The show starts with an obscene 3:45 am wakeup call for the chefs; speaking as one of the least morning-ish people ever, that offended me to the core. It’s Stefan’s 40th birthday, and true to form, he calls it “sentimental bullshit.” He’s just a bald barrel of sunshine, that Stefan.
* Quickfire: The chefs are all in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, which is awesome, especially in late summer when there’s this unbelievable array of fruits like Rainier cherries and various mountain berries available. Chef Daisley Gordon, who is probably another one of Tom’s kids, is the guest judge. The chefs divide into teams of two and oh-hey-what-a-shocker Josh ends up with John. Meanwhile, Josie Congeniality is already anticipating a clash in styles with Eliza before they’ve even said “good morning.” The challenge is to make breakfast to go for the vendors – but it has to be served on a stick. Daisley brought the pantry, Sur la Table is providing the equipment with the chefs given a $500 budget to purchase what they need, and they get one hour to do it all. Immunity for both winners is at stake.
* Eliza followed Widespread Panic around the country one summer and paid her way by selling “vegan sushi” out of the van. Following a band across the country strikes me as a little odd, but mostly because it’s not my thing. I’m having a harder time with believing that vegan sushi is actually a thing.
* John says he’s acceding to Josh’s plans so that their personal differences don’t get in the way. Once again, he’s not living up to his reputation at all, and Josh comes off far worse in their interactions through the whole episode. Maybe the editors aren’t being fair to Rollie Fingers here but I do not believe they’re letting John off the hook.
* Eliza points out Josie doesn’t play well with others because Josie is the queen of logical fallacies, arguing that her way is right because it’s her way. Then we see Eliza trying to convince Josie to do it another way, which means that Eliza is insane.
* Sheldon and Bart’s panini press dies on them, but apparently the warranty expired after 20 minutes. Lizzie and Danyele got to the open pantry a little late and ended up with neither dairy nor eggs, which tells us nothing about how good they are as chefs. I get that the supplies can’t be infinite, but maybe making sure a few of the essentials are properly stocked – or that other chefs aren’t hoarding for competitive reasons – could be a part of the show, so chefs can be judged on their cooking skills.
* The dishes: Josh and John turn out chilaquiles as tacos, which I think would have been my favorite, especially since the Hillside Spot has hooked me on their chilaquiles. Eliza and Josie make ricotta pancakes with raspberry and linguica sausage, like a layer cake on a stick, but are killed because it’s too hard to eat. Micah and Kristen do a bacon and cinnamon waffle with cantaloupe marinated in pecan maple syrup and boysenberry and strawberry jam, probably the best presentation of any dish. CJ and Tyler do salmon in a crepe with arugula and cream cheese. Bart and Sheldon serve a breakfast sandwich with eggs, cheese, pancetta, and spinach purée; although no one mentioned nutritional value, this seemed like the highest protein dish along with the vitamin punch of the spinach, good for someone who’s going to be on his/her feet for hours before lunch. Danyele and Lizzie do summer berries with crispy pancetta, blackberry honey, and black pepper, but are criticized for its simplicity and lack of substance. Stefan and Brooke do a croque-monsieur with toasted fig.
* The top teams are Sheldon and Bart for their breakfast sandwich and Josh and John for their tacos. Sheldon and Bart win and grab immunity, which turns out to matter more than ever this time around.
* Elimination challenge: Remaining in teams, one per pair randomly draws an artisanal ingredient sold at the market. They then have two hours to prep and cook, with $10K on the line. The central ingredient must be highlighted, and the seven artisans will be guests at the dinner table along with Chef Daisley and the judges (including Hugh!).
* CJ and Tyler get spicy dill pickles. CJ wants to do a burger, fearing that Tom would criticize a more complex dish by saying “why not do a simple burger?” Tyler’s afraid it’s too simple but wants to be polite, which is a great life strategy but generally sucks on Top Chef. You have to be a little bit of a bastard to win reality shows. Just don’t be too much of one or the editors will make you look like a serial killer.
* Josh is merely yessing John to death and barely contributing to the concept of their dish, which isn’t any better than what Tyler’s doing. Lizzie and Danyele, given coconut curry chocolate, disagree on their dish – Lizzie wanted to do snapper or other fish, while Danyele insists on dessert. I can’t fathom Lizzie’s concept here; dessert may seem a little obvious, but chocolate and curry are such dominant flavors that I think they’d blow fish completely off the plate.
* Sheldon says he and Bart will go “balls to the wall” since they have immunity; Chef Udo Dirkschneider approves. Their dish is salmon candy, which Sheldon says is like salmon bacon (I’ve never had it) and says he’s never seen anything like it in Hawaii. Bart says it’s so sweet they must go in the opposite direction, so maybe it’s more comparable to bacon coated in the maple syrup that slid off your pancakes?
* Stefan and Brooke get rose petal jelly, which Stefan hates from the start because it smells like perfume from a prior century.
* Josh pan-sears medallions of pork tenderloin but crowds the pan so they won’t brown correctly. Their artisanal item, truffled popcorn, shows up in their very thick grits and in a truffled sauce. They’re not communicating at all – John sees that Josh is cooking the pork badly, but won’t say anything for fear of a blowup. What a prick, that guy.
* To judging … Josh and John’s pork, truffled popcorn grits, and balsamic truffle vinaigrette are not good. Hugh says “those grits suck.” Tell us how you really feel, brother. The sauce is a gloppy mess, the meat is poorly cooked per Tom, and the popcorn is not cleverly integrated. Well then.
* Micah and Kristen used their core ingredient, cheese curds, three ways – in a bechamel, raw, and fried. All the criticism is aimed at the fried curds, which are so small and so overpowered by the romesco sauce that everyone says the curds disappeared.
* Stefan and Brooke used their rose petal jelly to glaze duck and in the braised cabbage, producing an overly sweet dish without balance in the cabbage, while they also seem to have overcooked the duck.
* Sheldon and Bart served their candied salmon (which is made by the market’s fish throwers) with sweet and sour salad and a salmon mousse underneath. This might have been the best-reviewed dish of all, but the complaint was that they didn’t use enough of the salmon candy.
* Danyele and Lizzie’s coconut curry chocolate mousse tart with orange tea syrup falls apart when the diners cut into it. The artisan was mad that they used other chocolates in the dish, but I could understand wanting to mute the curry a little bit. They may have just done it really poorly.
* CJ and Tyler’s pork crumpet burger with fried spicy dill pickles is a hot mess because the crumpet collapses like wet toilet paper. Tom kills them for their lack of originality here. Has a burger ever fared well on Top Chef?
* Josie and Eliza had cardamom bitters, which I imagine is also powerfully fragrant. I like cardamom but it’s definitely one of the bossiest spices in the drawer. They do a white king salmon with cardamom bitters pistou and white clams. Josie complains about the flavor of Eliza’s pistou, which apparently is salty and has a little sand in it. Hugh says it’s not singing for him, which on this episode is like calling it an All-Star.
* Overall, everyone at the table was disappointed, and Padma even apologizes to the guests. Tom heads to the waiting room to go all Lee Elia on the chefs, calling it “actually a pretty poor showing” between lack of imagination and lack of technique. He changes course and says they’re sending an entire team home instead of just one chef (and, it turns out, not appointing a winner). He also tells them that Last Chance Kitchen is on again, although apparently some of the chefs never watched last season’s version of LCK and don’t understand how it works. Tom’s final comment was probably the most important one as he told them to step it up and take some risks. Chef Udo nods.
* Back in the condo, CJ says he would feel like an “absolute failure bitch” if he were eliminated on this challenge. We should really retire that last word. Meanwhile, Josh lights into Tyler for nothing, letting his own frustrations explode on someone who was just trying to make small talk. Josh later says he and Stefan are both on “the arrogant asshole side … but likable.” He’s half right.
* The bottom three teams are John/Josh, CJ/Tyler, and Brooke/Stefan. Tom hammers them all for a lack of creativity, while Gail says the food just wasn’t well made. Padma says the sugar in Stefan’s duck glaze needed more heat. Hugh accuses Stefan of sending out food (the cabbage) he knew was too sweet. Josh and John cut pork into medallions, and Josh immediately blames John for that, as if he were John’s employee in the kitchen. Tom says the food looked like someone who hated cooking made it, which has to be about as bad an insult as you can offer in this environment. Hugh says CJ’s burger was overcooked and the bun was soggy.
* CJ tries to throw the dessert under the bus as they’re walking out to await the final decision, which, while obviously reflecting his own frustrations, is pretty bush league.
* Hugh compares the rose-petal jelly dish to eating someone’s grandmother with its archaic perfume.
* Gail ends up the deciding vote on who goes home. CJ and Tyler go. CJ says he wasn’t judged fairly which is a joke – it was his dish from the start, and if anyone should feel slighted, it should be Tyler, but even he has to take some blame for failing to stand up for himself.
* LCK: Make a dessert in 30 minutes, with Tyler and CJ working together as a team against Kuniko. Kuniko doesn’t like to eat dessert, but says she has an advantage because she’s working alone. CJ wants to make hay-flavored ice cream, but don’t you need to age egg-based ice creams to improve their flavors?
* Kuniko makes a frozen banana with lemon curd, fruit compote, crushed cashews, shredded coconut, brown sugar syrup, tea, pink peppercorns, and olive oil! Tyler and CJ make hay ice cream with a cherry fritter, cooked cherries, arugula, and a chocolate sauce. Tom praises Kuniko’s flavors and the way she compressed the fruits, but dings her for using a bowl instead of a plate; she defends it off camera because that way you get every element in every bite. Tom says CJ/Tyler’s dish had too much arugula, but had a good fritter. CJ and Tyler end up winning, which I find really bizarre if the only criticism of Kuniko was the bowl. Her flavors were apparently strong and her technique was clearly better, especially with the trouble CJ had forming quenelles of his ice cream.
* Final three prediction: John, Kristen, and Micah.
, is ambitious for its subject matter – three intertwining plot lines around a Holocaust survivor, a mysterious author, and a young girl named for the main character in the author’s lone novel – and for how much it crams into a book of scarcely over 200 pages. The survivor, Leo Gorsky, and the girl, Alma, receive substantial time on the book’s pages, as Gorsky walks us through his past and through his mundane days as he nears and fears the end of his life, while the precocious Alma, still missing her dead father, seeks salve in the mystery behind the book, also called “The History of Love,” that gave her her name, powered her father’s love for her mother, and somehow ties all three storylines together.
, a self-published memoir from Mark Lijek, one of the six embassy employees rescued by the CIA; and 
, co-authored by Tony Mendez himself.
is the book to buy for any miserable wretch in your life who thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is quality erotica. Salter’s book earned notoriety when it was published in 1967 for its explicit descriptions of imagined sex scenes between its two protagonists, the American ne’er-do-well Philip Dean and the young Frenchwoman Anne-Marie, scenes that have lost their power to scandalize readers but retain some of their shock value because of the contrast between those descriptions and the mundane passages that surround them. A Sport and a Pastime remains an erotic novel, but its greatness lies in its incisive, almost heartless look at the vacuous nature of any relationship built exclusively on sexual attraction.
.
showed up in Allison Hoover Bartlett’s 
(just $199!) in what I can only assume is a bit of 
TV series and the 1997 edition of the classic American cookbook Joy of Cooking. With Good Eats airing in repeats on the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, you can just set up your DVR to record them rather than buying the overpriced DVD sets, but the companion books, starting with 
, are worth owning for the revised (usually re-tested) recipes and the commentary on each episode. Brown’s techniques always revolve around sound science and increased efficiency, whether it’s a faster way of doing something or a way to reuse an existing kitchen tool for a new purpose. He’s goofy – belching yeast sock-puppets are just never not funny – but always educational. And of all of his recipes that I’ve tried (more than I can count), only one, the squash dumplings, didn’t work for me, and that was fixed in the companion book.
is always my first recommendation for people who are either just learning to cook or who are looking for one cookbook to rule them all. There are many editions available and there are some wide variations from one to the next, but the ’97 version has served me extremely well for its tremendous breadth of recipes – that’s still my go-to book even for Italian classics like pesto Genovese or shrimp scampi – and for the clear, logical recipes. For this edition, the publisher hired food writers to rewrite most of the recipes in the book, losing the folksy prose that charmed readers of earlier editions, but ensuring that the recipes were easy to follow and worked properly. Each recipe in Joy lists the ingredients in bold face at the point in the recipe where they’re used, rather than listing them all at the top. If you don’t succumb to the temptation to skip your mise en place – prepping and measuring ingredients before you start any cooking – this makes it much easier to follow the recipes and reduces the odds that you’ll skip an ingredient.
for nearly a decade. It’s out of print but amazon has used copies for $4 and up at that link.
, a book I own myself and have given away as a gift. Its recipes require a slightly higher skill level than Joy, but Ruhlman’s twenty section essays – on basic techniques like poaching, braising, and frying, or core ingredients like onions, eggs, and salt – build up your knowledge on each subejct from the ground up. It’s the kind of book that might intimidate a rookie but, if you try some of the recipes, will leave you impressed with your own capabilities. I 
, is another must-have but is for intermediate home cooks and above because it makes assumptions about the reader’s experience and comfort level with certain techniques or foods. The book’s recipes are largely presented as ratios that can be scaled up to produce the desired quantity. If you want to make biscuits, you need 3 parts flour to 1 part fat to 2 parts liquid. The specifics are largely up to you, and there are brief discussions of your options, but again, Ruhlman is largely assuming you know how a biscuit or a Hollandaise or pâte à choux and is describing each recipe in terms of its foundation.
, which I 
, easily the most beautifully shot cookbook in my collection. Slater is a very famous food writer in England who has just a small cult following here, but Tender deserves a much wider audience for its focus on vegetables from seed to table. His gardening advice hasn’t helped me much because you can’t get a much wider gap between soil types than England and Arizona, but his dishes, many of which do contain meat but still accentuate the vegetables, are subtle showstoppers, turning some very ordinary veg – the more mundane and kid-unfriendly the plant, the more Slater seems to adore it – into warm, glowing, gorgeous dishes. Tender is the book that got me to buy and cook an actual pumpkin (not from a can), a process that, with about a tablespoon of added brown sugar led to this:
, which isn’t a cookbook at all. The authors, Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, interviewed dozens of professional chefs about what ingredients went well together, and tabulated the results in this book. Look up an ingredient in The Flavor Bible and you’ll find a long list of good partners, with ingredients that were mentioned more often earning bolded entries. For example, parsnips are in season right now in much of the country, and the parsnip entry first says they should always be cooked, and work well when baked, boiled, braised, fried, grilled, mashed, pureed, roasted, or steamed. When the authors asked chefs about parsnips, the most-mentioned ingredients were butter (including browned butter) and nutmeg, both appearing in bold, capital letters. Bolded entries, mentioned less often than those two ingredients, include apples, chives, cream, curry, garlic, ginger, maple syrup, olive oil, parsley (a relative of parsnip and carrots), pepper, potatoes, sage, salt (duh), brown sugar, thyme, and root vegetables. The entry also includes about fifty other ingredients that work well with parsnip and were mentioned at least once by the interviewed chefs, and then concludes with five “flavor affinities,” combinations like parsnips + honey + mustard or parsnips + butter + cream + potatoes. Some entries have “Holy Grail” pairings, marked with an asterisk and mentioned by a large portion of the chefs they interviewed, like plums and Armagnac or lamb and rosemary, and some entries have “avoid” sections, like parsley and dessert. There are even sections for national cuisines – if you want to know what flavors work well in Afghan or Eastern European cuisines, for example, they’ve got you covered. What The Flavor Bible doesn’t do, however, is tell you what to do with these pairings. There are assorted quotes from celebrity chefs describing specific dishes, but the book contains no recipes. They assume you have the recipes and techniques and are looking for inspiration.
, which has most of the basic desserts you’d want to make, including a pie crust (for lattice tops, like the one in my Twitter avatar, but functional in any pie) that works as reliably as any I’ve ever tried. The writing can be cloying, especially when they go into more detail on failed kitchen experiments than I ever needed (if you’re going to describe something that didn’t work, at least make it funny), but the recipes work and their pumpkin pie is bar none the best I have ever tasted, one I make at least once every year.
, 
(most of the same breads as the first book, but in whole-wheat, multi-grain, and 50/50 variations), and the more accessible 
. His pizza doughs are pretty foolproof; I add a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten to his 100% whole wheat pizza dough and it’s strong enough to stretch it to translucency without tearing. (Sometimes I tear it anyway because I’m clumsy like that.) His pain a l’ancienne white-flour baguettes from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice are absurdly easy if you have a stand mixer or food processor (this 
is the current version of the one I’ve used for fifteen years) and never fail to get raves when I bring them to friends. I’ve made his focaccia, his cinnamon rolls, his struan, his challah, his pitas, and his wild yeast starter, which I kept going for about a year and a half until we packed up the house in Massachusetts. His books even have recipes for international breads like pumpernickel, panettone, hutzelbrot, and stollen, as well as Ethiopian injera and crackers like lavash and graham. Go with Artisan if you’re a bread-baking rookie, or the others if you have more experience or want books that will focus on baker’s ratios and allow for more ingredient substitutions. I 
. I don’t own the full book, but have a magazine version they sold when the book first came out, including about a third of the main book’s recipes, and they’ve all worked on the first try, including a surprisingly flavorful bolognese sauce that makes enough to freeze for one or two future meals (you lose a little texture, but the flavors remain strong), a beef burgundy stew that gave us about three dinners’ worth, and a white chicken chili that is surprisingly low in fat.
. I’ve eaten at Mesa Grill three times, once in Manhattan and twice in Vegas, and every dish I have eaten at those restaurants is in here and easy to reproduce at home. The blue- and yellow-corn muffins are decadent.
, which does, indeed, include wisdom from the woman who introduced America to French cooking – but whose most famous cookbooks haven’t aged well, at least not to my eyes. This book focuses on the bare essentials in the kitchen, including the basic vinaigrette formula I’ve been using for years, mother sauce formulas, simple instructions for roasting or braising major cuts of meat, souffles, breads, custard, and even baking-powder biscuits so you can make strawberry shortcakes.