→ December 3, 2015
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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.

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→ December 2, 2015
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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.

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→ December 2, 2015
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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.

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→ December 1, 2015
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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.

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→ December 1, 2015
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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.

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→ November 30, 2015
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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.

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→ November 30, 2015
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Cyber Monday boardgame deals.

Here’s what I’ve found on amazon so far – feel free to list other deals you’ve found in the comments:

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→ November 28, 2015
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Stick to baseball, 11/28/15.

Eric Longenhagen and I posted a too-early ranking of the top 2016 MLB draft prospects, one that highlights the lack of a clear #1 overall prospect.

I reviewed two boardgames for Paste recently, the tile-laying game Cacao and the the family adventure game Mission: Red Planet.

Around these parts, I posted my annual list of recommended cookbooks and a short post listing boardgame app sales for this weekend.

And now, the links…

  • Glenn Greenwald destroyed CNN for suspending reporter Elise Labott for two weeks for a rather innocuous (my opinion) tweet on the Syrian refugee topic. Greenwald even went on CNN to rip them apart for their fearmongering and mishandling of Labott, as covered here by Erik Wemple, whose initial complaint of Labott’s “bias” in her tweet seems to have sparked the suspension. (Wemple has said he opposes such suspensions, but I don’t see why he singled out Labott, a relatively unknown female reporter, among the various more serious breaches of ethics Greenwald listed.)
  • Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks says Syrian refugees are just looking for a “paid vacation.”
  • Is the west’s reaction to the Paris terror attacks the war that ISIS wants?
  • The young Iraqis who are presumably risking their lives promoted evolutionary theory and rational thinking.
  • A great longread on so-called “inauthentic” ethnic cuisine as practiced by Asian-American chefs like Danny Bowien, Dale Talde, and David Chang. Authenticity is great, but isn’t de facto superior to inauthentic food made well.
  • The Guardian weighs in on fad diets that are often light on science, asking what constitutes “healthy eating?”
  • Aziz Ansari appeared on NPR’s The Hidden Brain podcast to discuss findings from his book on love and dating, co-authored with a sociologist, called Modern Romance.
  • Via a reader, a story from June in Slate that describes aquafaba, the possible vegan replacement for egg whites. It’s actually just the brining liquid found in canned chickpeas, and for reasons not yet understood, its protein structure can create a stable foam just like the albumin from chicken eggs.
  • Remember that hedge fund douchebag who bought the rights to a decades-old drug and raised the price fifty-fold, then reversed that decision under public pressure? Yeah, well, they reversed that reversal. It’s a clear situation where the free market – of which I’m a rather ardent supporter – fails, because the market for the drug is so small (the NY Times says that there were only 8821 prescriptions for it in 2014) that it likely wouldn’t support the creation of a competitor due to the high regulatory costs. The only solution I see would be for the FDA to “fast track” a generic alternative, assuming a manufacturer could be found – or, unfortunately, for the federal government to mandate a price cap.
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→ November 27, 2015
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Boardgame app sales and Thanksgiving post mortem.

Eric Longenhagen and I have a too-early top 30 ranking for the 2016 MLB draft up for Insiders. Paste posted my review of the boardgame Cacao on Wednesday; it’s a big hit around here as the rules are pretty easy to pick up but there’s still some strategy involved. I posted my annual list of recommended cookbooks here on Monday.

Many of the best boardgame apps are on sale this weekend; I haven’t updated my rankings since last January but will do so around the holidays. In the meantime, here’s the ones that are on sale, starting with my favorite and working down in rough order:

1. Carcassonne: $6.99 for iOS, $2.49 for Android.

2. Agricola: $2.99 for iOS.

3. Caylus: $2.99 for iOS.

4. Galaxy Trucker: $2.99 for iOS or
Android.

5. Pandemic: $4.99 for iOS.

6. Elder Sign: $0.99 for iOS or Android.

7. Lost Cities: $2.99 for iOS.

8. Hey, That’s My Fish: $0.99 for iOS or Android

9. Steam: Rails to Riches: Brand new app, $2.99 for iOS. I’ve played it three times, and so far I’m enjoying it.

10. Lords of Waterdeep: $2.99 for iOS.

11. Kingdom Builder: $1.99 for iOS or Android. I haven’t played this one yet.

–

A little post mortem on yesterday’s Thanksgiving feast, which went pretty well overall.

Today's menu. Have a safe and highly caloric Thanksgiving, everyone.

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

With three guests who are gluten-free, I had to tweak the menu in a few ways, thickening the gravy with tapioca starch, for example, and making the cornbread with gluten-free flour. The chocolate tart was also gluten-free (recipe from Bon Appetit, includes a small amount of wheat flour which I swapped out), and was one of the two biggest hits of the day, along with the carrot soup, which came from Hugh Acheson’s must-have cookbook The Broad Fork. The beet dish gave me some trouble as roasting them for an hour still didn’t make them soft enough to smash as I’d intended.

Spatchcocking and salting (“dry brining”) the turkey was a huge success, and I’ll cook the bird that way for the foreseeable future. It definitely created crispier skin and juicier meat, and the whole 16.66-pound bird cooked in about 90 minutes. I pulled the bird when the breasts registered 152; the tenderloins were a touch less cooked than I’d have liked, but everything else was cooked perfectly. I now also have a backbone and neck to use to make stock, as well as the remains of the carcass, and a lot of leftovers.

As for the dish that must not be named, I used Alton Brown’s master recipe to make it 1) less gross and gloppy and 2) gluten-free, as condensed mushroom soup often has wheat flour as a thickener. I also fried the onions with rice flour, although I think I needed to crank up the oil’s temp to something higher than 350 to get them to brown faster and thus absorb less grease. (Sitting them overnight on paper towels took a lot of oil off them.) It was fine for a first attempt but that dish clearly needs work, since it’s demanded by several family members even though I think it’s a cruel thing to do to vegetables.

I hope all of you had a safe and happy Thanksgiving. I’ll be back Saturday with a links post and on regular duty again starting Monday, by which point I hope we’ll get some signings and/or larger trades to discuss.

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→ November 24, 2015
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Le Havre the Inland Port app.

The new app version of Le Havre: The Inland Port (for iOS) – itself a two-player adaptation of the highly complex strategy game Le Havre – is a beautiful port of a boring game. That’s probably enough to keep most of you from reading a long review, so here’s a short one instead. (And if you’re looking for a good new two-player game, try 7 Wonders Duel instead.)

The boardgame version of Le Havre The Inland Port takes the theme of the original game and creates a much simpler two-player experience, where a stream of buildings, advancing in cost and productivity/value, comes up for sale in the central market, and players must balance gaining resources from buildings that they’ve already built (you can use yours or an opponent’s, paying one coin for the latter) against buying new buildings to add victory points and go for two game-end bonuses. The buildings are the same in every game and even the order in which they appear for sale doesn’t vary much at all.

Resource production/acquisition is the strangest part of the game, a peculiar mechanic that seems to be peculiar for its own sake. You don’t just get, say, 2 wood or 1 bread, but you move your four resource tokens (wood, coal, bread, fish) on a numbered array, going up a row (plus 3), right one space (plus one), up and to the left diagonally (plus 2), and rarely up and to the right diagonally (plus 4). When you spend resources, you can spend in combinations of 1, 3, and 4, which means sometimes you have to pay an extra unit or two, for no reason other than that’s how the game was designed.

Most buildings bring you new resources, showing an arrow in one resource’s color, with the arrow telling you in which direction to move. When you buy a building, it goes in the zero column of the main board, and each “day” of the game that you don’t use it, it moves one column to the right, with the columns numbered 2, 3, 4, and 4+. The number tells you how many times you can invoke the building’s capability – for example, if the building with the brown arrow pointing to the right is on the 3 column, you can use it, moving your wood (brown) token three spaces to the right, then returning the building to column 0. The + symbol in the last column gives you one coin in addition to the building’s regular function, and if you don’t use that building before the end of the current day, it’s sold back to the bank for half the face value (which you get).

There are five special buildings that can award bonuses at game-end. There’s one “anchor” building for each resource that gives you one point per unit of that resource that you have on hand when the game is over. A fifth building, the dock, costs 7 coins to build (but no resources), and gives you ten points for each of those other four anchor buildings.

Because turn order is determined from the start, the player who goes second will get the first shot to buy the Dock when it appears on Day 12, the last Day of the game. So if s/he plans properly, s/he gets an automatic ten-point bonus – the dock plus one of the two anchor buildings that show up in day 12. (The other two appear in day 11.) That gives the game a deterministic feel, and I found after two or three plays I felt like this guy:

As for the app itself, it looks great, with bright colors, clear graphics, and a thorough tutorial. The AI has five levels of difficulty, but I beat the medium player the first time through, and took down the hard AI player (named Pascal … of course) after two or three tries. I hope the developers choose a better game to port next time out, because their work is good, but this title just wasn’t worth their efforts.

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