→ September 26, 2012
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Homeland.

I’ll give the series Homeland, which just took four of the five major Emmy Awards for dramatic series on Sunday, the highest praise I can: For the first time ever, I’m now a Showtime subscriber, because I didn’t want to miss season two when it starts on September 30th.

Homeland, adapted from a ten-episode Israeli series called Prisoners of War, follows the return of a POW, long presumed dead, from eight years of captivity in Iraq as he readjusts to normal life and finds himself held up as a hero and used as a political pawn by the current Adminstration … all while a rogue CIA analyst believes that the soldier is actually a terrorist sleeper sent to the U.S. to carry out a major attack. The first season’s twelve episodes dance on the edge of implausibility but rarely cross it, with brilliant pacing that belies how much of the series’ action is happening in something approximating real time.

Claire Danes, playing the CIA analyst Carrie Mathisen, is the series’ ostensible star, but while her performance playing an obsessed workaholic who is hiding her bipolar disorder from her colleagues was superb, I thought Damian Lewis, as the former POW Nicholas Brody, was even more deserving of the postseason award. The viewer knows from the first moment on which side Carrie sits, but Lewis has to spend much of the season bobbing and weaving to keep his true intentions hidden from the viewer and, to some extent, from other characters. Lewis is practically asked to play three or four separate characters, if you include flashback scenes to his captivity as well as the different faces he shows to colleagues, to his family, and to Carrie. Danes’ performance might not have won if not for the difficulty level of the final two episodes of the season, although she was incredibly convincing as the just-barely-hinged obsessed analyst who is absolutely sure that there’s an imminent attack but can’t quite convince anyone in a position to do something about it. Mandy Patinkin is also superb as Carrie’s closest ally within the CIA, while Morena Baccarin, playing Brody’s wife, is gorgeous with or without her top on and I suppose she’s a pretty good actress too. (Obligatory Firefly plug here, from when Baccarin had long hair.)

Where Homeland succeeds most is in bringing realism to unreality: The basic premise is, at least so far, a fiction, an American soldier who might have been turned by Islamist terrorists and who is intent on causing harm to his own country. Moving forward from this starting point, however, the writers kept the series grounded with mostly realistic, or at least plausible, depictions of the the various plot threads, including Brody’s difficulty readjusting and the CIA often being a day late and a dollar short when trying to chase people who don’t want to be found. Absent are the mindless midday shootouts on urban streets present in most network police procedurals. Absent is the uberhacker who takes a few seconds to “break through the firewall” and cracks non-alphanumeric passwords with a few keystrokes. I don’t know exactly how the CIA operates, but at least I never thought that Homeland was insulting my intelligence with shortcuts and misused jargon just to move the plot along. And by making the possible antagonist a white American male, the series forces viewers to confront some of their own biases, even subconscious ones, where the subject is Islamist-based terrorism.

The series did slip into implausibility, for me, with the extent of the personal interactions between Carrie and Brody, a relationship that evolves very strangely over the course of the season, although there is a plot payoff to all of that in the season’s final two episodes. But I was more disturbed by the treatment of Carrie’s bipolarity as a critical plot point, especially that without her medication, she becomes an insane savant, barely capable of rational thought. It wasn’t even clear to me why the character needed to be bipolar, or needed to be shown going off her meds, to advance the overall plot, and I don’t like seeing mental illness trivialized through fictional depictions that show sufferers as cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

The season finale wrapped up many of the outstanding questions – I don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who haven’t seen it – but left enough plot points open to create suspense for the second season. There is still a plot afoot at the end of the finale, although I won’t say how or why. We still don’t know who the leak within the government is, a detail I expect to see resurface in the second season. And some of the backstory remains untold; I still felt like the motivation for the threatened attack felt incomplete and am somewhat anticipating more flashbacks that fill in those blanks for the audience. This kind of episode-to-episode or season-to-season suspense was completely lacking for me in the first seasons of both Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire, two critically-lauded series that many of you love but that couldn’t hold my attention into their second seasons. To create suspense without forcing viiewers to suspend their disbelief is a rare skill for writers in any medium, but Homeland does so, making it, in my opinion, the best dramatic series currently on American TV.

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→ September 24, 2012
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Trouble with the Curve.

Trouble With the Curve opens with a scene of Clint Eastwood’s back as he struggles to urinate and has a conversation with his uncooperative apparatus before it finally complies with his demands. The film is all downhill from there. It’s manipulative, anachronistic, sentimental claptrap that would make Ken Burns blush and is an insult to anyone who works in the baseball industry, including the very scouts it purports to defend through a staunchly Luddite point of view that would have seemed quaint a decade ago.

Aside from a host of baseball-related mistakes, the film is just too superficial to take seriously, probably better interpreted as a wishful fable than a serious story – built around the idea that good things will come to good people if they’re patient and keep their minds and hearts open. That’s cute if the film is aimed at kids, but it’s a little insulting in an adult movie that’s trying to play it straight, hitting every cliché and predictable plot point it can along the way, like the kid in driver’s ed who thinks the goal is to knock over every cone. When you see the young peanut vendor is left-handed, you know what’s coming. When you see Eastwood’s character’s daughter, Micki (the always adorable Amy Adams), play pool in a bar and humiliate the stranger she’s opposing, you know what’s coming next. When Micki is up against a glib, ambitious colleague for a potential promotion to partner at her law firm, you know where we’re going. When Micki and the younger scout Johnny, with whom she’s tentatively been flirting, end up at a lakeside in the middle of the night, you know what comes next. When Micki’s boyfriend at the start of the film says their relationship is “perfect on paper,” your eyes should roll back far enough that you can see the inside of your skull. Absolutely nothing in this film should surprise if you’ve ever seen another movie in your life.

The shame about Trouble with the Curve is that it could have been an interesting film if it weren’t so busy trying to beat us over the head with Feelings: A long-widowed scout facing his mortality not just through age but through disability (declining eyesight) and technological changes that both threaten the loss of the career to which he’s been married for thirty years reconnects with his estranged daughter as they jointly go to evaluate a candidate for the second pick in what could be that scout’s last draft. Unfortunately, the script is so busy trying to convince us what these characters are that it gives us no time to learn it organically. The scout, Gus Lobel, refers to the “Interweb” and “fang shmei,” while referring to yoga as “voodoo.” Micki’s a vegan, because a gorgeous 30-year-old woman isn’t sufficiently distinguished from grizzled 60-year-old scouts as it is. The main antagonist in the film, the office stat geek (played by Matt Lillard like he’s got a sinus infection), never goes to see players and seems to think there’s value in high school stats, while thinking nothing of insulting Gus to his face. Gus crying at his wife’s graveside while mumble-singing “You Are My Sunshine” might have looked good on paper, but in practice it is so blatantly manipulative even a Lifetime executive would send it back for rewrite.

Adams’ performance as Micki was one of the few bright spots in the movie, bringing some semblance of reality to a thinly-drawn character and delivering the best lines of the film in the diner-booth soliloquy to her father, providing at least something of a backstory to explain both her character and her estrangement from Gus. She’s magnetic enough to pull a strong performance from Justin Timberlake, whose job otherwise is to stand around and be likable, something he’s pretty good at doing. There’s a smattering of good baseball in here, including some of the lingo used (dead-red hitter, quick hands, using hips and legs for power), and the fact that the other main candidate for the draft pick in question goes to Arizona State. Micki knowing the hotel housekeeper’s name showed the kind of subtlety too absent in the script, showing she’s the kind of person who’d take the time to find that out and then remember it. But don’t ask me to believe that her law firm, which has no female partners, is seriously considering promoting another white male over her just because she’s tending to her ailing father.

A number of you asked on Twitter if the film was even worth seeing just because of its baseball content, but I’d say no, it’s not. Even aside from the baseball errata, it’s just a maudlin father-daughter story melded with an awkward romantic comedy involving the daughter and the younger rival scout. The emotions in the film almost never rang true for me, aside from a few moments where Adams gives the shaky script her best efforts, and the story is so predictable that there’s no narrative greed to keep you engaged.

As for the baseball stuff, this film really could have used a basic fact-checker, a consultant somewhere along the way to just say, “hey, this stuff is dead wrong, and someone on that Interweb is going to call you out on it.” Here’s just a list of stuff I wrote down that was absurd, in rough chronological order.

* Maybe the biggest error of all is the idea that nine days before the draft, Atlanta’s area scout (Gus) hasn’t seen the player in his area who’s a candidate for the second overall pick – and no one else in the organization has seen him either. That player would have been seen more than a dozen times by the area guy, every regional and national cross-checker, and the scouting director (an underutilized John Goodman), and possibly by a front-office exec or two since the player is within driving distance of Atlanta. The idea that this huge pick is hinging on one look less than two weeks before the draft is necessary to feed into the film’s mythologizing of old scouts, but in fact, it’s insulting to scouts of all ages by making their process seem more whimsical and less methodical.

* Gus’s resume is an impossibility. He’s a lifelong area scout in the Carolinas who signed Dusty Baker (Sacramento), Chipper Jones (Jacksonville), and Tom Glavine (Massachusetts)? He’s “only signed three guys in four years” … and that’s a bad thing? Some scouts go a year or two without signing any players because that’s how the draft goes. But the geography thing bothers me more – just pick players from the same region. It’s not that hard.

* Scouts don’t stay at rundown motels like the one where Gus, Johnny (Timberlake), and the others stay. We all like our frequent guest points way too much for that.

* The actor playing the phenom, Bo Gentry … I hate to say it, but for a baseball player, the kid is fat. The only legitimate prospect I can think of in the last five years to look like that is Dan Vogelbach, and he’s probably a DH who was never a consideration for that spot in the draft. When they refer to Gentry as a “five tool” player, they conveniently decline to list those tools, one of which – speed – is clearly not in Gentry’s toolbox. We never even see him field. Just find a more athletic actor and this issue goes away. I did love seeing Cocoa Carl from Good Eats playing Gentry’s dad.

* Gentry is a right-handed hitter, so why are all the scouts sitting on the third base side to scout him? You can’t see his hands from there – scouts want to see a hitter’s open side more than his closed side.

* Are there only five scouts in the whole industry, and only one of them under the age of 60?

* The draft-room scene mentioning a “draft and trade deal” … come on. You can’t trade draft picks in baseball.

* Gus mentions seeing a “hitch” in a player’s swing, which is a real thing – but it’s something even non-scouts can notice, and I didn’t see one in the movie. Besides, it’s not an automatic kill on a player – Hunter Pence has a hitch so big it looks like he stole it off a tractor-trailer and he’s done fairly well for himself.

* I’m okay with a film embellishing the drama of the draft room by implying that the decision on the second overall pick is being made in the final seconds before it’s made, but just for the record, no team operates like that. Reality probably isn’t dramatic enough for fiction in this case, though.

* I don’t think there’s any team that would say no to giving a left-handed teenager with an average fastball and an average (or better) curveball a tryout. It costs them nothing. And when the kid is good, no GM in the universe is going to be concerned with finding an agent for the kid – he’d try to sign the player before any agent got wind of it.

* A struggling minor league hitter gets better because his family came to visit him? That might be the film’s most insulting moment – and the entire thread is superfluous anyway, other than to further aggrandize Gus’ character at the expense of those evil computers.

* I’ll end with a point I’m not sure about. Gus mentions at one point the possibility of “putting a bullet in my head” when he can’t scout any more. I don’t know if that was a deliberate reference to Tony Lucadello, a longtime Phillies scout who did just that at age 77 when the team let him go, but I hope that it was, as Lucadello’s story is one worth remembering, even if the reference is a little morbid.

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→ September 22, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E9.

This was my favorite episode of the season because of the elimination challenge. It served a good purpose, but I think it also required the chefs to demonstrate teaching and leadership skills that they almost certainly have to display in their restaurants anyway. It turned out that those weren’t factors in the ultimate decision, but they could have been, and I think that it’s one way to set Masters apart from regular Top Chef.

* Quickfire: Blind cooking with a mystery teammate, a holdover from Season 3. Kerry points out that, based on the previous season, “it pays to be nice” to your teammate. Each chef must create identical dishes with his/her teammate, and will be judged on how similar they look and how they taste.

* The mystery teammates are Ruth, Francis, and Jimmy Sunshine. Ruth uses a bizarre generic European accent in an 80-year-old’s voice to try to fake Kerry out. James uses fake Southern-ish accent – but then actually turns out to be the best listener of the three.

* Chefs in this challenge nearly always assume too much skill or knowledge on the part of the partner, but here the mystery partners were clearly playing dumb too, which I assume was the producers’ direction.

* I find the shouting within this challenge really annoying. Chris is actually the quietest of the three, which I would not have predicted.

* Chefs are all shocked at the reveal. Chris calls it “fucking hysterical” and their laughter was pretty infectious.

* Chris/James did prawns with sauteed celery, thyme, pine nuts, and chili threads. Curtis can’t decide which he likes more, to which James says “shut the fuck up.” This whole quickfire showed a far different side of James’ personality – the most human and likeable he’s been over the two seasons I’ve watched. He was genuinely stoked at the positive results.

* Lorena/Francis: Swiss Chard with sauteed chicken, bacon, onions, shallots, stock, touch of cream, and parmesan. Lorena wanted to serve this over pasta, but the pasta wasn’t ready in time. I thought this sounded simple yet delicious – I’m going to try this over pasta tonight using some of the bacon I smoked myself and a little reserved fat. (There’s no bacon in the online recipe.) The dishes tasted the same, but Curtis dings them for serving a sauce without something to put it on.

* Kerry/Ruth: Sauteed chicken, chard, bacon, parmesan, and rosemary cream. Ruth used way more chicken on her plate, which is part of that “playing dumb” bit I mentioned earlier. Curtis says Ruth’s chicken might be slightly better cooked!

* Winner: Chris, so $5K more for the Michael J. Fox Foundation and a total of $41K so far.

* Elimination challenge: Working with two Southwest Career and Technical Academy students who have taken culinary arts classes, each chef must create a dish … but they can only direct their student-chefs and can’t touch the food to be served. The students first prepare dishes for the chefs to taste and the chefs have to reinterpret the dishes to be “masters-level.”

* Chris says he has/had a learning disability but doesn’t say what it is. It does seem like a lot of great chefs were poor students in school for one reason or another, yet excelled once they discovered they had a passion for food.

* Lorena’s kids made lasagna and she says she feels limited by that dish – but why not deconstruct it somehow so she’s not bound by the shape and format? Anything with a starch, tomatoes, and cheese would have worked. Even just another pasta dish, but one that’s not so homey.

* Kerry is appalled that his students haven’t seen The Godfather. The movie did come out over 20 years before they were born.

* Chris keeps his kids with him during shopping so that he’s still educating them, which is awesome. It looks like both of the other chefs are doing some of this as well, so perhaps the editors just focused on Chris in the final cut.

* Chris shows the kids the basics of butchering the pork loin, but they can’t use the meat he cuts. Please tell me that food wasn’t discarded. His kids are so nervous that they break a bottle of cider vinegar. Opa.

* Kerry’s got his team roasting bones to make “brown jus,” which I assume is a stock he’s going to have them reduce. He says this is restaurant-level cooking, which turns out to be key – he’s really pushing his kids both in efficiency and in the quality of the food they’re producing, exceeding what Chris and Lorena are doing.

* One of Chris’ students will be the first in his family to graduate from high school, and says he grew up in poverty, eating same thing every night. One of Lorena’s students has Type 2 diabetes. I hope the producers do this challenge again in the future.

* Chris is concerned that they’re plating too soon, saying he won’t be happy if he goes home for “teaching kids to be fast.” But why dress the salad and plate with five minutes to go? If the meat is done early, that’s one thing, but you can dress the salad and plate it inside of sixty seconds. That was never fully explained.

* Judges’ table: Same trio from the quickfire. Guests include staff from the Southwest Career and Technical Academy plus some family members of the students.

* Team Chris: Pork loin with hazelnut and sage brown butter, apples, and watercress. They reimagined a basic pork tenderloin dish. Ruth says her paillard is beautifully cooked. Francis says the sauce is perfect. Emilio’s (single) mom starts crying.

* Team Lorena: Lasagna with three meats and a parmesan crema, along with a baby arugula salad and raspberry vinaigrette. The pasta is served in a skillet. Francis likes the goat cheese in the lasagna, but overall this seems like the least ambitious dish.

* Team Kerry: Florentine-inspired chicken with orzo and asparagus ragout. Kerry raves about the kids he worked with. Ruth is very impressed by the dish. James says it’s the best creamed spinach he’s ever had. It’s funny how sophisticated the finished plate is, since Kerry was so underwhelmed by the chicken florentine that he had to reimagine for the final product.

* Judging: Ruth asks Lorena if she thought about asking them to vary from straight-up lasagna, which would have been my first question, and Curtis seems skeptical that Lorena would really serve it in a restaurant. Chris says his kids were so efficient that they plated five minutes early and James comments on the soggy salad. Kerry seems to be the only chef getting no criticism, and he wins the $10K.

* Ruth hammers Lorena after chefs leave – says it was good home-cooking, not fine dining. James disagrees. Francis then makes a pretty spurious argument about the ‘experience’ of bringing people together in that lasagna. Then it seemed like three of the four, Ruth being the exception, were fabricating an argument against Chris to give the sense that this decision was closer than it actually was.

* Lorena is eliminated and doesn’t seem surprised. She earned $27,500 for Alliance for a Healthier Generation. Chris is visibly relieved – as was I, since I really wanted to see him in the finals. As much as I’d tab Chris the favorite, Kerry seems to have really hit his stride over the last three episodes, so maybe he just needed to adjust to the show’s format and, now that he’s done so, his skills are showing through.

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→ September 21, 2012
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A Separation.

My notes on Yu Darvish, Zack Greinke, C.J. Wilson, and Brandon Belt are up, as is a short piece on Baltimore promoting Dylan Bundy. I also chatted on Wednesday.

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The Iranian film A Separation won universal acclaim from critics on its release last winter, landing the top spot on Roger Ebert’s list of his favorite films of 2011, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and prompting Will Leitch to harass me to see the film. (He’s since moved on to taunting me about Trouble With the Curve.) I did finally see it this week and it is among the best movies I have ever seen, and had it been filmed in English it would have been a lock for a Best Picture nomination – and should have gotten one anyway.

The separation of the title refers to the dissolution of the marriage between Nader (Peyman Moaadi) and Simin (the beautiful Leila Hatami), a schism spawned by Simin’s desire to leave Iran permanently and raise their 11-year-old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) in another country, while Nader refuses to leave his ailing father, who suffers from Alzheimer’s and is rapidly fading. The film opens with Nader and Simin arguing in front of a judge who refuses to grant her petition for divorce, because Nader doesn’t consent and she lacks sufficient grounds. Simin moves out, so Nader hires a woman, Razieh (Sareh Bayat, frumped up to appear less attractive), from a lower economic stratum to take care of his father during the day. Razieh struggles with the job, leading to an accident that draws her, her volatile husband Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), Nader, and Simin into a legal battle that threatens to tear both of their families apart.

The power of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s script, which was nominated for Best Original Screenplay but lost to something written in English, is in its simple, unsparing realism. At several points the film seems to move as if in real-time, with painfully rendered arguments between Nader and Simin, Nader and Razieh, Hodjat and pretty much everyone in sight, and eventually Termeh, who naturally finds herself caught between the warring sides. The drama is organic, growing inevitably about of a few small misunderstandings, many of which are never cleared up (as they might not be in real life), each of which adds exponentially to the misery of the people involved.

This degree of attention to the mundane aspects of the conflict allows Farhadi to populate the film with small, intense details that punctuate the pervasive despair of the central characters. Nader doesn’t want to leave his father, who doesn’t recognize his own son but asks several times for his daughter-in-law, and feels her absence more than he would Nader’s. Hodjat’s fury is driven by his own unemployment and lingering resentment over the injustice done to him by his former employers. Nader tries to comfort Razieh and Hodjat’s young daughter, Somayeh, played by a first-time actress, Kimia Hosseini, who probably should have won the Academy Award for Best Eyes. And the final plot point hinges on something so small and so brilliant that a simple request unravels the entire resolution, leading to a final scene that may just rip your heart out for good, assuming you still had it after the first 110 minutes.

Truth, or the futile search for it, lies at the heart of A Separation, as every crime or offense that takes place in the film leaves room for doubt about culpability or even whether a crime was committed, with unreliable witnesses and dubious motives shading nearly every character’s words and actions. With the truth thus obscured, Farhadi gives us terrific portrayals of human responses to this uncertainty – usually interpreting events to fit their predetermined notions. The five principal actors are all superb in roles that demand that they show a broad range of emotions and convince the viewers that there is real empathy underlying much of the suspicion and the senses of betrayal.

It’s a small miracle that Farhadi was even allowed to make a film that is far from subtle in its criticism of life under an autocratic government in Iran. The oppressed status of women is central to the plot, in Simin’s inability to unilaterally leave her husband, in her (never fully elucidated) reasons for wanting to raise Termeh somewhere else, and in Razieh’s difficulties in finding and holding a job. The absurdity of the justice system and the stark differences between economic classes – especially Hodjat’s fear that he will be and Razieh will be treated unfairly by the authorities – also play significant roles in the story, and the overall picture painted of Iranian society is quite unflattering.

A Separation blows away most of the other 2011 films I’ve seen; of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, only The Descendants comes close, yet a head-to-head comparison makes the Clooney vehicle seem ham-handed and superficial. I don’t know if A Separation was the best movie to come out in 2011 – I still haven’t seen Shame, for example – but it is the best I’ve seen from that year by far, and the presence of subtitles shouldn’t deter anyone from watching such a precise, heart-wrenching work of art.

If you’ve seen A Separation already, check out Children Of Heaven, another Iranian film that shares this film’s subtle approach and deep empathy for its main characters.

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→ September 20, 2012
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The Tiger’s Wife.

Tea Obreht’s debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, won the Orange Prize for Fiction (now known as the Women’s Prize for Fiction) in 2011, making her the youngest author to win the award, given to the best English-language novel written by a female author in the preceding year. It’s an unusually thoughtful book for an author of 25, reflecting Obreht’s upbringing in the former Yugoslavia until age 7, when her family moved to Cyprus to flee the war, eventually settling in the United States. The book employs magical realism and obvious yet strong symbolism to cover the tragedy of her native country’s brutal sectarian civil war, although the story was surprisingly antiseptic for such an awful, emotionally-charged subject.

Obreht’s protagonist/narrator is Natalia, a young doctor who has recently lost her grandfather, to whom she was extremely close as a child and who often told her stories of his encounters with “the deathless man,” a man who could not die and claimed to be an agent or acolyte of Death itself; and of the tiger’s “wife,” a deaf-mute woman who befriends a tiger that escaped from a local zoo and lives in the woods outside of the town where the woman lives with her abusive husband. The deathless man draws from just about every major work of magical realism you can think of, as well as more overtly spiritual works like The Alchemist, and as a result is the less interesting of the two major subplots. I understand his relevance in a country repeatedly torn apart by wars, both civil and continental, where death becomes an ordinary part of life, and could see his value as a symbol of something that cannot die or be killed (national pride, family, love) even when death is everywhere.

The fable, presented as fact, of the tiger and the woman known in her village as the tiger’s wife is more complex and more compelling, even though it starts with one of the worst cliches and ends in hatred and intolerance. The tiger is the outsider, escaped from a zoo elsewhere in the country, scraping out an existence on the periphery of this village, apparently aided by the deaf-mute wife of the abusive butcher (the cliche, right down to his back story). Her unknown relationship with the tiger, especially after her husband’s disappearance, becomes the subject of gossip in the town, fueled by fear, ignorance, superstition, and hate. Here lies the book’s greatest strength – where Obreht could have beaten the reader over the head with “bigotry is … bad!” commentary, she allows the story itself to make those points subtly, further softened by the use of a non-human character who appears more often in conversation than in the flesh.

Natalia herself, however, is surprisingly bland, more of an outside observer in the mold of Nick Jenkins without the latter’s wry observational humor. Her relationship with her grandparents is sweet, but draws little sentiment from the reader because so much focus is on the two secondary stories. Her own relationship with her friend Zora, another doctor with whom Natalia visits an orphanage to deliver vaccinations, is an afterthought, as is the story of the band of gypsies tearing up a local field to find the remains of a cousin buried there during the country’s civil war twelve years earlier. It’s rare that I write that a book could have been longer, but Obreht cut herself off too soon and could have tried to tie the four main plot strands together more fully.

Ultimately Obreht’s book reminds me of the two novels by Khaled Hosseini, both strongly symbolic novels that attempt to tell a specific country’s tragic history through smaller narratives, yet both books I enjoyed reading more than I enjoyed pondering after reading them. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with reading for pleasure, but for whatever reason, I prefer novels that stick with me more after I’m done.

Next up: I finally went back and finished Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, which was borderline unreadable, and am about to begin Lush Life, by The Wire writer Richard Price.

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→ September 18, 2012
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Plenty.

I’m not a vegetarian – I like bacon way too much to be so crazy, and duck confit too for that matter, and sushi, so really this isn’t going to work out – but I do believe in eating less meat as part of our overall diets. It’s better for the planet, and it’s better for the wallet, even if you choose, as I do, to spend some of the savings on buying better-quality meat, like grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, or organic chicken. It’s probably better for your health as well, although I think that’s still up in the air. The problem is that a diet based around meat is pretty easy to plan and prepare – most meats can be marinated and grilled, or brined and roasted, or even pan-seared with a quick sauce, without a ton of active work. If you want to eat more vegetables, either with or in place of meat, you need more time and more creativity to make them taste better and fill the void left on the plate by the reduction in animal proteins. Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty: Vibrant Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi, a book of vegetarian recipes written by a chef who eats and cooks with meat, has filled a critical hole in my bookshelf.

Ottolenghi was born in Israel, trained as a chef in London and operates one restaurant, Nopi, and four shops in that city. His food is heavily Mediterranean, although it has strong Turkish, Italian, and Arab roots as well as the obvious Israeli influences, and at the same time grabs from other cuisines around the world, often crossing boundaries – such as his insistence that cilantro has a place in dishes that are fundamentally Italian. Plenty brings that sensibility together with the idea that a vegetable can be the star of the show, filling its pages with potential main courses and luxurious side dishes across the spectrum of vegetables, even stretching into pulses and grains before the book concludes.

I’ve tried a half-dozen recipes from Plenty so far, with broad success overall. The hits included zucchini and hazelnut salad with parmiggiano-reggiano; stuffed zucchini with rice; mushroom ragout with croutons and poached eggs; roasted sweet potato wedges; and caramelized endive with Gruyère, although that latter one suffered slightly from the way the cheese melted right off the endive halves in the oven. In general, Ottolenghi uses every non-meat tool available to boost the flavor of vegetables and make them more suitable for the central role on a vegetarian plate, including spices, herbs, acids, sharp cheeses, yogurt, crème fraiche, and the occasional runny egg. The resulting dishes burst with strong yet balanced flavors and are bright and appealing on the plate, with most recipes within reach of a moderately skilled home chef. The one disappointment, lentil galettes with a lemon-yogurt dressing, wasn’t bad, but even with all of the spices and herbs included in the mix, you’re still left with a plate of lentils, just nicely seasoned ones. Every recipe I tried was clear enough to make substituting ingredients (e.g., swapping out pine nuts because my daughter is allergic to them) simple.

The drawback to Plenty is that the instructions for several recipes don’t seem to have been tested on home stoves. When the text says “simmer gently,” what they actually seem to mean is “boil.” Oven cooking times all seemed too short, even with a thoroughly preheated oven. The book also includes volumetric measurements when weights would be more accurate. It’s a better cookbook for someone with a little more home cooking experience than a beginner would have, but if you’re like me and want to find new ways to get vegetables into your diet, whether as side dishes or as main courses, it’s perfect.

So here’s my take on Plenty‘s stuffed zucchini recipe, tweaking some of the ingredients to suit our tastes and allergies. Removing them from the pan after 40 minutes of cooking was a little tricky because I used very long zucchini, so look for short, wide fruit that will allow you to stuff them without requiring an engineering degree to extract them once they’re done.

Stuffed zucchini
Adapted from Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty

1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
2/3 cup short-grain rice
2 tbsp chopped pecans
2 tbsp minced parsley
½ tsp dried thyme
½ tsp ground cumin
½ tsp ground coriander
¼ tsp ground allspice
3 Tbsp lemon juice
2 wide zucchini, sliced lengthwise
¾ cup boiling water
1½ tsp sugar
1 tsp toasted sesame seeds
about 1 oz Pecorino Romano
salt and black pepper

1. Saute the onion in the oil until translucent but not brown. Add the next seven ingredients, a pinch of salt, plus 2 Tbsp of the lemon juice and cook on low to medium-low heat for five minutes, stirring to avoid sticking, until highly fragrant.

2. Use a spoon to scoop out the centers of the zucchini for stuffing. Place them in a shallow but wide saute pan that is large enough to fit all the zucchini. (You can use more zucchini if they’re small enough to fit in the pan.) Fill them with the rice-onion mixture. Pour the boiling water, sugar, a pinch of salt, and the last tablespoon of lemon juice around the zucchini (but not on top yet).

3. Cover and cook at an active simmer for 30-40 minutes, basting with the cooking liquid several times to allow the rice to cook. They’re ready when the rice is al dente.

4. Plenty suggests serving these cold with yogurt as a sauce, but I liked these hot, topped with sesame seeds, freshly ground black pepper, and shaved Pecorino Romano.

Note: Thicker grains of rice may require more cooking time, so you might parcook them about ten minutes to get them soft before adding to the remainder of the stuffing ingredients. I’d also recommend the same if you wish to use brown rice, although that might require even more pre-cooking.

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→ September 17, 2012
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The Worst Intentions.

I had two pieces go up late last week for Insiders – one on the Yankees’ dimming future and another on Josh Beckett and Lance Lynn.

–

I’ve been blogging a little out of order (and often late) recently, but before I forget I wanted to throw a quick post up on Alessandro Piperno’s 2005 novel The Worst Intentions (Con le peggiori intenzioni), a huge best-seller in Italy that won several major literary prizes there and appeared in English in 2007. Piperno, an Italian writer and literary critic born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, has produced the Italian equivalent to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, equally crude and funny but without Roth’s trademark self-indulgence and with a more satirical eye turned toward the hypocrisy of the protoganist’s family members and friends.

Piperno’s narrator, Daniel Sonnino, is the sexually immature 33-year-old heir to a nonexistent family fortune, squandered by his extravagant and crooked grandfather, Bepy, who, along with Daniel’s father, believes in keeping up appearances over all else. The novel eschews the traditional narrative for a stream-of-consciousness approach to the family history of the Sonninos, chronicling their decline from his grandfather’s bankruptcy and flight from debtors, leaving his family to clean up the mess, to his father, mother (who views the Sonninos as frauds), uncle, and his grandfather’s one-time business partner, cuckolded by Bepy, and whose granddaughter, Gaia, becomes the object of Daniel’s puerile obsessions.

I’m not a fan of Roth’s writing, primarily because I find his central characters so self-absorbed despite their development being so arrested, but Piperno’s Daniel, while still immature both emotionally and sexually, is better able to observe his family from a detached perspective, and can even turn the lens on himself and recognize the impacts of his own failures and his inability to form meaningful relationships. His own worst trait is a sometimes-subtle misogyny that often bubbles over into not-subtle forms, particularly with Gaia, who enjoys having Daniel as a follower but dates the most popular boy in the school – one of the only other Jewish students and Daniel’s best friend. The entire final chapter is devoted to this triangle and its devolution, including Daniel’s own destructive action that follows him for years afterwards, which, given Gaia’s name, is fraught with metaphorical implications as well.

Piperno also separates himself from Roth by populating his book with enjoyably quirky side characters, similar to the way the TV series Arrested Development acquired such a devoted cult following – its narcissistic characters helped create a new genre of television comedy. Piperno’s characters aren’t all so awful; some are merely amusing, such as the Arab waiter who only reads Tolstoy’s War and Peace, over and over, reading nothing else over the last thirty years:

But every time, as he returned those old familly volumes [of Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust], the Arab’s face displayed a slightly fastidious expression, as if to say: “Thank you for the suggestion, my friend, but, you see, once you’ve read War and Peace you are condemned to read nothing else all your life!” And who’s to say that he wasn’t right?

Piperno’s previous book was a work of nonfiction looking at anti-Semitic elements in Marcel Proust’s work, and the Proust influence is strong here both in word choice and in the meandering flow of the story, although Piperno’s sentences and paragraphs aren’t quite so endless as Proust’s. Here he’s taken Proust’s narrative style, merged it with the neurotic realism of Roth, and produced a slightly difficult but clever and incisive work that was worth the effort required to get through it. His subsequent novel, Persecution, was just released in English in July, and its sequel, Inseparabili, won this year’s Premia Strega, the Italian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, so it appears that this book may just be a taste of his capabilities as a writer and satirist.

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→ September 16, 2012
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Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

When I decided seven years ago to try to read every title on the TIME 100, the book that intimidated me most wasn’t The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, or Infinite Jest. It was a 150-page book aimed at children, one I refused to read until it became available in e-book format because I couldn’t be seen reading it in public – Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, in which the title character has to deal with moving to a new school, facing the onset of puberty, and exploring religion in the midst of a family battle over what faith, if any, she should follow.

The book touches on a few themes I’m not really prepared to cover here, including the ardent desire by Margaret and her classmates to get their first periods. (Given what many of the women I know have suffered as a result of this process, this must be the greatest example of “be careful what you wish for” in literary history.)

Blume’s broader theme in the book is about the need to fit in with one’s peers, especially for children approaching such a sensitive stage. Every child character in the book acts in some way on his/her insecurities about fitting in socially or even physically. While the treatment of the one girl in the class who sprouted early (in fourth grade, which would mean she hit puberty at nine) has an obvious resolution to any adult, it matches lessons my wife and I try to teach our daughter when she notices kids picking on other kids at school, that the bully and the victim often both need others’ help.

Even the subplot of Margaret’s search for God or religion works within this broader theme, although in this case Margaret is trying to fit in within her family, where her parents, one raised Jewish and one Christian, don’t practice any religion, while Margaret’s mother is estranged from her parents because of their fury over her marrying a Jewish man. (They eventually make a horribly awkward appearance toward the end of the book, straight out of central casting.) Of all the various strands within the book, this one was the most sophisticated and thoughtful, as Margaret, who generally sees herself as behind her peers, shows a more mature side in her desire to at least understand more about religion and her open-mindedness about the subject.

I appreciated the subtle humor of the book, even though some of it would likely fly over younger readers’ heads. Margaret commenting, without meaning to pick on the boys who haven’t seen their voices drop yet, about music class where “mostly the boys sang alto and the girls sang soprano,” or her grandmother using the expression about Mohammed coming to the mountain in the midst of the family’s battle over religion, or her matter-of-fact observation that her mother can talk her father into anything, each kept the book from becoming dry and preachy with its simplistic morality.

But unlike a lot of classic young adult novels, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret comes across as juvenile to adult eyes, not due to gender differences but because it’s so thinly written. The plot is highly predictable, and the stories are all flimsy enough that you’d have trouble stretching this into more than a half hour of television. Most of the adults in the book are ineffectual, while the boys are mostly creeps (as is the 24-year-old sixth grade teacher who can’t stop staring at the girl who has already hit puberty). It feels like a book you might give your nine-year-old daughter to prep her for a Big Talk, but it’s not the kind of book that’s serious enough to answer any questions on its own. Its main value may be in making its readers feel better about their social anxiety around puberty, changing schools, and generally fitting in with peers, which is worth something, but maybe isn’t as ambitious as the book could have been. None of which made it any less awkward for me to read, although at least now I can cross it off the TIME 100 checklist.

Next up: I just finished Téa Obreht’s Orange Prize-winning The Tiger’s Wife, which blew away my modest expectations.

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→ September 13, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E8.

Is it just me, or is this show kind of limping to the finish? Perhaps it’s the lack of urgency from chefs playing for charity rather than for personal gain or career advancement. I’m not seeing the tension I would expect on Top Chef: Original Recipe.

* Quickfire: The chefs are paired up, Chris and Patricia vs Kerry and Lorena, and must work in tandem with one chef in the pantry and one on the hot line – but with neither chef able to cross to the other side of the kitchen. So that means the chef working pantry must rely on the chef at the stove to fire his/her dish correctly.

* Intelligentsia coffee makes its appearance in the pantry, which is only notable because I made my first visit to one of their shops this morning. The espresso was outstanding, smooth yet with plenty of character – I guess by smooth what I really mean is that the flavor wasn’t interrupted by unwanted bitter notes. I was very impressed and am grateful to reader Stan, who works for Intelligentsia, for hooking me up and joining me for coffee.

* Pretty sure I heard Awful Chris ask Patricia, “do you want water in the salt?” I believe Thomas Keller would approve of that phrasing.

* Patricia was once Chris’ boss, so the two are working very seamlessly and without conflict. Kerry and Lorena aren’t communicating as well, and Lorena ends up frustrated that Kerry blows her dish off to make sure his is cooked correctly. This, it turns out, is also a function of scoring – the judging is based on a single dish, not on a team’s output of two dishes together.

* Patricia, working pantry, chooses to make a tempura-fried tuna dish that cooks for only two minutes, to make it easier for Chris (and, I presume, herself).

* Lorena is making a tom-a-teeeeeeyo sauce. She’s pretty clearly playing that accent up for the camera. It’s like watching Dora. Anyway, her salmon dish ends up incomplete when the rice is never plated, which is apparently Kerry’s fault but I’m not sure why.

* Guest judge: Johnny Avello, who runs a sports book in Vegas that also takes bets on entertainment events, including Top Chef. 

* Chris’ dish: Berber style duck with dates, pine nuts, and mint. Curtis and Johnny both thought Chris could have rendered more fat; Chris chafes at the suggestion, but I’m with the judges here – render more of that fat out so the finished product is mostly crispy skin and duck meat. Duck fat is a glorious cooking medium but you don’t really want a mouthful of it in its solid state.

* Patricia makes a nori and wasabi-crusted tuna with ginger and scallion vinaigrette. I’m guessing this was expertly made but not adventurous enough.

* Kerry: Farfalle with shrimp and a yellow tomato fondue that was “tangy,” so I must have missed an ingredient in the sauce, something like goat cheese or creme fraiche. This was boxed, dried pasta, which is fine for home use but not really what I expect on Top Chef.

* Lorena: seared salmon filet over salsa verde (with tom-a-teeeeeeyos) and an arugula/cherry tomato salad. Johnny says it’s “just salmon.” I don’t see how white rice on the side was going to rescue this dish.

* Kerry’s pasta dish wins, even though Lorena’s dish flopped, and the two split the $5K prize. That’s a bizarre way to judge a team challenge. 

* Elimination challenge: Like Awful Chris, I’d never heard of Diner en blanc before this show. It’s a pop-up dinner party where guests all dress in white and bring the tables, chairs, linens, and so on. The all-white getups push this over the line from cool to pretentious. 

* This dinner party will include 300 guests in the plaza at the Venetian. Each chef will have to serve a three course packable meal to be eaten “picnic style” (yet with silverware and plates, which is rather fancy for a picnic), and each chef is responsible for feeding 75 attendees.

* Lorena going to make a spicy jalapeño chocolate mousse, because, you know, she’s from Latin America, which she might have mentioned before.

* Kerry says he got inspiration for his cold cauliflower soup from Hillary Clinton, who uses it in place of cream. I may have heard this wrong too because that sentence makes zero sense to me. I don’t even get the whole mashed cauliflower in lieu of mashed potatoes thing. You’ll never get the texture right without loading it up with fat and cooking the cauliflower to death (also known as “English-style”). So why not just use potatoes?

* Chris and Patricia are still cooperating, which really pisses off Lorena. Who cares? Shut up and go cash another check from Taco Bell.

* Awful Chris is making a terrine with pork belly and chicken livers, which makes some sense because it’s a dish designed to be eaten cold. But forcemeats are apparently very fussy dishes (I’ve never made one, since no one else in my house would eat it) and Chris even acknowledges the risk involved in rushing one and slicing it before it can chill and set fully.

* Chris pushes Kerry to get his stuff on the cart in time, which Kerry later credits him for doing during judging. I have no objection to seeing cooperation among the chefs, but I think that’s why this show feels so much less dramatic than the regular version.

* Lorena’a three items: huancaina style potato salad with aji amarillo and cilantro; jerk chicken salad with mango and caramelized pine nuts; spicy chocolate mousse with berries and whipped cream. The mousse became too thick and stiff overnight and the chicken salad gets lukewarm reviews. That potato salad does sound like a showstopper and is easily the best-reviewed item in her boxes.

* Patricia tries to do a Silk Road-inspired trio: daikon, edamame, and radish salad with whitebait; Uighur-spiced bison with chili jam; sumac-dusted flatbread with curried cauliflower and red chief lentils. The flatbread grew stale overnight and there are mixed reviews on the bison, with comments that the spice in the jam overwhelmed the meat. James says her dishes were too busy, required too much assembly, and that he wants his binky.

* Awful Chris: swordfish conserva (or confit – he uses both terms) with green beans, tomatoes,and olives; marinated wild mushrooms with toasted pine nuts; pork and chicken liver pâté with hazelnuts and truffles and carrots cooked in … Did he say hay? Everyone raves about the terrine, with the Diner en blanc founder saying it’s one of the best he’s ever eaten. Swordfish may have been slightly overcooked – that fish is so lean it dries out really quickly. I haven’t eaten it in ages because it’s been overfished and can contain more mercury than most other species. So hooray for us destroying the planet.

* Kerry’s French accent sucks. His dishes: cauliflower soup with saffron coulis; green bean and orzo salad with fresh mozzarella and pesto; grilled chicken and kielbasa with peppers and paprika pepper coulis. This sounds the least interesting to me of all the picnics, certainly the least experimental, with two dishes that I could easily recreate at home. Francis, meanwhile, says Kerry swung for the fences. He grilled chicken. That’s not even the right field fence at Yankee Stadium.

* “Robin Leach TV personality” is really its own punch line. 

* Judging: Kerry gets tons of praise, especially that the three dishes worked in a progression. Lorena’s chicken salad was too sweet, her mousse got too thick overnight, the potatoes were great but there was too much sweetness overall. Chris gets raves for the terrine, with Ruth pointing out the sea-forest-land theme across the three dishes. (Chris never says whether that was deliberate.) Ruth didn’t love the chili jam and bison together cold in Patricia’s dish, and overall it sounds like she prepared items that would have been better served hot.

* Awful Chris wins again, another $10K, which I think brings him to $36K total for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.

* James calls Patricia’s salad a “mouthful of bitterness,” and I suppose he would know what that’s like.

* Patricia is eliminated. It’s Understandable, as she didn’t make food that could survive sitting overnight. Chris has to be an overwhelming favorite as the next two best chefs are now gone, although next week’s challenge appears to involve cooking with kids, which seems like a big random variable to include.

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→ September 11, 2012
→ By

Pasta alla carbonara.

I’d made pasta alla carbonara many times, using the recipe from Joy of Cooking or similar recipes that all worked primarily the same way – beat some eggs and toss the pasta in that mixture along with a little reserved pasta water, then adding the grated cheese and some cooked bacon. Even using all the right ingredients – Pecorino Romano and either pancetta or the harder-to-find guanciale – didn’t solve the basic problem of texture. No matter how quickly I moved or how carefully I managed the heat, the sauce would cook unevenly and I’d end up with some bits of sauce scrambling on the bottom of the pan.

As I tried to figure out a reason this might happen aside from user error (always a possibility in my kitchen), I had a small breakthrough while frying eggs for breakfast. The egg white cooks more or less the moment it hits the hot pan, while the cook can control the cooking of the yolk and keep it runny for quite some time. The sauce in pasta alla carbonara might have cooked too fast because I was using the wrong ratio of yolks to whites – instead of one to one, why not use more yolks and fewer whites? It turns out that it’s wrong to think of carbonara as a sauce. It’s a custard, and the texture of the finished sauce should be comparable to slightly melted gelato (itself a custard, just with a small amount of air beaten into it).

This turned out to be a one of the two major adjustments I made to the recipe while experimenting with the ratios. The other involves the pasta water. Most recipes that call for pasta water use it for its thickening power (it contains starch from the pasta itself, as well as some of the salt you added before adding the pasta), or to thin out a sauce that might otherwise be too thick. In this case, however, I decided to reserve twice as much of this water as the various recipes called for, and then used some of that to deglaze the pan in which I rendered and crisped the pancetta, imparting substantially more bacon-y flavor to the finished sauce.

Pasta alla carbonara is often served in the United States with long, thin shapes like fettuccini or spaghetti, but I prefer to go with shorter tube-shaped pastas with ridged exteriors. The tube shape allows the pasta to grab some of the smaller pieces of bacon in the sauce, and the sauce clings more easily to shapes with ridged exteriors, like penne or rigatoni. You can use whatever kind you like, of course, but I do think the shape and the sauce need to work together, and long, smooth shapes just leave too much sauce at the bottom of the bowl.

So, the summary:
* Use more yolks and fewer whole eggs
* Use real pancetta (or the similar guanciale) and Pecorino Romano
* Deglaze the bacon pan with pasta water
* Choose the right pasta shape
* Work quickly once you begin constructing the sauce in the pasta pot
* Don’t add anything else – that means no cream, no butter, no chicken, no vegetables, nothing. The sauce is the star and this is a one-man show.

And, finally, I don’t want to hear about how unhealthful this dish is. I’m not suggesting you make this every night. This is peasant food for the soul.

½ pound penne, rigatoni, or similar shape
3 egg yolks
1 whole egg
¾ cup Pecorino Romano cheese, finely grated
About 75 grams of pancetta or guanciale, finely chopped for rendering (this was about 3 thick slices for me)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Hardware: Pasta pot, saute pan, tempered glass measuring cup, strainer, long-handled wooden spoon or heatproof plastic tongs

1. Render the bacon in the saute pan. I prefer the method from the indispensable Ruhlman’s Twenty, in which you just barely cover the meat with water in the pan, put the lid on, and heat it on high until the water’s gone, reducing the heat as the bacon sizzles and browns. You can do this as you cook the pasta as long as the pancetta is done ahead of time. Drain and reserve the rendered fat, and reserve the meat, but do not clean the pan.
2. Cook the pasta according to the package directions, making sure to use plenty of water and salt it aggressively before adding the pasta.
3. Beat the eggs together until homogenous.
4. Here’s where things speed up.
a) When the pasta is just barely al dente, use the measuring cup to remove a cup of the pasta water. Use ¼ to ½ cup to deglaze the hot saute pan, scraping the bottom to clean it. Hold this water in the pan for now; it can simmer but don’t let it boil.
b) Drain the pasta and return it to the pot, off heat, tossing with enough of the bacon fat to just barely coat the pasta and keep it from sticking together.
c) Add the eggs to the pasta along with the deglazing liquid and stir or toss aggressively. Don’t let the sauce sit at the bottom of the pan. You want this to get warm, about 160 degrees F, but never hot.
d) Once the pasta is coated and the egg/water sauce is warm, add ½ cup of the cheese and toss. Then add the bacon, toss again, and season with freshly ground black pepper. Serve with the remaining cheese as an optional garnish.

The remaining pasta water has two purposes. One is to thin the sauce in the pot if it’s looking too thick. The other is to thin the sauce if it’s been sitting for a few minutes before anyone can get a second helping; this sauce thickens (or maybe just contracts) as it cools.

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