week, so look for that post either later on Thursday or at worst on Friday, as long as the baseball world doesn’t go bananas again. You can see last year’s top 40 rankings while you wait.

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→ December 1, 2013
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Lords of Waterdeep app.

My analysis of the Phil Hughes signing is up for Insiders.

Playdek, the folks behind this summer’s spectacular iOS adaptation of Agricola, just released their most recent boardgame app, Lords of Waterdeep, a straightforward worker-placement/task-completion game with some modest interactions through the use of special Intrigue cards that let you sabotage your opponents here and there. (Amazon has the physical version of the game for $38; the game itself is currently ranked 28th on Boardgamegeek’s overall rankings.)

While Lords of Waterdeep has a theme from the Dungeons & Dragons universe, it’s pasted on to a game that has neither might nor magic in it, using the Forgotten Realms for artwork and nomenclature but nothing more. Each player tries to complete Quests in exchange for victory points and resources, where Quests in certain categories may earn the player additional bonus points unique to his player identity. Resources include money and four different worker types, the availability of which are unequal and can vary over the course of the game. Players begin acquiring money and workers by placing “Agents” in open buildings on the board, as in Agricola, but can buy and place new buildings, as in Caylus, to open additional opportunities for all players to earn resources while gaining commissions (money, workers, Intrigue cards, or victory points) for the builder. And the aforementioned Intrigue cards add an interactive element: You can steal resources from other players, or assign a “mandatory” quest with a tiny victory-point value to an opponent who must complete that quest before any others.

The game comprises eight rounds, with two distinct phases. In the first four rounds, each player has two Agents to place on open building spaces; in the last four rounds, each player gets a third Agent to place. Building spaces offer various returns:

* Most just offer resources – one or two workers of a specific type, or money, or a combination of both.
* Three spaces offer access to the four visible Quest cards, with each bringing something along with the Quest card, such as an Intrigue card.
* Three spaces in Waterdeep Castle allow a player to play one of his Intrigue cards, with the twist that an Agent placed there can be reassigned later in the round once all players have placed their Agents once.
* Another space allows the player to build one of three visible Buildings and place it on the right side of the board, assuming he can pay the cost (in money) on the card.
* And the final space allows the player to take over the Starting Player (going first in each round) role while also granting him/her an Intrigue card.

Once occupied by an Agent, a building space is unavailable to all other players (except those with a specific Intrigue card) for the remainder of the round.

The dynamic of each round is simple: Place two or three Agents for resources, money, or Quest cards; to play an Intrigue card; or to buy and place a building; and, whenever you have the right resources, complete a Quest, an action that does not require the use of an Agent. At the end of eight rounds, the player with the most victory points – from completed Quests, from Quest-related bonuses, from money (1 point per 2 coins left), and from unused workers (1 point per cube) wins.

In my experience, the path to victory revolves mostly around bonus points. You want to complete quests with high point values, or, failing that, complete a lot of quests with lower values, but it’s most important to stick to the Quest types for which you’ll earn rewards. There are various Quest categories, such as Piety, Arcana, Warfare, Commerce, and Skullduggery, and each player character gives four point rewards for each Quest completed in two of those types. Where possible, I’ve only acquired and completed Quests in my two categories, and also have tried to complete a Quest that increases those bonuses – for example, in one recent game, I earned an additional two points for each Skullduggery Quest I completed on top of the base four points I got from my character.

I’ve also learned from watching the AI players that laying down Intrigue cards is a high-return endeavor because of the ability to reassign that Agent later in the same round – so it’s like getting an extra half-turn. Some cards have higher value early in the game, both Intrigue and Quest cards, so obtaining and playing those in the first few rounds (if possible) is key.

Lords of Waterdeep ultimately comes down to a lot of little decisions around resource allocation, with minimal (but non-zero) interaction with your opponents and only a few small ways in which you can strengthen your abilities over the long haul. You don’t have any choice of Intrigue cards, and your choice in Quest cards is limited to the four you see in the open pool at any given time. There’s a fair amount of luck in the game as a result, but I don’t think it’s enough to defeat a player with a focus on completing Quests that provide the right bonuses.

The app is moderately entertaining, with competent AI players on the hard and medium levels, but the board layout is atrocious. It’s impossible to view everything on the screen at once, as the developers seemed to hew too faithfully to the physical game, and there’s so much unnecessary detail that critical pieces of text are often obscured unless you zoom in to see them. Caylus and Agricola are both stellar examples of how to display a game board that can’t fit comfortably into one screen, but Lords of Waterdeep is an example of how not to do this. Even after several plays, I still felt like it was hard to follow what the AI players were doing, and frequently had to zoom back to place my final agent because it wasn’t clear what building spaces were still free.

There’s a major two-part expansion for the physical game called Scoundrels of Skullport that adds buildings, characters, Quests, and Intrigue cards, which I hope becomes available for the app as it promises to increase the game’s replay value. For now, it’s a mid-tier app for me, a little too perfunctory to become an essential game and in need of a UI overhaul, but a straightforward, nicely balanced game that was stable through several plays and included a thorough, clear tutorial to get a noob (like me) started. If worker placement is your favorite style, it’s worth picking up.

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→ November 29, 2013
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Thanksgiving, 2013.

I hope all my U.S. readers had a safe and happy Thanksgiving. I have a new piece up today for Insiders covering the Nolasco and Haren signings as well as the Pirates/Padres swap of minor leaguers.

I also want to take a moment to thank all of you who read my work here or on ESPN.com. Your readership and loyalty make it possible for me to do something I love for a living, and write about all this other fun stuff on the side here at the dish. It’s an honor to write for you and I feel very fortunate to be able to do it.

My tweets this week describing my daily prep work leading up to Thursday (tagged frivolously with #gameplan) had a small point, that doing all of that stuff ahead of time could make the holiday itself a lot easier. I’ve tried to do the whole thing on Thursday, or just on Wednesday evening and Thursday, and it’s miserable. This year, I even slept in Thursday morning, since we weren’t eating the main meal till 5 pm. That alone made a huge difference, but it wouldn’t have been possible if I hadn’t done so much cooking and prep work in advance.

The final menu for yesterday:

* Sweet potato gnocchi with kale and brown butter (recipe from Richard Blais’ Try This at Home)

* Turkey two ways: Roast turkey breast and turkey leg confit

* Gravy: brown turkey stock reduced by 75% plus drippings from pan deglazed with white wine, thickened with a flour-butter roux (2 Tbsp each)

* Basic bread stuffing with pain au levain (recipe from Joy of Cooking)

* Cranberry-port gelée (recipe from Canal House via food52)

* Roasted Brussels sprouts with sweet-and-sour sauce and sesame seeds (dressing based on one from The Whelk in Westport, CT, via Bon Appetit)

* Cucumber-pomegranate salad with lime-cilantro dressing (recipe from Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life)

* The awful green bean casserole (the less said about this, the better)

* Pumpkin pie (recipe from Baking Illustrated)

I probably would have pulled the turkey breast and the pie a little sooner from the oven, but otherwise it was a fairly smooth week. Doing so much prep ahead of time, like quartering, blanching, and shocking the sprouts on Wednesday, made a huge difference on Thursday; I was only actively cooking for about two and a half hours, which includes the standing-around-and-waiting parts. And when the day was over, I was tired, but not a wreck. I hope those of you who cooked had a similarly pleasant experience, and only set off the fire alarm once (par for the course in my kitchen) rather than, say, deep-frying your entire house to the ground.

For the sprouts, I made a few changes to the Whelk’s recipe linked above. I blanched them as mentioned above, and tossed them with canola oil rather than olive, because I roasted them about 25 minutes at 475 degrees, a temperature that will cause olive oil to smoke. (Any neutral oil, like soybean or safflower or even rice bran oil, would work.) I used rice wine vinegar rather than red, and honey rather than pure sugar (2.5 Tbsp instead of 3, as honey is sweeter than sugar). I only finished them with toasted sesame seeds, trying to stick with the Asian flavor theme without losing the crunch added by the Whelk’s pumpkin seeds; if I had had toasted sesame oil in the house, I would have used some of that in the vinaigrette as well. The idea is simple: Cook the sprouts through while browning as much of the exterior as you can, then toss in a vinaigrette that hits sweet, sour, salty, and umami flavors, as the sprouts themselves will provide a hint of bitterness. You can alter ingredients in the dressing at will as long as you maintain the balance across those four tastes.

Some final admin notes – my updated board game rankings for 2013 will go up Wednesday or Thursday of next week, most likely, and my top songs of 2013 list will go up two weeks later on the 19th, after the winter meetings. I’ll chat again at ESPN.com on the 5th and 19th, with the winter meetings week chat possibly pushed to the 13th due to travel. Thanks again for reading.

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→ 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.

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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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