→ September 1, 2012
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Gun, with Occasional Music.

I did a final blog post on Arizona Rookie League prospects yesterday, including the Cubs’ big bonus baby Juan Paniagua; some other Cubs, Rangers, and Royals prospects; and notes on Tyler Skaggs and Jacob Turner.

—

Back in December, reader JD recommended Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 novel Gun, with Occasional Music to me, saying:

It’s the best and funniest modern (well, futuristic) noir I’ve read — Chandler and Hammett by way of Philip K. Dick and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And it’s shorter than a playoff game, to boot.

All of which is pretty accurate – the various pull quotes from critics include two that mention the Dick/Chandler combination, but Lethem’s dystopian hard-boiled detective novel is also more wryly funny than either writer was, and occasionally a little too wrapped up in its own sci-fi stylings (although so was Dick’s Ubik). It’s one of the most interesting books I’ve read this year, and certainly one of the quickest, including a clever twist in the final third of the book that differentiates it from the standard (and slightly hackneyed) hard-boiled format.

Lethem’s detective, Conrad Metcalf, is a drug-addicted “private inquisitor” – but the drug addiction isn’t a big deal, as everyone in the novel is using “make,” a blend of drugs provided for free by the government and customized for each individual, including components like Forgettol, Acceptol, and Addictol, as an actual opiate of the masses to keep everyone in line. Citizens also carry around magnetic cards that track their “karma points,” which can be increased or, more commonly in this book, deducted by formal inquisitors from The Office, the Gestapo-like police presence that stands in Metcalf’s way as he tries to help a client who’s been set up by the Office for a murder he didn’t commit – one that pushes his karma down to zero, threatening him with this new world’s equivalent of prison, cryogenic suspension. Oh, and Metcalf is being dogged by a trigger-happy gunsel who just happens to be an evolved kangaroo.

The rich details of Lethem’s dystopian world start to overwhelm what is, at heart, a straightforward detective novel, one where Metcalf starts investigating one case and ends up enmeshed in a conspiracy to cover up one crime that eventually involves a second murder, Metcalf getting knocked unconscious*, and a web of lies and suspicions of adultery that doesn’t clear up until the penultimate chapter. Even though I felt little or no sympathy for any of the characters involved in the crime, Lethem layered enough complexity into that part of the story that the story maintained my interest level right to the end, both to see how the crime took place (I didn’t figure it out) and how Metcalf’s own side story would be resolved.

*If there were a hard-boiled detective story drinking game, the detective taking a blackjack or other blunt object to the back of the head, describing the carpet as it approaches is face, and waking up somewhere else would be worth two shots.

The dystopian aspects varied in their effectiveness. The “make” was at the top of the list, both because of its veneer of plausibility and because of its increasing relevance to our dependency on Big Pharma (and I say this as someone who depends on them myself). The evolved animals are largely props beyond the kangaroo, who could just as easily have been human. The “babyheads,” children with evolved brains but immature bodies, seemed to serve no purpose whatsoever. The karma cards, once you get past the RPG experience-points feel, also feel somewhat prescient, written seven years before the Patriot Act and the start of our era of no-fly lists, monitoring of electronic communcations, and other erosions of privacy in the name of increasing security. It’s dark but feels more madcap than paranoid, even though there’s a clear paranoia underneath the surface. If you can gloss over some of the slightly siller sci-fi trappings of Gun, it’s a fast-paced detective story with enough of a serious underpinning to elevate it above the various pulp authors who’ve tried (and mostly failed) to repurpose Chandler and Hammett into different eras.

Next up: Alessandro Piperno’s The Worst Intentions, which, after reading about 40% of the book, I would call an Italian version of Portnoy’s Complaint.

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→ August 31, 2012
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Lost Cities app.

I’ve been touting the physical version of Lost Cities, Reiner Knizia’s easy-to-learn two-player gateway game, for about two years now, because of its combination of simple mechanics, modest strategy, and portability, even though it has a little more luck or randomness than I like in most games. The iOS version of Lost Cities is now out, from the same developers as the best-of-breed Carcassonne app, and as you might expect the Lost Cities app looks tremendous and plays very easily and quickly, with just a few minor glitches.

The entire game of Lost Cities revolves around a single deck of 60 cards, containing 12 cards in each of five colors: cards numbered 2 through 10 as well as three coin cards that allow a player to increase his/her bet on that color. Players build “expeditions” in each color by placing cards in increasing numerical order, so once you’ve placed the 4 card in one color, you can no longer place the 2 or the 3 (and must hold or discard it). Each player’s turn consists of playing or discarding one card, and then drawing a card from the deck or any discard pile. You receive points for an expedition equal to the sum of the card values in that expedition minus 20, so you can receive negative points if you don’t place enough cards in a column. Placing one coin card (before you place any numerical cards) doubles your gain or loss, placing two coin cards triples the result, and placing three quadruples it. There’s also a 20-point bonus for placing eight or more cards, including coins, in a single column. Since there is only one card of each number/color combination, the game’s decisions revolve around when to play a specific card – do you play it now, or hold it to see if you can get an intervening card first? Do you hold certain cards to keep them away from your opponent? Do you draw from the deck to move the game closer to the end, or draw from a discard pile to prolong it?

The app version has incredibly bright, clear graphics, enough that it plays well on the small iPod/iPhone screen, with a very sensible layout that makes it easy to see what’s been played, including coin markers next to the current score in each column. That ability to see the current score is probably the biggest advantage the app version offers over the physical version – the math in the game isn’t hard, but it’s easier to make quick decisions when the running tallies are there in front of you. (It can be a little disconcerting to see a -40 or -60 when you’ve played coin cards but no number cards in an expedition, though.) The app offers four AI players, one comparable to a box of rocks, one very challenging, and two in between. It also comes with a set of thirty in-game achievements that serve as tutorials on mechanics and on strategy, with the higher levels forcing you to handicap yourself in ways that will force you to think about the game a little differently. Online play is available, but I haven’t tested it out yet. I have played over 100 games against AI opponents, with most games taking under five minutes. It’s addictive enough that my daughter complained I was playing it too much.

The main glitch in the game is the proximity of the discard pile to your expeditions, making it far too easy to accidentally place a card in the wrong place. While your placement isn’t final until you draw another card, either from the deck or from a discard pile, if you move very quickly, which I found I was able to do after just a game or two, you’ll likely make a wrong move along the way because it’s so easy to put a card in the wrong place. Obviously there’s a user error element there – if I would just slow down, I wouldn’t make these mistakes – but I’d prefer to see more space between the two areas, perhaps by relocating the discard piles to the center of the board, which is how the game is set up if you’re playing the physical version. I’ve also caught the weaker AI players making what appeared to be extremely bad moves, such as playing coin cards late in the game when the probability of reaching the 20-point threshold in that expedition is very low, so once you’re up to speed on gameplay you will probably just want to face the most difficult AI opponent.

One of the best aspects of the migration of advanced boardgames to iOS has been the high-quality implementations, since the audience is still somewhat of a niche market, willing to pay a few bucks for every title released in this space. The Lost Cities app takes a fun if very simple game and gives it a high-class makeover for iOS, with tremendous graphics, plenty of replay value thanks to the game’s random element and one very strong AI player, and the potential for online play – another top of the line electronic version that matches or even exceeds the quality of the original.

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→ August 30, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E6.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up. Still waiting on that blog post I mentioned on the podcast.

This episode might have had the worst first half and best second half of the season for me, although I had the rare personal connection to the elimination challenge to increase its appeal to me.

* Quickfire: Make an ‘aphrodisiac’ dish. Guest judge is something named Dita Von Teese and the winner gets $5k and immunity. This challenge seems designed to embarrass multiple people involved.

* Really, Art, no one cares about your dreams, and no one thinks you’re psychic because you dreamed about chocolate.

* Patricia referring to “hoochie mama outfits” in her obviously-scripted description of who Dita Von Teese is – are we really supposed to think she’s up on the biggest celebrities in the burlesque scene – was another highlight in a season of classic chef quotes, followed later by her “bend over, baby!” during judging.

* Blenders are hitting the floor all over this place. I haven’t seen this much shattered glass since I watched the first season of Breaking Bad.

* Art makes floating islands (large meringues floating in a pool of chocolate sauce) and starts tossing around bad jokes about breasts. Also, did you know he’s gay?

* Lorena keeps talking about sexy. She brings the sexy, she puts the sexy in her food, she has all the sexy on the plate, even Prince thinks she says “sexy” too much.

* Awful Chris makes seared foie gras with fig and champagne sauce. Of course he does. And of course it’s awesome.

* Seriously chefs, Von Teese is just not that hot. I had no idea who she was before this show – apparently she was briefly married to Marilyn Manson, which says a lot right there – but found her mostly sad. The forced double (or sometimes single) entendres, the pouty expressions, the fake breasts … I don’t know what happened to that woman when she was younger, but the whole act screamed “bad self-esteem” to me. Meanwhile, Curtis, who is wearing more makeup than Von Teese is, can’t stop blushing and ends up completely tongue-tied.

* The bottom two: Art’s, which looked like a mess but also suffered because von Teese doesn’t like chocolate that much (so why was it offered as a star ingredient?); and Lorena’s, which von Teese loved but said wasn’t sexy, sort of like The Black Album.

* Favorites: Kerry’s seared tuna with uni, soy, and aromatics, because uni are gonads or something; and Takashi’s chilled oyster with sea urchin and yuzu truffle vinaigrette, which was “slippery and sexy and adventurous.” Takashi wins for a dish that apparently had the texture of a vagina. That’s basically what they said, right?

* Elimination challenge: Out comes Saipan Chutima, chef/owner of perhaps the best Thai restaurant in the United States, Lotus of Siam, which I’ve visited three times and reviewed here. The chefs are asked to put their own spins on classic Thai dishes and will work as one team to open a restaurant in the TC kitchens, each producing one dish while collaborating on service. They’ll dine at Lotus of Siam to prepare.

* The chefs all seem to agree that this challenge is a bit ridiculous between the cuisine and the time to open a place; I don’t doubt the validity of their complaint, but since they’re not cooking live bugs this year, I think they kind of got off easy.

* One dish comes out with pork blood, so Awful Chris proposes to Saipan on the spot, ignoring the fact that her daughter Penny is the attractive one. Meanwhile, Lorena is studying the dishes like a scientist, poking and prodding; if someone had put a live ingredient on one of her plates to move when she poked it, she might have hit the ceiling.

* They go shopping in two stores and once again can’t coordinate to save their lives. Too many alphas. Awful Chris probably shouldn’t be the translator, either.

* Patricia is full of quips this week, saying to Art after he tosses a whole bird at her, “Come on, that was a girl’s throw!” She’s making seared duck breast with masaman curry, grilled eggplant, and green pineapple, then later decides to tear Lorena a new one for using half of the twelve burners. Assuming that was as out of nowhere as it seemed on TV, Lorena had a right to be pretty hacked off at Patricia for that one.

* Meanwhile, Kerry turns expediting into rocket science, mumbling about a fake ticket and confusing the hell out of the chefs working the line. When Awful Chris eventually takes over so Kerry can cook his own dish, he starts expediting like he means it.

* Lorena offers her take on tom kha gai with a pisco chicken soup with galangal, coconut, lime, and cilantro – the judges mostly loved it aside from the garnish, which Grubby Alan said wasn’t edible, and a later complaint that Lorena didn’t poach her chicken in the flavored broth, which seems like a more serious error to me.

* Takashi does a yellow curry with crispy fried noodles. Penny loved the flavors, while Saipan, who suddenly looks like someone just offered her a plate of rotten onions, is unimpressed. Perhaps asking chefs to make versions of Saipan’s dishes for Saipan wasn’t such a hot idea.

* Next course: Awful Chris does his take on beef larb, making a tartare version with 21-day aged sirloin and using most of the same ingredients in larb. Francis particularly liked it, although he felt the flavors were a little understated, to which Awful Chris responds that he wanted the beef flavor to come through most strongly. Saipan is unimpressed and says her two-year-old grandson puts better larb in his diaper.

* Art kind of ignores the challenge, which I’m sure is okay because did you know he lost a lot of weight? His cashew-crusted chicken and crispy rice salad with lemongrass-lime vinaigrette gets mehs all around. Apparently he didn’t grind the nuts enough and I’ll just let that one sit there for you all.

* Final course: Kerry is cooking too slowly, so Patricia ends up tossing the dishes she’d prepared for the judges’ table and firing new duck breasts so theirs will be ready at close to the same time. Unfortunately, she undercooks the new breasts, and James even sends his back to ask for a new one. Meanwhile, Kerry gets high marks for his braised pork belly with mustard greens, Thai spices, and a taro root purée, for which even Saipan offers a grunt of praise.

* Afterwards, Patricia smokes Kerry with a sarcastic “thank you,” and he genuinely feels bad about the whole thing. I think Patricia’s response to stress or anger is to let it all out at once, after which she feels better because the emotion is gone – but she’s oblivious to the effect that her lashing out has on the people around her, which can be lasting. Her dish gets some of the lowest marks of all during judging.

* Aside: The service might have been a little slow, but did anyone else think the comments from the diners on the slowness of the service felt forced, or even scripted? If you’re getting a free meal from these chefs, are you really complaining that your entrees are taking twenty minutes to arrive?

* Back to judging, James seems to make the most salient point of all, that the signature flavors of Thai cuisine (let alone the northern Thai cuisine of Lotus of Siam) were missing. I think he was about to say the chefs’ output was as authentic as the Thai Chicken Wrap at Panera, but Saipan brandished her Kom Kom vegetable knife and put an end to his comments.

* Top dishes: Chris and Kerry. Chris was more adventurous in concept than Kerry and wins the $10K for the Michael J. Fox Foundation, bringing his winnings to $26K total. Kerry does get praise from Curtis for turning taro, one of Curtis’ least favorite ingredients on the planet, into something not just edible but pleasant.

* Bottom: Lorena, Patricia, and Art. Art’s was kind of bland and boring, so he’s tearing up again (drink). Lorena went for presentation but not function, and the photo of her dish, with a whole red chili pepper on top, is a little odd to look at. Patricia’s curry wasn’t intensely flavored, and of course, she botched the duck.

* Patricia hesitates to say why her duck was off, although she’s trying desperately to telegraph to the judges that someone else made her screw up. Curtis then aggressively pushes Patricia to throw whoever it is under the bus. She looks at Kerry and more or less guilts him into confessing, so credit to him for owning up to it when, ultimately, she made the choice to serve it when she knew it wasn’t done (which she admitted to Kerry post-judging).

* Elimination: Art. It’ll make for a less interesting kitchen, and perhaps less interesting recaps; he certainly led all the chefs in personality this season. He seems quite understanding and wasn’t thrilled with his dish; I wonder if fatigue plus exasperation at a challenge so far from his comfort zone did him in. Of course, at this point they’re whacking a good chef every week. I kind of hope his prediction that he and new BFF Lorena open a restaurant together comes true. I’d go.

* I’m still looking at Chris, Patricia, and Takashi for the final three, although I fear Patricia is fading.

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→ August 29, 2012
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A Naked Singularity.

Sergio de la Pava’s sprawling, ambitious novel A Naked Singularity took an unusual route, albeit an increasingly more usual one, to the broader marketplace, appearing first as a self-published title in 2008, finding a small but dedicated online following, and eventually attracting the attention of the University of Chicago Press, which published it this May to largely positive reviews. I received a complimentary review copy around that time and just worked my way through it this month. It is at times darkly funny, cynical, twisted, and bizarre, reminding me of other works from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to Aravind Adiga, brandishing a new American hysterical realism that, while often uneven, grabs you by the throat and forces you to pay attention.

The novel centers on Casi, an inadvertently-named young public defender in Manhattan who enters the book having never lost a case, only to find his 12-0 record in jeopardy, which flashes him back to the career of the (real) Puerto Rican boxer Wilfredo Benitez, who was on top of the world until he wasn’t, leading to a rapid and ignominious decline. Casi finds himself entangled in his usual mess of near-hopeless cases as well as pro bono work on an appeal for an Alabama death-row inmate of well below-average intelligence, while his friend Dane (who never seems to appear when anyone else is in the scene) tries to convince him to participate in a can’t-miss heist, stealing $10 million (or more) by intercepting a drug deal that involves one of those hopeless clients. He also has to cope with a bizarre immediate and slightly-extended family who wink in and out of his non-working life, as well as an even more strange group of neighbors living upstairs, one of whom is convinced he can make Ralph Kramden become real by playing episodes of The Honeymooners nonstop on his DVR. And that just scratches the surface of what transpires across the book’s 678 pages, some of which becomes increasingly divorced from reality as the novel goes on – hence the ‘hysterical realism’ tag, which I first heard in reference to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a novel on which I had mixed feelings but have often found myself pondering in the four years since I read it.

Aside from Casi himself, all of the subplots in the novel revolve around the theme of justice, and its only occasional, arbitrary connection to the law and the judicial system. His indigent clients have their sob stories, some more sobby than others, but are largely treated by the system as widgets to be processed as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Ramon De Leon, the client who knows about the huge impending drug deal – which also involves a very large man known as La Ballena, or The Whale – is trying to manipulate the system, which is hungry for headlines and career-making deals, for his own benefit, working with lawyers from the district attorney’s office who are eager to swallow any story he feeds them without regard to its veracity. The Alabama death-row case gives de la Pava some room to criticize the hilariously stilted system of “justice” in that state, where judges may impose the death penalty by overruling juries that have voted for life without parole, one of only three states that allow such atrocities. Casi has a conscience and a strong sense of justice, and his rising awareness of the gap between that sense and the actual level of justice meted out by the system causes him to become slightly unhinged, especially in the novel’s final third, where he and Dane execute their heist plan, after which Casi is subject to a series of kangaroo-court hearings at work, is pursued by a corrupt detective straight out of central casting, and bumps into a new neighbor who has to be seen to be believed.

There are some off notes in the novel, even beyond the handful of typos. De la Pava always capitalizes the word Television, without a modifier, although even in 2008 it had already started to lose its grip as the dominant force in our culture, to be replaced (for now at least) by Internet. The vignettes involving his family often felt tacked-on, and had they disappeared from the story the main plot wouldn’t have suffered any for it, the kind of bulk-forming narrative that an experienced editor might have excised. De la Pava also had to get the long meaning-of-life soliloquies that seem to plague every new author today out of the way; if I never have to read another chapter where a bunch of fictional twentysomethings debate the existence of God or the virtue of altruism it will be too soon. Dostoevsky and Trosky covered this ground a century and a half ago. Can we all please just move on?

My tastes in fiction tend more toward classic novels and straightforward narratives, so A Naked Singularity was a clear departure from the norm for me, and it’s often compared to three postmodern classics that I have yet to read (but intend to hit soon): The Recognitions, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest. If those appeal to you, or if you like novels that, while a little unpolished, are broad and experimental with a liberal dose of humor, you may enjoy A Naked Singularity even more than I did.

Next up: Still ripping through Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music.

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→ August 28, 2012
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The Golden Notebook.

I’ve got a piece up today previewing the top 30 prospects for the 2013 draft.

—

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who’d be kind to me. That’s what people really want, if they’re telling the truth.”

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, #48 on The Novel 100 and part of the TIME 100, is apparently a landmark in feminist literature as well as a rumination on the empty promises of communism, written by an author who had herself become disillusioned with both the philosophy and the British branch of the Party. Lessing attacks the novel’s traditional structure with a post-modern twist, weaving five narratives together across roughly 600 pages before the book culminates in one short story that attempts to reconcile fact with her protagonist’s own literary voice, a structure that challenges as it confuses.

That protagonist, Anna Wulf, is a divorced mother of a young daughter and a once-successful writer who has spent years unable to write a follow-up to her one novel, a wartime story that was commercially and critically successful and now spawns a series of comical attempts by English and American producers to film a bastardized version of it that takes its name but scarcely any of its plot. Anna and her best friend, Molly, are both little-c communists who have drifted out of the party and are gradually sliding into a passive socialism, which becomes a central conflict between Molly and her ex-husband, a successful financier, over their joint custody of their son, Tommy.

The golden notebook of the title doesn’t appear until the end of the novel, but we do read four other notebooks Anna has kept over the years, recounting her experiences with a group of white communist activists in Rhodesia, her time in the British Communist Party, an unfinished novel based on her own doomed love affair with a married man, and a more traditional journal where she records more mundane events as well as dreams and conversations with her therapist. The golden notebook represents her attempt to use fiction to bring together all four narratives as well as the more recent events of her life with Molly and a love/hate affair she has with an American communist who fled the blacklist and McCarthyist movement.

The one other distinguishing feature of The Golden Notebook is its unusually frank and graphic depictions of sex and biological functions, not unusual today but certainly so for the era in which it was published, particularly since its author is female. I imagine the novel was shocking in its time, although I was more surprised at how perfunctory the descriptions of sex were, not just anti-romantic, but clinical and sometimes even violent. The passage on menstruation is just as graphic, so while I saw it as an obvious metaphor for her own anger over societal prescriptions on gender roles, I also found it shocking to see a female writer write something so critical of her own female-ness, even if it was solely in a biological sense.

The narrative structure of the novel makes sense given where Lessing is taking us, but I found it incredibly confusing because of the shifts in time and the use of metafiction that is itself a thinly-veiled rendition of an actual life event belonging to the novel’s central character. It’s a hard book to put down for a day and return to without some thought as to who’s on the stage and in what time period the current scene is taking place. As someone who reads quickly, I found that offputting, even though Lessing’s efforts to converge all five narratives in that final bit of metafiction in the golden notebook are ultimately successful and likely part of why this novel remains a critical favorite.

I also found the metafictional Anna much more difficult to empathize with than the “real” Anna, who is herself flawed but more able to view her own decisions clearly, because the fictional version is the authoress of her own destruction within the book. The fact that her paramour is a lying cad can’t excuse her from failing to see that her involvement with a married man who has no intention of abandoning his wife – and whose wife is clearly suffering from her husband’s infidelities – or from the consequences when he inevitably flees from the affair as well.

The Golden Notebook fits in with many of the critically-acclaimed novels I read from these “greatest books” lists, an intelligent, thought-provoking, well-written book that deals with the larger (or largest) issues in life, but ultimately falls short on plot and character. I never felt driven to find out what was going to happen with the central characters, and the one Big Event within the book is dealt with swiftly enough that it becomes secondary to Anna’s journals. That all makes it a good book in terms of quality, but not one I’d be driven to read again.

Next up: I just finished Sergio de la Pava’s strange, often darkly funny debut novel A Naked Singularity (just $5.13 on Kindle) and have started Jonathan Lethem’s sci-fi hard-boiled detective novel Gun, with Occasional Music, the latter an old recommendation from one of you.

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→ August 23, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E5.

Today’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote up the Under Armour All-American game for the draft blog.

* Quickfire: Cook for the Indigo Girls, who look old. The B-52s were a weird enough choice, but why the Indigo Girls? They’re judging a group of the best chefs in the country? The challenge is to prepare two related dishes, one with meat, and one vegetarian, with $5K and immunity on the line.

* Takashi tells an interesting story about lacking a fridge in his house while growing up, so they’d get tofu from the “tofu guy” coming by the house. That seems like such an incredible anachronism today … and yet something that we’ve lost too, that kind of contact with our food sources, and the idea of cooking food that was just picked or butchered or in the case of tofu lightly processed.

* Awful Chris, usually the most off the wall of everyone, goes pretty straightforward with a beef bordelaise and a portobello version, both with the same sides. That feels a little like a punt to me – the same dish twice with only one ingredient change? I get substituting portobello – which is just an overgrown cremini and, to my palate, a fairly bland mushroom – for beef, but the mushroom requires different treatment and works with different flavors than the steak does.

* Kerry’s chicken with olives and herb flan with olives looked as boring as hell. Is there a less interesting protein in the kitchen than chicken? I try to cook it as infrequently as possible because unless you marinate it for hours, chicken breast has marginally more flavor than wallpaper paste.

* We get what I think is our first outright failure of the season when Patricia tries to play Beat the Time … and loses, failing to get her broth into her pho bowls in time for judging. At least they allowed her to serve the broth after judging, although I don’t see why, on Masters, they couldn’t just allow her to finish plating after the time while disqualifying her from consideration for the prize?

* Art mentions that he’s from the south. Drink.

* Anyway, the three favorites are Art’s, Takashi’s, and Lorena’s. Art makes two pot pies and his vegetarian version, wild mushroom and arugula with a “Parmesan” and cheddar crust, looked and sounded way better than the regular chicken version with a cheddar biscuit crust, which sounded like something you’d get at Cracker Barrel. My one quibble with Art’s vegetarian version is that it lacks protein, so it’s kind of weak for a main course. I do make pot pies in the winter and usually add some kind of legume, like lima beans, to balance the nutritional content. Lorena goes with arepa dumpling soup with queso and a chicken salad arepa – again with the chicken, but still, arepas rock. Takashi wins with two agedashi tofu (deep-fried tofu cubes) dishes, one with pork and ginger, the other with eggplant and other veg. Obviously I didn’t taste any of these, but I can’t imagine a fried tofu dish coming close to an arepa or a pot pie for pure satisfaction. That’s $15K for Takashi and am-munity per Curtis.

* Elimination challenge: Playmate Holly Madison is having a cocktail pool party and wants a brunch buffet, but with canapé sized dishes and no garlic or onions. Why don’t we just get her views on vaccines too? Chefs have two hours to cook plus an hour to plate the next day.

* Art mentions that he’s gay. Drink.

* Art and Awful Chris are bickering. Drink.

* Thierry is struggling with temperature on the flat top. Note to future Top Chef contestants: Bring an infrared thermometer. I don’t care if you have to smuggle the thing into the kitchen in your underwear. You will be glad you had it.

* To the food. Art makes a turkey burger on a biscuit with a garlic chutney. Holly identifies the garlic as ginger before Curtis sets her straight, so I guess a box of rocks is actually smarter than a pair of cans. Judges love it.

* Thierry makes a croque-madame with bechamel and tomato vodka shooter. Judges can’t figure out how to eat it. The sauce is visibly congealed, almost like melted cheese, and the bread is slightly burned. This was just a poor choice by Thierry – he thought “brunch” but didn’t consider execution. A croque-madame is a croque monsieur with a fried egg on top; he seems to have made a croque-monsieur with a bechamel that he has thickened with eggs, and it’s just a fiasco. That sounds really heavy and disgusting to me, just weight upon weight with no bright flavors.

* Kerry makes a corn and crab fritter with red pepper coulis. Krista’s was slightly underseasoned and slightly overdone, but I do think he had the right brunch vibe with those ingredients.

* Lorena says she “put all the sexy (she has) in this dish.” I’ll take two, then. She makes buñuelos, fried dough balls filled with cheese that I thought were more of a Christmas/New Year’s dish, with fresh berry compote and white chocolate and vanilla sauce. James raves about the custardy texture inside the crisp outer shell. Sounds like Sexychef knows her frying.

* Patricia is massacring her braised pork shoulder and says she can never get “that two handed chopping thing” down. She’s calling this barbecue, which it’s not – there’s no smoke involved. Her pulled pork on toast is a mess; James says the sauce is boring and dull, and the judges all agree the bun was toasted too far in advance and tastes stale. Holly loves the meat. I have no other comment.

* Awful Chris serves a skewer with watermelon, “tuna bacon,” tomatoes, and pistachios, plus some unidentified citrus zest visible on the screen. It’s the most complex dish so far in terms of concept and ingredients. Holly gives it props for being relatively healthful. The criticisms here and at judges’ table strike me as very nitpicky. The flavors may have been slightly unbalanced, but there’s nothing actually wrong with the dish in execution or in the combination of elements.

* Takashi makes a sheep’s milk yogurt panna cotta with fresh berry compote and almonds. One of the guests doesn’t know what a panna cotta is, but knows that the fruit is in a compote. All righty then.

* Art mentions the weight loss. Drink.

* James is undressing and/or ogling the various (apparently waxed?) young men around the pool. Had Curtis done the same with some of the ladies, this would have been offensive, right? I don’t care what team you play for; let’s just treat everyone equally.

* Judges’ table: The favorite dishes are from Takashi, Art, Lorena, and Kerry. Apparently Holly said off camera (or pre-editing) that she liked Art’s dish even with the garlic. The biggest raves seem to be for Lorena’s and she wins $10K for the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, giving her $15K so far.

* The bottom three are Thierry, Patricia, and Chris. Thierry’s sauce thickened after leaving the kitchen and the toast was burned. James says pulled pork (Patricia’s) should be fine and feathery in texture, but I disagree – that’s Carolina-style and I find it unpleasant and stringy. Properly smoked meat should still have some of its meaty characteristics yet can be served in larger chunks because the meat itself is tender from the long, slow smoking process. Awful Chris’ dish didn’t resonate with the audience, and the exhibitionist said it was overspiced. Was the challenge to please the non-discriminating pool crowd or the judges? Krista points out that his dish had soft and chewy textures but no crunchy element, which is the only really legitimate criticism I hear on this.

* Elimination: Thierry leaves. I thought Patricia would go based on the comments, but I also think she has a better chance to win the whole thing, so I’m glad she stayed. Thierry’s concept just wasn’t right for the setting. He says, “The chef in the hat is leaving” while acknowledging that he “was totally on the wrong planet” with trying to make a croque-whatever for outdoor, small-bite service.

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→ August 21, 2012
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Chicago eats.

I wrote about Bryce Harper’s struggles today for Insiders, and about Twins prospects Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario yesterday. My post on Saturday’s Under Armour game should go up in the next 24 hours.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my photograph of 2 Sparrows‘ maple bacon donut, which is on the short list of the best things I’ve ever eaten, not just for the bacon, but for the absolutely perfect donut at the heart of the $4 dish. The maple glaze is very sweet, like pure maple sugar, so the donut beneath it has little to no sweetness of its own, instead shining for the crispy exterior and a soft, light interior. The bacon crumbled over the top is house-cured, with the salt well balanced with the glaze’s sweetness, and some texture contrast with the soft donut. I admit the plate seemed a little gimmicky, but the execution across the board is tremendous.

The duck confit hash was less successful, however, primarily because of texture – every item in the hash, which is mostly duck and sweet potatoes, is soft, with the duck actually the least so, even slightly tough in comparison to everything else in the dish. I also find duck meat in general and confit in particular slightly sweet, at least relative to any other protein, so the combination with sweet potatoes felt unbalanced.

My dinner with Old Hoss Radbourn on Saturday night was also a huge hit, as we went to The Purple Pig, a restaurant that promises “cheese, swine, and wine.” We went heavy on the swine, going for pork liver paté, fried pig ears, and the “JLT,” with pig jowl standing in for the bacon – as well as two vegetable dishes and dessert. Dish by dish:

* The pork liver paté was unreal – as smooth as a dessert mousse, with a pronounced smoky undertone and a thin layer of high-quality olive oil on top, served with thick slices of grilled country bread. The server even brought more bread so we could finish every last bit of the paté, and even though I’m not even a huge fan of liver, I’d order this again in a heartbeat. The dish is one of a handful of “smears” they offer, including one made from lardo, cured pork fat that melts into whatever hot item is underneath it.

* I would never have guessed I was eating fried pig ears if I didn’t know going in what we had ordered. They’re slow-cooked, julienned, then quickly fried like french-fried onion rings, served with fried kale, pickled cherry peppers, and a fried egg on top. The pig ears have just a hint of tooth to them, but aren’t tough, and the frying makes the kale crispy while setting its deep green hue. It’s like the perfect bar snack for food snobs like me – and with a Belhaven stout in front of me I had no trouble finishing my half of the dish. You can find the recipe if you want to try this at home.

* The JLT was incredibly awkward to eat, but when I could get all the flavors into one bite, it was masterful, with huge flavors all in perfect balance. The jowl is the pig’s cheek meat, cured like bacon but thicker and much more tender; those of you familiar with regional Italian cooking may have had it as guanciale. The heirloom tomatoes are sliced nearly an inch thick, which contributed to the construction issues, although they were extremely bright and provided the one sweet element in the dish. The duck egg … perhaps I’m a philistine, but I doubt I could have identified this as a duck egg rather than a chicken egg, and either way, a runny egg makes every dish better. The lemon aioli tasted more like a cold bearnaise sauce, providing the one acidic element, while frisee adds a slightly bitter note. As a whole, the dish has a complex mixture of colors, textures, and flavors, and if it was a little easier to eat it would have scored an 80 for me.

* The broccoli with roasted garlic and anchovy vinaigrette was another winner, with the broccoli also roasted and the umami-filled vinaigrette coating the vegetables (florets and I believe julienned stalks) perfectly, but without the fishy taste the description might lead you to expect. The charred cauliflower with toasted breadcrumbs, cornichons, and parsley was our least favorite of the five dishes, even though it might have been the prettiest thanks to the use of green and purple florets; the flavors were all muted and compared to the strong flavors in every other dish it felt bland.

* Both desserts were excellent; the mixed berry crostada had a textbook flaky/tender crust that could have stood on its own, while the salted caramel soft-serve ice cream was very smooth and had the complexity you expect from that flavor, even if it’s become a little hackneyed at this point. I’d take the crostada over the ice cream just because it was more unusual. Good call by Hoss on this place, especially since I figured there was even money we’d end up at a brothel.

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→ August 18, 2012
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Top Chef Masters, S4E4.

Thursday’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I wrote a column looking at hypothetical ballots for the five awards on which I’m not voting this year.

* Quickfire: Make a salad in eight minutes. I like this – making good salads is hard, much more than just throwing a bunch of leaves in a bowl. The prize is $5,000 and immunity.

* Patricia avoids the mad rush to the giant salad bar – and am I wrong to look at that and assume that it is covered with germs! – and focuses on the dressing first, going for the best-quality oils and vinegars in the pantry. One, I just generally think she’s really smart, more methodical than most chefs I’ve seen on any iteration of Top Chef. And two, this is the opposite of how most people, even most non-high-end restaurants, think about salads, right? If you make your own, you spend more time picking out the vegetables than you do considering the dressing. We’re lucky to live near an olive grove that presses its own high-quality oil, the Queen Creek Olive Mill, and I always have a bottle of their EVOO in the house, which means I don’t buy prefab dressings any more. Three parts EVOO, 1 part fresh lemon juice, a dash of Dijon mustard (for flavor and emulsifaction), salt and pepper to taste, and you’ve got a dressing to blow away anything that comes in a bottle for $5.

* Awful Chris says that despite being a meat guy, he spends more on produce than anything else at his restaurant.

* The B-52s are guest judges, which would be incredibly cool if this was 1988. Apparently it’s well-known that they’re vegetarians, but that wasn’t exactly the first thing I thought of when I saw them come out on stage. Fred Schneider seems extremely negative, a possible side effect of the producers raising him from the dead for this challenge. He’s also wearing sunglasses inside; he should have just popped his collar for the full effect.

* The three top dishes were Kerry’s salade rousse with yogurt dressing, Chapeau Guy’s blueberry salad with beets and baby arugula, and Lorena’s grilled cauliflower – the only dish that involved a cooked ingredient. They also seemed to like Patricia’s chopped salad with yuzu vinaigrette, largely for including those cheap crunchy Asian noodles. Lorena wins the $5K for her charity, Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which makes perfect sense for a woman who has sold her soul to Taco Bell.

* Please tell Curtis the word is not “AM-munity.”

* I don’t know what was the more shocking revelation of this episode: That Art has lost over 100 pounds in the last two years, or that he’s gay. Really, I can’t believe he kept this stuff from us for this entire season. I have a sneaking suspicion he’s also from the South but is still in denial about it.

* Also, I seriously hope Clark doesn’t prepare ingredients in the same bowl he used to cut his own hair.

* Elimination challenge: The Chairwoman of the Hualapai Tribal Council has invited the chefs to use eight ingredients native to their land and significant in their tribe’s culinary traditions in four dishes cooked outside by the rim of the Grand Canyon. The view is spectacular, as it’s such a grand … canyon.

* As it turns out, most of the ingredients are pretty straightforward, with only two real exceptions – prickly pear and banana yucca, which is actually a fruit rather than a root vegetable. I’ve never cooked with either, but I’ve had prickly pear in a number of things, including lemonade at the aforementioned Olive Mill (I recommend it half-and-half with their iced tea, a “Prickly Palmer” if you will … or if you won’t), and it brings both great flavor and color.

* The chefs are paired up at random into teams of two, each using one protein and one vegetable: Prickly pear with quail, banana yucca with venison, squash with rabbit, and corn with beef. They get two hours to cook and the meal will be served family style.

* Takashi is apparently afraid of heights, and then has to go in a helicopter and walk out on a glass-bottomed viewing walkway over the Canyon. Get thee some Xanax, Takashi.

* Anyone else notice from the helicopter shots how low Lake Mead is? The level of conservation awareness out here in Arizona is absolutely embarrassing. Drought or no drought, we live in a fucking desert. Stop putting grass on your damn lawns, people.

* It starts raining as they cook, although it never quite got to the level of pouring, and I wasn’t sure if the rain was causing issues with their grills or if the issue was wind, which is kind of a chronic thing all over Arizona as far as I can tell. Awful Chris repurposes his grill to create hot cooking surfaces with cast-iron planchas, then allows other chefs to use them as well, which is how you know you’re watching Masters. In the regular edition, one chef would have brained another with one of those surfaces, and on Desserts they’d still be arguing over who put out the fire.

* Chapeau Guy, working with Takashi, ends up pitting and stuffing the banana yucca, then breading and deep-frying them. It turns out he was also supposed to peel them, but I’m not sure how he would have known that ahead of time, since he’d never so much as heard of the ingredient before.

* Clark and Kerry disagree over presentation, and Clark just backs down. That nearly always foreshadows the chef getting eliminated.

* Serving: Art and Lorena go first and take so long to explain their dish that Lake Mead’s level dropped another two feet by the time they say what’s on the plates – quail with prickly pear sauce and slaw, corn dressing, peaches, and mint. They also basted the quail with the sauce while it cooked but didn’t butterfly or otherwise break it down to make it easier to eat. I love quail but it is a ton of work to get the meat off that little skeleton. Anyway, the quail also wasn’t cooked evenly, which seems to be a bigger problem.

* Kerry and Clark serve a beef filet with a raw sage pistou, grilled corn, bacon, tomatoes, and chili. Their beef is grey, as they never got their grill hot enough to sear it, so it looks boiled and gets none of the flavors that come from the Maillard reactions (what happens when you expose proteins to high heat, often mislabeled “caramelization”). Hualapai cooking doesn’t include much chili, but the tribe members at the table seem to enjoy its inclusion. However, every item on the dish is soft, so there’s no texture contrast, and this sounds really unadventurous overall. It’s steak and corn.

* Takashi and Chapeau Guy serve grilled venison and fried banana yucca cake with braised figs. This seems to get the highest marks and I thought sounded the best of the four dishes – if I saw all four on a menu, I’d probably order this one. Francis Lam compliments the mixture of textures in this dish, and the sugar in the figs makes up for the bitterness of the banana yucca skin.

* Patricia and Awful Chris serve “rabbit loin and its bits” with acorn squash and red berry and piñon agrodolce. They used the entire animal, which appeals to me as my own philosophy of the ethics of eating meat has evolved over the years – in particular, that there’s some obligation to eat more of the parts of any animal you consume than we typically do in this country. That’s been an adventure for me as someone who did not grow up eating things like marrow or gribiche, and I admit I still struggle a little with some organ meats (heart in particular due to its texture), but I’ve made the choice to change my eating habits.

* How is Aunt Inez, the oldest of the Hualapai at the dinner table, eating all this food with one tooth?

* Judges’ table: Curtis, Ruth, James, and Francis are all trying to outdo themselves with profound statements on the setting, the tribe’s traditions, the spiritual feeling of the meal, threatening to turn the whole thing into an Insufferable Feast.

* Judges’ table: Patricia/Awful Chris and Takashi/Chapeau Guy are on top. Chris and Patricia seemed to get the spirit of the challenge more, especially by using the entire rabbit, but Takashi and Chapeau Guy win and split the $10,000 prize. Thierry remarks that he won with an ingredient he’d never used before, of which he seems rightfully proud.

* Elimination: Lorena’s cole slaw wasn’t great but everyone loved the prickly pear sauce. Art split some quail but eventually chose to serve them whole because he didn’t want to lose the presentation. Kerry said getting a sear on the beef was hard. Their sage pistou got raves, but the second sauce, a compound butter with berries, separated on the plate. Clark made a corn ragout to “honor the cuisine of the region, “ then says he didn’t want to ruin the dish by making something that competed with Kerry’s beef, but that’s just a flaw in conception – the two didn’t work together to build a cohesive offering. Clark ends up eliminated, so the great tragedy they tried to show us last week of Mark’s separation from his partner lasted just a few days. Clark’s charity, Outright Lewiston, which helps LGBT kids in the community where his and Mark’s restaurant is, receives a donation as well.

* I think Patricia and Awful Chris are pretty clearly the top two chefs here, and have been from the start, with Takashi probably third. I’d be surprised if the winner isn’t one of the first two.

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→ August 15, 2012
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Dracula.

Dracula, #98 on Daniel Burt’s original version of The Novel 100, gave us one of the best-known characters in all of literature, generated an enduring myth of the undead vampire (and yet another reason to love garlic), and provided enough fodder for sex-obsessed English professors to analyze for centuries. It’s also surprisingly uneven and even a little slow in parts, despite a strong opening chapter that is among the best pieces of horror writing I have ever encountered.

Stoker was apparently a hack writer before the publication of Dracula and didn’t produce much of enduring literary value afterwards, but that one book – in the public domain in the U.S. since its publication due to an error in its copyright notice – is one of the most influential works of fiction written in any language, spawning what Jasper Fforde has dubbed the “Sexy Vampires” subgenre and inflicting Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson on us all. There is some obvious sexual metaphor in Stoker’s work, with blood-sucking standing in as a symbol for sex, but it’s far less overt the modern glut of vampire-romance stories (I’m including non-literary adaptations, like the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer – remember “When did the building fall down?”); I wonder if he had a more direct influence on D.H. Lawrence, who also explored religious and pagan themes with more frank depictions of human sexuality (especially that of women) that led to the banning of some of his works.

Stoker borrowed a narrative technique from one of my favorite novels, Wilkie Collins’ 1860 thriller The Woman in White, which told the story in a series of first-person narratives from various participants in and observers of the main story, resulting in a panoramic view by the end of the novel as pieces fall into place while allowing the author to add or remove clarity as he ses fit. Stoker’s version is more disjointed because so much of the novel is in diary form, with shorter sections that result in too-frequent changes of perspective and, for me at least, occasional confusion over who was speaking.

The more successful trick of Dracula is how Stoker builds up his antagonist early in the book, so that the villain becomes an ever-present force to the characters involved even though he barely appears in the novel’s final half. The opening segment, the longest from any single character, follows the young solicitor Jonathan Harker to Transylvania, where he is to meet a new client and help him with the purchase of an estate in London. Harker is unnerved by the locals’ apparent fear of the castle he’s visiting but is taken in by his host’s charm until he discovers that his host is keeping him prisoner, and that the castle is also home to three evil enchantresses (“the weird sisters,” which is itself a possible reference to the prophesying sisters of Macbeth, and a familiar term to the Harry Potter fans among you) who nearly kill him with their kiss. Count Dracula’s character is fully defined in this section, with some scattered details provided later with the appearance of Professor Van Helsing, but Dracula only physically appears in the text a handful of times after Harker’s escape from the castle. The fear of Dracula takes over the antagonist role from his incarnation, and if Stoker hadn’t used so many narrators to make the story internally reliable, he could easily have written a similar story where Harker hallucinated the initial episode and the characters are chasing a villain who doesn’t exist.

There’s a downside to that trick of Stoker’s, however. The final quarter or so of the novel involves a race against the clock as the protagonists chase Dracula around London and back to Transylvania to try to kill him (permanently), even though he only appears in the text via one character’s psychic connection to him. The novel suffers from his absence, as the characters seem to emphasize repeatedly the risks of failing to reach him in time rather than allowing him to demonstrate it – the narrative greed was lost for me. Where Collins managed to maintain suspense in his novel through mystery, Stoker built up suspense through fear and couldn’t hold that tension once the antagonist was on the run – or, more accurately, in a box.

One plot point I didn’t quite grasp, for those of you who read it, is how Dracula settled on his initial female victim, who is connected with Harker. I might have missed something at the start, but this seemed like an odd choice that never received any explanation; he just happened to target this woman, who just happened to be connected through a friend to a great expert on the undead. That worked out well for Stoker, but even in a book that requires substantial suspension of disbelief, those two coincidences jarred. I’m glad I read it for completeness purposes, but I think its presence on Burt’s ranking is more reflective of its popularity and historical importance than overall literary merit.

Next up: I’m almost through Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, #48 on The Novel 100 and part of the TIME 100 as well.

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→ August 11, 2012
→ By

Top Chef Masters, S4E3.

Through three episodes of this season of Top Chef Masters, I feel like they’ve toned down some of the absurdity of the previous season, at least in terms of the challenges. The “twists” in this episode weren’t outlandish – they forced the chefs to think differently, or maybe push themselves into an area where they were less comfortable, but there was nothing this week that screamed “gimmick” to me.

* Quickfire: Use at least one of the proteins (fish and shellfish) on display … without heat. In other words, a crudo challenge. Chris jokes that Takashi, as an expert in sushi and sashim, had an advantage. The prize is $5000 plus immunity, and the chefs have just 20 minutes since they’re not cooking. The guest judge was Brian Boitano, spurring the question of what he would do.

* Love Kerry’s charity, City Harvest, which takes leftover food from restaurants to food pantries – the quantity of food we waste in this country, neither given to people who need it nor composted, is appalling.

* One thing I didn’t follow: Was the lobster raw? I have eaten raw shellfish, but I can’t say I’m crazy about it, and growing up on Long Island where pollution kept warnings about eating raw oysters in the news on a regular basis has instilled a fairly strong fear of raw shellfish in me.

* Art’s avocado soup looked disgusting, like discolored mashed potatoes, or, well, baby vomit. The color also reminded me of the appliance set my parents had in the late 1970s, with a linoleum floor to match. That ain’t comin’ back in style any time soon.

* After some initial panic, it looked like the chefs actually enjoyed this challenge; why wouldn’t they, since nearly every high-end restaurant offers some sort of raw fish preparation on its menu?

* Patricia praised Boitano as the chefs watched the judging for his intelligent commentary about their food, and I’d agree. This almost makes up for the fact that he is one of the most boring figure skaters who has ever put on blades.

* Thierry’s gooey duck … excuse me, geoduck earns demerits for a briny/salty flavor. I have no other comment than “gooey duck.”

* Boitano’s idea of awarding medals when he names the top three was a little corny, but at least he can sell a joke properly rather than beating into the ground (which Curtis threatened to do, repeatedly). Bronze went to Mark’s maine lobster with heirloom tomato salad. Silver went to Chris’ one-bite mackerel fra diavolo. Gold went to Takashi for aji sashimi with daikon and apple, a fish Brian had never tried before. Takashi’s charity is American Red Cross disaster relief, and he’s sending his winnings to their rebuilding efforts in Japan. Given how one tragedy is displaced from the headlines by the next one, I think most of us are probably guilty of forgetting how much cleanup and reconstruction remains for the areas of Japan affected by last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

(Aside: I was in Long Beach earlier this week for the very modest 4.4 earthquake that had its epicenter in Yorba Linda. I’ve been through two or three lesser earthquakes before, but you have never seen me move as I did when this one hit, from the bed to the window to see exactly how much I needed to panic.)

* Elimination challenge: Teppanyaki. The chefs seem … displeased, but really, did they expect something easy? At least they’re not cooking with their right wrists strapped to their left ankles, which was an actual challenge in season 3 and succeeded in taking out four chefs in one episode.

* Takashi has never cooked on a teppan, then says it looks easy but isn’t easy at all, so you can try to figure out how he knows it’s not easy. As it turns out, none of the nine has cooked on a teppan before. The diners include four former competitors on Top Chef Masters.

* Teams are selected at random. Chris and Art end up on the same team – and the producers pop champagne corks. Prize is $10,000.

* Thierry interrupting his grocery shopping to get an in-store massage has to be a top five all-time Top Chef moment, right? He didn’t even show a shred of remorse afterwards.

* No one knows the grill temperature, which becomes a recurring problem throughout the episode. No one uses an infrared thermometer? That’s not snark – even I own one. I feel like Alton Brown watched this and just shook his head in disgust, while explaining to his daughter how to make an infrared thermometer from a clothes hanger and a television remote.

* Oh, God, does James Oseland have no mirrors in his house? Was that a gingham necktie? Did he strangle a schoolboy and steal part of his school uniform? Seriously, you’re supposed to be a food expert. Dress the part, be the part, motherfucker.

* Krista Simmons is replaced this week by Francis Lam. Never heard of him.

* To the dishes, most of which looked really good. Mark made Scallops and bok choy and pickled mushrooms with dipping sauce. Immediately evident that didn’t challenge himself. The dish looked very simple, and the judges weren’t wowed. You know right away he’s in trouble.

* Kerry made a Korean dish, shrimp with eggplant and herb salad and gochujang sauce (made with chili and red bean paste). Ruth’s shrimp was overcooked, also a bad sign.

* Lorena: Fried rice with kaffir/orange zest infused chicken, cilantro, and a sauce of soy, guava, and orange juice. It’s very colorful, but it’s fried rice – is that likely to win anything on Top Chef? Her guava starts to burn because the center of the teppan is very hot, and no one on this team tasted their food for salt, so all three dishes were under-seasoned.

* Team two starts with Takashi, who made Calamari with okonomiyake, a savory Japanese pancake (first place I had one? Epcot), along with a sweet soy sauce. Takashi struggles with time, so Patricia jumps in to help, telling the diners “I’m not really here.” Takashi knew when preparing the batter that he had the wrong kind of flour, and the diners comment right away that the texture was off.

* Clark struggles with grill temperature as well, making lobster with orange-soy vinaigrette, a dish that spurs disagreement among the diners over how well it was cooked.

* Patricia makes kalbi in a lettuce wrap with her own gochujang. Mary Sue thought the meat needed more marinade, but in general this earned high marks, especially for her lettuce wrap, which only makes me think “P.F. Chang’s.”

* Team three: Chris is bossing Art around in the kitchen; I don’t think the editors are responsible for this. Thierry just mocks them (“Hey, girls…”), which is really all he can do, but also, he was Zen because he’d just had a massage, man.

* The interesting bit here is that this team avoided Asian flavors entirely. Art makes cheese grits cakes with two tomato-based dressings, marinated grilled shrimp, and a watermelon salad. The cakes aren’t staying together – but with polenta those messy ones can be great because they brown more, since you’ve increased the surface area. Art is also the first one to put on a real show, pouring some Jack Daniels over the shrimp and lighting it.

* Chris gets some eye-rolls from the judges for the way he browbeats Art – but I think Art played the victim a little here too. Chris’ dish is a take on clam chowder, although I don’t think I heard much about this after he said “seared pork belly in duck fat.” Skip the soup and serve that, pal. Art misplaces Chris’ mandoline and Chris loses it to the point where Thierry even seems shocked.

* Thierry makes crepes, then struggles with the hot grill and uneven temperatures across the surface. I think crepes were a good idea, but several of the chefs approached it like it was a traditional flat-top, which it’s clearly not (among other things, that would risk burning the diners). He finessed the uneven cooking with his charm, or maybe just the accent, and really I can deal with an overcooked crepe when it’s served with flambeed pears, almond cream, and pear butter.

* Judges’ table: Team three, Art/Chris/Thierry wins. They seem shocked, but they didn’t know anything about the other teams’ troubles. Winning chef is Art, making a nice comeback from last week’s fallen cake. He won points for the flambe – and $10K for Common Threads, a charity that teaches low-income kids to cook and understand nutrition. That feels like a great cause that might struggle to raise funds because it’s not sexy and its goals seem modest, even though modest goals are better because you can actually achieve them.

* Elimination: Team one, Mark/Kerry/Lorena. Lorena calls the teppan “the plancha,” which is either funny or a little playing for the judges.” Ruth says the whole team’s food was under-seasoned. Francis says Kerry’s flavors didn’t come together. Mark’s dish was indeed too safe. Lorena gets praised for working the teppan, but Ruth saw some of the food burn, and hers was also underseasoned.

* Mark goes home – dish was not ambitious, and the flavors didn’t click. He seems to understand that he took a risk by not taking a risk. Equality Maine gets a donation. The cameras keep showing Clark as Mark says his goodbyes. I’m sure he was upset, but it’s not like they broke up. They’ll be apart for what, a few days? It’s not half as tragic as the fact that they can’t legally marry. Let’s focus here.

* Final three prediction: Chris and Patricia seem way ahead of the others, at least in terms of working within the confines of the challenges. Takashi is probably the next most skilled, but the judges seem to really like Lorena’s way of utilizing Latin flavors in unexpected places, so I’ll give her the edge.

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