Uncategorized — Page 168

→ December 7, 2015
→ By keith

The Keepers of the House.

My thoughts on the Jeff Samardzija contract are up for Insiders. I’m still waiting for details on Hisashi Iwakuma’s reported contract before writing that one up.

Shirley Ann Grau’s novel The Keepers of the House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965, is an outstanding work of seething rage that manages to address themes of race and racial injustice by telling the story of a white family, of all things, in rural Alabama, from the late 19th century through the period just before the book’s publication. It is obvious to me why it won the award, and baffling to me that it has all but disappeared from reading lists, with no film adaptation or anything else to keep it alive.

The book nominally details seven generations of the Howland family, but the focus is primarily on two of them: the fifth William Howland and his granddaughter Abigail, who returns with her mother to live with her grandfather after her father abandons the family to fight in World War II, and ends up raised by her grandfather after her mother dies shortly after. William brought a young black woman named Margaret in to be the housekeeper after his own wife died in childbirth, and Margaret eventually became his mistress, bearing him three children, each of whom was sent away to schools in the north where their mixed heritage would not be held against them. While the relationship was commonly known in the area, the locals – depicted by and large as the sort of upstanding racists you might associate with the South of the 1950s – overlooked it as a quirk of those crazy Howlands.

After William dies, Margaret moves back to the black section of town with her family, and Abigail and her ambitious politician husband John Tolliver move into the Howland estate. When John runs for Governor of Alabama, a post he’s favored to win in a landslide, one unknown detail emerges about William and Margaret that derails his campaign and marriage while bringing the wrath of the town upon Abigail, thereby unlocking within her generations of outrage at the hypocrisy all around her, from the local whites who would tolerate such miscegenation up to a point to William and Margaret’s children who try to reject their black heritage.

The first three-fourths of Grau’s novel feel like many other novels in the subgenre of southern literature, telling a vast story of a family that once ruled a vast estate or accumulated great wealth but watched it fritter away via complacent or dissolute descendants. But Grau plants many seeds (no pun intended) in the early going to set up a dynamite climax (same) that gives Abigail two shots at revenge on her family’s tormentors, taking advantage of the unspoken dependence of the townfolk to enact a vicious vengeance. Abigail serves her revenge piping hot, and because of its genesis, it’s an extraordinarily satisfying conclusion for the reader.

It’s even more potent for Grau’s decision to tell the story with Abigail as the narrator. Imposing that fog over the family history – it’s passed down orally, so bits of it seem embellished, perhaps impossible – meant that images become clearer as the story approaches the material Abigail herself would have seen, and allows us to trace the development of her identity as a Howland, especially from the time when she goes to live on the family estate. In the time when Grau wrote Keepers, it was unthinkable to have a black character enact the sort of revenge Abigail gets – as it was, Grau ended up with a cross burned on her lawn after the book was published – so giving us a white woman who was raised in a house where black children were treated as cousins was probably the closest Grau could get. And in so doing, she never spared the white racists who smiled and said the right things but harbored the same centuries-old bigotry in their hearts.

Next up: I just finished Rex Stout’s Too Many Cooks, a Nero Wolfe mystery, and have begun Stephanie Kallos’s highly lauded 2015 novel Language Arts.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, highly recommended, pulitzer prize, racism

→ December 5, 2015
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 12/5/15.

I have written three Insider pieces this week, one on David Price and Chris Young, one on Zack Greinke and John Lackey, and one on Jordan Zimmermann and J.A. Happ. I also held my weekly Klawchat on Thursday.

Top Chef recaps began this week with episode one and episode two.

And now, the links…

Anyone else remember Sideshow Bob running for Mayor as a Republican in a 1994 Simpsons episode? The Daily Beast points out some similarities to a current Presidential candidate.
Quietly underlying the multiple rape accusations against porn actor James Deen is the pervasiveness of the idea that any sex worker – porn actress, prostitute, whatever – has less of a right of consent than any other woman.
Of course, if I’m linking to the Daily Beast twice, I should also include this takedown of their embarrassing journalistic fails in identifying the wrong Syed Farook in the San Bernardino attack, including photos and the wrong home address.
Speaking of San Bernardino, a day later “every Senate Republican except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the F.B.I.’s consolidated terrorist watchlist from purchasing guns or explosives,” per the New York Times. How this is a partisan issue is beyond my limited cognitive capabilities. The paper followed up today with their first front-page editorial since 1920, calling on an end to the gun epidemic in the U.S.
The New Yorker weighed in too, along the same lines: The average person does not need these guns.
Those crap viral sites that steal other people’s content grabbed this one in the last week or two, so here’s the original: The Battle, a fantastic comic on having depression and anxiety.
Charles Pierce drops some fire in an op ed for Esquire subtitled “nowhere is Idiot America more at work than in the Climate Change ‘debate.’ This is yet another topic where we are likely to have one Presidential candidate actively denying settled science. I can vote a lot of ways on the various issues that matter to me, but I can’t vote for someone who thinks science is a matter of who yells loudest.
In case you were concerned, no, the universe is not merely a 3-D hologram. I don’t think any reasonable scientists thought it was, though.
Earth – you know, this one – has one-third of its arable land in the last four decades. You know what they say: you can feed all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time, but you can’t feed all of the people all of the time.
The Useless Department of Agriculture said something right, for a change, with a brief post on alternatives to antibiotic use in livestock. Of course, they could just ban such use as a major public health threat, but, you know, why be so drastic?
Oh, maybe because of the rise in carbapanem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the “phantom menace” bacterium that can transfer its resistance to nearby bacteria.
This story’s a few weeks old, but it seems to be getting relatively little mainstream coverage: The singer known as Kesha (or Ke$ha) has alleged that her producer Dr. Luke sexually abused her, and is now suing Sony for the right to record music without him. While I understand the allegations are unproven, why would Sony appear to ignore the allegations, and potentially force an abuse victim into continued contact with her abuser?
Mars’ larger moon, Phobos, has been a key part of many works of fiction that explore colonizing the red planet, and appears as a territory in the game Mission: Red Planet, but it’s slowly falling toward the planet and will fall apart in 20-40 million years, becoming a ring around the god of war. So we’d better get there fast.
The Hollywood Reporter talks about the process behind its annual actors/actresses roundtables and the pre-Oscar nominations machine in explaining why its actress roundtable has no women of color this year. It’s an ugly reason.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: links, stick to baseball

→ December 4, 2015
→ By keith

Top Chef, S13E02.

If you’re looking for the episode one recap it’s here. Unrelated to Top Chef, but there’s a big boardgame sale again today on amazon, including half off Splendor, Flash Point, Dominion Intrigue, and more big discounts on Ticket to Ride and others.

Back to Top Chef land … Ludo Lefebvre, whose website bills him as an “impresario of pop-up dining,” is the guest judge this week, so you know the challenge will revolve around pop-up restaurants – typically a one-day experience where a chef or team of chefs opens a restaurant with a very small, focused menu for a single meal or an afternoon. The contestants split into four teams of four and have to open four popups around LA, each in a distinctive neighborhood. Meanwhile, Ludo says that he’s sick of pop-ups, so why exactly is he here?

Each team gets an address but doesn’t learn the type of food until they reach the restaurant.

* Philip says the part of Venice they’re going to is “white people town.” Isn’t “white people town” where most restaurants are located? How many high-end places open in highly non-white neighborhoods? I’d love to see that change – the area in downtown Wilmington where La Fia and sister restaurant Cocina Lolo are has noticeably improved since those two restaurants arrived – but it’s certainly not common.

* Isaac, Marjorie, Angelina, and Amar get Persian food. Isaac knows nothing about it. I’m not sure any of them know much about it. When I think Persian food, I think rice and saffron and pistachios and tah dig. There’s no discussion around any of that stuff, although they do eventually incorporate a lot of pistachios into the menu.

* Karen, Carl, Jason, and Giselle get Korean. They’re at Sang Yoon’s place; he was on Top Chef Masters but is probably better known for his gastropub Father’s Office, with a burger that’s been named one of the best in the country and a big craft beer selection. Sang Yoon says Korean food in LA compares to Korean food in Korea, but that Korean food in New York or other cities doesn’t. This is as stupid as people who say you can’t get good pizza outside of New York. If you have the right person at the helm, you can get good ethnic or regional cuisine anywhere.

* Giselle has eaten wings but never cooked them, and is sort of freaking out a bit in front of the team, saying, “you guys aren’t going to let me fail” … I mean, yeah, they probably would. If the ship starts sinking, they’re not letting her in the lifeboat.

* Even better, her description of Korean-spiced fried chicken wings includes “something makes them red.” Yeah, that’s gochujang. I have a tube in my fridge right now. If you’ve ever eaten Korean food at all, you’ve had it, and I don’t know how a professional chef wouldn’t know what it is: a paste made from fermented soybeans, red chilis, “glutinous” rice powder (sticky rice – not rice with gluten, which would be weird), salt, and often some kind of sweetener. It’s spicy but balanced and is high in glutamates from the fermented soybeans, making it a powerful way to add umami to a dish. I put it in a fresh mayonnaise I served at Thanksgiving with roasted Brussels sprouts.

* Philip, Grayson, Renee, and Frances are at Seed in Venice, a vegan restaurant. Philip’s wife has been an “on and off raw vegan,” which is extremely California. It’s not mentioned till later in the show, but the couple runs a vegan restaurant in Studio City called The Gadarene Swine. As for the team, this seems like a much harder challenge than the other three teams got, although they can make their budget go a lot farther since they don’t have to spend big on meat or fish.

* Grayson says “God put animals on this planet for a reason: to eat them.” Well, I’d argue they came from natural selection, but they can be rather delicious.

* Chad, Wesley, Kwame, and Jeremy get Mexican. Chad and Jeremy have cooked Mexican, while the others haven’t.

* Grayson wants to do a charred bean salad, but Whole Foods doesn’t have the wax beans she wants, which is fine because wax beans have absolutely no taste whatsoever. Grayson is about as bitter as burned garlic this season and I wonder if she’s just a ringer, brought back to stir shit up.

* Frances says she cooked Indian food for the royal family in Dubai, which is ironic since homosexuality is illegal in Dubai and punishable by death. Anyway, she can’t find fresh chickpeas, so she buys canned chickpeas, and around these parts we refer to this as “foreshadowing.”

* Giselle accosts a Korean customer and grills her on how to cook chicken wings. I kind of like that – I’m hoping she didn’t just pick an Asian woman at random but perhaps saw the woman buy items with Korean labels? – although she could also have just asked Sang Yoon.

* What isn’t clear to me in this episode is whether the pop-ups are supposed to be super authentic or merely inspired by each restaurant’s regular cuisine.

* Frances says Philip has gone from being a leader to being bossy … but we see one brief example, if that, and nothing else to support the claim. Plus, he has an actual vegan restaurant; if I were cooking vegan with no experience, I’d want his direction.

* Is it just me or has Gail’s wardrobe changed for the better? I’m loath to make too much of the physical appearance of anyone on the show, but that’s two straight episodes where she’s wearing something that at the very least flatters her more than looks in previous years, where what she wore was often a huge target for criticism (much of it unfair – she’s not there to be ogled) among viewers.

* The judges start the orgy of eating at the Persian place. Amar made grilled heirloom carrots with cilantro pesto, cauliflower hummus, and vadouvan spice (which I think is Indian, not Persian). The judges like it and the host chef, Saghar Fanisalek, says it’s “very Persian,” so there. Angelina serves chicken with a crispy fennel-coriander crust, yogurt with fresh herbs, and lemon confit. Tom says it’s really nicely cooked, loves the crispy skin, but says that it needs a little salt and more aromatic. Isaac makes lamb kofta and chile-spiced beef kabob over smoked eggplant, which even one or two diners say is spicier than “real Persian food.” Marjorie is the only chef of all sixteen to make a dessert, usually the kiss of death on Top Chef (well, that or risotto), making a yogurt mousse with pistachio sponge cake, saffron orange syrup, candied pistachios, and poached orange supremes. Everyone loves it, Ludo especially. As someone who loves to make dessert, I’m thrilled when a chef says “screw it” and makes one on Top Chef anyway. I’d love to know how that sponge cake came together.

* The Mexican pop-up is next. Chad makes a “carrot asado” (uh, you mean roasted carrot?) with banana yogurt and carne seca with hot sauce. The carrot is undercooked and the judges all agree it’s not Mexican enough, which is weird since Chad at the time had two Mexican restaurants, one in Tijuana. (He’s since shuttered them and moved back to Spokane.) Kwame made a chipotle and raisin-glazed shrimp over masa porridge, avocado lime crema, and chicharron and almond puree. This seems like a big hit although I’m imagining a sickly sweet note from the raisins. Jeremy served potato confit poached in “pork lard” (is there another kind of lard?) with charred skirt steak and a poblano-almond puree. This sounds good, but while Tom loves the dish he says it’s also not Mexican. Wesley serves an orange and tomato stew with chorizo, hominy, mint, and cilantro. Ludo says he doesn’t taste the chorizo, which is surprising because I can taste chorizo if my neighbor down the street eats it. It emerges afterwards that the chefs here didn’t ask their host chef, Ray Garcia for much if any direction or advice.

* The vegan pop-up comes third, and we see the food served on sustainable paper plates. Philip serves a dish of cauliflower done three ways, cleverly titled “Cauliflower cauliflower cauliflower,” which I assume is just an homage to the band Toyboat Toyboat Toyboat. Frances made chana masala (chickpeas in curry) with tofu chips and saffron. Renee made a stuffed beet (misspelled as “beat” on the Bravo site right now) with toasted cashews and tofu. Grayson’s salad ended up a mixture of charred haricots vert with pickled red onion, frisee, mint, pepper. She says, “I know it could have been better with a little pork fat.” Sure, but that’s not the only option for flavor or umami, right? A little miso in the dressing, a splash of soy sauce, a poached eggoh wait scratch that last one. All four of these fall a bit flat: Philip’s cauliflower puree isn’t very good, Frances’ dish was good but used canned chickpeas with fresh produce everywhere, Renee’s appears to have sucked in every way but especially in texture, and Grayson’s was just boring. But isn’t cuisine vegan extremely limiting compared to the other three pop-ups’ cuisines?

* The Korean place is last. Carl made a cuttlefish and shrimp salad with avocado. Jason served chilled noodles in radish broth with fried anchovy, cucumber, Asian pear, and egg. Karen made grilled kalbi (marinated, grilled, flanken-cut short ribs) with nectarine kimchi. Giselle’s Korean chicken wings are glowing red and served with cuke salad and cabbage. The cuttlefish in Carl’s dish gets dinged for lack of any real flavor. Giselle’s chicken wings came out well, while Karen’s dish had the most overall flavor and Sang called it the most Korean dish of the four.

* Judges’ table: The Persian team wins. The four chefs said they asked Chef Saghar a lot of questions. Tom really loved Marjorie’s dessert, which means she wins – perhaps breaking the Top Chef Dessert Curse? Chef Saghar wants to put the dish on the menu at Taste of Tehran. If anyone’s been there I’d love to know if that’s actually come to pass.

* The bottom team was the vegan team, although Gail says Kwame’s dish saved the Mexican team from the low spot. Frances admits she used canned beans, which is one of those things you shouldn’t say at judges’ table unless they ask you about it. Grayson’s salad was too ordinary and she’s doing that whole “I’m not sorry I cut your stupid class” act again. Renee’s beet was a good idea (really?), but the beet was dry, there wasn’t enough sauce, and Ludo says it was very mushy. If the beet is that soft, why not finish it on a grill to get some caramelization of all of those sugars? Philip’s dish needed more flavor and there wasn’t enough on the plate, although if they crushed him over the bland puree we didn’t see it on the show. Padma says the vegan team’s task was the easiest because they “could have gone anywhere … just had to omit animal products.” So, cooking is easier with no butter, no cream, no bacon, no eggs, no cheese, no honey, no duck fat, no anchovies, not even ground grasshoppers? I think Padma is out of her mind on this one. There’s no way that’s easier, not with tons of ingredients out of the pantry – you can’t finish a dish with a bit of Parmiggiano-Reggiano for salt and umami, you can’t thicken a sauce with an egg yolk base or finish with some buerre monté.

* Renee is out. Her “dish just didn’t eat well at all, and didn’t have a lot of flavor.” Plus apparently it had the texture of baby food. She looks crushed. Meanwhile Bad Attitude gets another chance.

* “I arrived sassy and I’m leaving even sassier.” You keep using that word, Renee. I do not think it means what you think it means.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Garret has to cook with Renee’s losing ingredients, and Renee with Garret’s. Garret hates tofu and finds “some really dirty beets” in his ingredient box. They grew in the ground, genius, what the fuck do you expect? He doesn’t seem to be pressing any moisture out of the tofu and he’s not using the beets at all, although on the latter point I’m not sure how he could cook them fully in 30 minutes. Pressure cooker?

* Garret makes a coriander- and white pepper-coated tofu with coconut and tea-braised mustard greens, lemon vinaigrette, and roasted cashews. Tom likes the tofu, says he wishes Garret had used the beets, and that the sauce came out too salty (Garret says he reduced it too much … season last!). Renee made a pan roasted chicken with sauteed dandelion greens, poached eggs, and a chicken skin chip. She burned one side of the chicken so she cut that part off before serving, and didn’t use the garlic, ginger, lemongrass enough. Garret wins, perhaps by default with Renee botching the dish. Either way, I don’t think Garret’s around for much longer either.

* Way too early top three rankings: Kwame, Amar, and since she just won the challenge, Marjorie. Sounds like Kwame might have won or been top 2-3 had they done the dishes in this episode by chef rather than by team first. Jeremy did win the first week, but it was with a crudo dish, which seems to always give chefs an advantage here as long as they cut the fish properly. Bottom three would be Grayson, Angelina, and Wesley.

* So far, by the way, this is not the most inspiring group of chefs. Maybe a few of the stars haven’t had enough screen time to show off what they can do, but I’m not blown away by either the dishes or any effusive personalities. There may be a tremendous amount of talent on the show – certainly by resume there is, and I’d rather judge someone on the resume than the interview, so to speak – but through two episodes the season feels a bit, well, underseasoned.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ December 3, 2015
→ By keith

Klawchat 12/03/15.

Klaw: A chance encounter, you want to avoid the inevitable, the Klawchat.

Clark: Why do smart front offices make bad decisions?
Klaw: I feel like you should ask your rabbi that question.

Brady: Hi Keith, thanks for chatting. There’s been a lot of Shelby Miller for Jorge Soler speculation, but Miller had 2.5 more WAR last year than Soler has had in his career. Would you trade Miller for Soler straight up?
Klaw: Different service time and cost, plus higher innate risk of a pitcher, makes that a reasonable deal for both sides in my eyes.

scottdsimon: Would you give a quick preview of your Paste review of two-player 7 Wonders?
Klaw: I liked it (7 Wonders Duel), but it’s not quite 7 Wonders for two players – same theme, somewhat simpler mechanics, more direct interaction.

Anonymous: Keith, thanks again for the chat. Any surprises among the non-tenders, and anyone you’d think a good candidate on which to take a flyer?
Klaw: Nicasio jumped out at me. Some guys who were non-tendered just to sneak them off the 40, like Rosell Herrera or Domingo German (who had TJ last winter), would be worth a look. I don’t know what to make of Minor or H Alvarez, since both had shoulder surgery and I don’t know what their outlooks are. A little surprised at Chris Carter – I think I’d rather take another year of him than of Gattis.

mike: Aside from adding a power arm or two to the bullpen do you think the BlueJays are done adding to roster?
Klaw: I thought Shapiro said they were done with major adds. BTW, remember those stupid rumors about how some “source” said the Jays were David Price’s top choice, or that they were negotiating a deal? So much BS out there this time of year from people who want clicks or retweets.

Miles: Thoughts on Kivlehan?
Klaw: Fringe to non-prospect. 1B only, good approach, limited tools.

Bradley: After seeing what Zimmerman and Price signed for, $63 million over the next three years for Shields doesn’t look so bad to me. Yes, Zimmerman and Price are younger, but if somebody is looking for a solid No.2 or 3, Shields looks like a reasonable option.
Klaw: I agree. Seems like he’s got real trade value if they want to move him.

Tom: I finally disagreed with you on a board game. Tried Race for the Galaxy last night and loved it. First time for everything. Thanks again for all the reviews. You’ve singlehandedly increased our family together time by sparking my and my kids’ interest in board games. Always much appreciated. Keep up the good work.
Klaw: I’m in the minority on RftG. Most folks who like serious games love it.

James: Hey Keith, is there any worry about Luis Ortiz’s weight gain? I love his stuff but I’m worried that his weight becomes an issue if he doesn’t get it under control
Klaw: Absolutely. Guy’s as big as a house right now.

Donald X: Play the new Dominion app yet?
Klaw: Reviews are awful so no. Plus they want $15 for expansions, which is high comedy.

Chad: Why is Pandemic so much lower on your 2 player rankings, then your overall rankings? I bought it on Cyber Monday, and I primarily play with my wife, and I was just curious if there was a clear problem with the two man gameplay?
Klaw: I think two-person games turn into one-person games.

Ryan: With Jeimer Candelario’s showing in the AFL, is he a viable MLB player and is he only a 3B
Klaw: Can’t play 3b.

Pops: Alen Hanson PIT a starter at 2B for you or a utility guy?
Klaw: Starter.

Joe: Any chance Mark Trumbo can be a 2 WAR player again in Camden Yards?
Klaw: Not there or anywhere. OPACY is not this great hitters’ park that some folks (including media/broadcasters) think it is.

Bradley: What was your favorite dish at Thanksgiving this year?
Klaw: I was very pleased with the Kale Caesar with duck confit – I made Ruhlman’s Caesar dressing from his book Egg, using confit oil, and (since my wife does not eat any seafood) using about 1 Tbsp of white miso in lieu of the anchovies to keep some umami in the dish. Plus my daughter and I then ate all the extra duck legs for dinner the next few nights. But that wasn’t the biggest hit with the guests – they crushed the basics, including the from-scratch g.b.c.

Jace: Other than move to Australia, is there any real chance for living in a sane gun control environment in my lifetime?
Klaw: This is morbid, but if a major celebrity is killed in one of these massacres, that might do it. Or campaign finance refoHAHAHAHA oh my God I almost got that out.

Ryan: I don’t understand all of this interest the Mets are showing in Ben Zobrist. A long-term contract to a 35 year old second baseman? No, thanks. What is it about Dilson Herrera that the Mets don’t like?
Klaw: Hey, Zobrist is a good player, but four years? That makes no sense to me.

Jeremy: what is a reasonable comp for Benitendi? Adam Eaton?
Klaw: Like him more than that. More power.

Todd: If I told you five years ago Keuchel and Kluber would win consecutive Cy Young awards, how crazy would I have looked? Which guy surprised you more?
Klaw: Keuchel. Saw him in college, 5th starter type. Totally overhauled his arsenal before 2014. Guy deserves a ton of credit.

Vin: Seems like both Cueto and Samardzjia will get more than $100 million. Who would you feel more comfortable giving that contract to?
Klaw: Cueto.

Nick: How often does a guy who doesn’t take any walks, such as grichuk, change their approach to do so? Could he be an all star with an upped walk rate?
Klaw: It’s very rare for that to happen and last at all. I don’t think he’ll do it.

Alex: Would you give Grienke a 6th year? Sounds like that is going to be what it will take for either the Dodgers or Giants to get him.
Klaw: Yes.

Craig: What is Josh Hader’s ceiling after his AFL performance? #3 starter?
Klaw: still think that’s a reliever all the way. Low slot for a starter, lot of effort, questionable command.

Steve: Just wanted to say thanks for the recommendation on the food lab and the note it was 30% off at Amazon. About 50 pages in and it is a great read.
Klaw: That book is amazing other than its sheer heft.

Ray: What kind of player do the Dodgers have in Yusniel Diaz? More bat than power or a little of both?
Klaw: Power/speed guy. Lot of tools meaning high upside but more risk than Estevez, the other Cuban they signed the same day (both Boras clients, IIRC), who has better feel to hit right now but lacks the big tools.

Ryan: Know anything about Jose Miguel Fernandez?
Klaw: He was actually on my top free agents ranking last winter, prematurely as it turned out. Chance to be an above-average everyday player.

Bret: It’s not a major deal, but I was surprised that the Jays kept Justin Smoak around for $3.9M. What do they see in him?
Klaw: Platoon bat with plus defense at first. Slight overpay IMO – probably a $2MM player.

Ben: Byung Ho Park – thoughts on his deal?
Klaw: Less than I thought he’d get, which is good for the Twins and also an example of how this posting system sucks for the players.

Ian: Is Jose Berrios a (potential) front of the rotation starter? I know you’ve had concerns about his height limiting his ceiling.
Klaw: Don’t think so. He’s likely to be too homer-prone with that flat fastball.

Tyler: Can Jason Heyward be a above average CF defender for the likely life of the contract he signs this offseason (6-7 years+)?
Klaw: No, I don’t think so.

nb: Hey Keith – Thanks for these chats. They’ve become one of my favorite hours of the week! Just wanted to know when we will start seeing your organizational rankings on the mothership. Thanks
Klaw: End of January for the whole thing. I always do the entire prospect package at once, over a three-day span.

Ryan from Richmond: When is the Rule 5?
Klaw: Next Thursday morning. I fly home late that morning so I may not attend it in person – not that the rule 5 matters much any more.

Alan: Just wanted to let you know my thoughts and prayers are with you through this chat.
Klaw: Thanks, Alan, really feelin’ the love right now.

Patrick: I know that lineup order has been shown to not have much importance, but am I crazy to use it as the main thing I judge a manager on? It is the decision that the manager has the most time and information to make as opposed to in game decisions that need to be made in an instant. I equate it to an open book test where it is really inexcusable to get questions incorrect.
Klaw: You’re right if you’re looking at a manager who puts a low OBP guy in the 1 or 2 spots and you think he’s a moron for doing so, because he is.

Bob@TheGoldenTriangle: Your thoughts on Pedro Alvarez getting non-tendered (released, really), please. How did he perform based on what you saw of him as a prospect.
Klaw: I loved the power, saw high risk with the swing and miss and the inability to hit lefties. Also didn’t think the body would stay at 3b long term. I remember ranking him around #37 one year on my top 100, and getting called all kinds of names by (some) angry pirates fans. Some high-risk guys work out; that one didn’t.

Alan: Felt like every guy the Giants brought up was able to contribute (Crawford, Panik, Duffy, Tomlinson, etc) despite having a system that is always seen as pitching heavy at best. What’s the Giants secret sauce?
Klaw: Pretty good system for getting the most out of high-contact bats. Lot of folks in the game credit Meulens and Bochy. Some of that was fluky though – Tomlinson has so little power it’s hard to see pitchers even giving him the opportunity to hit .300, and Crawford’s first-half spike was a mirage.

Bill G.: Which do you believe will have a better career, Max Kepler or Odubel Herrera. Also, have you played with any of the simulation baseball games like DMB, if so which do you like best? Thanks!
Klaw: Kepler, and no, I haven’t played any sim games.

Vin: What have you heard about Kenta Maeda? Is he more of a back-of-the-rotation guy?
Klaw: I think that’s where he ends up if he comes here and has to pitch every fifth day. Plus splitter, average to slightly above avg fastball, very small/slight guy who doesn’t look very durable and missed a handful of starts in 2013 and 2014.

Ian: Early 2016 draft question but who goes #1?
Klaw: If Alec Hansen is healthy, he’s my bet. Jason Groome and AJ Puk are possibilities too, although I think that’s too much for Puk – if I’m going pitcher at 1-1 I want a better athlete.

Josh Bell: So, does this mean I’ll get the call quicker?
Klaw: Not if you can’t make a significant improvement in your defense at first base.

Tom: You mentioned on Twitter yesterday that fans complain about player salaries but not owner profits (hey, no one complains about movie actor salaries either) but shouldn’t fans be concerned how contracts affect teams’ abilities to put together future rosters? Or, say in Price’s case, how many guys have been productive in the 7th year of these long term deals?
Klaw: Those complaints are fair criticisms; I’m referring to comments like “$31 million is insane!” (actual comment on my FB page) or “no one is worth that much money for playing a game” (I made that one up). It’s economic illiteracy. The owners are raking it in; revenues are rising faster than salaries. The players are the product and should be able to earn the marginal revenue product of their labor; there are players who are worth $40 million a year in added revenue, like Harper and Trout, but good luck convincing the average fan who didn’t even take economics in high school that a guy making $20 million a year is “underpaid.”

Jack: Is there anything to like in the Orioles farm system?
Klaw: It’s in poor shape. Sisco is a prospect, Hess and Scott are big leaguers, and you can always hope Harvey and/or Bundy gets healthy at some point.

Logan: Surprised by the Henderson Alvarez non-tender? He should have a pretty robust market, yeah?
Klaw: Depends on what the shoulder looks like. If it’s just ground beef in there, then no.

Jeremy: Javy Guerra or Jorge Mateo?
Klaw: Guerra.

Ian: What’s the scouting report on Kohl Stewart? Twins fans are calling him a bust because of the lack of strike outs. Does he have time to turn it around?
Klaw: Twins fans calling a 20-year-old a “bust” by scouting the stat line are not actually Twins fans.

Fred: What is it with Mets starters that their stuff seems to get better in the majors? Harvey, deGrom and Syndergaard’s stuff have all been better in the majors than minors. Is it due to better instruction in the majors, elite athletes elevating their game as they reach a higher level or just a fluke thing?
Klaw: Their folks credit the pitching coach, Dan Warthen. Will be interesting to see what he can do with Matz (if healthy), where the stuff is pretty good already but the command isn’t.

Andrew: Does Carter’s release indicate that AJ Reed will be the everyday 1B by May 1 (assuming he hits in AAA in April)?
Klaw: I hope so, just because I think he’s close to ready and I hate seeing clubs hold players down for arbitration/service time reasons. It does a disservice to the game and the fans even though it is the right business move in many or most cases.

Kyle: Did you read the Bill James piece on the three man rotation? Seems crazy enough to work….but is there any team out there that would actually try it? And any agents that would let their pitchers take the mound for said team?
Klaw: No, but if this is three starters, none faces more than 18 batters idea, it’s been around for ~30 years. I also think something like that is inevitable given data that shows that pitchers are worse the fourth time through the order.

Rob: So is Wil Myers the new 1B in San Diego? Does he profile adequately as an everyday 1B? First division upside or not?
Klaw: I assume so – he was awful in the OF last year, and that’s a bad park for a below-average defensive outfielder anyway. I do think he can hit enough to play there if he’s healthy.

Ben: Do you see Greinke setting a new AAV record?
Klaw: I think it’s about even money on that. I wouldn’t hesitate to give him 5 and $160MM if I were a high-revenue contender.

Tyler: More likely in next CBA… A) Rosters expanded to 26-27 B) NL DH, C) International Draft D) None of those are happening
Klaw: Some form of C, which will take the current system, fix some of its flaws, and create new ones instead.

Jeremy: what do you think the Rangers should do with Profar? seems like they are locked into Odor/Andrus in the middle infield.
Klaw: Probably start him in AAA anyway to get him some at bats and some reps in the field. I believe these surpluses often work themselves out due to an injury or an unanticipated trade opportunity. No reason to force it now unless something comes to you. Maybe they’ll get a proposal next week for one of those three guys that makes too much sense to refuse.

Mike: What is Roughned Odor’s power ceiling?
Klaw: I could see a 20 HR season there. Hey, did you know that the Rangers signed his brother, who is also named Rougn*()_U#I@R##(strangling sounds)

Pat: The Rays held Desmond Jennings in AAA in 2011 until summer to avoid the super 2, and then he played so well that you could question whether bringing him up earlier would have made up the 1 game by which they missed the playoffs. Now he’s been underwhelming and getting expensive and it would be tragically ironic if they were to non-tender him after the 2016 season.
Klaw: One man’s tragic irony is another’s black comedy.

Jeremy: if salary weren’t an issue, would Aaron Judge be a better RF option than Beltran in April 2016?
Klaw: I thought that would become the case last summer/spring, but now I don’t. Judge would get eaten alive by MLB pitchers working him soft away right now.

Lewis: Do you consider the 2016 Draft good like 2011 or more of the same of the last few years?
Klaw: We may not see another 2011-level draft for many more years. That was an absolute delight to cover.

Bryan (Montclair, NJ): Klaw, thanks for recommendation on Carcassonne. I haven’t bought or played a board game in years, and my wife and I loved it. Since I’ve also enjoyed some of your other recommendations related to literature and cooking, do you have any book recommendations for expecting fathers?
Klaw: The Happiest Baby on the Block was our mainstay.

Jake: Greg Bird upside?
Klaw: Everyday DH. Low average, walks, 25 HR.

Thomas: Many seem to think opt-outs are bad deals for teams, but I don’t see it that way at all. The back end of contracts are always bad. Provide a door the player can step through to save you from the bad years. The Yankees should have done that with CC. Am I wrong here, and if not, do you see more teams using them strategically?
Klaw: I think they cut both ways, for the reason you cited. The argument that they’re always bad for the teams – a belief to which I used to subscribe, by the way – was that if the player performed well in Phase 1 of the contract, it indicated that he would continue to perform well in Phase 2. I don’t think that correlation is quite as strong as we once believed it was, especially for pitchers.

Jack: Isn’t Greg Bird’s upside technically sky-high?
Klaw: How sick?

Sam: Why in the world would the Diamondbacks say Cueto rejected their offer? Seems the only viable explanation is to let the fans know they are trying to spend money even if they eventually do not. Any way it comes off as bad form and since nobody else publicly releases rejected offers it seems petty.
Klaw: Yes, I believe that’s the reason, but in general, please don’t ask me why the current Diamondbacks regime does anything they do, because I sure as hell don’t understand it. This is the same club that sold Touki Toussaint to cover a budget shortfall caused by Yoan Lopez. I’d sooner explain magnets and the tides.

Jeremy: is JBJ the best defensive CF in the MLB?
Klaw: I was going to answer this question but Kevin Kiermaier just robbed it from the queue.

Jeremy: if Pedroia got hurt, is Betts or Holt a better replacement at 2B
Klaw: Betts.

Kirk: Do you think Miguel Sano has the ability to play right field every day?
Klaw: I’d try him in LF and Kepler in RF. I’d say 2 to 1 odds against Sano working out in the outfield, but well worth the try.

Scott: Should the A’s extend Reddick? I worry that he won’t be worth the amount he likely needs to stay put.
Klaw: I think they should shop or trade him.

Tom: Thanks, I’ve always thought it was funny that it’s common to hear “Hey, greedy (pro athletes) aren’t worth $20m a year” but no one ever complained when Tom Cruise/Jim Carrey, etc would rake in $20m per film. All of it’s entertainment, right?
Klaw: Yep, and indeed no one cares about celebrity salaries or musician incomes. If that player was your son, you’d want him to get every dollar he could.

Fred: Why is everyone forgetting about Wheeler with the Mets rotation? Correct me if I’m wrong, he still projects better than Matz? How is Wheeler not in the big four but Matz is?
Klaw: Because he had Tommy John surgery? I love Wheeler, but expecting him to step right back into the rotation and make 30 starts at his old level this year is a bit optimistic for me.

MFY: How did the Yankees miss on Anderson Espinoza? They spent so much that year and didn’t come up with the best prospect.
Klaw: Well 29 other teams missed too, right? Signing players in Latin America is about as difficult as it gets. You have to start when they’re 14 and often they already have (illegal) deals in place before their 15th birthdays.

Thomas: How could the O’s not sign Alvarez? Seems like he can walk right into Davis’ role.
Klaw: Well “walk” probably isn’t the ideal word there.

Matt: How much value, if any, would you ascribe the the notion of pitchers being “comfortable” with a certain catcher? I’ve been seeing a lot of criticism of the White Sox non-tender to Flowers based on the fact that Sale loves pitching to him, and I’m wondering if that’s something that should be considered in the FA process
Klaw: I think it’s a nice thing to have but not something I’d really pay for if the catcher didn’t have other tangible value, like framing or OBP or something. Otherwise it becomes unverifiable bullshit and I don’t pay for that.

Sooperjones: Can we get that Turkey and Soba Noodle Soup recipe?
Klaw: It wasn’t a recipe – lot of my dishes aren’t – I just made a very rich turkey stock, cooked it down enough that it barely set at room temperature and was a solid block of gel in the fridge, then heated it and added cooked soba noodles, leftover turkey, salt, chopped scallions, chopped celery leaves/hearts, and a splash of rice wine vinegar.

Michael: I’m trying to learn a foreign language. I believe you’ve been vocal against using Rosetta Stone. Before I spent hundreds on it, why?
Klaw: Because I don’t think their method teaches you the language at all. You learn some vocabulary and not in a way that increases retention. It’s very expensive for how little it delivers – but it feels like you’re doing something so people pay for it.

Ray: Will Brett Phillips hit for avg, power or both? Can he be a 15 HR-20 SB-.280-.350 hitter?
Klaw: Yeah, I buy that. Not huge power but he hits the ball hard and could peak at 20-22 HR.

Ryan E: Any thoughts on who the Phillies go for in the rule 5? Are any available outfielders interesting to you?
Klaw: The rule 5 draft is not interesting to me. There’s too little talent available. In a good year you get two guys who stick and do something. In most years you get one or none.

Scott: Is it just me, but have you noticed that people are much more defensive about their tastes in music, compared to movies, books, etc?
Klaw: Every year I do some best-of-the-year music posts, and every year at least one person shows up to insult me for my choices because I omitted some album/artist that person loves. Never fails. I don’t get it – these lists are inherently subjective and I claim nothing more for them than that they’re my opinions.

Joe: Baseball Prospectus has a lot of data on pitch framing, and basically it shows that the best pitch framing catchers get about an extra strike and a half per game. Long story short: do we seriously overrate pitch framing as analytics people?
Klaw: I think we do, and another major reason is that it doesn’t seem to correlate well from year to year. Wasn’t Rene Rivera supposed to be great at framing? Hank Conger? How’d those work out? Now we’re chasing exit velocity the way we chased framing a year or two years ago. The value in new statistics is learning their predictive value, not in arbitrarily deciding that this one or that one is valuable before we have proof.

Jeremy: does Henry Owens 2015 debut lower his ceiling for you? the changeup didnt seem to fit the 70 profile at the MLB level.
Klaw: Nope, it didn’t. And the deception wasn’t as effective as it was in the minors.

Billy: I’ve seen you mention that you have a few Celiac family members recently. My fiance was recently diagnosed and I was wondering what resource(s) you’re using to find recipes, suggestions for substitutions, etc.
Klaw: One gluten-free family member (non-celiac but medical reasons), one close friend who developed a severe wheat allergy after dying in childbirth. (She got better.) Bought KA Gluten-Free Flour blend and xanthan gum. I start with 1-for-1 substitutions in regular recipes (but not bread – you need gluten for real bread) and work from there.

DC: Comps for Josh Bell and Alan Hansen? Thanks
Klaw: I don’t do comps, sorry.

Thomas: Regarding Judge, is the slow away going to kill him permanently, or to-be-expected growing pains?
Klaw: To be expected but it’s a real hole he has to address now.

Jeremy: which of the 2016 draft prospects is most likely to crack your midseason top 25 prospects list?
Klaw: Right now I would guess none.

Josh: Back to the James Shields trade value q, I believe he can opt out if traded, which significantly lowers his value, because if he’s good, he will walk and if he gets worse then you are stuck. Worth more to the Padres than any other team I think.
Klaw: If he’s good, he walks, and you’re off the hook for what are likely to be worse years anyway. But yes, if he sucks, you’re screwed.

Jeremy: for a non-contending Phillies team, would you bring JP Crawford up in June/July 2016? or let him work in AAA until September?
Klaw: When he’s ready – when the at bats are good enough, when he’s no longer making some of the little mistakes that mar his game.

TodD: I read somewhere that many scouts believe this is the best draft class in 10~ years. Do you agree with that sentiment?
Klaw: I don’t think you read that anywhere because it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Jeremy: did you see anything in Seager in 2015 that would make you believe he could stick at SS for 3-4 years?
Klaw: I’d bet against it.

Kirk: So if Kepler in right and Sano in left, that leaves Rosario…where? (Assuming Buxton in center) trade chip? Super sub?
Klaw: Trade chip, most likely. Rosario’s not as good as the other guys and the makeup is not great either.

Michael: As someone who is socially liberal, but fiscally conservative (I can’t be the only one), I find that I basically have no political candidates to vote for. Would you make any changes to the election process in the U.S.? How do you vote? Do you prioritize certain issues over others?
Klaw: You’re far from the only one but there is no party that represents that set of views. I don’t talk much about specific candidates, but I can tell you this: I won’t vote for anyone who’s anti-science. If you don’t accept the reality of evolution, climate change, vaccination safety and effectiveness, and so on, you don’t get my vote. I don’t always vote for the same party, or for the same reasons, but I always vote science.

Vin: Since Crick looks destined to be a reliever, who’s the best pitching prospect in the Giants’ system?
Klaw: Don’t even think Crick is a reliever at this point. I’ll defer on the latter question till I do their rankings because the guy I have in mind would be something of a surprise.

Chris: You can add gerrymandering and a total misread of the 2nd Am as obstacles to reform, Keith.
Klaw: Gerrymandering is something of an anti-science (or anti-math or anti-technology) thing on top of mere self-preservation – exhibited by all parties and ideologies, by the way. Not a huge issue in my state, though, with a single Representative.

Frustrated Cubs Fan: Thoughts on Theo basically twiddling his thumbs when it comes to acquiring SPs?
Klaw: I think you should take a Xanax.

Jeremy: How does Santa act in your house? Reward the nice and punish the naughty? Or give gifts out of unconditional love?
Klaw: We have one child and overall she’s quite well-behaved so it’s not a huge issue. We do wield that hammer, though – behave or Santa will see – but in reality she’s going to get a ton of presents even if we chose to skimp.

RC in the 41Six: JA Happ to the Jays for $12 million? Better shore up the bullpen but I don’t see how losing Hendriks helps this cause. Are good relievers simply much easier to find than #3 or #4 starters and is this the way you would have rebuilt the post Price Jays?
Klaw: Didn’t like that deal or the Estrada one. BTW, I’ll predict here that Atkins gets the GM job, and while I’ve known Ross for years and like him as a person and as a baseball mind, that would be just another preordained handpicked GM “search” that should add to MLB’s list when examining obstacles to minority advancement.

Tom: Since LAA traded their one good prospect to shore up SS, what’s their best course of action to address the black holes in LF, 3B, and 2B?
Klaw: It’s money or nothing (well, or finding someone on the scrap heap, which isn’t a crazy idea, just not guaranteed).

robb: The problem with the athletes-entertainers comparison over salaries is that, if you don’t want to go see a Cruise movie, you can go see one with Hanks in it. If you get upset at the contracts the team you’ve followed all your life hands out, you don’t start following another team. That said, I don’t get why people complain about it at all. It’s not our money.
Klaw: And people who complain about that one contract – oh, I can’t believe they gave Estrada that deal – aren’t my target here. It’s the Blue Jays fan who gets mad at what Price and Greinke and Heyward make just because it sounds like a lot of money. It isn’t in the context of industry revenues.

Taylor: Pedro Alvarez is very limited but the power is… something. What would you do with a player like that and who do you think should pick him up?
Klaw: IMO always a place on the roster for a player with a huge tool like Pedro’s power. Just have to use him judiciously and be willing to accept the failure that comes with it. He’s not a zero or replacement-level; he’s a part-time asset. BTW, tough week for that 2008 draft’s college first basemen: Alvarez non-tendered, Smoak signs a small one-year deal to avoid non-tender, Alonso traded because he was about to be non-tendered and goes to a club to replace Ike Davis. The other college 1b taken in the first round are all essentially done – Brett Wallace, David Cooper, Allan Dykstra. Yikes.

Michael: Boston talk radio has already started with the Price-sucks-in-big-games narrative. Funny or sad?
Klaw: A sad commentary on our country’s innumeracy.

Jimbo: You mentioned somewhere (twitter?) recently that you’ve cured and smoked your own bacon before. How did you do the cure? Did you use nitrates or nitrites?
Klaw: Pink salt (sodium chloride plus sodium nitrite). Otherwise your bacon will come out grey and taste very porky, plus you’re slightly increasing the risk of some bacterial growth. Ruhlman’s Twenty has a cure recipe that I use as my base.

J: Love it that Adele has sold 4m copies of her new record. It shows that people are still willing to pay for music
Klaw: Agreed. I bought Grimes’ new album. I will say that the industry-wide jump from 99 cents a track to $1.29 a track did impact my purchasing – I didn’t expect to react that way but ended up a Spotify premium member instead of continuing to buy lots of singles.

Corey: With all their young MLB players, long term contracts + minors talent close or on the way, Boston doesn’t really have any holes to fill for a few years (Sam Travis at 1B, Hanley to DH) How would you manage the farm system and MLB roster if you were GM given there’s no place to put a lot of these guys?
Klaw: They become trade assets for now or July or maybe next winter. Marrero, Cecchini, Barnes, Owens, Shaw … they’re all useful parts of larger deals, or maybe pieces to get good relief options who are younger than free agents and maybe don’t have the mileage of a Darren O’Day.

Thomas: Have we flipped too far towards youth and prospects? Will “older” players become the new market inefficiency eventually?
Klaw: I hope so or else I have no shot at getting that one at bat to get me a page on Baseball-Reference. That’s all for this week’s chat – thank you so much for reading. I’ll be in Nashville for the winter meetings next week and may delay the chat till Friday around my travel, but I’ll be writing, tweeting, posting on my Facebook page, and perhaps doing a Periscope if I can find a good spot and strong enough wifi connection.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: klawchat

→ December 3, 2015
→ By keith

Top Chef, S13E01.

We’re back! Top Chef season 13 has a two-night premiere this week, with part one airing last night and part two airing tonight. The season will have the chefs running all over California, starting in Los Angeles and eventually ending up in San Francisco. I’m a little disappointed that this season didn’t go somewhere new, though; it’s not like the LA/San Fran food scenes need the press.

Since you’re here, and possibly interested in food, may I also point you towards my 2015 gift guide for cooks and my latest cookbook recommendations?

This is a pretty strong group of contestants by their resumes; nearly every contestant is an executive chef, and only one is a sous chef (but at Buddakan NYC, a highly-regarded offshoot of a Philly mainstay).

* The self-intros are usually pretty awful, and we get one right out of the chute when Renée from Kansas City says “I’m the super sassy chef,” causing a lot of eyerolling in the crowd. Is it actually arrogance or just nerves that makes people say dumb things like that when introducing themselves? Hi, I’m Keith, I’m a sportswriter, nice to meet you all, I’m really excited to be here. It’s not that hard. Save the shtick for later.

* Grayson is back! She says she “mentally quit” during season 9 in Texas, when Paul Qui lapped the field anyway. I hope Eric Ripert comes back to pronounce her name “ghray-soh” again. (Speaking of season nine, runner-up Sarah Grueneberg’s new restaurant, Monteverde, just opened last month in Chicago, with house-made pastas and what seem to be reasonable prices for a high-end restaurant in that city.)

* Quickfire: we get two parts, starting with a mise en place race, where each chef gets to pick one task – turning four artichokes, prepping 45 stalks of asparagus, separating 20 eggs, supreming eight oranges, or breaking down five chickens – and must be among the first nine to finish to get to the second stage. I’d say the eggs or chickens would be the easiest. I’ve never turned artichokes but it just looks like a huge pain in the ass.

* Frances, the lone sous chef in the group, says they’re the “bitches” of the executive chefs, but “executive chefs take the credit.”

* Sassy Renée chooses chickens and finishes first; Wesley (executive chef at the Spence, Richard Blais’ old place in Atlanta) also chooses chickens and comes in second.

* Garret calls for a check (meaning he thinks he’s finished), but he has just 19 whole yolks, and can’t seem to get that last one out whole. I’ll defer to any sous chefs in the audience but I didn’t think breaking yolks was that huge of a problem; I usually waste more time trying to get those last few globs of albumin off the yolk instead.

* Anyway, that’s all pretty anticlimactic – mise en place is important but it’s not exactly riveting television – so let’s skip to part two. The nine chefs who advanced split into three teams of three, and each team has 30 minutes to create a dish, but each chef can only cook for ten minutes while the other chefs on the team are blindfolded and can’t communicate with each other. The winning team gets immunity for all three chefs.

* Frances confesses “that the last time I was blindfolded was the first time I met my wife,” so it appears that Grayson will be getting a run for her money in the ribald commentary department.

* Isaac reveals his superhero identity as “Cajun Man, Cajun Man 5000,” which is great, but in a team challenge, when you’re the first chef, should you be making such a narrow dish when two chefs have to follow you and you can’t tell them what you’re doing? Anyway, his nickname reminded me of the ingruous appearance of metal band Powerman 5000 on an episode of Beverly Hills 90210, something I thought I’d dreamed until finding it online maybe fifteen years after it happened.

* The red team is the designated disaster. Jeremy takes over for Jason, can’t figure out where Jason was going with the dish, and ends up putting chicken in the oven where Wesley can’t see or find it. Wesley ends up taking the now half-burned drumsticks that Jason had put on the grill, cutting off the raw halves, and finishing them himself.

* Amar, who hails from the DR, says people make fun of him for loving yellow mustard. I would too. That stuff is vile – it’s like mustard-flavored white vinegar. I have several other mustards in the house at all times but never yellow mustard. Even on the rare occasions when I eat a hot dog, it’s Gulden’s spicy brown over French’s yellow paste every day and twice on Sundays. (Scratch that. Twice on Sundays means heartburn into Monday.)

* The dishes … Green team, which was Carl, Grayson, and Isaac: breaded chicken breast with brown butter, asparagus, and mushroom sauce. Sounds very solid but kind of straightforward.

* Red team: grilled chicken leg with orange, anchovy, and potato. Padma this must be “an appetizer portion of the meal,” and Tom says it’s a “lot of anchovy,” which is never a good thing in any context. Besides, who would even think to serve a fraction of a chicken leg?

* Blue team, which was Renée, Amar, and Frances: sweet and sour chicken with marinated slaw. Padma likes the mint, and overall it seems like this was the most ambitious dish of the three, so they end up winning.

* Over the next three days the chefs will face two elimination challenges, which is how we’re getting two episodes in week one (fine by me). The first one comes at the Dine LA showcase, serving 200 VIP guests including local food critics and bloggers (Murray Chass among the latter, I presume). Chefs can cook whatever they want – “just make a standout dish that lets you shine,” which seems like a fairly clear direction to do go big or go home. The critics will vote on the top five and bottom five, from which the judges will pick the overall winner and loser. Emeril and Gail round out the judges.

* Grayson is at it already, planning to make pork and veal meatballs and saying “I’ve gotten raves about my balls.” I like the saucy humor too (pun intended), but only if the food backs it up.

* Frances is using bitter melon, Momordica charantia, a member of the gourd family and relative of squash, cucumbers, and watermelon, but the only member of the Momordica genus that we eat. As the common name indicates, and as Frances says, “duh, it’s bitter,” which I believe is due to the presence of triterpene saponins in the plant; saponins, which you’ve probably encountered on the exterior of quinoa seeds, are very bitter and provide the plant with a natural defense against predators. I’ve had it once and found the bitterness overwhelming; if I were working with it, I’d want to include a lot of salt, especially as a finishing flavor, to cover some of the receptors that might otherwise grab those bitter compounds. Frances says “for some who try it the first time, they think it’s poisonous,” and I can kind of see why.

* Amar is also making pork meatballs, like Grayson, but his will be spicy and it sounds like they’re non-traditional in just about every way.

* Wesley is blending tomatoes to make tomato water and you can see one of the stickers in the blender, which is kind of disgusting. His station is an absolute mess, which will not endear anyone to Tom, who believes cleanliness is next to codliness in the kitchen.

* Frances and Renee are fast friends after which Grayson points out a slight resemblance between Renee and Frances’ redheaded wife, which I guess would be much funnier if I had the picture to show you. That said, would this joke even have gone over so well ten years ago? Now we’ve got several openly gay, married chefs on the show and it’s unremarkable – as it should be, but I still take it as a good sign of a cultural shift. Their love lives are not our business.

* Garret fires a shot at former Top Chef All-Stars runner-up Mike Isabella, saying he’s “serving one of the worst bastardizations of kind of Italian food in the history of the world.”

* Philip is smoking something over dry grass he grabbed from the ground in the field where they’re serving. That’s weird, I guess, but I can’t say I shared the reaction of one of the other chefs (Marjorie?) who said it was disgusting. I mean, most of your food grows in dirt and, very likely, manure. Humans spent centuries cooking over burned dung. Food is not inherently clean, nor is “clean” quite what it was cracked up to be.

* Now, the many dishes, moving as quickly as I can … Cajun Man 5000: his grandmother’s shrimp and court-bouillon, pronounced “coobiyonh,” gaining good marks all around … Angelina: goat cheese croquette, smoked romesco, caramelized parsnip puree, and a touch of cider vinegar. Padma says there are “too many purees,” while Tom says his croquettes were not that crispy … Garret: Vietnamese chicken brodo, Emeril likes toasted garlic and noodles, but later Padma and Tom get awful versions of the same, with broken noodles and burned garlic chips … Renee: citrus marinated pork tenderloin atop soft polenta; Tom says both are a little underseasoned, and I don’t know why you’d pick the most plain cut of pig for something like this … Kwame, the man we all know and love: spicy romaine and mah haw (minced meat served on pineapple) with shrimp, pork, charred pineapple, and toasted peanuts, with a habanero foam … Amar: spicy sherry-glazed pork belly meatballs, celery root puree, with “everything spice” like you’d find on an everything bagel. This earned raves and I thought it sounded like the best or one of the best dishes, mostly because, you know, it’s pork belly.

* Karen: salmon and apple tartare, with pomegranate pickled cherries and walnuts; I’m not huge on salmon tartare, as raw salmon can carry a nasty parasite and you’d better be dead sure you’re getting the good stuff … Grayson: pork and veal meatballs with spicy tomato sauce, gremolata, and Parmiggiano; Padma is not impressed and Tom calls it “Jersey red sauce,” which is a mortal insult in my book … Carl: spiced carrot soup with turkish spices, garbanzo beans, almonds, and feta, which has great colors and gets high marks … Jeremy: oh, hey, a raw fish dish, never seen that on Top Chef before! He serves a crudo of pacific snapper with kombu gel, lime zest, and chiles; Tom and Padma both love it and say it was smart to go lighter … Wesley: potato salad with mustard, shrimp clams, and ocean herb broth. He tastes it with a spoon that goes back into the food, and now that is actually disgusting. Padma says “if you put a spoon in your mouth don’t put it in my food,” and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Tom had axed him right there, but they didn’t, mostly because they loved the dish itself.

* Philip: selection of different vegetables cooked in different ways, including three colors of cauliflower, all pickled; roasted radish; avocado mousse; red grape; puffed amaranth; and more. Emeril says it’s “new California cuisine,” while Gail justifiably mocks Philip’s man-bun … Giselle: vegan cauliflower almond soup, paired with prosciutto “which is not vegan,” so why call the soup vegan? Just say you thickened it with almond milk and leave it there … Marjorie: lamb tartare with smoked egg yolk and a shaved veg & herb salad; raw meat dishes are almost as cliché here as raw fish … Jason: poached heriloom chicken with salsa apicius (an ancient Roman recipe that probably used fermented small fish), toasted long pepper, caramelized honey, and fish sauce … Chad: tangerine aguachile (a Mexican ceviche) with scallop and shrimp cake, seasoned with ancho chili hash and a little bit of ground grasshopper (yep, that’s what he said … insects are the new black pepper, I guess) … Frances: mung bean soup with yuzu and pickled bitter melon.

* Isaac, Amar, Jeremy, Carl, and Kwame came out on top for critics; the bottom five were Angelina, Renee, Grayson, Garret, and Frances. Tom thought Chad should be on top, while Gail thought Jason should be, and none thought Kwame was really top 5. Tom’s least favorite was Garret, with the same for Padma, while Emeril says he got a different dish. Gail said Angelina’s was the weakest, calling it “forgettable.” Tom criticizes Grayson’s lack of ambition in a dish that was very New York (or, the horror, New Jersey) Italian restaurant.

* Judges’ table: Tom says everyone did really well, with nothing God-awful as they often get in the first elimination challenge. Amar, Jeremy, and Carl were the top three. Emeril tells Carl, “I felt like I was eating at your house,” which would probably have been an insult if he’d said it to Wesley. Tom says Jeremy’s was “predictable” (yes, it was) but a really really good version. Emeril liked Jeremy’s “organization,” after which Padma says, “There were others who should take note of that” while looking daggers at Wesley. Winner: Jeremy. Raw fish wins too often on this show. And if predictable can win here, why is Grayson on the bottom for predictability too?

* Bottom: Angelina, Garret, and Grayson. Angelina’s didn’t seem to push the envelope, while the parsnip didn’t make much sense. I think the execution was worse than they’re letting on here, based on the comments we saw earlier in the show. Padma and Tom loved Garret’s concept, but Garret says he failed to provide the “due vigilance” to make it consistent, which sounds like some xenophobic politician’s talking point on admitting refugees. Grayson’s dish wasn’t interesting, and Gail says it could have come from anyone. Grayson’s pissed off, somewhat justifiably so, although I’m not sure what saying “I’ll put sparkles on it” is supposed to earn her. When Emeril says, “I wanna cut through the bullshit, I expected more from you,” you have to listen, because in all the times we’ve seen him on this show, he’s never been an asshole to anyone. If he’s calling you out, it’s legit.

* Garret is eliminated. That’s rather surprising, but Tom says his dish was “the only one that was a real mistake.”

* Since we’re getting a second episode tonight, I’ll save the too-early rankings for after that show.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: top chef, tv

→ December 2, 2015
→ By keith

November 2015 music update.

November was a relatively light month for (good) new tracks, although we did get a few singles of note ahead of January/February album releases, including the return of Wild Nothing and a second single from Savages. Not on this list but worth a mention – Mercury Rev released The Light in You, their first new album in seven years, in October. Like much of their work, it’s better enjoyed as a full album, without any huge standout singles, with the first two-thirds filled with spacey soundscapes before they conclude with a run of ebullient pop tracks. I don’t like it as much as I did Deserter’s Songs (which they just remastered a few years ago) or All is Dream, though.

Grimes – California. The first full track off Grimes’ incredible Art Angels album and probably my favorite, although it’s hard to choose given how many outstanding, clever songs this album features. It’s the first year I can remember where the two best albums I’ve heard were both from solo female artists (the other is Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit).

Wild Nothing – To Know You. A welcome return from Jack Tatum, who writes and records Wild Nothing’s albums himself (a la Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker). This first single from Wild Nothing’s third album, due out in February, returns to the psychedelic rock/dream-pop fusion of Nocturne, with over allusions in the music and lyrics to Talk Talk’s “It’s My Life.”

Hinds – Garden. Hinds, formerly known as Deers, will finally put out a proper album in January after a year-plus of hype, one that I hope will dispense with their earliest singles’ production values (where it sounded like they recorded everything inside a phone booth located in a bathroom stall). The Spanish foursome has kept their slightly offkey vocal harmonies and punk-tinged folk style, music that verges on the slightly annoying but keeps you coming back because of the underlying melodies … and maybe because there’s something a bit charming in their entire approach.

Cloves – Everybody’s Son. The Australian teenager who records as Cloves released her debut EP XIII last month, featuring the two impressive singles she dropped over the summer (“Frail Love” and “Don’t You Wait”) as well as two new tracks, including this song, which drops the piano for an acoustic guitar but still has the stripped-down feel of her previous songs.

City Calm Down – Rabbit Run. Another Australian act, this Melbourne quartet appears to have listened to a lot of Echo and the Bunnymen with some New Order thrown in for good measure.

The Gills – Rubberband. Blues-punk from Pensacola by way of Nashville, the Gills have their self-titled debut due out in a few months, but you can grab this song and the single lemonade for free via NoiseTrade.

Daughter – Numbers. Daughter’s second album drops in January, and this single features some wordplay on top of a gothic dream-pop (or perhaps nightmare-pop) track that isn’t so much catchy as it is insinuating.

Savages – T.I.W.Y.G. “This is what you get when you mess with love.” I wouldn’t mess with Jehnny Beth, though. She sounds pissed off.

Ten Fé – In the Air. A London duo whose name means “have faith,” Ten Fé merge some very British sounds (Madchester, the Verve) with a sizable dose of American roots-rock on this five-minute track that grooves along at a much faster pace than you’d expect.

Chairlift – Romeo. I can’t wait for their album to drop next month. “Ch-Ching,” the first single, is one of the best songs of the year. “Romeo” has a similar feel, kind of somewhere west of Sleigh Bells’ overt cacophony, stronger melodically and of course featuring Caroline Polachek’s lovely voice.

Floating Points – Peroration Six. A name drawn from math, with a great vocabulary word in the song’s title? I’m in. (A peroration is the conclusion of a speech, usually the kind used to whip up the crowd.) This is highly experimental music, dispensing with conventional song structures, totally instrumental, but grabbing the listener’s attention repeatedly with sharp changes in direction and the judicious use of silence. It reminds me a bit of These New Puritans, just without the vocals of the latter’s work.

Rare Monk – Warning Pulse. Yes, the intro sounds a bit like the Offspring’s “Self-Esteem,” but I promise it’s not the same song or genre. They describe themselves as “experimental,” but I don’t hear the experimentation – it’s conventional indie rock with some subtle layering in the guitar and keyboard lines, built more around textures than giant hooks.

Sunflower Bean – Wall Watcher. This odd Brooklyn trio – I should probably have a macro for that phrase – deliver music as strange as their personal style, with a sort of hepped-up stoner rock here on this short, almost poppy single that comes two months ahead of their debut album Human Ceremony.

Wolfmother – Victorious. The Aussie trio’s best track since “The Joker and the Thief,” although I know that’s not saying a whole lot. The Sabbath-esque riff at the 2:40 mark elevates this from a good album-rock track to a memorable one.

The Fratellis – Baby Don’t You Lie to Me! The Scotsmen behind “Chelsea Dagger” released their fourth album this summer, and while they’ve had a handful of catchy singles over the years since their signature song came out and became a sports-arena anthem, I think this is their best hook since their debut – both tracks have the feel of a rousing hard-drinking song, but approach it from different directions, with “Baby Don’t You Lie to Me!” like something from a bar scene in a lost episode of Firefly.

Freddie Gibbs, Black Thought – Extradite. The best hip-hop song of the year, off the best hip-hop album of the year, although the lyrics are way over the top (for example, I counted over 40 uses of “bitch” in the first half of the album alone). Gibbs’ delivery is very old-school, with a deep voice like Rakim’s, a bit like Tupac with a head cold, and he rhymes fast and can be very clever when he’s not running over the same tired rap memes.

Krayzie Bone – Cloudy. Speaking of old-school, Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony founding member Krayzie Bone – who, per Wikipedia, has eight children, none of them with his wife – is back with his first proper solo album in a decade. I’m including the single primarily out of historical interest; his style and technique are still strong, but the song lacks a good hook to make you come back for a second listen.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 2015 in music, alternative, Music, rap

→ December 2, 2015
→ By keith

Come Back to Sorrento.

My thoughts on the David Price and Chris Young contracts are up for Insiders.

Dawn Powell is one of the most criminally overlooked novelists I’ve come across; moderately popular (more with critics than consumers) during her lifetime, her books all fell out of print after her death, only coming back thanks to the dogged efforts of music critic Tim Page and a seminal 1987 essay by Gore Vidal that reignited some interest in her work. That interest has flagged again, unfortunately, as so many of her devotees are themselves out of the conversation or have passed away (other fans included Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos).

I first encountered her work in 2009 when I read her magnum opus A Time to Be Born, a scathing, witty satire that showed off her sparkling prose and deep understanding of character. Her novels fit into two main categories: Stories of artists and pretenders up to their necks in the life and culture of New York (think of the Algonquin Round Table … and imagine a book about all the people who think they belonged in that circle), and stories of people trying to escape dead-end lives in rural Ohio, usually hoping to get to New York. The former novels tend to be more incisive, while the latter are softer even though Powell doesn’t ease up on the parodic throttle.

Come Back to Sorrento belongs to the second group, a very short novel about two people in small town Ohio who believe they were destined for greatness until Fate intervened, although even here we can simultaneously see Powell’s empathy for these flawed characters while she’s mocking their pretension and self-absorption. Constance “Connie” Benjamin was blessed with a beautiful singing voice and once sang for “the great Morini,” but her grandfather refused to give her any support for lessons or to start a musical career, so she ran away from home and, yata yata yata, ended up married to a cobbler in a small Ohio town, with two daughters, one of whom has no respect for either of her parents. Connie’s life picks up when she meets the new music teacher, the bachelor Blaine Decker, who has his own story of a brush with fame and a belief that he’s a genius whose life is being wasted through no fault of his own. Connie’s situation is foolish, while Blaine’s is tragic, but the two find kindred spirits in each other because each will support the other’s delusions of faded grandeur – even as their lives appear to be going absolutely nowhere.

These two characters swirl gradually towards the drain in the nosy, insular small town that they feel doesn’t deserve their greatness, until an event that Connie in particular should have seen coming a mile away leads her and Blaine on a futile mission to the medium city (you know, the one you have to pass through before you get to the big city) that lays bare before Connie how little substance there is supporting her ego. The trip devastates her and unravels the fragile friendship she had with Decker, whose demons are more tangible and harder to avoid even with the facade he throws up before himself – one which no one but Connie seems to believe in the first place. Decker ends up the one who gets the second chance to live his life, although even as the novel closes it’s unclear whether he has the courage to match his ambition.

Come Back to Sorrento is currently out of print, again, but can be found in the Library of America’s five-novel volumee Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942, which also includes A Time to Be Born. David Mamet has the film rights and wrote a screenplay for the book, with the movie apparently to star Felicity Huffman as Connie and William H. Macy (natch) as Decker, but as far as I can tell it’s been in turnaround since about 2010.

Next up: Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House, winner of the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which has been very engaging for the first 40% of the book.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, dawn powell

→ December 1, 2015
→ By keith

Steam: Rails to Riches app.

Steam: Rails to Riches was itself a reimplementation of an earlier game, Age of Steam, both by designer Martin Wallace, the man behind the game Brass … which, like Steam, was also just adapted as a an app for tablets. The Steam: R2R iPad app (no Android version available) had an early bug issue to work out, so I played and reviewed Brass first and tried Steam last week. Like Brass, it’s a solid implementation if you already know the game, but the AI players could use some work and the tutorial isn’t very thorough. Unlike Brass, Steam still has a few glitches to work out, particularly if you change your mind while doing something on the screen.

Steam: Rails to Riches (just “Steam” from here on out) came out in 2009, shortly after the release of the third edition of Age of Steam, cleaning up some flaws in the first game’s mechanics and starting what appears to be a long debate over which version of the game is superior. Since Steam is the one we have in app form and I’ve never played or even seen Age of Steam, I’m going to pretend that debate doesn’t even exist and will focus on the app.

Steam is a train game, but rather than just connecting cities and building routes as in Ticket to Ride, Steam players have to raise funds, lay tracks, and then ship goods along the tracks they’ve laid (and sometimes tracks opponents have laid) to earn either recurring income or one-time victory point bonuses. The base game’s map covers the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, with various cities already placed on the map as stations with cubes representing the different types of goods in five colors.

For each round – the number of turns varies with the number of players – there’s an auction to determine the turn order, which also determines which special ability or benefit each player gets in that round, which can include the ability to turn a town (marked on the board) into a full-fledged station, to add goods to a city on the board, or to increase the player’s locomotive power, which determines how far that player can ship a goods cube. After the bidding ends, each player gets three actions: one to build tracks, and two to ship goods. Each player can use a shipping action to upgrade his/her locomotive power. Each stop on a track – a station or a non-upgraded town – counts as one segment, and a player can only ship a goods cube along a number of segments equal to or less than his locomotive power. The maximum locomotive power is six, so obviously getting to that mark and then shipping as many goods as you can along six-segment paths of your own tracks is the optimal strategy. You can ship a good along another player’s track segment, but that player gets the bonus point or boost to recurring income.

Once upon a time there was an engineer…

Of course, building those perfect routes is difficult with other players chasing the same goal and frequently blocking your path or stealin’ your goods. The AI players in the Steam app are good enough to teach you the game, as they all tend to build delivery loops – tracks that appear to be convoluted but provide 5- and 6-point plays for shipping cubes. (There’s no reward for efficiency here; if anything, inefficient delivery networks are key to racking up points.) But they’re often not aggressive enough in bidding for turn order, and they appear to struggle with creating enough options for big-point deliveries in the final round or two. I went from having never played the game to consistently beating the best AI options in 3- and 4-player matches – only by a few points each time, but never losing, even once in a game where I accidentally borrowed $0 in round 2 (which meant I could do almost nothing that entire round).

That’s the main issue with the app, but not the only one. The tutorial is too simple and probably wouldn’t suffice to teach anyone the game if s/he hasn’t played it before; I didn’t understand the rule around building through undeveloped towns (and how that could be beneficial – it adds a segment to a line between two cities). Turning a track tile to orient it properly is a little more finicky than it should be, and the app itself often “guesses” wrong with its initial orientation after you drag a tile on to the desired space. I also ran into frequent graphics glitches if I started to drag and drop a track hex from the array at the bottom of the screen to the map, but changed my mind and tried to return it – the image would remain in the middle of the screen unless I backed up to the main menu and resumed the game. The app also will let you take the City Growth action even if there are no more cubes to add to cities on the board, which makes it a wasted move. Tightening up the AI players should be the top priority, but I’d like to see these other hiccups addressed before fully recommending the app for solo play.

—

There’s a new, free, official Dominion app available today for iOS and Android tablets, but the early comments on Boardgamegeek’s post are overwhelmingly negative. It doesn’t seem to work well, and in-app purchases of expansion decks are $15 a pop. I love Dominion, but this sounds like a pass for now.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: apps, boardgames

→ December 1, 2015
→ By keith

Gift guide for cooks, 2015 edition.

With only a few minor new recommendations from last year – a knife sharpener, a small digital scale – I’m reposting the 2014 guide with the additions marked as such. Enjoy, and as always, feedback and suggestions are welcome.

I’ve seen a few “Christmas gift guides for the cooks in your life!” go by already this fall, but most of them are like this one from Grub Street, with recommendations for things that no one could possibly need – a “rosemary stripper” (I have two of those; I call them “hands”); a “banana slicer” (use your paring knife, genius); a $140 toaster (makes toast); and a $1600 set of Thomas Keller-branded pans, which, unless he forged them personally out of pure adamantium, are a colossal fucking waste of money. These are not gifts to by the cook in your life; these are gifts to buy the person in your life who pretends to cook but really just likes playing with toys. Toys don’t make you a better chef; they just make you a less socially responsible one.

I do have a few pricier toys in my kitchen, but aside from one, they’re all highly functional, at the middle to low end of the price range for their jobs, and built to last a long time. I’ve had my chef’s knife for over a decade, my food processor for 17 years (new bowl but original motor), my Dutch oven for about eight years, and just replaced my 18-year-old stand mixer when we moved in 2013. You are free to call me cheap, but I think I’m just prudent. I’ll spend money in the kitchen if it gets me something I need. I will not spend money to get a famous name, a fancy design, or a paperweight to live at the back of a gadget drawer until we move again. If I can make do with something I already have in the house – binder clips, a (clean) putty knife, a (clean) paintbrush – I’ll gladly do that instead. I’d rather be cheap when it doesn’t matter and spend the money when half price means a quarter of the value.

Therefore, what I recommend here – for your cheffy friends or for yourself – is largely what I own and use. If what I own isn’t available, or isn’t good value for the price, I recommend something else. I am also willing to answer any and all questions about these or other suggestions; if I include it here, that’s an endorsement that it’ll be money well spent. I’ve already posted my cookbook recommendations in a separate entry.

The most important tool for any cook is a good chef’s knife, and I love my Henckels 8″ chef’s knife, the “four-star” model (which just refers to the handle style). It’s a workhorse, has only needed professional sharpening once, and is a comfortable grip and weight for my rather small hands. However, it’s $100, and I doubt it’s worth the premium over the $30 Victorinox 8″ chef’s knife, which America’s Test Kitchen has long recommended and, therefore, so have I.

The basic knives any home cook must have are a chef’s knife, a paring knife, and a bread (serrated) knife. The bread knife is good for more than just slicing bread – serrated blades are safer for slicing tomatoes, and they’re excellent for chopping chocolate and other hard foods. I have another Henckels four-star model, also eight inches, but the same blade is available with a different handle for just $9. You might look at a 10” blade if you get a lot of large, artisanal loaves. Any strong paring knife will do, such as this OXO 3.5″ paring knife for $7. With a modicum of knife skills, you can tweak and hull strawberries with one of these without any risk to your fingers or waste of fruit. It’s also good for cutting citrus supremes, slicing apples and pears, pitting olives and cherries, and other fine-motor-skills work.

I do have two other knives I use frequently, but they’re not essential for most cooks. One is the santoku, a very sharp knife with a thin edge but wide body that’s ideal for slicing vegetables and hard fruits; I recommend a 7” blade, which you can get in this two-santoku Henckels set for $21 and just … I don’t know, regift the 5” version or something, because I can’t see any use for it. I also own this exact Henckels boning knife, which is ideal for breaking down a whole chicken – it’s substantially cheaper to buy a whole chicken (sometimes called a broiler-fryer, usually 3-5 pounds total weight) and cut it into parts, and you get the bones to make stock – or for deboning other cuts of meat like short ribs. Some folks recommend a flexible blade instead, but I have never used that kind so I can’t give an opinion. I do not own a home sharpener.

New for 2015: I finally caved and bought a home knife sharpener this year, buying this Chef’s Choice Diamond Hone 3 Stage Sharpener, a manual sharpener that turned out to be both easy to use and very effective; I sharpened every knife I own and even a few pairs of scissors, including the kitchen shears some of you saw me using to spatchcock this year’s Thanksgiving turkey.

My pots and pans aren’t a single set any more; I have some remnants from an All-Clad anodized aluminum set I got with rewards points in 2001, but have swapped out certain pieces to get better nonstick (coated) skillets. What you really should get for your loved one (you may include yourself in that category) is a a 12″ Lodge cast-iron skillet, an absolute workhorse that can handle about 90% of what I need from a skillet or a saute pan. I still use a nonstick skillet for egg dishes, and a saucier (sadly one that’s no longer made) for sauces or custards, but the Lodge skillet is past a decade old and just keeps getting better. The work of seasoning them is nowhere near as arduous as you’ve heard.

If you want to splurge on something, get an enameled cast-iron Dutch oven, great for soups, stews, braises, deep-frying, jam-making, and caramelizing huge batches of onions. Cast-iron doesn’t distribute heat well, but it holds heat for a long time. These pots are heavy, but I use mine for every saucepan duty that doesn’t involve boiling water or cooking grains on their own. They go stove to oven (as do the skillets) and can take the hours of low heating required for a proper braise. I own a Le Creuset that I got on sale at an outlet store because the color was discontinued; if you’re not quite that fortunate, try the 7.8 quart Lodge model for $97.

Isn’t she lovely?

New for 2015: I also upgraded my stockpot this year with this ~$40 Excelsteel 16 Quart Stainless Steel Stockpot. I make stock constantly throughout the year; I buy whole chickens, break them down myself, and freeze the carcasses and necks for future stocks. I also made a turkey stock after Thanksgiving with the backbone, neck, and the picked-clean roasted carcass, and the result was so full of gelatin that it was solid at room temperature. (It made an unbelievably rich turkey and soba noodle soup.) I needed a good stockpot since my previous one’s pseudo-nonstick finish had started to fade; this pot is also taller and heavier so it holds the heat in more effectively and I can do a double batch with two chicken carcasses and plenty of aromatics. I usually have to get at the interior bottom with a little Bon Ami, though.

I don’t own a proper mandolin slicer, but I do pretty well with a handheld mandolin for about $20 that works great for things like root-vegetable chips or thinly slicing onions. I love this digital instant-read thermometer, which at $10 is cheap enough that I don’t feel bad when inevitably I drop it into something and ruin it. (I’ve only done that once.) Amazon tells me that I bought my Microplane classic grater in November of 2003, and I’ve had their coarse grater for almost that long. The former is great for zesting citrus fruits or grating nutmeg; the latter is ideal for creating a snowfall of hard cheese over a pasta dish. In that same 2003 order, I bought my first Silpat silicone baking mat; I now own two and won’t bake cookies without them.

I own two scales – a chef I’m friends with on Twitter made fun of me for this – one, this AWS Digital Pocket Scale for weights up to about 2 kg, which is ideal for precise measurements like grams of coffee (more on that in a moment), and a larger scale that’s long discontinued. This $13 Ozeri scale looks like a more than adequate replacement, measuring up to 12 kg; I rarely need to measure more than about two pounds of anything, maybe a little more for some large-batch baking but that’s about it. You need at least one good scale if you’re serious about baking, though; the best bread and pastry recipes all use grams, not cups or liters. I’ve also done horrible things to this digital oil and candy thermometer over the ten years or so that I’ve had it, including making forty or more batches of jam, dozens of batches of macarons, and engaging in numerous deep-frying experiments, and it still rocks. You absolutely must have one of these to make caramel, any kind of jam or preserves, or true buttercream frosting.

Other things I always appreciate getting or often end up buying for myself: Wooden spatulas (not spoons), silicone spatulas, good (not decorative) metal measuring spoons, Pyrex or similar measuring cups for liquids (never measure liquids in a plastic cup designed for measuring solids).

New for 2015: I don’t have this exact brand/model, but I love having a few silicone ingredient cups in the kitchen. I use one for measuring and pouring out coffee grounds, and I often have another one next to the stove with salt or freshly ground pepper or toasted sesame seeds to add to something right before serving.

Now, for the expensive stuff:
* I believe this Cuisinart classic 7-Cup food processor is what I own; we got ours in 1996, and in all that time I’ve just had to replace the plastic bowl, which cracked during a move. At $100, it is an essential, at least in my mind; it makes so many things easier, from pie doughs and biscuits to pesto and hummus and nut butters and mayonnaise (although I do that by hand because I’m a wacko) … and the pumpkin pie I make every Thanksgiving.

* I have this Vitamix 1782 TurboBlend “food preparing machine” (it’s a blender, stupid), and it’s amazing. I can make smooth vegetable soups with it, no cream required; don’t toss those broccoli stalks, just peel, quarter, and roast them, then blend them with some vegetable stock and season to taste, maybe with some basil oil and toasted pumpkin seeds on top. I used it this Thanksgiving to make the carrot soup in Hugh Acheson’s The Broad Fork. The blender is nearly $400, however, too much if you’re just making milkshakes and smoothies (and there is nothing wrong with just making milkshakes and smoothies). You’ll probably be fine with just a basic blender and the food processor.

* I have the 5-quart KitchenAid stand mixer, which is about $265 right now. I kind of wish I had the next model up, mostly for bread-baking, which is still a bit of a chore for this model, but it’s great for everything else – mixing up cookie dough, brownie batter, quick breads, whipped cream, and Italian meringues (for macarons). The pasta-maker attachment is overpriced, but it does the job, and the grinder attachment has been good for me in a handful of uses, especially for turning stale bread into bread crumbs.

* Coffee is my big kitchen weakness, at least when it comes to spending money; I’m fortunate to have a few friends in the industry (whom I met through social media) who work for direct-trade roasters and have tipped me off to good sources of coffee and helped me pay for the gear I own, which is wonderful but expensive. The Baratza Virtuoso burr grinder is the least expensive grinder of its kind and caliber; when my first one had an issue with the motor, I sent a quick video of it jamming to Baratza and had a new machine within two weeks. I do make pour-over coffee at home using this Hario V60 ceramic dripper, but my preference is espresso, for which I use a Rancilio Silvia machine that is a wonder. The boiler is huge, so it bounces back quickly between shots and you can heat up the steam wand before your shots go cold. If you get your ratios right (for me it’s 17.5 to 19 grams per double shot, depending on the bean and roast), you’ll get great crema, 32-35 grams of output in 25-30 seconds, with almost no bad pulls. I use it every morning and I miss it when I travel. I weigh the beans, grounds, and output on the AWS digital scale I mentioned above, which came recommended by a barista at Lord Windsor Roasters in Long Beach, California.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Cooking, cooking essentials, gear, gift guides

→ November 30, 2015
→ By keith

The Way West.

My latest post for Insiders covers the Jordan Zimmermann and J.A. Happ signings.

A.B. Guthrie’s The Way West won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was the second in what would become a series of six novels covering the settlement of what is now the northwestern United States from Montana over to the Pacific, with this novel specifically detailing one wagon train heading out on the Oregon Trail. Although Guthrie’s work all seems to deal with that same topic, The Way West comes across much more as a “buddy movie” sort of book, covering the nascent friendship between the two most significant characters as they assume the leadership of the wagon train and deal with various hazards between Missouri and Oregon.

It’s a real page-turner.

Lije (I assume it’s short for Elijah) Evans is the most central of the various characters in the book, the man who eventually becomes the captain of the caravan by virtue of the respect the other men in the group have for his character and his calmness. Yet it’s Dick Summers, who appeared in the preceding book The Big Sky, who makes the journey possible; he’s an experienced hunter and traveler with nearly supernatural capabilities, able to speak with many different Native American tribes, to hunt all manner of game and fish, and even to forecast the weather, a man without whom the group would likely have faltered somewhere east of Wyoming. The mutual admiration society that develops between these two stoic men is the emotional heart of the book, the one constant through the vicissitudes of the group’s months-long trek across dangerous and hostile terrain.

Guthrie infuses The Way West with plenty of subplots, although they lack the intensity or narrative greed of the two connected strands of the bromance between Evans and Summers and the overarching plot of the trip itself. Evans’ teenaged son Brownie becomes infatuated with the one teenaged girl in the caravan, Mercy McBee, the sexually precocious daughter of two rather worthless parents, who herself has gotten into trouble with the married Curtis Mack. (Mercy and Mack’s wife Amanda both show signs of past sexual abuse or trauma, although it’s never mentioned explicitly in the text.) Guthrie gives the Native Americans a little more humanity and intelligence than I’d expect of a writer of his era, especially as they’re seen through Summers’ eyes; while they’re still a bit of the ‘noble savage’ and are frequently depicted as thieves, Guthrie couldn’t be clearer about his disdain for white settlers who viewed them as less than human or took their lives without cause.

It’s definitely a male-centric novel, as the female characters are mostly props, even Lije’s wife Rebecca, who has some strength to her character but gets relatively little screen time, which adds to the book’s dated feel – we’re already going back over 150 years here, and while it’s historically accurate to have the white guys making all of the decisions and doing the hunting and shooting and fighting, the women on such caravans still had to do a tremendous amount of work. Giving a couple of the women more prominent roles than getting pregnant and cooking dinner would have made the novel a much more enduring read.

I also found it a bit light on action – there are hard times, including conflicts with natives and difficult terrain crossings, but they happen quickly, as if Guthrie very clearly did not want to confuse the people-centric narrative with the tension of a shootout with the Sioux or of a wagon collapsing as the group attempts to ford a rough river. Such scenes give way to longer passages of dialogue or describing the as-yet unspoiled country between the western edge of white civilization and the Pacific coast, which I imagine was part of the Pulitzer committee’s logic in choosing The Way West to win the award. The resulting book, however, is one that’s well-written but dry, lacking so many of the dimensions that make more recent winners (like The Orphan Master’s Son) more colorful, gripping experiences.

Next up: I knocked off Dawn Powell’s Come Back to Sorrento over the weekend and have since begun yet another Pulitzer winner, Shirley Ann Grau’s The Keepers of the House.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: american literature, historical fiction, pulitzer prize, westerns

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