keith — Page 215

→ January 9, 2013
→ By keith

Catching up on recent reads.

For a variety of reasons, I fell behind on book reviews in December, so I’m cheating a little with an omnibus post on everything I read between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that I haven’t written up yet, aside from the usual Wodehouse/Christie/Stout stuff I generally don’t cover here. I had pretty mixed feelings on all of these works except the one non-fiction title, which is probably part of why I procrastinated on the reviews – it’s easier to write something quickly when you know which way you’re leaning from the start, but these books had enough positives and negatives to keep me from coming down on either side.

* The longest book I read in that span, and the one most deserving of a longer writeup, is Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, part of the TIME 100 and #81 on the Modern Library 100. Tabbed “the great American novel” by Martin Amis, praised by authors from Amis to his father Kingsley to Salman Rushdie to Christopher Hitchens, Augie March is an ambitious, expansive story of its title character’s growth from an impoverished Chicago childhood through one money-chasing scheme after another, including various brushes with the law and materialistic women. It starts slowly, hits a promising note for several hundred pages, and then ends with a gigantic whimper that ruined an otherwise enjoyable serious yet comical read for me.

Augie’s odyssey of self-discovery while he’s trying to make a buck – or a pile of bucks – draws him into various webs of fascinating side characters, a panoply identified by Hitchens as Dickensian, but one I think comes from the broader tradition of picaresque novels (to which Dickens contributed in The Pickwick Papers) and that continues through postmodern works like Ulysses and The Recognitions and later writers like Dawn Powell, Haruki Murakami, and Richard Russo. Augie March even has the peripatetic thread that defines the picaresque novel, even though Augie’s adventures, like his brief but disastrous time in the Navy, rarely encompass the high ambitions of classic picaresque characters.

Augie himself straddles the line between hero and antihero – he’s the protagonist and quite likeable despite his highly fungible morality, in part because he’s got the rags-to-riches vibe about him and in part because he entertains us through one peculiar situation after another – creating a curious ambiguity about Bellow’s point. If this is to be the great American novel, what exactly is Bellow telling us about the American experience? Is the key to the American Dream a refusal to commit oneself to anything – an education, a career, a marriage? Or is he saying the American Dream is an illusion that we can pursue but never catch? I think Bellow was posing the questions without attempting to provide any answers, which works from a thematic perspective but left the conclusion of the plot so open that I felt like I was reading an unfinished work, like The Good Soldier Svejk or Dead Souls.

* I wanted to like Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, since I think Lolita is one of the best novels I’ve ever read, and while I didn’t enjoy Pale Fire I do recognize how clever it is and that I might not fully appreciate its humor. But Pnin, the story of a fish-out-of-water Russian professor at a fictional university in upstate New York, suffers from Pale Fire‘s problem even more deeply: The target of its parodic efforts is too obscure for the average reader to appreciate. Where Pale Fire satirized technical and literary analysis of poetry, Pnin takes aim at the ivory towers of academic life at private universities, which is probably hilarious if you’re a professor or a grad student but largely went right by me as someone who sleepwalked through college by doing the minimum amount of work required for most of my classes.

* Abbe Provost’s 1731 novel Manon Lescaut seemed to be stalking me over the last two months, so I had to read it – it appears on Daniel Burt’s revised version of the The Novel 100, then was the subject of allusions in at least two other books I read that time, including Augie March and I think Nicole Krauss’ History of Love as well. Manon Lescaut follows the Chevalier des Grieux as he ruins himself over his obsession with the title character, a young, beautiful, and entirely materialistic woman who throws the Chevalier overboard every time he runs out of money. The two engage in multiple schemes to defraud wealthier men who fall in love (or lust, really) with Manon at first sight, and eventually end up sent to the French colony at New Orleans, where the pattern repeats itself with a less fortunate conclusion. Its controversial status at the time would be lost on any reader today over the age of 12, but its depiction of sexual obsession mixed with several early examples of suspense writing (before either genre really existed in its own right) made it a quick and intense read. Plus now I get the references.

* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther is another short novel of obsession, also appearing on the Novel 100, this one telling the tale of a man who is so in love with a woman who is betrothed to someone else that he eventually takes his own life. Told through the letters Werther writes to his friend, I found the deterioration of Werther’s mind as his depression deepens to be far more interesting than the pseudo-romantic aspect of a man so in love with another woman that he’d rather die than live without her. He just needed a good therapist. It was by far the shortest novel I had left on the Novel 100 and brought my total read on that list to 80, so it was worth the two hours or less I spent on it.

* Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reimagines E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (which I read and didn’t care for that much) in a serious comic novel around a conflict of race rather than class, set in a New England college town in the early 2000s. Smith also sends up the conflict between conservative and liberal academic ideologies (or theologies, more accurately) in one of the subplots that, much like that of Pnin, ended up missing the mark for me, although I could at least recognize glimpses of my alma mater in some of the satire. The novel’s greatest strength is the way Smith defines so many individual characters, especially those of the Belsey family, headed by a white father and an African-American mother and whose children are searching for racial, religious, and cultural identities while their parents try to recover from their father’s inability to keep it in his pants. I couldn’t help but compare On Beauty, which has some brilliant dialogue along with the deep characterizations and is often quite funny, to Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, which produced very mixed feelings in me when I first read it and didn’t fully appreciate (as I think I do now) how Smith was trying to stretch the boundaries of realistic fiction to tell a broad and expansive story. On Beauty, paying homage to a classic work of British literature, feels restrained by the confines of its inspiration when Smith’s imagination is a huge part of why her writing is so appealing, leaving it a good novel, a funny yet smart one that reads quickly, but a slightly unsatisfying one because I know she can do more than this.

* Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World tells the history of that somewhat mundane, unrespected fish, which had a substantial impact on the growth of civilization in Europe and in North America, and which was one of humanity’s first warnings (duly ignored) that we could exhaust a seemingly endless natural resource. Kurlansky’s book Salt turned a similar trick, taking a topic that seemed inherently uninteresting and finding interesting facts and anecdotes to allow him to make the story readable. Cod actually has a stronger narrative thread because Kurlansky can trace the fish’s rise in popularity and commercial value as well as its role in international relations, climaxing in the sudden collapse of cod stocks and the uncertain ending around the fish’s future as a species and a food source. We’re really good at overfishing, because technology has allowed us to catch more fish (as well as species we didn’t intend to catch) which has in turn made fish too cheap to consume. Kurlansky didn’t focus enough on this issue for my tastes, although Cod was published in 1997 when overfishing was seen as more of a fringe environmentalist concern, before celebrity chefs embraced sustainability and began preaching it to the masses.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, british literature, comic novels, food writing, french literature, german literature, history of food, jewish-american literature, non-fiction

→ January 7, 2013
→ By keith

Farro with braised duck legs.

My favorite protein of all isn’t bacon, or short ribs, or smoked pork shoulder – it’s duck, duck legs specifically, which are best cooked slowly until the meat falls off the bone, after which the skin is cooked over direct heat until crispy and slightly sweet, while the fat rendered out during the slow cooking process is saved for another dish, like potatoes or bitter greens or even fried eggs. The one issue with duck legs is, once cooked, figuring out how to serve them, since they tend to fall apart before they even get out of the pot. I’ve tossed duck leg meat into risotto, which is fabulous but also a lot of work, and more of a special-occasion meal than a weekday-night dish. I’ve also had them served in crepes (at Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill) or in tacos, but again, that’s a lot more work, and not a complete meal in and of itself.

Enter farro, a whole grain that can be prepared similarly to brown rice or barley but with a starch that is released during cooking to produce a slightly creamy texture similar to that of risotto. Farro is an “ancient grain,” an unhybridized plant found in Egyptian tombs and still popular in northern Italian cuisine, part of the wheat family but very low in gluten. It’s related to spelt and einkorn but is easier to cook than the berries of those two members of the wheat (Triticum) family), and, in my opinion, it tastes better too. You can prepare farro using the liquid/farro ratios below and treat it like a risotto, starting with onion and garlic, finishing with grated Parmiggiano-Reggiano and a little butter, or you can treat it like a pilaf and stir or fold in greens or peas after the cooking is finished. Here I use it as the platter for the duck, finished with some peppery leaves for color and to make it a one-dish meal.

As for the duck meat itself, I use the braised legs recipe from Ruhlman’s Twenty, which is foolproof and can be made a day or two in advance – it’s a great thing to throw in the oven on a cold weekend day, since it makes the house smell amazing, and braised meats always taste better a day later anyway. Just store it in the braising liquid and skim the congealed fat off the top the next day. You can even strain the defatted liquid and use it in place of some of the stock in this recipe. If your local Whole Foods or similar high-end market sells prepared duck confit, that will work as well.

Farro with duck legs and arugula

4 duck legs, braised or confit
1 tbsp rendered duck fat or olive oil
1 shallot, minced
1 cup farro
¼ cup white wine or 2 Tbsp brandy
3 cups chicken stock or low-sodium chicken broth
½ tsp salt
1 handful of arugula, radish leaves, or other peppery greens

1. Shred the duck meat by hand. To prepare the skin, remove it from the legs, keeping it as intact as possible, and scrape any remaining fat off the inside of the skin using a paring knife. Crisp the skin in a dry, non-stick skillet until brown on both sides, and set aside until serving. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. Heat the fat/oil in a large (3-quart) saucepan until hot and add the shallot, sweating for 1-2 minutes until translucent but not brown. Add the farro and toast in the oil 2-3 minutes until the grains smell slightly nutty.

3. Add the wine/brandy and stir until the alcohol has mostly cooked away and the pan is dry when you separate the grains. (Lean over the pot and inhale. If you get dizzy, it’s not ready for step four yet.)

4. Add the stock/broth and salt, stir once to combine thoroughly, and bring to a boil. Cover and place in the oven for 35 minutes, at which point the farro should have absorbed all of the liquid.

5. Once the pot is out of the oven, add the duck meat and green leaves, stir, and cover for ten minutes to heat the duck and wilt the leaves. Serve in bowls topped with sliced crispy duck skin and freshly ground black pepper.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Cooking, duck, one-dish meals, recipes, whole foods

→ January 6, 2013
→ By keith

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver’s Orange Prize-nominated novel The Poisonwood Bible is a mixed bag of extremes: It’s one of the most authentic works of historical fiction I’ve come across, evoking a time, place, and culture with precise details while also serving to educate the reader without ever feeling didactic. It also draws its plot from diverse works of classical literature, notably King Lear, yet doesn’t feel the least bit derivative. However, the novel rests on the backs of four female characters who are so thinly drawn that you’d have to put them all together to get a complete, well-rounded woman.

The Poisonwood Bible follows Nathan Price, an evangelical preacher who, in 1959, drags his family on a dangerous mission to spend a year preaching the Gospel in a remote village in what was then known as the Belgian Congo but was also on the brink of an implosion that still echoes today, two names and four national leaders later. Nathan never speaks directly to the reader, however, as the book is narrated by his wife, Orleanna, and his four daughters – superficial Rachel; daddy’s girl Leah; Leah’s twin sister Adah, mute and slightly disabled by hemiplagia yet highly intelligent; and the innocent and much-younger Ruth May. Nathan is an ordeal in and of himself, one increased exponentially by their move to the heart of Africa, to conditions for which they are wholly unprepared. Nathan is as one-dimensional as the women in his family, stubborn, misogynistic, driven by the shame of a wartime injury that has left him shell-shocked yet with the veneer of functional behavior. Like Lear, Nathan loses his daughters one by one through his increasingly erratic and foolhardy behavior, eventually losing his wife, the last one to truly abandon him emotionally, when his choices provoke tragedy with no recourse.

Kingsolver spent a year in the Republic of Congo around 1962, after independence and the bulk of the events depicted in this book, but her knowledge of the country, its terrain, and its culture suffuses The Poisonwood Bible as thoroughly as if it were a country spawned entirely by her own imagination. The natives of the small village to which the Prices move are given respectful treatment, neither denigrated as noble savages nor elevated as wise shamen, just shown as regular people surviving in a difficult environment and demonstrating a degree of empathy that is somewhat foreign to our get-off-my-lawn culture today. The Prices’ inability to adjust to local agriculture, and Nathan’s refusal to accept or even solicit help from local women who farm with more success, is a harbinger for the ultimate failure of their entire mission, and a metaphor for the failure of Western attempts to graft our culture, religion, and even our economic philosophies on to a country that is, itself, a Western-created fiction.

Those one-dimensional characters ended up detracting greatly from the book for me, especially through the last third or so as the daughters’ ability to narrate long stretches of the story increases with their age. The kindest interpretation I can conceive is that Kingsolver intended for each of the female characters to represent a specific aspect of womanhood – maternity, beauty, intellect, fidelity, innocence – yet even if this is true, the format limits the potential for any of these women to grow over the course of the novel, especially the children as they become adults. Leah and Adah mature the most, with Leah shifting her deep allegiance from her father to her eventual husband while Adah, forced by a cataclysmic emotional trauma, must overcome both that and her physical handicap. Yet none of the women spoke with a compelling voice, not even the rhyming, backwards-talking, poetry-quoting Adah, who was interesting but whose extreme rationality came with a coldness that kept me at arm’s length. Rachel never quite grows up all the way, still displaying the same peculiar combination of a lack of self-awarness and an obsession with appearances that makes her earlier narration so hard to read.

If you read primarily for plot and enjoy historical fiction, however, Poisonwood sings in both departments. Kingsolver offers tiny bits of foreshadowing without making the book’s handful of plot twists too obvious, and as the book nears its conclusion its pace quickens to avoid reader fatigue. While Kingsolver’s prose is undeniably American, her ability to paint a picture of life in central/sub-Saharan Africa fits in with writers like Achebe, wa Thiong’o, and Adichie who spent much of their lives in the region. It isn’t a pleasant feeling for those of us who grew up and live in comfort and blissful ignorance here, but there’s merit in a reminder that these conditions existed just 50 years ago – and still exist in many parts of the world today.

Next up: Back in August of 2011, I spent much of a game in Lake Elsinore chatting with two readers, one of whom recommended King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. I finally picked up the book the other day at Tempe’s Changing Hands bookstore, figuring this was the ideal time to read it, and through 100 pages it’s quite compelling.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: african literature, american literature, feminist literature, post-colonial literature

→ January 3, 2013
→ By keith

Top Chef, S10E9.

Sorry my recap is a little late, but I had trouble finding a flat keyboard on which to type this.

* Stefan is moisturizing and cursing about his wrinkles. This isn’t creepy, I think. I may have also lost my appetite.

* Sheldon sharpens his knives every day, saying, “it’s what separates a good chef from a great chef in my opinion.” He may have been subtly threatening to slit the throats of his competitors, which is an alternative path to victory assuming you use the blood for black pudding.

* Quickfire: Testing knife skills, coincidentally. “Master bladesman” (that is, artisan knife-maker) Bob Kramer is the judge. His carbon-steel blades sell for $500 per inch, so John Holmes would have been worth a fortune.

* The challenge is a relay race involving three teams of three chefs each: turn dull knives razor sharp, then tourne 50 potatoes, then work against your ex-teammates to French racks of two rabbits, with immunity and a Bob Kramer blade at stake.

* Stefan says “I always wanted a $4000 knife. Who doesn’t?” I’m not sure I’d turn down a $4000 anything you offered me, even if I only intended to sell it on eBay the moment you turned around.

* If you cut yourself, you’re DQ’d. I’m going to laugh at this while pretending I didn’t put a 1/4” gash in my index finger two weeks ago while slicing ribbons of kale.

* As much as I love the show and recognize the importance of good knife skills and handling, watching chefs sharpen knives is not good television.

* Kristen gets mad that her teammate John called “check” before she was ready, but then HIS knife was the one to fail the test – making a clean slice through a sheet of paper. That’s about the closest we’ve come to seeing Kristen get mad or even irked about anything.

* Using a chef’s knife strikes me as dangerous, since it’s not a knife designed for precise cuts. There is such a thing as a tourne knife, also known as a bird’s beak knife, but a paring knife would also do the job. No one severs a finger here, although Josie does nick herself and is disqualified, which leads to her team losing by just two potatoes to another team that still has all three chefs.

* Am I the only one weirded out by a race involving knives? I’m fine with grading knife skills, but encouraging chefs to work faster with extremely sharp objects seems a little dicey, pun intended.

* The final challenge is to French two rabbits, which isn’t as deviant as it sounds and can even produce some serious flayrah. Frenching means trimming the meat and fat off the ends of rib bones or chops, typically with racks of pork or lamb, so that the bones are exposed like handles. The meat can then be cooked as a whole rack or broken down into ‘lollipop’ chops. If you’ve seen meat with little paper hats on the ends of the bones, you’ve seen a Frenched rack. Doing this on tiny rabbits with giant knives is like asking the infield coach to hit grounders to the shortstop by using a cricket bat. (I’ve never done this, but I’d reach for a boning knife for the job.) Josh ends up making a hash of his rabbit racks. Micah says Frenching the racks is a “very Zen moment” for him, and he wins pretty handily.

* Elimination challenge: Each chef is assigned a memorable moment from the previous seasons and has to cook a dish based on that moment while making it healthier than the original dish was. The winning dish will inspire future product placements and earn the winner a cool $15K. The guests at the dinner will be Top Chef “Superfans” who live in their mothers’ basements and dissect Top Chef using spreadsheets.

* The first moment they show has to be the most famous – Fabio’s comment that ‘it’s Top Chef, it’s not Top Scallops.’ We also Carla’s chicken pot pie screaming moment on Jimmy Fallon, which might have been the main reason she ended up on that daytime food/talk show she’s on.

* Another, er, classic moment: “I’m not your bitch, bitch.” Two offensive connotations in one five-word sentence!

* The chefs are then shown eating the product placement entrees from the microwave, which I’m sure thrilled them to no end. They also discuss the pea puree moment.

* John claims Anthony Bourdain based a character in the absolutely essential book Kitchen Confidential, Jimmy Sears, on him. It sounds like it’s true, but given John’s reputation and his showing these last two episodes, would it surprise anyone if Bourdain came out and said John was full of shit?

* Micah has Beverly and Heather’s duck breast from season 9, a moment memorable primarily for Heather throwing Beverly totally under the bus in front of judges, reducing Beverly to tears.

* Lizzie’s scallops don’t smell fresh, which is seriously bad news. What I missed was whether she smelled them when she bought them – a good fishmonger will allow you to sniff the fish you’re buying, since that’s an immediate clue if it’s not fresh. (Fresh fish or shellfish should smell of the sea, not “fishy,” which is actually the odor of fish that has already started to degrade.)

* We’ve got a murderer’s row of judges, including Wolfgang Puck, Wiley Dufresne, Jonathan Waxman, and Chris Cosentino. Wiley needs a haircut in the worst freaking way. Long hair on men is fine – not on me, since I think I’d look absolutely absurd like that – but straight, shoulder-length hair while it’s thinning on the top is like a deliberate attempt to look bad.

* John says risotto isn’t hard to cook, but has a bad track record on Top Chef, so he’s making it anyway. This is known in the business as “foreshadowing.” It also shows a delusional degree of self-confidence. No one else has been able to do this right, but I can.

* Service: Josie (whose moment came from S1) serves roast chicken with parsnip puree and steamed root vegetables. Stefan (S2) has a roasted red pepper soup with bacon and grilled cheese, which is about as healthful as a cup of trans fats. John (S3) does an umami risotto with dark meat chicken, salmon roe, burdock root, and a carrot puree emulsion to simulate the color of sea urchin. Josie’s chicken skin isn’t crispy, and the dish isn’t exciting. Stefan’s grilled cheese is greasy but tasty. John’s risotto is not cooked consistently, with some grains overcooked, some undercooked. Of this group, I expected both Josie and John to end up on the bottom, more so Josie because her dish wasn’t that good and it was boring as heck.

* Sheldon (S4) serves beef carpaccio with poi aioli, mizuna (Japanese mustard green) and mushroom salad, and a silken tofu foam. Lizzie (S5) has seared scallops with a roasted fennel and orange salad. Josh (S6) does a soy-glazed pork tenderloin, cashew puree, heirloom peaches, and thai basil. Josh cooked the pork really well, grasped the “healthier” portion of the challenge, and his smoked cashews and peaches get praise from Wiley. Sheldon’s beef is not eye appealing, and his tofu had no flavor. Lizzie’s scallop quality is “dubious,” per Wolfgang Puck, and there’s no discussion of anything else. My immediate reaction was that she was toast. You can’t serve ‘off’ seafood and survive. In a restaurant, you’d send that stuff to the compost bin.

* Brooke (S7) serves hot-smoked salmon with forbidden black rice, pea and parsnip puree. Kristen (S8, Carla’s chicken pot pie) does a poached chicken breast with carrot puree and a garlic/tofu/soy milk emulsion, emphasizing that it’s dairy- and gluten-free. Micah (S9) does duck breast with miso polenta, sriracha jelly, and pickled cherries. Micah’s duck is cooked well; Waxman hates miso with polenta, but Tom likes the cherries. Kristen’s dish is light with a lot of flavor and earns praise for her rethinking (almost a deconstruction) of pot pie, although Chris’ dish doesn’t have enough sauce. Brooke’s was nicely cooked throughout with a good smoky flavor and that’s about all anyone says about it.

* The judges bring out five of the nine chefs. Josh, Brooke, and Kristen are on top, with John and Lizzie on bottom. Brooke’s salmon was perfectly cooked and lightly smoked. Kristen’s was homey without homey presentation. Josh finally nailed a pork dish and the judges say his flavors were really well done. Unanimous winner – the chef who took Top Chef history into account and elevated the moment to a healthy dish – is girl-on-fire Kristen, who has won three of the seven elimination challenges where the judges named at least one winner, plus one Quickfire. This seemed to be a clear win for concept, as all three chefs executed but Kristen was the one who was by far the most creative in her reimagining of the original dish and who did the most to reduce its fat and caloric content.

* John’s risotto was improperly cooked, after which he makes an excuse about the pots in the kitchen not being “flat” enough while saying it’s not an excuse or a copout. It absolutely is an excuse, and a copout, and a failure to take responsibility: If he’d tasted the risotto as he went, he would have known it wasn’t cooking evenly and he would have adapted. Josh then throws him under the bus, which would bother me if John hadn’t thrown Stefan under the bus in an earlier episode for using frozen fish. John’s money quote here (it gets better) was “Equipment was an issue.” Even weasels cringed at that wording.

* Lizzie admits “the scallops must have been old,” at which Tom appears ready to pounce on her only to have Wolfgang interrupt. I think in most episodes, this would have been Lizzie’s death warrant, but this week the bottom two chefs will cook against each other in a challenge based on this season’s memorable moment: the spicy dill pickles where CJ and Tyler made a burger that got them both eliminated. Josh is mocking John in the back room, asking if he can find a pan flat enough to cook a burger in?

* John makes a harissa lamb burger, which sounds to me like we’re moving in the other direction, making something unhealthy because it’ll taste better and win the challenge. Lizzie, relieved that she gets to cook again, gets ground chicken, saying it’s tricky to make it juicy.

* John used all of Lizzie’s fresh dill after she said he could use some, but then says he’s a good guy because he shared the pickles. Lizzie wants to “beat his bum,” which also isn’t as deviant as it sounds.

* John serves a lamb burger with fried egg and a spicy pickle, tomato, and pomegranate salad. Aioli of dill and cream cheese. Wolfgang’s burger isn’t moist enough, and Chris questions how adding an egg makes sense on a dish intended to be healthier. Lizzie makes a chicken burger with a goat cheese ricotta cream and a dill pickle roasted red pepper salad. The white meat is moist and flavorful, and the only criticism is Chris saying he “just wanted a whiff of salt.” Chris, Wolfgang, and Tom all pick Lizzie to stay, so John goes. He’s “not bitter, but this is bullshit.”

* John, in the confessional, is still talking about having all the pickles. All your pickles are belong to John. You have no chance to survive, make your time. Had he hoarded the pickles, isn’t it more likely that the chefs would have axed him on principle?

* LCK: This wasn’t much of a fight, with the chefs allowed to do whatever they want but forced to cook in cheap vessels found at nearby yard sales. John rushes for pans, while CJ focuses on ingredients. John goes heavy in his dish, CJ went lighter, and CJ was the pretty clear winner, only issue was using too much chili oil but his flavor profile was more unusual. John’s choice of lobster and foie gras seemed a little cliché, like the lamb burger with a fried egg – he was pandering a little to the judges. John’s comments during and after LCK are a 180 from his comments during the main show. When adversity strikes, his personality flaws really show through. He hates taking responsibility for mistakes, and is quick to blame others, or even inanimate objects, when he’s ultimately at fault. You can win Top Chef with that attitude as long as you never screw up, but John ran out of steam three episodes ago and never bounced back.

* Top three: Kristen remains the clear leader, with Brooke in a somewhat distant second. I had John making it to the finals, but he’s out, so I’ll restore Micah to the top three in his stead. Josie remains the bottom chef, and I think the format saved her from another bottom-three performance this week.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ December 28, 2012
→ By keith

Top Chef, S10E08.

So the drama is building, leaving viewers to decide which chef is less of an obnoxious ass between Stefan (who can actually cook a little) and Josie (who spends more time making up cutesy names for her dishes than tasting the food). Meanwhile, Kristen, who is the ’27 Yankees in this group, allows herself to sound slightly confident in the confessional. After Humble Paul in season 9 Bravo must be dying for a contender with some arrogance to him/her to show up at some point.

(Speaking of season 9, it’s $9.99 for the full season in SD on amazon Instant Video right now, which is way below what past seasons cost the last time I checked.)

* Morning quickfire: Chefs must drive to Bow, Washington – did you know they were driving Toyotas? I’m surprised half the chefs didn’t die in some horrible accident involving their Camrys en route – and harvest fresh oysters for the challenge. The chefs are actually very fired up, putting on waders, eating oysters as they harvest them. I grew up on Long Island (sorry, I’ve mentioned this before) during a time when raw oysters were contaminated by God-knows-what and we were told every day in the news that it would kill us if we so much as looked at a local oyster, so I still shudder a little as I see this. I know they’re a chef’s favorite, but a little voice in my brain tells me they’re poison.

* Josie sinks into the mud, calling attention to herself yet again. Micah, who helps rescue her, reveals that his father was a pastor and he grew up kosher, so he didn’t eat shellfish until he was an adult. I didn’t realize that there were Christian sects that obeyed kosher rules.

* John grew up on the east end of Long Island. I knew I liked that guy for some reason, but he clearly grew up when local shellfish was safe to eat.

* Bart went to cooking school at 12. At 12 I was in 8th grade and worrying about high school and playing cheap video games on a Commodore 64. I wasn’t planning my future career.

* The actual challenge: Prepare oysters on the half shell for Emeril, without being distracted by Padma looking gorgeous. Half the chefs must do a hot preparation, the other half must do a cold prep. $5000 prize. 25 minutes to cook.

* The chefs have to grab one of the red (hot) or blue (cold) aprons to pick which kind of dish they’re preparing, which is always weird – are we testing cooking skills here, or reflexes? What if at some point they had a chef with a disability? Am I overthinking this as usual? Anyway, the red aprons go first, which surprised me because chefs always seem to want to do raw oyster preparations on Top Chef and not cooking the oysters would save some time.

* Micah says cooking for Emeril is like Moses meeting God. I’m going to go “argument by false analogy” on that one, since Emeril, while obviously talented, falls a bit short of Omnipotent Deity for me.

* Stefan smoking oysters in a Ziploc bag might be the most interesting thing anyone did, followed by Lizzie using red currants, which made me imagine oysters with grape jelly.

* Josie says she’s making “Spanish roc-a-fella.” Enough with the fucking names already. And then her sauce broke in the pan, which is God’s – or Emeril’s – revenge for the fact that she wasted brain waves on coming up with a bullshit name for her dish. As it turns out, her chorizo-cilantro cream sauce might have been delicious if it hadn’t broken and hadn’t blown the oyster off the plate.

* Bottom: Bart, whose champagne-butter reduction was too rich, losing the champagne and masking the oyster. Josie, for obvious reason. John, whose oysters poached in garlic butter with Swiss chard and a Parmiggiano-garlic foam had “no pop.” Also worth mentioning that Josh and Brooke both ended up with a little shell in their oysters.

* Top: Lizzie, who took a chance with the currants and succeeded, even to Padma’s surprise. Micah, also risky piling spices on the oyster, but they “popped” according to Emeril. Brooke, whose salsa verde had all kinds of beautiful flavors that didn’t take away from the oyster. Winner: Micah finally comes through for me, slightly justifying my optimism about him earlier in the season.

* Elimination challenge: Cooking for “one of the hottest sports teams in Seattle” – the Sonics! I mean, a roller derby team. There’s really such a thing as roller derby? And people go to the matches? That’s the second-weirdest sports thing I’ve heard this week.

* Chefs divide into teams of two to cook the food for the league’s wrap party, which I assume is held in the basement of a Chuck-E-Cheese. Stefan grabs Kristen, by what body part I’m not sure. The dishes must be inspired by the unbelievably lame nicknames of the five rollergirls in the room, like “Tempura Tantrum.” I’m sure someone was up all night coming up with that. They don’t want “fussy food” but not “concession food” either, which is a surprisingly constructive remark.

* Josie was a pro football player. Whatever you think of women’s football (non-lingerie division), it’s better than roller derby.

* So the chefs go to a match and the other nine get mad at Josie for being loud and obnoxious in the one public place where it is acceptable and even encouraged to be loud and obnoxious. Sorry, guys, I’m with Josie for once. Get off your asses and scream a little.

* After the game, the guys are talking shit about Josie at the apartment while she’s lying on the couch in the next room. An “I can hear you” would have sufficed but she goes apeshit, including the line, “This tree right here, you don’t want to bark up,” which was either Confucius or Sun-Tzu, I always mix those two guys up. Then she says Micah is “hiding in a closet,” so apparently she’s convinced he’s gay (and was she saying that she is too?). Josh’s deadpan “what just happened?” might be the line of the year so far.

* Lizzie says “I still have scars on my knees” from roller skating when she was younger. With all the dogs in the room, no one comments on this? This song came to mind, certainly.

* Josie, teamed with Bart, wants to go aggressive with the spice. Bart definitely has a different concept of “bold” and doesn’t want to overspice. This is like a matter/anti-matter thing where the entire Top Chef kitchen collapses into a singularity at the end of the show.

* Sheldon/Josh are doing tempura-fried dessert; Sheldon says the batter should be like a pancake batter, “lumpy as shit.” Good to know.

* Kristen points out that when Stefan was 14 in 1986, she was 3. Doesn’t seem to mind him hitting on her every episode, though.

* Bart/Josie do a makeshift grill of cooling rack over a foil roasting pan with coals in it. Nice strong direct heat. I might try that by resting the pan on fire bricks in the grill, which would get the food closer to the heat than I could otherwise get.

* Hugh gives Padma the roller-derby nickname “Padma Smacks-me.” I have no real comment for this.

* The dishes are judged by Padma, Tom, Hugh, Emeril, and the girl your dish was named after, which is about as strong and tough a group of judges as we’ve had.

* Tasting time, starting with Brooke/John: Thai beef with lobster jasmine rice and Thai cole slaw. Hugh likes the building flavors and the kick of acid in the slaw.

* Josie/Bart: Teriyaki steak, forbidden rice with beet blood, and a green papaya salad. Hugh thinks it’s a little “unique crappy.” Tom questions skewering the meat since it can’t be properly seared. The rice is overcooked and looks like a liquified brick. Padma asks why they buried black rice in red liquid. This seems like a fail all around.

* Micah/Lizzie: Crab-stuffed whole jalapeno pepper (fried) with avocado crema and onion and pepper relish. The judges are surprised that they love it. Crispy, great flavors. The rollergirl likes that they rethought a “party food favorite,” which was a pretty insightful comment too.

* Stefan/Kristen: “Chicken inside-out” for their rollergirl’s nickname, Eddie Shredder. Corn puree under chicken liver with a port wine reduction under phyllo dough under a sunny-side up egg. Tom says it’s a dish of missed opportunities. Emeril’s egg was slightly overdone but the corn puree and liver were perfect. This seems a little unadventurous to me.

* Josh/Sheldon: Tempura yuzu curd with shiso, fresno chili, sweet potato, and vanilla sauces (“tantrums”) smeared on the place for the diner to run the tempura through. The judges agree that it was a great idea, the sauces were great, but the tempura wasn’t fried enough. Emeril thinks the small fryer couldn’t hold temperature, which should have occurred to Sheldon (who says he does tempura every night in his restaurant) before they started. So I ask this all the time: Where are the damn thermometers? Were they not frying with a thermometer in the oil at all times?

* Stefan is right, for once: Padma is hot. He says he bought season 9 just to watch her in snippets. She was hottest post-baby in (I think) season 7.

* Judges’ table: Top teams are John/Brooke and Micah/Lizzie, no surprise on either one. Brooke/John’s lobster was cooked perfectly, as was the meat. Micah/Lizzie’s pepper was hot and delicious but the heat didn’t overpower the crab. Brooke and John are the winners, third win (quickfire or elimination) for John, and third for Brooke as well. I think they won for the more adventurous concept, with roughly equivalent execution. Micah and Lizzie reinvented a dish, but Brooke and John invented one.

* John says in the confessional that winning was great, but “it would have been sweeter if I’d won it alone.” Really? Who says that? That’s about as gracious as a sledgehammer to the forehead.

* Bottom: No surprises here either as it’s Josh/Sheldon and Josie/Bart. Josh/Sheldon had a good concept but blew the main element, underfrying the tempura. Bart/Josie had problems throughout the dish, and it’s clear one of them will go home. Tom kills them for underseasoning the rice, saying, “If something is properly seasoned, and something is bland, you put it together, you end up with bland.” Hugh calls the rice portion of the plate “beet espuma syrup on top of boring porridge.” Put that on your menu and smoke it.

* Josh does the second-dumbest thing you can do at judges’ table – the dumbest is refusing to accept responsibility for your dish – by asking why a competing dish was on the top. Tom gives a great explanation of the stuffed jalapeno being not concession food conceptually, after which Padma gives a perfectly concise follow-up on their execution.

* Josie says in confessional that she doesn’t “want to go home for someone else’s mistakes,” ignoring how the judges didn’t like anything she cooked in the dish either.

* Bart goes home. It should have been Josie, although I didn’t see Bart potentially winning the whole thing either – he’s a charming guy and I’m sure he makes a great waffle, but his dishes never stood out in the least. Bart says that “Josie talks to the judges and puts on the Josie Show,” except that I’d rather watch Heil Honey, I’m Home! than The Josie Show and somehow The Josie Show never gets cancelled.

* LCK: So another rollergirl comes through Last Chance Kitchen and CJ blatantly watches her ass as she goes by, saying the skater’s buttocks “were amazing, like two Parma hams.” You can think this stuff – I’ve thought worse, certainly – but good grief, man, the red light means the camera is on.

* Anyway, the challenge is to take chicken breast, which is bland and boring, and make it delicious. I thought leaving the skin on the meat was a gift, because rendered and crisped it’s a poor man’s duck skin (crispy with hints of sweetness from caramelized carbohydrates), but CJ removes the skin and never uses it. Bart goes bold, seasoning heavily, using paprika and either cumin or turmeric, then crushing speculoos (the Dutch cinnamon cookie sold here under the Biscoff brand) and sprinkling the dust on the top. CJ wins, even though his dish was less complex, less adventurous, and far less attractive on the plate. Tom dings Bart for going too bold, saying the flavors would have been great for venison, but the challenge was to go bold. I know flavor is king here, but it seems like Bart’s concept better met the challenge, and again, it looked way better on the plate.

* Top three: Kristen still blowing away the field, followed by John and Brooke, same as last week. I’d like to see another good week from Micah before moving him back into consideration ahead of Lizzie, who’s been very steady, occasionally on top but rarely below par. Josie is still on the bottom for me, with Josh at #8.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ December 26, 2012
→ By keith

The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat and Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

I have a piece up today for Insiders on the Joel Hanrahan trade. There is no Klawchat this week due to the holidays.

If I asked you who invented penicillin, you’d probably give the standard answer of Alexander Fleming, and maybe recall a story of him accidentally getting some bread mold in a Petri dish and noticing its antibacterial qualities. Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist, ended up sharing a Nobel Prize for this discovery and received accolades for decades beyond his death, even though, as Eric Lax details in the surprisingly gripping The Mold in Dr. Florey’s Coat: The Story of the Penicillin Miracle, Fleming wasn’t actually the first to identify that the Penicillium notatum mold could kill several dangerous species of bacteria, nor was he at all involved in the massive effort to translate this laboratory accident into a usable weapon for human medicine.

Lax’s work is brief (263 pages) and very easy to read, but his research into the subject of the discovery and development of the now-ubiquitous drug is thorough and relied heavily on first-person accounts from the era, including journal notes, correspondence, and interviews with surviving members of the team at Oxford that undertook years of experiments to figure out how to scale mold production and also understand its functioning. Fleming did share the Nobel with the Australian Howard Florey and the German-born Ernst Chain, but the latter two, working at the Dunn School of Pathology under the privations of wartime England, managed to demonstrate that P. notatum was safe to use in humans and effective against bacteria, including Streptococcus and Staphylococcus, that at that time had no known chemotherapeutic antagonists. (That is, if you got a staph infection from a scratch from a rose thorn, there wasn’t much hope for your recovery.) Fleming wasn’t even the first to notice that P. notatum had antibacterial properties – the Belgian bacteriologist Andre Gratia apparently observed it three years earlier, but, like Fleming, didn’t follow through.

Lax attempts to shine light on those who deserve it, not just Florey and Chain but others, including Norman Heatley, without whose knowhow the drug might never have been produced in quantity. Lax goes back to the myth of Fleming’s discovery of the mold’s effects – Fleming did indeed discover it, but the legend of how he did so, which he himself propagated once Florey’s team made the drug viable, is likely false, according to Lax’s research. The focus then shifts to the Dunn School and the difficulties Florey had in assembling a team, finding funding for their work, and in producing enough of the stuff to keep the testing going – even salvaging penicillin from the urine of patients fortunate enough to receive it, as more than half of what a patient was given was eventually excreted via the kidneys. Lax’s access to contemporary documents and later in-person accounts allows him to flesh out the personalities of these central actors, as well as providing details on some of the early successes and failures of the drug as the scientists figured out how best to use it, including the now-common practice of administering an antibiotic for a week or more past the disappearance of symptoms. I’ll also leave the very amusing detail of how pencillin extraction moved from P. notatum to the more potent P. chrysogenum to those of you who choose to read the book.

Where Lax could have gone further was in explaining the science behind penicillin’s action, which he mentions just briefly near the end of the book. Penicillin is a beta-lactam antibiotic that inhibits cell wall development in bacteria, especially Gram-positive ones – meaning that when one cell tries to divide, its cell wall will rupture rather than expanding and closing around each resulting cell, so no new cell is formed and the original cell becomes a wall-less and very fragile spheroplast. Resistance to penicillin also only earns scant mention, again at the very end of the book, with some polite hand-waving about the subject and positive words about penicillin’s continued effectiveness against Streptococcus, but no mention of the rise of Staphylococcus bacteria that have evolved resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics in general. This is a history of science book that leans more toward history yet is a little light on the science for my tastes, but that may increase its accessibility to less science-inclined readers and absolutely made it an easier book to tackle.

If you like your popular science books a little heavier on the science, I also just read Jonah Lehrer’s first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist ($5.98 through that link), which draws parallels between various famous practicioners of the fine arts (and one very famous chef) and later discoveries, mostly by neurologists, that showed that the artists’ insights into human psychology and behavior were biologically justified. Lehrer’s star was nearly extinguished when the first chapter of his 2012 book Imagine – a book I enjoyed tremendously – was found to contain fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan, after which the publisher pulled the book from publication entirely rather than edit and re-release it. (It’s still a great book if you want to learn more about how to be more creative, especially in the workplace.) Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more like a collection of nonfiction stories that share a basic narrative structure: Lehrer introduces a famous writer, musician, or artist, describes his/her oeuvre and a particular advance or insight for which s/he is known, then explains the science behind that insight, discovered decades after the artist’s work.

My favorite chapter was, of course, the one on chef and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier, one of the fathers of modern French cuisine and the man who first wrote down a specific method – not just a recipe, but a concept – for making brown veal stock, now the foundation for an entire family of sauces without which French cuisine as we know it would not exist. Escoffier’s great contribution, according to Lehrer, was his understanding of what we now know as umami, the so-called “fifth taste” – the intensity of flavor produced by glutamate, which is recognized by the tongue and is found in rich foods from Parmiggiano-Reggiano to anchovies to soy sauce to cured meats to mushrooms. (It’s also found in powdered form as monosodium glutamate.) The chemical basis behind Escoffier’s insight was first discovered after he had already risen to prominence in European food circles and wasn’t fully demonstrated until long after his death. Lehrer uses these eight examples to plead for greater interaction between the science and art worlds, arguing that each can learn from the other if they speak a common, “third” language. That message is largely lost on me as someone who works in neither sphere, but some of the anecdotes, including the ones on Paul Cézanne and Igor Stravinsky, were fascinating reads because they involved areas of the fine arts in which I have little to no background, even as a casual fan. I don’t take a jaundiced view of Lehrer’s earlier work just because of the debacle around Imagine, so just as I still recommend that book with the caveats around its veracity, I recommend Proust Was a Neuroscientist as well even if its underlying message isn’t as powerful.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: highly recommended, history of science, nobel prize, non-fiction

→ December 23, 2012
→ By keith

Baldur’s Gate for iPad.

I have new posts up for Insiders analyzing the Nick Swisher and Edwin Jackson signings. I’ll write up the Pirates/Red Sox trade if and when the clubs finalize it and we know all of the names involved.

I’ve never gotten into role-playing games as a genre, even though I think I probably fit the stereotype of avid RPG players, aside from the fact that I never actually lived in my parents’ basement. I tried the pen-and-paper version of D&D in high school with some friends but found it way too slow for my short attention span, and most of the computer versions I tried were too focused on combat (“hack-and-slash” games), which becomes really monotonous over a game that’s expected to take 30 or 40 or more hours to play. I played The Bard’s Tale in high school, but that game was horribly designed (you had to keep fighting the same battles over and over again to make your characters strong enough for the final encounter), and also tried the first of the “gold box” D&D games, Pool of Radiance (bad graphics, some clever subquests, but once I got to the Big Foozle at the end of the game he treated my party like we were the 2012 Astros), but neither of these was good enough to turn me into a fan of the genre.

Baldur’s Gate remains the one exception, and I think the main reason is that its writing is better than those of other games in the genre. It’s a D&D game, both in mechanics and in setting, but contains a fairly well-written central story, lots of dialogue (much of it funny, at least the first or second time around), and enough opportunities to roam outside of the linear core plot (also of the Kill-the-Big-Foozle variety) to give the game some replay value. Most importantly, the game worked: Early challenges are balanced enough to give you a shot even when your character is weak, and later challenges are difficult but don’t require advance knowledge or cheat codes to survive them. I played Baldur’s Gate and its two-part sequel through several times, using different character types to vary the experience slightly from time to time. I’ve tried other games that were supposedly similar, but nothing lasted me more than an hour or so.

A group of the original Baldur’s Gate designers have now reissued the game and ported it to new formats, starting with an iPad version, with good-not-great results. The game looks and feels just like the original, with some enhancements that were either only found in BG2 or that appeared in user-created mods, but retaining the original graphics (looking a little dated), voices, and music (both big positives). Aside from the creation of a few new NPCs, one in the base game and a few available as in-app purchases, this is the original Baldur’s Gate game in every aspect. If you feel a little nostalgia for the original game, you’ll love the reissue.

The story, in brief, is a little cliched for the fantasy genre – you’re an orphan, and you’re being hunted by an unknown enemy for reasons that don’t become apparent until much later in the game, but it turns out you’re something of a Chosen One. That’s all blah-de-blah, but the overlaid story of an iron shortage in the region and bandit attacks up and down the coast give the story some texture beyond the linear who’s-trying-to-kill-me plot that drives a lot of these games. You’ll also get a ton of subquests if you talk to every named character you come across, only some of whom want to kill you or pick your pockets, and the game is loaded with enough non-player characters and special items to allow you significant flexibility in constructing your party however you like.

That said, playing BG on the iPad has its frustrations. Using a touchscreen to play a game that expects the precision of a mouseclick is extremely aggravating – it can be hard to get your party to enter a building or to get a character to attack the right enemy. Sometimes I find my characters are just standing around in the middle of combat while their mates are being disemboweled. (I still don’t know if that’s a game error or mine.) The app crashes way too often, so you’ll want to quick-save (one click on the left-hand bar) as often as you can – and once or twice I’ve crashed while quick-saving, unfortunately. (I also crashed once because I tried to take Boo from Minsc. Squeaky wheel gets the kick, I suppose.) The port didn’t update the graphics, so zooming to try to tap more accurately on the screen just produces a blur. I’ve spoken with one of the designers about the touchscreen issue, which they were already aware of and are working on for future updates. I’ve had to fight certain battles, not just major ones, multiple times strictly because of that one issue – either a character went where s/he wasn’t supposed to go, or I couldn’t get a character to attack the right opponent. I’ve adapted to the latter issue by specifically selecting the weapon (turning its highlight orange) and then selecting the opponent, but that adds up to a ton of extra taps over the course of a game.

The base game app is $10, about the maximum I’d be willing to pay for a port of an older game that is available in a complete four-in-one boxset, with BG2 and the two expansions, for $15 on DVD-ROM for Windows. I’ve played probably ten hours or so in total – I just wiped out the bandit camp, for those of you who’ve played the game before, and don’t act like those little pricks didn’t have it coming – and appreciate the fact that starting and quitting the game is so much faster than it was on CDs when I played it around ten years ago. If it wasn’t so crash-prone, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, but even with that flaw I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it even if I decide not to go after the Big Foozle after all.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, fantasy, rpgs, video games

→ December 21, 2012
→ By keith

Top Chef, S10E7.

Time to review another product placement-packed edition of Top Chef!

* Quickfire: Season four winner Stephanie Izard of Chicago’s Girl and the Goat is here as a guest judge. Every ingredient in the pantry is covered in Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil. I hope they recycled all of that metal, because otherwise this whole challenge is just a big environmental disaster. Once you unwrap an item, you must use it. There are also no cooking vessels available – you must cook in the foil itself, and that stuff can’t be recycled. Immunity’s at stake. Ecological concerns aside, is this challenge really that different from giving each chef a sealed box of ingredients and telling them they must use everything in it?

* Kristen decides to make a sponge cake and we see her whisking eggs in a bowl she made of foil. Danyele says making a cake in this challenge is “the ballsiest shit” she’s ever heard of. That’s also a pretty good indication that Kristen will win the challenge, isn’t it? Ballsy tends to win on this show.

* Bart shapes a bowl on his head, which seems a bit unsanitary, and also made a strainer, which makes him MacGyver in this crowd.

* Chefs can’t sear anything because foil doesn’t conduct heat well enough, and we get a shot of one foil “pot” leaking off the edge of the flat-top. This can’t be the advert that Reynolds was hoping it would be. As an aside, I don’t go through that much foil in the kitchen, but I do use a lot of another Reynolds product – parchment paper, especially to keep pizza dough from sticking to my wooden pizza peel.

* Sheldon smokes scallops. I can’t even think of a time I saw smoked scallops on a menu, and I’ve certainly never eaten them. Wouldn’t a protein that lean fare somewhat poorly in a smoker?

* The bottom three: Brooke, whose dish was under seasoned and who got a nasty reaction from Padma during tasting for her use of raw onions; Micah, whose lamb was still wandering around looking for Mary; and Josh, whose dish was “uninspired.” Is it just me, or is Josh looking pretty overmatched the last 3-4 episodes? You can’t talk that tough and not bring the goods.

* We get a top six first, with Sheldon, Kristen, Josie, Stefan, Danyele, and Bart, of which the actual top three are Danyele, Kristen, and Sheldon. Winner is Kristen, of course, since she took the biggest risks, had a number of different elements, and seems to cook with tremendous precision. She needs to stop acting so surprised when she wins – she’s practically the Paul Qui of this group. And I can’t imagine that Bravo would be upset to have a former model win the season.

* Elimination challenge: Stephanie’s sticking around as guest judge, which seems like a great idea the show should use more often. The challenge involves cooking with fresh berries in head-to-head battles, other than Kristen, who cooks alone because she has immunity. The other top chefs from the quickfire pick their opponents. Sheldon picks Micah, Danyele picks Josh, Stefan picks John T, Josie picks Lizzie, and Bart gets Brooke. No one seems to really be picking for competitive reasons except maybe Josie, and even then, neither Lizzie nor Brooks seems like a pushover.

* Of the berries, the one I’d least want would be gooseberries, which Stefan and John draw. Gooseberries are powerfully tart and a real pain in the ass to clean and trim. Kristen gets tayberries, the one berry here I haven’t tried; it’s a sweet cross between a raspberry and a blackberry, but, per Wikipedia, can’t be machine harvested so it’s rarely grown commercially. I bet it makes an unbelievable pie, though. The whole episode reminds me of the time my wife and I went to Alaska and spotted salmonberries growing wild on the side of a road – but we didn’t touch them because I didn’t know what they were or if they were safe to eat. (They are.)

* Stefan buys flash-frozen tuna, saying it’s the “highest-quality fish in the store.” That might be true at some markets, but Whole Foods typically sells high-end sushi-grade tuna at the fish counter. Also, fish really suffers in the defrosting process, losing texture as the ice crystals melt. I almost never use frozen fish at home; if I can’t get it fresh, I don’t get it at all. John razzes Stefan for it, but then tattles to Tom about Stefan using frozen fish, which is just bush-league. There’s no un-hearing that – Tom had to taste that food with the notion that the fish was previously frozen already in his brain. John’s lame excuse is that he was mad that the tuna wasn’t sustainable. Hey, I’m all about sustainable product, but just admit you threw the guy under the bus already.

* The “kitchen” is an outdoor setup on the farm where the party (with 150 guests) will be held, and it’s chaos, with too little room for eleven chefs to set up. Danyele, not the most assertive chef in the group, has to get loud and pushy just to get counter space. Of course, I don’t know if there wasn’t enough space or if one or two chefs were taking up too much room, but I’d rather not see chefs suffer because they couldn’t find flour or get enough room to work. Bart is struggling to find a blender, and ends up cursing out John, who’s hanging on to a blender but might not have used it yet … again, why not have 11 blenders available?

* Up pulls a tractor with freshly picked berries. How do I get one of those to stop by my house?

* Kristen tells her backstory – she was born in Seoul but abandoned by her mom, and at four months moved to Michigan to be adopted by an American family. That means three chefs of these eleven were adopted. I can’t imagine growing up and dealing with that feeling of abandonment, rightly or wrongly. Kristen talks about taking the $10K prize for this challenge, should she win it, and going to Korea for the first time to see where she’s from.

* Micah’s daughters are named Sage and Saffron. I want to mock this but those names really aren’t that odd.

* Tasting time. Danyele: chicken ping nut terrine with blueberry mostarda on a crostada. No bueno. The bread slices are too thick and crunchy, the terrine is rubbery, and it’s all underseasoned. She looks totally lost in her own head at this point. Josh: savory goat cheese mousse with blueberry compote, plus a little Serrano ham and cracker crust. Judges say this one doesn’t have enough crunch, but that’s the only real comment, so it seems like Josh will win this one by default.

* Josie: A “rock’n raspberry roll” that she’s rolling to order while she babbles like a leaky faucet to distract guests from the fact that she’s woefully unprepared. The roll has sockeye salmon, Dungeness crab, and a raspberry aioli. Gail says there’s not enough raspberry. Tom says there’s too much style, not enough substance. If he’d added “too much blather” he would have nailed it. Lizzie: steamed cabbage roll with heritage pig and bacon stuffing, fresh raspberry, and raspberry liqueur. Padma loves it right off the bat. Tom says it’s just a little under seasoned. We’re not getting much of Stephanie’s commentary, unfortunately. I’d value her contributions over Gail’s, certainly.

* Sheldon: ahi poke, strawberries, sweet chili sauce, and strawberry purée, all in a summer roll. There’s also a radish in there that sells Stephanie. Micah: strawberry-marinated fried chicken with a strawberry and pepper bacon buttermilk biscuit. The fried chicken seems fine, but everyone hates the biscuit, which looks dry on camera and apparently was also dense and mealy.

* John: white gazpacho with chorizo and gooseberry jelly. The whole dish is overpowered by the chorizo, and one guest says it reminds him of “cheeseburger soup.” That’s probably not a compliment. Stefan: tuna crudo with Asian vinaigrette with gooseberries and more gooseberries on the dish itself. Gail doesn’t taste the berries enough, but as with Josh, this looks like a win for Stefan by default.

* Brooke: spicy smoked chocolate pudding with blackberry tapioca and salty graham cracker crumble and earl grey marshmallows. At this point in the show it seems like this is the top-rated dish, with everyone loving the concept, the execution, the use of the berries, and the nod to s’mores. Bart: blackberry soup with salmon and rhubarb yogurt. Tom loves soup, hates the salmon. Stephanie says the salmon is superfluous.

* Kristen: Matcha goat milk custard with tayberry jam, cornmeal sable, and olive-oil macerated tayberries. There are a ton of flavors going on in this dish. She just seems to be conceptually way ahead of anyone else in the competition, and she executes more consistently than anyone else.

* Stefan telling John to “suck it hard” in the stew room. All class, that guy.

* Judges table: John, Josie, Bart, Micah, Danyele lost their matchups in the eyes of the guests and the judges. Micah acknowledged that Sheldon’s food “popped.” His biscuit was dense and chewy, and for a guy with evident skills he is failing to execute at an alarming rate here. Josie gets ripped for “doing a demo” and makes more excuses, which seems to be her core competence. Gail says her flavors were muddled. Tom says it was too heavy with aioli. It didn’t look or sound appealing, and she made guests wait way too long for it. Bart’s salmon had terrible texture. Danyele said she heard people eating the crostada. Tom says she gets her halfway through a great concept but can’t finish it. John saw gooseberries, thought grapes, went gazpacho, then makes excuses about crazy kitchen and says he’s not making excuses. I’ve defended John to this point but he came off horribly in this episode. Perhaps he behaves when things are going well, but when adversity strikes he reverts to juvenile responses.

* Tom says the winners all worked better with the product than the losers. The winner is girl-on-fire Kristen, who can now go to Korea and perhaps eliminate “Gangnam Style” at the source. Stefan plants one on her cheek. Subtle.

* The judges joke about Josie’s dish looking like Pepto Bismol, but end up sending Danyele packing. She’s been on the bottom most of the competition, but Josie’s act is way more tired to me as a viewer, and I’ll miss Danyele’s hair.

* Then we get some drama as Josie goes all over Stefan in the stew room with what appears to be no provocation other than him starting a separation conversation that was too loud for her liking (but wasn’t about her). That’s pressure getting to someone, and that someone handling it poorly. Stefan isn’t the reason Josie’s been on the bottom. Own your mistakes.

* LCK: Make a sandwich in twenty minutes. Danyele goes way too simple, CJ goes over the top, and CJ wins. People do not learn: Simple almost never wins on Top Chef, because the judges nearly always favor a great concept done reasonably well over a fair concept done perfectly. And that’s how they should judge the dishes. That said, I’d rather eat Danyele’s sandwich – and she even takes one of the sandwiches she made to go. I agree with her that avocado just makes any sandwich better; I put guacamole on burgers all the time, and I like her method of making it into a simple spread by mashing it with a little acid and salt. But again, that doesn’t win on TC.

* Revised top three: Kristen, then a big gap, then John and Brooke, with Lizzie and Sheldon rounding out the top five. Micah’s falling fast. Josie seems like she’s clearly the worst competitor left, followed by Josh.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ December 19, 2012
→ By keith

Silver Linings Playbook.

David O. Russell’s Oscar-nominated 2010 film The Fighter underwhelmed me relative to its critical acclaim because the story felt so generic, salvaged by great performances in the lead and supporting roles. With his follow-up, Silver Linings Playbook, based on a 2008 novel by Matthew Quick, Russell is mining more serious territory – most of the central characters are grappling with various forms of mentall illness – but with the general tone of an indie comedy, resulting in a film that takes its serious issues seriously, but not so seriously that the movie drags or becomes something less than enjoyable.

Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper, showing unexpected range) is just getting out of an eight-month stint in a mental institution where he’s been receiving treatment for bipolar disorder after “the explosion,” an incident (later hashed out in full) that resulted in a plea agreement that kept him out of jail but left him with a restraining order against him and some fear and prejudice among neighbors and former co-workers. His parents, played by Oscar winner Robert Deniro and Oscar nominee Jacki Weaver (for 2010’s Animal Kingdom), form an unstable support system for Pat, unable to fully understand his disorder or, in the case of Pat’s father, to separate his own needs from those of his son.

Pat’s one constant friend, Ronnie, himself dealing with a pretty serious anxiety problem but receiving no help for it, ends up introducing Pat to his sister-in-law Tiffani (Jennifer Lawrence), a recently widowed young woman with serious issues of her own beyond her grieving, and the two form an immediate connection over dinner when discussing the side effects of their various medications. (I particularly laughed at the discussion of Klonopin, an anti-depressant I was once prescribed as a sleep aid but never took because I was concerned about … well, exactly what Pat and Tiffani described.) Their partnership in healing is uneasy between Pat’s lack of any filter between his brain and his mouth and Tiffani’s wildly varying emotional states, but it’s also evident from the start that the two will end up together – and, to the credit of Cooper and the always-impressive Lawrence, it feels surprisingly natural. Tiffani extorts Pat into being her partner in a couples dance competition, which feels a little implausible, and that ends up a family-wide event due to a rather improbable two-event parlay that was the movie’s one real false note for me. The Pat-Tiffani storyline works independently of the bet, which is played for laughs rather than plot and only provides a reason for Pat’s father to be there at the end to give his son some advice that Pat didn’t actually need after all.

The film is absolutely carried by the performances of its four principals, led by Lawrence, who I argued was worthy of the 2010 Best Actress Oscar over the landslide favorite, Natalie Portman, for Lawrence’s performance in Winter’s Bone. Lawrence has a stronger groundswell of support now, as one of Hollywood’s It Girls, thanks in part to her lead role in The Hunger Games, but she does the most in this film with the hardest role because her character lacks emotional boundaries – she varies from desperate to angry to crushed to sultry from sentence to sentence, and conveys her grief over her husband’s death and her own previous emotional problems as much through body language and tone as through her dialogue. (She’s also stunning as a brunette.) Deniro turns in what is probably his best work in a decade, playing Pat’s highly superstitious father, himself likely dealing with an undiagnosed mental illness, loving his son and yet obviously fearing him at the same time because he can’t understand why his son acts and speaks the way he does. Weaver, an Australian actress who dominated Animal Kingdom as the amoral head of a ruthless crime family, nails the Philadelphia accent and the role of the subservient wife to a husband who’s probably been something between difficult and impossible for their entire marriage. I could see all three earning Oscar nods, while Brad Cooper, who lacks the others’ history of work in serious roles and would be up in the most competitive category, gets Jim Carrey’d and ends up on the outside looking in. We even get a few great scenes from Chris Tucker, talking faster than ever, and Julia Stiles, somewhat surprising as a domineering wife to Pat’s friend Ronnie.

I was also very happy with how the film dealt with mental illness, taking it seriously but infusing what could have been a very depressing subject with humor, both dark and silly. (Anupam Kher has a couple of scene-stealing lines as Pat’s therapist.) Pat has several episodes of manic or depressive behavior, as well as the “explosion” shown in flashbacks, and some of them are, appropriate, quite painful to watch. I’ve seen several reviews, including the A/V Club’s top 20 films of 2012, that denigrated the film as a “rom-com” that implies that the cure for bipolarity is finding the right, quirky girl. I think those critics miss the point entirely: Pat gets better over the course of the film once he starts taking his medication, investing himself in therapy, and following his therapist’s advice to develop coping strategies and expose himself to potential triggers. That’s how treatment works for any mental illness, including the anxiety disorder for which I’ve belatedly getting treatment this year. Silver Linings absolutely makes it clear that the medication and treatment are working because Pat’s character doesn’t evolve until he gets serious about them. His moods change, his filter reappears, and his word choices start to reflect things he’d likely be hearing or discussing in therapy. Russell doesn’t shove this down our throats, elevating the romantic element (even though Pat and Tiffani don’t actually kiss until the penultimate scene) over the mental-illness storyline, but he lays it all out for anyone who’s paying attention, and respects the subject even while often deriving humor from it. I don’t see how anyone could walk away from this film getting any other message about mental illness beyond “get professional help.”

Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, and there is a romance, but calling it a rom-com doesn’t do it justice because it omits what sets this film apart from even indie romantic comedies. It tackles a serious subject with intelligence and wit while enveloping the viewer in a compelling romance that builds organically through mostly natural plot elements. The character development is far stronger than in even a good “rom-com,” and the performances are all Oscar-worthy, especially in what seems to be a weak year for serious films. And it’s pretty damn funny too. All rom-coms should be so good.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2012 best picture nominees, 2012 films, comedies, highly recommended, movies

→ December 18, 2012
→ By keith

Homeland, season two.

If you missed it, my analysis of the R.A. Dickey trade is up for Insiders. There will be a podcast on Thursday and I’ll chat that afternoon at 3 pm Eastern.

Season two of Homeland turned out to be very different from season one in plot, tone, and pacing, to the point where it felt for much of the middle of the year like a different show featuring the same characters. (Perhaps not quite to this extent, but you get the idea.) I tend to agree with Alan Sepinwall’s* take that Homeland redeemed itself with a strong finale that got at least most of the way back to the domestic-terrorism angle of the first season, but I think it didn’t move far enough away from the doomed-romance storyline that threatened to take over so much of the season and even occupied too much of the first half of the finale.

* I should mention that Alan’s got a new book out, The Revolution Was Televised, on twelve TV dramas that changed the genre. I haven’t read it, because I’ve only watched one complete series (The Wire) he discussed, but I love Alan’s work and will recommend the book on that basis alone.

I’ve never really bought the Carrie/Brody romance as a deep emotional connection. I get how two very broken people might find solace in each other, and I suppose we’re supposed to infer there’s physical chemistry between these two (I don’t see it – Jess and Mike look like they want to jump each others’ bones when they’re in the same room, but Carrie and Brody’s intimacy seems forced). What I don’t get is how these two broken people are really in love, unless they’re pretending they are, including deluding themselves right down to their comments at the end of the show that they were “so close.” They really should never be that close again, not if the show wants to regain the realism that characterized the first season but was all too absent from the second. And if, as Sepinwall suggests, Brody is largely absent from season three while the focus shifts to the rebuilding of the CIA with Carrie working on the side to clear Brody’s name, I don’t think that’s a bad thing for the show at all.

The loss of realism in season two was coupled with a massive uptick in its pacing. Where season one was slow and methodical, with the CIA team often a step behind the terrorists and making (by TV standards) painstaking progress in their investigations, season two absolutely flew by, with Bigger Moments and faster plot twists. We’re not in network procedural territory here, but the tension from the first season’s lack of story churning was a great part of its appeal to me, reminiscent of British series that aren’t afraid to make the viewer wait for a big payoff. I think season two was far less realistic right up to the finale’s biggest twist, where no one seems to notice that an SUV is parked in the middle of the Langley campus, something that would have likely spurred an evacuation of adjacent buildings and an immediate assumption that the vehicle was rigged. (As for who moved the car, assuming it’s a character we’ve already seen, my money remains on Galvez, whom the writers seem to have been setting up since the middle of the first season as the mole, including his presence at and survival of the Gettysburg assault.)

You can also count me among the fans who didn’t care for the Dana/Finn hit-and-run storyline, which became largely an excuse for Morgan Saylor to do that thing with her sleeves more often than before. Sepinwall’s post mortem with the show’s producers indicates that this subplot was going somewhere else but never got there, which showed in the finished product. It played out like an afterthought, with its only value a modest addition to the venality we’d already seen from Walden.

Aside from three very strong season-long performances from Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin – the latter probably getting better material for Emmy submission time this year – season two’s other main strength was in exploring the complicated entanglement between Brody and Abu Nazir, from the former’s inability to fully sever his ties to the terrorist mastermind to the latter’s presumed willingness to die to set up the cataclysmic attack of the season finale. I also credit the producers for turning the page on Nazir after two seasons, yet doing so in a way that doesn’t leave the viewers with much closure. He’s dead, but his organization seems to be living on, and his spectre will inhabit the grounds of the decimated CIA for years. Simply catching the bad guy can’t end the threat, because that’s not how the world works, and setting off the emotional catharsis of watching Abu Nazir die against the reality that the threat against us survives the death of one man was one of the best-plotted elements of the season.

What I’d like to see from season three is a devolution from the romantic elements, including the Carrie/Brody relationship and the Brody/Jess/Mike triangle, back towards the tense spy-story themes of season one. That first season was constantly infused with doubt about Brody’s actual intentions and how far he’d get with the plans handed to him, along side his difficulty in readjusting to civilian life. His character has been poisoned by the events of the finale for the time being, to the point where, if he appears anywhere on the show again, he’ll have to be arrested and thrown in that same prison where Eileen Morgan was held. I can’t see him becoming a central character again unless his name is cleared, and that process should take a full season or more. If the show turned away from him entirely, I’d certainly miss Lewis’ outstanding performances, but it might be better for the show in the long run, much as The Wire turned away from Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell to introduce new antagonists for the investigators to chase. If the star-crossed lovers story takes over more of the next season, however, there’s a good chance I’ll tune out of the show entirely, because that’s so far removed from the reasons Homeland hooked me in the first place.

If you haven’t gotten into Homeland at all, I strongly recommend season one, even if my review here sort of turned you off on season two. That first twelve-episode arc ranks among the best single seasons I’ve seen of any show, in large part because it eschews the rapid-fire pacing of most American dramas and builds tension through more organic means.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: dramatic series, homeland, tv

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