→ May 26, 2012
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Ludivine in Oklahoma City + the Saturday five.

I was only in Oklahoma City for about 36 hours, as everything that could have gone wrong for me on Wednesday did, but I at least salvaged the day with an outstanding experience at Ludivine, a farm-to-table restaurant in downtown OKC.

Ludivine’s menu changes daily depending on what ingredients they’ve acquired, with everything except seafood and a few cheeses sourced locally. The dishes are highly creative in the way they layer flavors and use ingredients in unconventional ways, such as the rabbit liver vinaigrette on my salad, or the blueberry thyme bread pudding served with the crispy sweetbread (which I didn’t try).

I started with a charcuterie plate – they make most of it in-house, and I spotted Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie on their bookshelf – including their pork rillette, duck speck, and house-cured salmon. The rillette was very tender, held together with bacon fat, but a little underseasoned for me, so it needed help from the whole-grain mustard and homemade pickles provided on the plate. The paper-thin salmon needed nothing else, not even the hit of acid I usually crave when I eat cured or smoked salmon, among the best dishes of its kind I’ve had. Speck is a smoked product usually made from the pig’s hind leg or thigh, like prosciutto, but Ludivine uses duck breast instead; the resulting product was salty and very smoky, pairing well with the blackberry-tarragon “marmalade” also provided on the platter but too strong to eat on its own. (Nitpick: It’s not marmalade without citrus rind, unless we’re speaking a language other than English.)

The aforementioned salad had the freshest mustard greens and arugula I’ve ever had from any place other than my own gardens – they defined the color “green” – as well as half-inch wide lardons (chunks of bacon) that had been quickly fried to crisp them up and a generous shaving of grana Padano cheese (Parmiggiano-Reggiano that was made in the Padua region, so it must go by another name). The rabbit-liver dressing had a peculiar texture, not grainy, almost muddy, but it may have simply stood out because I’d never had a dressing like it before. The flavor was very subtle, and next to the bacon, cheese, and two peppery greens, the vinaigrette was just a background note.

I went with another starter rather than a full entree, trying bone marrow for the first time – which means I have nothing to which to compare the dish. The marrow bone was cut in half the long way, roasted to brown the top but leave the interior pink, and served with more whole-grain mustard and a lightly pickled shallot; the marrow meat was luxuriously soft, obviously fatty, but bright and mild in flavor, more like a fresh butter than a heavy meat. I have no idea if this was a great marrow dish or not, however, only that I enjoyed it.

For dessert, the salted caramel crème brulee was tempting, but even I have my limits when it comes to saturated fat, and went instead for the fresh strawberries (lightly sugared) and blueberries … served in fresh cream, of course. The strawberries were good, but the blueberries were perfect, and that cream was a reminder that the stuff we get in paper cartons in the store is a mere facsimile of the genuine article. (Organic Valley’s pasture-raised cream comes fairly close, though.)

I’ll give Ludivine bonus points for that bookshelf as well, since it also included The Flavor Bible and my friend Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I felt like my own cookbook collection was partially validated.

Total cost of the meal was around $50 including tip but no drink (I was too tired for alcohol), well worth it between the meal and the chance to support the local food industry. This is real food, sourced right and prepared right.

—

To the links…

A WSJ piece on the rising use of “spent grains,”, the solid matter left over during the brewing process after the wort is strained. They apparently make excellent bread.

From the New York Times, a mini-memoir piece called “All I Wanted Was for Alice Waters to Feed Me,” excerpted from author Daniel Duane’s new cooking memoir.

Slate’s Josh Levin argues (correctly) that colleges shouldn’t be allowed to yank athletic scholarships.

TIME‘s Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and one of the two minds behind their top 100 novels list in 2005, argues that genre fiction is disruptive technology, in an essay of which I think Jasper Fforde would approve. Indeed, Wilkie Collins was among the earliest practicioners of what is now called genre fiction, and his mentor was none other than Charles Dickens.

Should a university – or anyone, for that matter – be allowed to patent a cut of steak? Obviously not, although I find it more galling that a public university is trying to do it. Then again, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been busy approving nonsense patents for about fifteen years, so I’m not optimistic that they’ll reject this one.

Bonus link, from my friend Rene Saggiadi: ten “Italian” food facts that aren’t authentically Italian. I didn’t know about the Feast of the Seven Fishes, but we also didn’t have that tradition in my family.

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→ May 23, 2012
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Sherlock, season two.

Season two of Sherlock, which just aired here in the U.S. for the first time, turned out to be even stronger than season one, in part because the characters are so well developed, and in part because the bromance between Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman) seems so natural at this point, as if the two actors have been doing this for years. The only real negative of the season is that it will be so long before we see a third set of episodes, especially on this side of the Atlantic. (My writeup on season one went up in February.)

As in the first season, the middle episode was somewhat weaker than the two surrounding it, with the first episode the strongest of the troika. Irene Adler’s dominatrix character is fascinating – with her clothes on or off, it’s all good, really – and the tense flirtations between her and Holmes were absolutely electric, even though it’s clear he has (or will simply admit to) no interest in sex with her. The crime he’s solving is almost secondary, and she seemed a more convincing adversary than Moriarty because her methods of social engineering are so foreign to Holmes. An American police procedural would have played up her professional life, whereas this episode focuses instead on layers of intrigue and the aforementioned dialogue between the two main characters.

The second episode, derived from the one full-length Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, takes the setting and some core elements of the original story and adds a host of modern twists, including a play on our worst fears about our governments and their research into weapons of mass destruction. The solution hinged on Holmes guessing a password rather impossibly quickly, which I’d peg as a copout; it’s a neat trick, but not that likely on the first try, and any decent network security setup would lock an account after an attempt or two. (Wouldn’t the modern Holmes carry a cracking program on a USB drive? Or is that too easy?)

The final episode, “The Reichenbach Fall,” brings an unexpectedly early confrontation between Holmes and his nemesis, Jim Moriarty, played diabolically by whats-his-face, clearly having the time of his life. Based on the story “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes originally dies, only to have it later revealed that he merely faked his death after public outcry forced Conan Doyle to hit control-Z, “Reichenbach” turns the tables and puts Moriarty on the offensive, destroying Holmes’ life from the inside-out with a cleverly plotted, intricate trap, from which Holmes can extricate himself only through his own death – or so it appears. The whole detective-as-suspect plot device is quite hackneyed at this point, but I’ll give the writers points for the Richard Brook twist, and for crafting the scheme so tightly that Holmes does indeed appear to be trapped when we reach the final clash between the two antagonists. I’ll get to the end of this episode, the subject of much speculation online (which won’t be answered until next year as the show becomes victim of its own success), later on, to avoid spoiling anything for those of you who haven’t seen it.

This season felt faster and tighter than the first one, which I think is in large part because the three episodes in season one had to spend time introducing us to the main characters and developing their relationships with each other. Cumberbatch and Freeman have a very easy chemistry and superb timing, enhanced by British series’ willingness to keep the pace up rather than slow it down to accommodate an audience looking for large print and short chapters. It feels like smart television because it is smart television, rapid-fire, witty, and demanding. It should have you talking long after each episode is done. To wit…

–

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing the end of season two, episode three below. Just stop reading if you haven’t seen it.

Seriously, go away.

For those of you who have seen it, it seems like some suspected elements of Sherlock’s faked suicide are, if not obvious, quite likely to be true. We have Sherlock’s conversation with Molly, where he says he expects he’s going to die and needs her help, a plea that remains unresolved at the end of the episode but that we know would be fulfilled because Molly is inexplicably smitten with the great detective. We have the flatbed truck that starts up the moment Sherlock’s body is about to hit the pavement. And we have the cyclist who hits Dr. Watson at the moment he’s about to cross the street to see to his friend, leaving Watson on the ground and quite groggy when he stands up. I submit that the grogginess is the fourth clue.

Here’s my theory, although it is a bit tinfoilhatty: Sherlock landed in the truck and threw a cadaver, supplied by Molly and rigged to bleed from the head on impact, to the sidewalk, obscured from witnesses by the truck. The cyclist clocked Dr. Watson and somehow drugged him – perhaps a gas like that from the previous episode – so that he wouldn’t be able to properly examine or even identify Sherlock. (That gas would make him suggestible, meaning one member of the crowd could also have been a plant from Sherlock, there simply to tell Dr. Watson it was Sherlock’s body and that he was dead.) This would explain Sherlock’s confession to Dr. Watson, which was wildly out of character for him – it was an act, yet one that, oddly, didn’t set off any alarms in his only friend’s mind.

This leaves a few unanswered questions: Why was Molly, who was on Moriarty’s radar after they had a few lunch dates (seriously, Molly, are there no other fish in the English sea?), omitted from the final hit list, while Holmes’ landlady and Lestrade were included? Who notified the other two shooters (we can assume the hitman assigned to Dr. Watson witnessed the suicide) that Sherlock was presumed dead? Why did the kidnap victim scream upon seeing Sherlock’s face? And, really, why did Moriarty kill himself? I believe he is actually dead, as Moriarty dies in the original story, “The Final Problem,” that inspired this episode. I can’t imagine the writers deviating that far from the source material, and the Moriarty character, who only appeared in two of the original stories anyway, is pretty well played out from here. But why would he die of his own hand, leaving himself unable to witness Holmes’ final humiliation?

Feel free to discuss any of these spoilers or questions in the comments; I assume anyone who’s made it this far has already seen the full season.

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→ May 23, 2012
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The Man Who Loved Children.

Louie, delighted, ran downstairs. Whenever her irritations got too deep, she mooched in to see her mother. Here, she had learned, without knowing she had learned it, was a brackish well of hate to drink from, and a great passion of gall which could run deep and still, or send up waterspouts, that could fret and boil, or seem silky as young afternoon, something that put iron in her soul and made her strong to resist the depraved healthiness and idle jollity of the Pollit clan.

Christina Stead’s 1940 novel The Man Who Loved Children, a fictionalized memoir of what was apparently a brutal childhood with her famous biologist father, David George Stead, lay virtually unknown for over two decades before a 1965 reprint, featuring an introduction by poet Randall Jarrell, earned critical accolades and established the book in academic circles. The book appeared on the TIME list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, and Jonathan Franzen has called the book a “masterpiece,” unsurprising given the book’s obvious influence on his own novel of dysfunctional family life, The Corrections.

Whereas Franzen’s book at least had humor, Stead’s novel is a bleak tale of psychological abuse and neglect stemming from an ill-advised marriage between a man, the egomaniacal Samuel Pollit, and his second wife, Henrietta “Henny.” Louisa, Sam’s daughter from his first marriage, is a primary target of Henny’s while suffering under the thumb of her father, while the couple’s six children all suffer more from the couple’s inability to live within their means or otherwise provide for the children.

Sam is a loudmouthed tyrant, a fatuous narcissist who believes himself to be a great philosopher who is destined for greatness, yet is despised by co-workers and loathed by his shrewish wife, not without reason on both counts. He preaches – mostly to his own children – that all men are brothers, and equal, and should be on equal footing, yet has some very peculiar views on who exactly qualifies under those statutes:

Suicide ought to be recognized and permitted, for a person was captain of his own life. Murder of the unfit, incurable, and insane should be permitted. Children born mentally deficient or diseased should be murdered, and none of these murders would really be a crime, for the community was benefited, and the good of the whole was the aim of all, or should be. Murder might be beautiful, a self-sacritifce, a sacrifice of someone near and dear, for the good of others – I can conceive of such a thing, Looloo!

He speaks to his children in a patois of babytalk, fake German accents, and an imitation of poor African-Americans that reads like the verbal equivalent of blackface. He accepts a six-month assignment in southeast Asia, leaving his wife largely to fend for herself during that period, only to return to find that his enemies at work have begun to plot his ouster – a vendetta he refuses to fight, claiming virtue but showing little more than cowardice. He’s a fraud, unaware of his falseness, who takes out his frustrations on his wife and children while feeding his voracious ego on the unquestioning admiration of his offspring.

Henny came from some money, only to find her wasteful husband ready to squander what she brought to the marriage and unable to provide for all of the children he seems to force her to have – yet one of her coping mechanisms is to hurl abuse at Sam, at Louisa, and even sometimes at her own children, including frequent threats to harm herself, Sam, and the children. She should elicit some sympathy as the victim of an emotionally abusive husband, a state that explains some of her behavior (particularly around money, which she remains inept at managing), yet her willingness to empty her well of hatred on the innocent children, especially her stepdaughter, exhausts any compassion the reader might have developed for her earlier in the novel.

Louisa stands in for Stead, who, like Louisa, lost her mother when she was two and lived with a stepmother who (she claims) never liked her. If there’s any positive storyline in the book, it’s the slow emergence of Louisa from the torpor of her home life, which gradually descends into shameful poverty, into a modest awakening and realization that she’d be better off on her own, without her parents. (How she achieves that is one of the book’s few surprises, one I won’t spoil.) Her character is little more than a punching bag for the first half to two-thirds of the book, yet she’s actually the central character; Sam and Henny don’t develop, because they’re long past the point where they might change, and are so blinded by contempt of each other that they have dug into their respective trenches and will engage in grinding warfare until one side capitulates through death. Louisa can and will evolve, thanks to outside influences that help her discover that her father is, indeed, a fraud, even a monster. The oldest of Sam and Henny’s kids, Ernie, comes to a similar realization but plays a supporting character as Louisa takes the lead in the novel’s climactic final two chapters.

As you might imagine from the descriptions above, The Man Who Loved Children is a terribly arduous read. Sam’s affected speech to his children is unreadable, for the difficulty in parsing the gobbledygook but more for the incredible condescension it entails, for how he uses the language to keep the children in his thrall and attempt to deny them their emotional maturity – they can’t grow up if I don’t talk to them like young adults. (For the record, my wife and I have never talked down to our daughter like that; there’s a clear line between being silly and stunting your child’s verbal and emotional growth.) But the arguments, the vile language, the outright abuse – especially that heaped on Louisa – was excruciating to read. This book was work, and I’m not sure the payoff was really worth it.

Next up: Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, two short novels in one volume that also served as the inspiration for the film Cabaret.

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→ May 19, 2012
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Too Big to Fail + the Saturday Five.

I posted some notes on Red Sox and Cleveland high-A prospects yesterday (from a game on Wednesday), and my first mock draft of 2012 went up on Tuesday. I also chatted on Thursday.

I finally finished the audiobook of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail, an exhaustively researched look at the 2008 financial crisis from the perspective of executives inside the various investment banks that were teetering on the brink of collapse, as well as the perspectives of the various government executives trying to stave off a depression. It is an outstanding work of investigation, compiled from what I assume is an enormous number of sources, but the result did very little to explain the causes of the crisis (as in, how did these very bright bankers end up in such stupid positions?) and was a very dull, clinical listen.

By comparison, I listened to an audio version of Michael Lewis’ first book on the subject, The Big Short, which looked at the crisis from the perspectives of several investors who saw it coming and reaped huge rewards, and while it’s not as thorough and is significantly shorter, it was far more entertaining and yet also went more into the causes of the meltdown. Lewis is a fantastic prose writer, and even if that book shared some of the, um, sharpening tendencies he showed in Moneyball (the book, not the film), making his villains a little too villanous (even Lewis’ mother says of her son, “he never lies, but he tends to exaggerate a little”), it did more to at least start to explore some of the questions around how these large investment banks and AIG ended up in a state of virtual default. (Lewis’ heroes, and others like them, made the disaster more disastrous by betting on its inevitability, so their heroism is probably up for debate.)

Sorkin’s book concerns itself more with the egos of the players atop the major investment banks as they’re collapsing – Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, even commercial banks like Wachovia – and the quick, if not always perfect, thinking of Tim Geithner (then President of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve) and Henry “Hank” Paulsen (then Secretary of the Treasury, later succeeded by Geithner). I can’t fathom the amount of work that went into reconstructing all of these meetings and conversations … but the result is so clinical that it kept losing my attention. Sorkin’s retelling took some very dramatic events and made them feel drawn-out and dry. Maybe that’s a function of his prose; I’m more inclined to think we ended up with more detail than we needed.

The links…

Can you call a 9-year-old a psychopath? That piece, from the New York Times, might be one of the best articles I’ll read all year. Terrifying in its implications, yet thorough and quite neutral in its approach.

Preparing fugu, or blowfish, the deadly Japanese fish dish which most of you probably know from an early Simpsons episode. Japan is easing the requirements for chefs to earn licenses to prepare it.

This Tuesday’s special edition of the BBC Newshour podcast – the only podcast to which I subscribe – focused on the Bo Xilai affair, and it is a tremendous work of impartial analysis with enough context to get you up to speed. (Link is to the mp3 file itself.)

I had the debut of the Food Network series Restaurant Stakeout, featuring my favorite Vegas restaurant, Firefly, saved on the DVR, but after watching it for 20 minutes last weekend I turned it off in disgust. Turns out I had good reason to dislike the show, as there are serious allegations that the ‘reality’ show is largely staged.

I’m excited about Freshpaper, a small sheet of paper that naturally inhibits the growth of fungi on fresh produce, but its backstory is also quite interesting. Buying fresh berries, even in this dry climate, usually means eating half of it and throwing the other half in the compost bin. I just placed a small order and will report back on how it works.

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→ May 12, 2012
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Saturday five, 5/12/12.

Reminder: My first first-round projection for the 2012 Rule 4 Draft goes up on Tuesday. This should be interesting, with the first overall pick still very much up in the air.

Several folks have asked about the homemade chipotle mayo recipe I mentioned as my favorite sauce for fried foods; it’s just the mayonnaise recipe from Ruhlman’s Twenty (also found in his earlier book Ratio), with one or two chipotle peppers, pureed with 1-3 tsp of the adobo sauce from the can, blended into it. I love this on everything from French fries to quinoa fritters.

Two albums I’ve been listening to over the last week: Of Monsters and Men’s full-length debut My Head Is An Animal (currently $5 through that amazon link) and Portugal. The Man’s In The Mountain In The Cloud (in spite of one of the worst band names I’ve ever heard).

To the five six links…

* Massachusetts wants to outlaw food waste – at least, putting it in the trash. First restaurants and eventually residences will have to either compost or recycle it for use in biogas facilities. I’m sympathetic to the philosophy, but the cost to implement this is going to be huge – and the risk of spreading disease, especially in the summer, is substantial.

* This is old, but showed up on my Twitter feed this week: Kenji over at Serious Eats’ Food Lab says you can caramelize onions in fifteen minutes. It may just be the lighting, but those last two photos look like the onions started to burn. If any of you have tried this method, I’d be curious to hear how you fared.

* The New Yorker had one of the most even-handed takes on Obama’s public support of marriage equality this week. I doubt this is any surprise to anyone here, but I fully support equal rights for all Americans regardless of sexual orientation or gender identification.

* The distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge is, according to this op ed, a fiction.

* An NPR story on the restored vegetable gardens at Monticello, thanks in part to painstaking research into what Jefferson (an avid gardener and vegetable eater) actually grew.

* An interview with Phoenix food icon Chris Bianco. I’ve met Chris once, chatted for two or three minutes, and this interview is pretty much what he sounded like in person. “The whole point is to have fucking fun.” Amen, brother.

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→ May 11, 2012
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Waverley.

Yesterday’s Klawchat transcript is up. Next post from me will be a projection of the first round of this year’s Rule 4 Draft, going up Tuesday.

—

Walter Scott’s Waverley has earned praise from a diverse group of writers from Jane Austen to the Marxist philosopher György Lukács and was 84th on Daniel Burt’s Novel 100, all based on its status as one of the first historical novels as well as a major social document about the second-class status of Scottish people within the United Kingdom during the 1700s. Perhaps it’s my modern sensibilities or merely my age showing, but I found Waverley‘s dated prose an incredibly slow read, for the language itself, for the bland story, and for Scott’s circuitous route to every point, no matter how minor.

The novel revolves around the title character, a sort of latter-day Tom Jones whose adventures are less bawdy and more political, as he becomes wrapped up in the Jacobite rebellion and ends up fighting for Charles the Pretender in his failed attempt to restore the Stuarts to the throne. Edward Waverley is more or less cast aside by his ambitious biological father and reared instead by a Jacobite-leaning uncle who gives his ward a cursory education and encourages him to join the army to find a vocation befitting his birth. On leave from the army, he finds himself introduced first to a band of Highland bandits and then to the chieftain Fergus Mac-Ivor, who leads one of the units in the ragtag revolutionary army seeking to install the young Charles as king. It’s all a hell of a lot less interesting than this sounds, though, as the title character has very little personality of his own and is as much witness as participant in the major historical events within the book.

Waverley, fundamentally a work of historical fiction (the subtitle is “’Tis Sixty Years Since”), incorporates elements of the picaresque through side characters, from Miss Nosebag, all up in everybody’s business, to the fatuous Baron Bradwardine, who peppers his speech with bons mots from sundry foreign tongues. That makes the book a little lighter, but it’s never actually funny, and the funny-name characters (according to Roger Ebert, funny names themselves are never funny) delivery some pretty obvious jokes. The book needed some levity amidst all the grandstanding about English oppression in ol’ Caledonia and a rather uninteresting love triangle, but one-joke side characters don’t cut it.

Scott strongly emphasizes Scottish history, culture, and even dialects, sprinkling the book with Scottish-English vernacular and rendering many characters’ speech phonetically, which served as yet another obstacle to working through his sentences. He originally published the novel anonymously despite his established reputation as a poet, likely because he didn’t want to be associated with the work of verbal quicksand he’d produced. (He failed, as writers and critics apparently recognized his voice immediately.) I understand that the subject matter and his even-handed treatment of both peasants and gentry would have seemed novel at the time, but 200 years later it’s unremarkable and didn’t do anything to sustain my interest.

Perhaps I’m the last person to criticize an author for long sentences, but I imagine Scott served as an inspiration for Proust, or perhaps an excuse (“Well, if Wally Scott could go 60 words between periods, why can’t I go 80?”). The length of the sentences, the heavy use of dialect and phonetic spellings, and the fact that long stretches of the book go by with nothing happening made it a tough slog – in fact, I started reading it in the fall of 2010, put it back on the shelf, and started over last week. If it wasn’t on the Novel 100 I probably would have given up a second time, this one for good.

Next up: I just finished Graham Greene’s tragicomic spy novel The Honorary Consul this morning.

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→ May 8, 2012
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50/50.

My ranking of the top 100 draft prospects for 2012 went up earlier today for Insiders. Twenty-two of them now have full scouting repots, with more to go up over the rest of the month.

—

Last year’s independent comedy 50/50 seems to have garnered little notice outside of some positive reviews, even though it’s quite funny and never as depressing as the premise would indicate (and perhaps not as dark as it should have been). Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a 28-year-old public radio reporter who discovers that a pain in his lower back is actually caused by a tumor on his spine, a rare form of cancer with a survival rate that gives the film its title – yet despite that morbid plot, the film mines substantial humor from all aspects of its protagonist’s experience.

Adam is in a dysfunctional relationship with a somewhat self-centered artist when he gets his diagnosis, but it’s his best friend Kyle (played by Seth Rogen) who rallies, with well-intentioned if not always well-executed attempts to keep Adam’s spirits up through the diagnosis and treatment. Adam’s girlfriend, who doesn’t seem to be that into him before he gets the news, isn’t quite up to the task (and is easily the film’s worst-drawn character, although neither of the other two female characters is all that well fleshed-out), while his therapist, Katherine, is still in grad school and is lost when her sessions with Adam veer off script, and his mother, played affectingly by an almost unrecognizable Angelica Houston, is mostly around to get on Adam’s nerves.

Gordon-Levitt carried Brick and was superb in a minor part in Inception, so it’s no surprise to see him excel here as an overly sensitive, slightly meek guy who gradually comes out of his shell while facing his own mortality. But Rogen, who helped produce the film (based on the true story of the experiences of Rogen’s friend, writer Will Reiser, with a similar cancer diagnosis), stole more scenes than anyone else as the loud, boorish, very crude best friend who also happens to care more for Gordon-Levitt’s character than anyone else in the film, even more than Rachael. I’m sure Adam’s mother cares for him, but she only appears in a handful of scenes and is more of a nuisance than a loving parent until the very end of the film – and even then, Kyle takes center stage when the doctor discusses the results of the last procedure. (I wonder if Reiser was working out his issues through the script here, or how his mother felt about her portrayal.) Anna Kendrick fares much better here than in Up in the Air, putting her great talents for appearing flummoxed and looking vulnerably cute to much better use here as Adam’s therapist, yet she’s still overshadowed by Rogen’s character and ends up short on screen time given how important her character is to the plot.

The problem with 50/50 is that it’s only a witty dark comedy, nothing more. The cancer is merely a plot device for exposing how the patient’s relationships with friends and family change once he receives the diagnosis – but only the humorous aspects of the changes, not the subtleties. I have no problem with cancer being played for a laugh, but when the film was over, I thought of a dozen ways in which the film had fallen short, from Mark’s father’s dementia to the way the film made chemo almost seem easy to the fact that every female character was two-dimensional. It’s a funny film, and it’s a well-acted film, but the script was too superficial for it to have any lasting impact with me.

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→ May 5, 2012
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Saturday five … er, eleven, 5/5/12.

I chatted on Friday, and wrote a piece on the Royals’ poor start on Tuesday and on the Yankees’ next move after Rivera’s injury yesterday. My top 100 rankings for this year’s draft will go up on Tuesday, May 8th, with a first-round projection to follow on the 15th.

Since I couldn’t post a Saturday five last week (I was barely online all weekend), here are eleven links of note for the week:

* The New Yorker on close, or too-close, ties between Stanford and Silicon Valley, and on the death of Adam “MCA” Yauch.

* Ernest Hemingway writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald after reading one of my all-time favorite novels, Tender is the Night.

* No, there is no ”Curse of Chief Wahoo”, but this overtly racist image – and the racist team nickname that goes along with it – should be retired as relics of an intolerant age best relegated to the historical dustbin.

* An excerpt from Jeff Himmelman’s upcoming book about whether Woodward and Bernstein used a grand juror as one of their sources on the Watergate scandal.

* I’m not comfortable with an athletics staffer at a state university actively campaigning for discrimination against members of the LGBT community. Fortunately, neither is my colleague Gene Wojciechowski, who wrote a piece about Nebraska’s assistant football coach, Ron Brown. The Kansas City Star has also weighed in with a similar yet more pointed op ed ahead of Brown’s anticipated testimony Monday against an anti-discrimination bill.

* Another interview with the Days of Wonder guys about putting Ticket to Ride on the iPad.

* Over 100 major California chefs have signed a petition opposing the state’s upcoming foie gras ban, while proposing more humane standards for raising geese and ducks for foie gras production. I think Alton Brown said it best on Twitter:

And he didn’t mention all the unnecessary, “prophylactic” antibiotics we shove down animals’ throats.

* NPR weighs in, rationally, on the small controversy over ”tuna scrape,”, responsible for over 200 cases of salmonella over the last two weeks. My issue with tuna scrape, and spicy tuna rolls in general, is that you’re not getting high-quality fish. The point of sushi and sashimi is to appreciate the fish itself; in spicy tuna rolls or similar preparations, the fish can be of very low quality and you’ll never know the difference. Don’t trust any meat item where the cook can hide substandard product under other ingredients, like a spicy sauce.

* Mark Bittman of the New York Times weighs in on the brewing fight over school-provided breakfasts, and how Big Food wants to further enrich itself by delivering junk food to food-insecure schoolchildren.

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→ May 1, 2012
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Las Vegas eats, 2012.

I was in Vegas with the family for a good friend’s 40th birthday weekend (or, as we chose to put it, her 39.99999….th birthday), and managed to sneak in two meals at places I can recommend.

Border Grill, located in Mandalay Bay near the hotel’s aquarium, first came to my attention via Top Chef Masters, where Mary Sue Milliken, one of the restaurant’s two founding chefs, won one of season three’s least ridiculous challenges (the fast-food challenge) with a recipe for quinoa fritters that I’ve made probably a dozen times at home since the show first aired. As it turns out, the Border Grill added quinoa fritters to the menu, which was enough to get us to try the restaurant since it’s the rare food item all three of us love.

Those fritters were excellent, larger than I expected and much softer inside without losing any of the crisp exterior – clearly I need to cook my quinoa a little longer, or with more liquid, before cooling it to make the fritters. They’re served with a mildly spicy aji amarillo aioli (although I find they work even better with a homemade chipotle mayonnaise, since the fritters themselves are so mild in flavor). We ended up ordering only smaller plates because the fritters can be so filling – two plates of fritters, one of green corn tamales, and a ceviche duo. The tamales were very sweet with a soft, rustic texture, rather than the mealy masa texture of most of the tamales I’ve ever had. The ceviche duo was half successful; the Peruvian style ceviche, with garlic and ginger, served on a tortilla chip, was phenomenal, but the baja ceviche was overwhelmed by one ingredient – I think it was mustard – and the fish just disappeared under the sauce. I like raw fish preparations that highlight the freshness of the fish itself, but between that heavy sauce and the fine dice of the fish, I couldn’t even tell what the fish was, while the Peruvian version was much more balanced (aside from perhaps a little too much red onion). My daughter also had a quesadilla that was clearly made with a fresh homemade tortilla; I’d offer her opinion, but I don’t think she’s ever met a quesadilla she didn’t like.

The dessert special of the day was mango upside-down cake, served with a quenelle of mango sorbet, and I don’t see why that isn’t a regular menu item printed in large bold letters; the cake was a little sticky-sweet on its own, but if you could get the sorbet and cake all together in one bite, the tanginess of the sorbet (from orange juice, I think) balanced out that sweetness so that the predominant flavor was mango rather than sugar and butter. I happen to love mangos for their complexity – they’re sweet, but with a savory component that reminds me of carrots, so you don’t find yourself beaten over the head with sweetness – and this cake highlighted the fruit perfectly.

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I also took the family to Cafe Bouchon, located in the Venetian, for Sunday brunch and ordered something I hadn’t tried before, Bouchon’s take on chicken and waffles, not exactly authentic but one of the most memorable breakfast items I’ve ever had. The chicken is roasted rather than fried, a half bird, the breast still moist, the skin a rich brown and well seasoned, with a hunter’s sauce (a brown sauce made from red wine and mushrooms) on the side. The waffles contained bacon and chives and were airy and crispy and probably contained about a pound of butter, but really, waffles are supposed to have too much fat for any reasonable diet, because that’s what makes them awesome. Bouchon also had a special beignet of the day, filled with raspberry filling that tasted not of sugar but of fresh raspberries, the type of detail I’d expect from a restaurant founded by a chef known for his meticulous approach to cooking. We overordered a little bit, in part because my daughter came down with a cold and we just wanted to ensure there would be something on the table she’d like, but there was nothing on the table – not even the apricot jam or the fresh epi-shaped country bread – that was less than perfect. One caution: It ain’t cheap, but it is decadent.

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→ April 26, 2012
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Husk, Vin Rouge, Customshop.

Today’s Klawchat transcript, and today’s Baseball Today podcast.

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Husk, located in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, was named the best new restaurant in the country for 2011 by Bon Appetit magazine, just the best of a host of accolades earned by chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s). I had lunch at Husk, which isn’t the full experience (with a very different menu from what they serve for dinner), but loved their local-seasonal-artisanal approach to traditional southern cuisine.

Husk has a giant blackboard right by the podium showing where the restaurant obtained all of its main ingredients, from proteins to dairy to eggs, with most sources quite local, in either South or North Carolina. I overordered a little, but rational portion sizes meant I didn’t end up with a ton of food left over. The catfish, lightly dusted with cornmeal and quickly panfried, served over a broth of tomatoes, several beans (including lima beans), and pea shoots, was superb, easily the best catfish I’ve ever eaten, with none of the ‘fishy’ flavor most people would associate with that fish, instead playing up what a mild, slightly sweet-tasting fish it can be when sourced properly. The skillet of bacon cornbread was also superb, rich, crispy on the bottom from the skillet and the bacon fat, with flecks of bacon throughout; this may have been gauche, but I found it quite useful for dipping in the tomato broth underneath the fish. For dessert, Husk had a special item, a blueberry crisp with local berries, a very thin layer of buckwheat granola on top, and a quenelle of lemon ice cream; overall the dish was far less sweet than most desserts, with a tangy/sweet combination that kept the blueberries at the center of the dish.

Service overall was very attentive, if a little peculiar. When I told the server it was my first time at the restaurant and asked for her recommendations, she actually recommended the cheeseburger, saying it was “the best thing on the menu.” That may be true, but is that really what I’m here for? I’ll get a burger at a great burger place. I went to Husk for the chef’s innovations in southern food. And I hope eventually to get back there for dinner, preferably with a few months’ notice so I can actually get a reservation.

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A few weeks back, I had a postgame meal in Durham at Vin Rouge, another discovery from Bon Appetit because the restaurant had participated in a charity dinner in Raleigh that was covered by the magazine. I tweeted at the time that their bacon confiture – a bacon, onion, brown sugar confection served with thick slices of country bread – was on the short list of the best things I have ever eaten, and I admit I haven’t stopped thinking about the dish since then. It overshadowed the meal itself, trout amandine that was slightly overcooked in the kitchen and became very overcooked on its way to me because the trout – the whole fish, or about two meals for me – was still folded in half and thus continued to steam itself until I opened it up. The mashed potatoes on the plate, however, were divine, with God-knows-how-much cream/butter and a perfectly smooth texture. As a wine bistro, Vin Rouge doesn’t have much of a beer selection, which isn’t so much a complaint (did I expect anything different) as a comment for those of you who, like me, prefer barley to grapes. I will return, just with a different choice of entree.

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Kiley McDaniel and I went to Charlotte’s Customshop last night at the suggestion of a reader (I apologize, I don’t remember who passed it along). Their concept is great – local sourcing, in-house preparations (such as duck- and chicken-liver pate) – but the execution wasn’t there last night. The braised pork belly had great color on the exterior and the ale and cider reduction was a perfect complement, but the meat was tough and some of the edges of the belly were actually charred. The roasted half-duck special had a crispy skin dusted with Chinese five-spice powder, but again, the meat was overcooked and tough, refusing to separate from the bones. They have a solid selection of charcuterie items – we went with Speck, Manchego (with honey), and drunken goat (with quince paste) – and the bread pudding (with sliced apples and caramel sauce, albeit with some over-roasted walnuts) was generally strong. With ingredients this good, the finished product felt more disappointing for the lack of execution because it could have been phenomenal with a more deft hand.

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