→ February 14, 2012
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Of Monsters and Men’s Into the Woods.

If you missed it, my top impact prospects for 2012 piece went up yesterday, as did my quick reaction to Yoennis Cespedes signing with Oakland. My first draft blog post of the year went up today, talking SoCal high school kids, including probable top ten picks Luc Giolito and Max Fried.

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I caught Of Monsters and Men’s debut single, “Little Talks,” on XMU over the weekend and became borderline-obsessed with it after just that one listen. The band won the Músiktilraunir, an Icelandic national battle of the bands, in 2010, although a look at the winners list tells me that doesn’t typically mean much beyond the small island’s coastlines. (The 2001 winner, Andlát, was a death metal act whose name translates as – wait for it – “Death.”) Of Monsters and Men seems ready to break out internationally on the strength of that single and the forthcoming album My Head is An Animal, which earned very strong reviews when it was released in Iceland last fall. I can’t profess much experience with Icelandic folk music, so it’s easier for me to define them in terms of other genres, and their first EP release, Into the Woods, shows a pretty broad base of styles that call to mind Arcade Fire, Mumford and Sons, Doves, ska-punk, Irish folk music, and – of course – a little Sugarcubes too. (It’s on amazon and iTunes.)

“Little Talks” is the song to buy if you only want to buy one track, an upbeat horn-driven track with a riveting call-and-response vocal track from the group’s two lead singers, Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Ragnar Þórhallsson, the former singing about losing her tether to reality while the latter, her lover, tries to comfort her while expressing his grief at watching her mind wither. The most poignant back-and-forth gives the song its title, as Hilmarsdóttir sings, “There’s an old voice in my head that’s/holding me back,” to which Þórhallsson responds, “Well tell her that I miss our little talks.” Yet this story is layered over a hybrid of Irish drinking songs and the short-lived ska-punk movement of the mid-1990s, complete with raise-your-glasses shouts punctuating the gap in the lyrics following each chorus. I couldn’t get it out of my head after the first listen.

The other three tracks on the EP are all strong, but nothing is similar to “Little Talks” in style or feel. “Love Love Love,” the next-best track, reminded me a little of Norah Jones meets Alison Krauss, with Hilmarsdóttir expressing regret to a lover whose affection she can’t quite return. The closing track, “From Finner,” is probably the most Mumford-ish, with a gloomy percussion-heavy shuffle behind mournful vocals, ending each chorus with a “we’re so ha-ppy” that I don’t think we’re really supposed to believe. “Six Weeks” is your Arcade Fire-influenced track, heavier on the drums as well with a marching, almost Bonham-esque beat that shares the front of the stage with the group vocals. All four tracks appear on the full album, due out in April, but I wasn’t going to wait that long to get “Little Talks” on my iPod. It’s the best new song I’ve heard in at least a full year.

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→ February 12, 2012
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Osteria Mozza.

I had dinner on Friday night at Osteria Mozza, one of the most popular and famous restaurants in Los Angeles at the moment, joined by my friend and colleague Molly Knight, a known cheese enthusiast and a veteran diner at Mozza. The restaurant is the brainchild of three luminaries in American food, including Mario Batali, who likely needs no introduction. The primary force behind the restaurant and its neighbor, Pizzeria Mozza (next visit!), is Nancy Silverton, co-founder of the legendary La Brea Bakery as well as of Campanile restaurant, where she previously served as pastry chef. The third partner, Joseph Bastianich, is a vintner, restaurateur, and son of Lidia Bastianich, the matron of Italian-American cooking. Names like these don’t always guarantee success, of course, but in this case, the restaurant lives up to its pedigree. Everything we had was outstanding; I would say some dishes were more outstanding than others, but nothing we ordered was less than plus.

The server said the menus are updated daily, so there are no off-menu specials. We went with two starters, two primi (pastas), and one secondo (main), plus a dessert and two beers. I believe it’s the most expensive meal I’ve ever paid for myself, just barely surpassing Craftsteak. The wine list looked extensive, as you’d expect given Bastianich’s involvement, but as I can’t drink red wine and couldn’t see white standing up to the duck ragù I went for the smaller beer list instead.

For starters, Molly humored me by letting me order the testina con salsa gribiche, better known in English by the unfortunate moniker “head cheese.” It’s not actually cheese, but is a terrine or aspic made by simmering the cleaned head of a pig (or sometimes cow) so the remaining the cheek and jowl meat ends up set in a gelatin from all of the connective tissue that surrounds it. The resulting terrine can be sliced and served cold, but Mozza slices it thickly, breads one side, and pan-fries it, serving it with a sauce gribiche, an emulsion of egg yolks and mustard to which one adds capers, chopped pickles, and herbs. (One might compare this dish, then, to a hot dog with mustard and relish, but I wouldn’t want to be so crass about it.) The result is very rich, with the strongly-flavored meat surrounded in luxurious gelatin that produces a fat-like mouth feel, while I left thinking I really need to use sauce gribiche a lot more often at home. The pan-frying, by the way, gets rid of the one real objection you might have to head cheese – the stuff looks like the result of some sort of processing accident.

You could build an entire meal just from Mozza’s selection of starters based around fresh mozzarella without getting bored, but we both zeroed in on the burrata (fresh mozzarella wrapped around a suspension of mozzarella bits in cream) with bacon, marinated escarole and caramelized shallots, which I think was my favorite item of the night. The saltiness and smokiness of the bacon, the acidity of the marinated escarole, and the sharp sweetness of the shallots were all beautifully balanced and gave depth to compliment the creamy texture of the cheese, which, while extremely fresh (of course), was mild in flavor.

I would have probably told you before Friday night that I wasn’t a big fan of potato gnocchi, but apparently I’d just never had a truly great rendition prior to tasting Mozza’s gnocchi with duck ragù, a dish we ordered primarily because I’ll eat just about any dish with duck in it. The ragù was strong, with deep earthly flavors and small chunks of tender breast meat, but played a clear second fiddle to those little pillows of love, lighter than any potato gnocchi I’d previously tried. It’s the kind of meat-and-potatoes dish I could stand behind.

Molly ordered one of her favorite primi, the goat cheese ravioli with five lilies sauce. The pasta was as thin as I’ve ever come across in ravioli, but with good tooth thanks to strong gluten development, wrapped around a thin layer of assertive chevre-style goat cheese; those thin wrappers produce a much better pasta/filling ratio than you typically get from filled pastas. The “five lilies” sauce refers to five members of the allium family – garlic, onion, chives, scallions, and leeks – which stands up well to the tangy goat cheese.

We went with one main, the short rib braised in Barolo wine and served over a very soft, creamy polenta. I’ve never met a short rib dish I didn’t like, and the braise was perfect, producing a rib that stands up on the plate but pulls apart with no effort. If I was to criticize anything we had all night, it might be that the exterior of the short rib was on the soft side, so it might not have been seared that much (it was definitely seared at some point) before the braise. But the criticism is a bit absurd, as the dish was still a 70.

For dessert, we went with the house-made gelato, mint chip and coffee side-by-side with a giant pizzelle with a faint anise flavor. The texture was perfectly smooth, no hint of ice crystals or of extra overrun; the coffee was a little sweeter than I like my coffee ice creams (but I admit I like coffee and chocolate ice creams to be as dark as possible), while the mint chip surprised with real mint flavor – not like an extract, but like actual mint leaves, brighter, fresher, and less harsh than your typical mint-flavored ice creams. (Plus, it wasn’t green.)

We sat at one of the two bars in Osteria Mozza and, at 7 pm on a Friday, didn’t have to wait to be seated, but there were no regular tables available before 10:30 pm at that point. (I actually love sitting at the bar in restaurants, alone or with a friend; you’re rarely forgotten by your server and you often get to see a lot of what’s going on in the kitchen, or at least what’s coming out of it.) The prices are not for the faint of heart, but as I said to Molly when we left, this wasn’t so much dinner but an experience, the kind of meal you might only have a few times in your life, but one you’ll think about for weeks afterwards.

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→ February 10, 2012
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Travels with My Aunt.

My list of sleeper prospects to jump on to the 2013 top 100 is now up for Insiders.

Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt falls somewhere in between his two styles, serious novels and “entertainments,” by layering a spy-novel veneer on a story of a lifelong bachelor and banker who finds his staid village life interrupted by an imperious, independent aunt who drags him on several trips out of England. The spy story aspect, and the mystery about the narrator’s biological mother, are superficial and slightly silly, but they open up the narrator to the kind of ruminations that reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (reviewed here). (Greene’s book was adapted (and altered, it appears) for the screen in 1972, with Lady Vio— er, Dame Maggie Smith playing Augusta, a character a good 30-40 years Smith’s senior.)

The narrator, Henry Pulling, has just lost his stepmother, who raised him from birth with his biological father, as the novel opens, and the funeral reunites him with an aunt he hasn’t seen in half a century. Aunt Augusta, who would likely fit well between Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha on the Wooster continuum of intimidating aunts, has, unbeknownst to Henry, lived a peripatetic life of adventure, and intends to have at least one more go before she finds herself alongside her late sister. Pulling is so stuck in his narrow life that he can’t quite accept that his aunt’s servant, a Senegalese man nicknamed Wordsworth, is actually her lover.

Unlike Greene’s “entertainments” – his own term for his popular novels, typically spy stories – the intrigue of Travels isn’t all that intriguing, and not even all that important beyond its role in forcing Henry to adjust his worldview. He worked in a stodgy industry, formed no permanent attachments to friends or lovers, and in retirement has taken up growing and breeding dahlias (perhaps an allusion, along with the Augusta/Agatha similarity, to Wodehouse). Augusta is trying to shake him out of his psychological torpor through exposure to her life of adventure, or misadventure, while also gradually showing him that things he long held to be true may not actually be so.

Greene’s dry wit comes through in some of the more ridiculous events, like Pulling inadvertently smoking pot while traveling the Orient Express, but those are just brief lulls in the increasingly serious meditations in which Pulling indulges as the book and his travels progress, on lost opportunities, life and death, and of course the difference between a safe, predictable life, and a more dangerous one with some actual upside.

I’m a huge fan of Greene’s novels, having now read fourteen of them, but would place this in the middle to the back of the pack. I’m still quite partial to Our Man in Havana (#27 on the Klaw 100), another half-serious “entertainment” novel that revolves around a vacuum cleaner salesman who is mistaken for a spy by the British government, only to find himself filling their absurd demands by sending mechanical drawings of vacuum cleaners while claiming they’re future Soviet weapons.

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I mentioned on Twitter last month that I was reading Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From, receiving responses from a large number of you who absolutely love Carver’s work. I’m afraid, then, that I’ll be disappointing you to confess that the collection left me cold; I found no attachment to the work, no emotional involvement, no obstacle to reading (the prose is pretty easy to get through) but no strong motivation to keep the book in hand. Even ignoring the controversy over how much of the finished product was actually Carver’s and how much was his heavy-handed editor’s, the stories seemed to me to depict realistic situations without getting anywhere below the surface of the characters’ outer behavior. I know his work is highly regarded; it just didn’t speak to me.

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Next up: Italo Calvino’s The Baron In The Trees.

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→ February 9, 2012
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Top Chef, S9E14.

The top 100 is up. Here’s the first part of the list (it’s spread over four pages), the top ten prospects for each organization, and ten eleven prospects who just missed.

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Fortunately, this week’s episode of Top Chef did not include any has-been comedians, just real cooking for some pretty elite guests.

* Last Chance Kitchen winner: It’s Bev! You knew it would be Bev. I’m sure her food was great, but forgive me my suspicion of anything that reeks of narrative. Sarah is still hepped up on bitchy pills, ripping Bev for being “off in Bevland” and saying she doesn’t want a ticket there. Apparently the food in Bevland is pretty good, Sarah. You might want to check it out if you ever get your head out of Italy.

* Quickfire: blindfolded pantry raid. Goofy, but certainly the idea that you should be able to identify ingredients by touch and smell has merit. Winner gets a choice between a new Prius or a guaranteed spot in the finals. This seems weak to me – you get to the finals by winning a quickfire?

* The footage of the chefs groping around the kitchen while blindfolded wasn’t all that entertaining, although Tom had an evil laugh going. There’s food on the floor and shellfish loose in the fridge. Cleanup on aisle artificial drama.

* Bev accidentally gets avocado, but she’s making fish, which is a pretty natural pairing. I felt like she could have won this thing if she’d cooked her fish through, but I think Tom feels about fish the way I do – if it’s not actually being served raw, it needs to be cooked to at least medium-rare. The shot of Bev running across the kitchen with the fish in one hand and her ten-inch chef’s knife in the other, tip pointed out, was terrifying. Her food may be great, but I wouldn’t want to share a kitchen with her.

* Ed gets pork casings instead of pancetta but makes lemonade, figuratively, by using the casings (pig intestinal linings, high in connective tissue) to make a broth for his soup. That’s the kind of cleverness the show should be rewarding, in my didn’t-taste-the-food opinion.

* Paul’s shrimp is also a touch undercooked. I don’t like raw shrimp, and I think undercooked shrimp has a really weird, unpleasant texture, so I could understand Tom’s immediate, negative reaction to the dish. Do you ever wonder (as I do) if the judges subconsciously hold Paul to a higher standard, because he’s so far ahead of the group?

* Lindsay makes fish with bulgur wheat at charred greens on top, putting her right in the middle of the group.

* Sarah makes corn soup with roasted mushrooms and peaches. Tom loved it, and she should get points for a non-obvious flavor combo, although nothing there was as clever as Ed’s broth. She wins, which I think is her first Quickfire win, and takes the guaranteed spot in the final four, which Ed labels a lack of confidence. I would have called it lazy, but your mileage may vary. And does anyone doubt that Sarah’s motormouth would have been in fourth gear, ready to run over any other chef who made that same choice? (Hat tip to my wife for raising that last point.)

* Elimination challenge: make a dish to impress your mentor. At least two of these mentors have been on before as judges or as Top Chef Masters. Waterworks commence immediately. Tito, give me some tissue.

* Ed can’t get fresh oysters so he chooses canned smoked oysters instead. Chefs on this show often pick ingredients they should know you can’t always get at whole foods, and never seem to remember how often a chef has been sent home for using one substandard ingredient, whether it’s canned or precooked or just not top-quality. Everyone loves his pickles and crisped pork belly skin, though.

* Lindsay makes errors of self-doubt by overloading a Mediterranean fish dish with a cream sauce and some dried herbs that she probably added too late for them to hydrate and mellow. You don’t get a lot of cream in Mediterranean fish plates because the regions where fish is central to the cuisine have typically had less cattle husbandry.

* Beverly takes a huge risk by cooking to order in the wok for eight people, making gulf shrimp and BBQ pork Singapore noodles. That’s a sensible risk given the history of the show, though – there’s substantial upside in showing you have a skill most others don’t, and can organize yourself to the point where you can pull this kind of fast, last-minute cooking off successfully.

* Paul takes a bigger risk by serving a cold sunchoke and dashi soup that’s assembled tableside with what was apparently a very delicate balance of seasonings across all of his ingredients. (Before Paul, when was the last time someone won an elimination challenge with a chilled/cold dish?) Hugh hasn’t blogged yet this week, but Gail wrote that it was the best Top Chef dish she’d ever had, and that the decision here wasn’t particularly close.

* Judges’ table: I told you who won. He and Bev move on, only to go to the stew room where Sarah gives Paul a big hug and Bev the finger. Paul showed wisdom in knowing when to stop adding ingredients or flavors. Comments like that from judges make me think Paul would succeed in any season, not just in this weak crop.

* No mentors at JT, just Tom, Padma, Hugh, and Gail. Gail loves everything but the smoked oyster sauce, and can’t explain why. Hugh points out that Ed had a great dish under there and buried it with one bad choice. Tom gets all double-u-tee-eff on Ed for using canned oysters. Hugh has the money line, of course: “you need to go to the store and see what’s great in the market and cook from there.” Everyone should cook like that.

* Ed is eliminated and says he was knocked out by Beverly. Uh, no. You were knocked out by a canned oyster. But I’ll still try your braised brisket with bourbon-peach glaze recipe from the latest issue of Bon Appetit.

* Final three: Paul and Lindsay are still standing, and I will take Bev over Sarah.

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→ February 8, 2012
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Sherlock, season one.

My annual ranking of the 30 MLB farm systems is up for Insiders. The top 100 follows tomorrow, with chats at noon ET (Spanish) and 1 pm ET (English).

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I admit to some reluctance to watch the BBC series Sherlock, which takes the famed detective character and reimagines him in the present day, solving crimes loosely based on some of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. I didn’t expect to like a series that so dramatically alters the setting of the original, and inevitably changes the character as well, but it’s surprisingly well done and engaging despite the occasional bit of TV-friendly drama to keep the hoi polloi interested. (The first season just aired on PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery last month.)

Rather than directly adapt Conan Doyle’s stories into individual episodes, series creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss chose to write new stories based on one or more of the originals, stretching them out to about 88 minutes apiece, with three episodes per season. Benedict Cumberbatch, who played a significant supporting role in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, plays the title character, a “consulting detective” who solves crimes the police can’t and keeps a blog on his exploits, infusing Holmes with substantial charisma despite his incredible aloofness and professed disinterest in human connections. Martin Freeman (of the UK version of The Office and the middling film adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide) plays Dr. John Watson, an Afghan war veteran paired up with Holmes by chance, forming an uneasy working relationship that’s more balanced than the partnership in Conan Doyle’s works, with Watson actually standing up for himself when he thinks Holmes is merely trying to humiliate him. (It doesn’t work, but at least he tried.)

The first season comprises three episodes, with the final one the tightest all around as the characters had become more developed and the crime (and its solution) was more clever and intricate. The first episode, “A Study in Pink,” has to get the two main characters together and define all manner of relationships within the show, and then has a drawn-out standoff between Sherlock and the killer because the BBC asked the producers to add another 30 minutes to the original hourlong show; the second episode was more focused on the crime, but the denouement was also over the top and involved a character who threatens to throw off the show’s equilibrium. The series does put Sherlock in danger a bit too often – while he did die in one of the original short stories, only to be resurrected by a recalcitrant Conan Doyle due to reader demand – even though we know he has to live till the next episode, making the drama from those scenes seem a little false, although I suppose it would be just as absurd to have the main character never find himself in any jeopardy at all.

Comparing Cumberbatch’s Holmes to the character from Conan Doyle’s stories is an exercise in frustration; I view the new Sherlock as inspired by the original character, rather than a mere adaptation. The series puts Sherlock in more situations that explore his lack of social skills, and Watson is more than just a foil for Holmes’ genius, providing commentary on Holmes’ bizarre behavior and personality. I did find myself regularly comparing this Sherlock Holmes to another TV character inspired by the literary one, Dr. Gregory House.

House is an unlikely protagonist for an American TV series, an antihero who aims for perfect rationality in his life and behavior, who solves cases for their puzzle aspects rather than any human elements, who abhors religion and other forms of authority, an unpleasant character you like because he’s clever, not because you love to hate him. Yet despite his claims of rational thought, he shows a malicious streak under the guise of flouting authority or establishing how much his superiors need him, whereas neither the literary Holmes nor the new BBC version exhibit any such behavior. Cumberbatch’s Holmes can be insulting – his line to Watson and a police officers, “Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring,” is brilliantly dismissive – but there’s no malice involved.

In just three episodes so far, we see subtle hints that Sherlock is aware he doesn’t quite fit in and might even be a little sad or ashamed about it, such as the time he lies to a potential client about how he knew the latter had recently traveled around the world. He’s arrogant, while House is misanthropic; Sherlock calls himself a sociopath (in response to the accusation that he’s a psychopath), but despite their shared focus on solving the puzzle for its own sake, Sherlock shows more glimmers of humanity in three episodes than House has in eight seasons. House has to rely on humor to make the show watchable, and with the show becoming less funny and its lead character more spiteful, the show’s quality has declined noticeably. Sherlock has some humor, but the stories and the two lead characters can drive the show on their own because there’s more to see and understand in the title character than there is in Dr. House.

Finally, it wouldn’t be a Klaw review of a British series without a mention of Foyle’s War, tied to Sherlock by (at least) a significant guest-starring role by Andrew Scott (who also appeared in The Hour). DCS Foyle is nothing like Holmes, of course; he has a normal range of emotions, but keeps them inside, producing a brooding, melancholy exterior that has become sharper with age. But what the two detectives do share is an attention to detail that characterizes most great literary detectives as well – crimes are solved when the investigator identifies some tiny inconsistency that exposes a wider range of evidence against the guilty party. Holmes solves his crimes through research, Foyle through interrogation, but both solve via deduction. The shows particularly differ in pacing, however – the London-based Sherlock moves quickly, not just in editing, but in dialogue and action, while Foyle’s War is almost leisurely and methodical, reflecting its bucolic setting and the illusion of peace while a war rages mere miles away. So if you’re a Sherlock fan looking for another British mystery series while you wait for season two to arrive here, give Foyle’s War a try.

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→ February 6, 2012
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Shadow of the Wind.

I read Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s best-selling novel The Shadow of the Wind last week between vacation and the long trip to Bristol (during which I also watched the first half of season 4 of The Wire) after a reader recommended it and I discovered my wife wanted to read it as well. It’s quick-moving with some interesting subtexts, but with a lot of silly, predictable plot elements and some least-common-denominator writing that drags the book down to a pulpier level.

The novel starts promisingly enough as the narrator/protagonist, Daniel, is introduced by his bookseller father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a slightly mystical edifice in Barcelona where the keepers attempt to obtain a copy of every book ever written so that they may never be permanently forgotten. Daniel’s father tells him to find one book and become its champion, of sorts, and Daniel is drawn to a book called Shadow of the Wind, by an unknown author named Julián Carax. Daniel’s attempts to learn more about the book and Carax then drive the remainder of the novel’s plot, which has almost nothing to do with books or literature but instead revolves more around the history of Spain from its civil war forward, and around the city of Barcelona itself, which is the book’s real center and its main character.

It turns out that some madman is running around burning every copy of Carax’s books that he can find, and when that madman finds Daniel as a result of the boy’s inquiries about the book and its author, it plunges Daniel into the story he’s chasing, one that dates back to Carax’s boyhood and features a doomed romance and childhood grudges that have become deadly in time, while paralleling developments in Daniel’s own life, including a forbidden romance of his own that almost (but, fortunately, not completely) mirrors Julián’s.

Ruiz Zafón’s best passages have little to do with the plot, or with dialogue (it may be the translation, which was done by Lucia Graves, the daughter of I, Claudius author Robert Graves, but Zafón’s language comes off as stilted), but with Barcelona itself. His prose is most evocative when he’s describing street scenes from what is a very scenic, memorable city, a city that mixes architectural styles and landscapes and features the kind of old buildings required for the novel’s gothic-horror-lite elements.

Unfortunately, I could never fully buy into the story’s plot, not the madman’s actions, not the acts of the violent policeman who also stalks Daniel, not the romance between Julián and his intended, nor her father’s actions when their affair is discovered. The madman’s identity was easy to figure out, and while I didn’t see the twist with Julián and Penelope coming, it’s not remotely original and I thought it was played more for shock value than anything else, a trick Ruiz Zafón also uses when Daniel pronounces, American Beauty-style, that in seven days, he will be dead. (Spoiler, which I think anyone could guess, but you should avert your eyes if you really don’t want to know: He ends up dead for a few seconds before he’s revived. Cheap.) I kept looking for a deeper meaning in the book relating to the dark period of fascism in Spain that lasted four decades, but either I’m not familiar enough with Spanish history to find it, or it just wasn’t there.

If you want a real page-turner with gothic horror elements, go for the longer but far more enjoyable Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. If you like the idea of a novel revolving around books, I’d recommend the tremendously fun The Eyre Affair (which I recommend all the time) or the clever if not entirely plot-driven City of Dreaming Books.

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I should also mention Dorothy Sayers’ mystery Whose Body?, which introduced the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey with a clever device involving the discovery of an unknown victim’s naked body in the tub of a working-class house in London. I like a good mystery, having read twenty-odd Agatha Christie novels, but Sayers’ writing and the resolution of the story both left me cold, particularly since the killer’s identity is revealed with about ten percent of the novel remaining, after which we get a long, drawn-out monologue (in epistolary form) from him explaining why he did what he did. Sayers also has Lord Wimsey speaking a very common vernacular that doesn’t gel with what we learn of his upbringing and seems like affect, and not the charming affect of, say, M. Poirot. The series has a devoted following but I don’t feel any need to go on to the next title.

Next up: Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt.

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→ February 4, 2012
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Caylus iOS app.

The complex strategy game Caylus is one of the top-rated games on Boardgamegeek, a site where voters tend to favor intricate games with pages upon pages of rules and little to no luck involved. It’s the kind of game I can’t imagine playing as a rookie against someone who’s played a few times – an experience I had with Agricola that ended up with me getting my ass handed to me by a slightly more seasoned player (who is, most likely, about to read this review). It’s also the kind of game that makes me say I’m not a “serious” boardgamer – I love smart games, but the complexity and length of games like Caylus (and Agricola, and Le Havre, for which I still owe everyone a review) keeps them off the top tier of my own list.

So I’m pleased to report that the Caylus app for iOS is very strong, with outstanding graphics, a very easy-to-use layout (no mean feat given the amount of information a player might need midgame), and, after a recent update, no issues with stability. The AIs could be better, and the rules included in the app are not sufficient, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to play and keeps you thinking the entire time – 15-20 minutes for a game against AI players. (I have yet to try this multiplayer, but that is available through GameCenter.)

Caylus is a worker-placement game: Each player has a small number of workers to place each turn on buildings that might return money, resources, or points; allow the exchange of some of those things for others; or allow him/her to construct something of value. Caylus operates around five resources, the value and supply of which fluctuate as the game progresses, and offers multiple paths to victory (although I found one the AIs just can’t seem to beat*). There’s really no luck involved, and because most buildings on the board allow just one worker per turn, each decision, from small to large, requires the player to consider not just his own future moves but those of every opponent as well.

* The strategy requires gold, the scarcest resource in the game. A human player would see that I was stockpiling gold and certain other resources and would at least try to made it harder for me to get gold from the gold mine, the one place to get gold for no cost beyond the cost of the worker. A human player would be trying to get gold for himself anyway. But the AI players don’t do either of these things, and I don’t think the AI players are that good at pursuing points via multiple, simultaneous strategies. I’ll come back to that.

The centerpiece of the game is the castle, which players build in blocks during three separate phases, after which their contributions to the castle are scored. Building certain numbers of blocks, or just building the most in any particular turn, grants the player one or more “royal favors” – money, a resource, victory points, or the ability to build a building at a discount. Failing to build at all in any of the three phases costs a player two victory points, but the opportunity cost is just as significant.

The graphics in this app are the best I’ve seen for any boardgame app so far, clear, bright, and very easy to look at for the length of a game. The layout is another strength, with critical information available in a left-hand sidebar that the player can rotate through several screens or can shrink to half its size to see more of the board. Moving workers is straightforward, and in the banner on the right from where the player drags a worker the app displays key info like money remaining (since placing a worker costs at least one unit of money).

I found the AI players all pretty easy to beat, working my way up from a two-player game against the easiest AI opponent to a five-player game against the two strongest AI players and two more from the next level of difficulty. The primary problem is that the AI players can’t detect a human player’s long-term strategy – an issue evident in other apps and one I expect to see in the upcoming implementations of Agricola and Le Havre. The simpler the game, generally the simpler it is to program a strong AI, either because it can pursue an optimal strategy that’s hard to beat or because the tree of potential human-player moves isn’t that wide.

The lack of in-game information is the other flaw here, one that creates a steeper-than-necessary learning curve for new players. The rules and tutorial show you how to use the app more than they show you how to successfully play the game. Buildings aren’t marked on the board; their icons are unique, so a player can look in the building directory in the left-hand sidebar and try to match them up, but allowing a player to tap any building and see its identity would be an easy addition. The app will also allow a player to select a favor that s/he can’t afford, with no opportunity to undo it as a player would have when playing the physical game.

For $4.99, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from Caylus, spending close to three hours total across all games I’ve played so far. I’ll still play it occasionally, but they’ll need to offer a better AI for this to be something I continue to play regularly without GameCenter (and since I play on planes, that’s a key issue for me). The weaker AI makes the app more of a Caylus tutorial, or even an advertisement for the physical game – albeit a very slick, easy to use one, once you figure out the rules, which you might have to do outside of the app. It’s really well done, and if they can offer a stronger AI player down the line, it’ll join that top tier of boardgame apps.

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→ February 2, 2012
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Top Chef, S9E13.

Recapping the worst episode of Top Chef I’ve ever seen…

* First order of business is to discuss the guest judge this week, Pee Wee Herman. I was too old for his original kids’ show, and never quite got the hipster-chic of it. I really don’t care about the public-indecency arrest, nor do I think it’s germane to a discussion of his appearance on this show. The real problem with Pee Wee Herman is that the character isn’t funny – and an unfunny guest judge who spurs the other judges to try (and fail) to be funny creates a very awkward show that, for me, was unpleasant to watch even before we got to the elimination-challenge foolishness.

* Quickfire: Twenty minutes to make pancakes. I love this challenge, because pancakes are such a classic dish, very American, often badly done, like lead in the stomach, tasting just of buttermilk or of the artificially-flavored syrup in which they are drowned. A pancake is one of the quickest of quickbreads, and while I prefer waffles – better surface/interior ratio, so you get more browning and more crunch – I like the way this gave chefs a blank canvas.

* Was it just the editing, or were most of the chefs just eyeballing their batter? I’m obsessed about measuring ingredients for doughs or batters of any sort, usually with a scale.

* The ricotta pancake thing, for me, is a little played out, and two chefs employed it – lemon-ricotta from Lindsay, ricotta-buttermilk from Grayson (who used chiffonade of basil in her fruit topping, which I love, as it has a surprisingly sweet flavor). Ricotta does produce a really light, fluffy end product though, including the zeppole at Via Napoli in Epcot, so maybe I’m criticizing a trend that is more of a new technique. But we didn’t get a lot of unusual flours, which surprised me because it seems like an easy way to change flavors and textures.

* Probably worth pointing out how incredibly forced the laughter from the chefs was during this entire episode. Grayson at least seemed to have some nostalgia for Pee Wee’s Playhouse, but that was it. Herman’s “the best pancakes I’ve ever had” gag was lame – anyone who didn’t see that coming shouldn’t be allowed to drive.

* Ed wins by going Jackson Pollock with the batter so he serves mostly the crispy edges of pancakes without the doughy interiors. This reminded me of a customer-from-hell incident my wife and I witnessed in a Cracker Barrel in Elkhart, Indiana, in 1998 (a story I may have told before, so bear with me). The burly guy in the next booth, dining alone, orders the pancakes “extra crispy,” and right before the waitress leaves to put in the order, shouts, “did I emphasize crispy?” So, in a development as obvious as a Pee-Wee Herman gag, the guys sends back multiple plates of pancakes because they’re “not crispy enough.” To this day I really have no idea what a crispy pancake would look like or whether that clown ever got what he wanted, or what he deserved for treating the server the way he did.

* Elimination challenge: This was a new low for Top Chef, surpassing the previous low, set when Pee Wee Herman walked into the kitchen at the start of the episode. The chefs had to head out on bicycles to find their ingredients at the farmers’ market in the Alamo district, and then had to find restaurants that would allow them to cook their meals in their kitchens. This is ridiculous for more reasons than I can list, but I’ll start with these.

1. The show is called “Top Chef,” right? So what part of this challenge is remotely relevant to being a chef? It had little or nothing to do with cooking, or even running a kitchen, which I could argue is a relevant consideration for evaluating someone’s cheffing skills.

2. Requiring the chefs to ride all over town on bikes is a pretty big handicap for anyone who’s not in shape, or has bad knees, or is otherwise physically limited. And given how hot it was during the filming of this season, weren’t they asking for someone to get hurt or pass out?

3. It had to be more structured than the editing made it appear. The show’s producers arranged this with restaurant owners beforehand, right? I mean, clearly these restaurant chefs/owners aren’t that surprised to have a TV crew and a random cook show up and ask to use their kitchens, and the chefs keep showing up at the same places, which can’t be a coincidence. So did the contestants get a list of restaurants to hit? And were the restaurants separately compensated? (Or was it just for the free publicity?) They had to know beforehand so they knew they would be asked to write up bills for the chefs. And if I’m right, why not make that clear to the audience?

4. None of that part of the show was even a little entertaining, let alone instructive about food or cooking.

* Moving along rapidly, Ed decides he wants to get proteins at the restaurant, which seems kind of foolhardy; don’t you build your dish around your proteins? He ends up using chicken breast instead of what he hoped for, shrimp, and is nearly eliminated because of it.

* Grayson says, “game night at the Schmitz house, usually one of us breaks down and cries.” I hear ya, girl – Ticket to Ride matches can get pretty fierce.

* Lindsay falls way behind the other chefs in getting ingredients – again, what are we judging here? Then she loses the kitchen she arranged to use because they don’t hold her spot and Sarah shows up. We sure learned a lot about Lindsay’s culinary vision by watching her get screwed over like that. The judges criticize her dish for having a little too much goat cheese, and Pee Wee Herman keeps talking about how amazing it is to have food served in “little boats,” so apparently he’s never seen an endive in his life.

* Sarah makes a “chicken skin vinagrette,” but it wasn’t just from the fat rendered from the skin, since she crisped it on the grill. I haven’t seen a recipe yet but am very interested now. The judges loved her okra, crush her for not seasoning her perfectly-cooked soft-boiled eggs. Outside of that – and chefs do get the axe all the time here for improper seasoning – this could have been a winner as a reconceptualization of a classic dish, a formula that always plays well on Top Chef.

* Ed got a little weird about sharing the kitchen with the guy who actually owned the place, although he was better humored about it at judges’ table than he was in the confessional. I get the criticism of the chicken’s texture if he pulled it too early and didn’t allow it to carry over, but Gail’s comment that poaching in beef fat isn’t flavorful made zero sense to me. Everyone knows the last time McDonald’s fries were good was when they still fried them in beef tallow.

* Grayson makes stuffed chicken breasts, which I’m not crazy about since they tend to dry out fairly easily, especially cooked without skin, because you’re trying to get the stuffing to at least get hot if not actually cooked through, by which time the breast meet is dry. Tom loves the combo of ingredients and loves her butternut squash but not in concert with tomatoes. Weird that Grayson would get large chicken breasts at a farmer’s market – you’d expect smaller ones if they’re really free-range or pasture-raised.

* Paul remains wildly ambitious even when working in someone else’s kitchen. It also seemed like he got along the best with his hosts, which says the easygoing manner we’re seeing post-editing is probably legitimate. He worried, as usual, about the sweet/sour balance, which the judges liked as long as you got all of the elements at once. Only David Tyree could stop him now.

* Can I just emphasize again how terribly unfunny this whole episode was? If Pee Wee Herman isn’t able to provide humor, what the hell is he doing here? Charlize had better insight into the food, and she’s hot. Just bring her back next time instead of letting some has-been comedian be a guest judge.

* Winner: Lindsay. Sounds like she just had the least flawed dish. Paul gets the thumbs-up as well, so I assume it’s fair to call him the runner-up this week.

* Loser: Given what we saw, which of course is a limited look, I expected Sarah or Ed to go home over Grayson. Grayson had a hell of a run though; she seemed early on like she lacked the range, but proved that she could succeed within her limits, and (not that it matters for judging) came off on TV better than anyone other than Paul.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Editing made Grayson look like the winner, but Ed betting the pack of cigarettes that it’s Beverly makes me think that’s who really won the LCK finale. Tom has the line of the week, funnier than anything PWH said, to Grayson: “I would not wake up this early in the morning just to fuck with you.” One preposition makes all the difference.

* Other LCK observations: Interesting to hear eliminated chefs, mostly men, now praising Beverly … Please stop saying “Asian” like it’s one fucking cuisine. Bev is Korean and her dish was more Thai than anything else; they’re no more similar than two European cuisines from different countries. It’s beyond annoying to hear Asian cuisine dismissed like it’s a gimmick, or some narrow style that could be summarized in a Dummies book.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay.

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→ January 26, 2012
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Top Chef, S9E12.

Recap of last night’s Top Chef: Frozen Food Infomercial…

* Charlize in the stew room! I’m impressed – if nothing else, it looks like she didn’t big league anyone, and really is just a fan of the show. So she and I have … one thing in common. We can build a relationship on this, right?

* Quickfire: Prep three ingredients, then make a dish incorporating all of them. Guest judge this week is Cat Cora, who might be the least impressive TV chef I’ve ever seen. I did watch Iron Chef America for the first year or two that she was on it, and found her stuff less imaginative and a lot less appealing than any of the other Iron Chefs at the time; Boston chef Ken Oringer (of Toro, Clio, Coppa, and La Verdad – he’s legit) just destroyed her in one of the last episodes I watched before I gave up on the show. Cora may be a wonderful person, but given what I’ve seen from her on TV I’m not sure why she’s here.

* And then she criticizes the deep-fried bacon for not having “flavor.” Really? Deep-fried bacon lacks flavor? If you want to criticize them for not rendering the bacon at all, I guess that’s valid, although bacon fat is loaded with flavor, so really, what the hell was she talking about?

* Back to the quickfire … Padma looks like she’s wearing her boyfriend’s clothes, assuming she’s dating a lumberjack, or perhaps is just wearing his tablecloth. Then she refers to the prize money as “ten thousand smackeroos,” so someone forgot that she’s not at home talking to her baby.

* Chris J. and Grayson are one team, and their styles don’t meld that well, with Grayson – who nearly botches the fresh pasta beyond repair; I’d love to know what she did to rescue a dough so dry it was tearing in the roller – telling Chris to get a move on, and Chris saying, “Fast is slow, and slow is smooth,” reciting something he apparently once read in a fortune cookie. “Good fortune happy lucky big time for you and family.”

* Paul and Ed, the dream team combo, end up DQ’d because Paul forgot to cook the shrimp. He didn’t just forget to add them, as Bev did with her curried rice krispies – he didn’t even cook them. He might have been the last of the six chefs I’d expect to brain-cramp like that, even if he was once a dope dealer.

* Despite all their issues, including finishing in the final seconds, Grayson and Chris win, leaving Lindsay and Sara as bitter as raw radicchio. (Foreshadowing!) Sara says in the confessional that her dish was better, which would be entirely plausible if we’d ever seen her touch Grayson and Chris’ dish. No immunity, though, which makes sense since we’re almost to the finale.

* Elimination challenge: feed 200 people at a block party with your take on a traditional block-party dish, which is then twisted into a commercial for Healthy Choice, which pushes low-calorie, low-fat, low-salt, dishes made with cheaply-sourced factory-farmed ingredients and pretends they’re good for you. Anyway, how come I never get invited to these parties? I need to get my agent on this.

* Anyway, the chefs pick their dishes, and are then told to lighten them up because the sponsor says so. Healthier versions? Come on, it’s Top Chef, not The Biggest Loser. I want fat served on a bed of fat, topped with hollandaise.

* We keep hearing about how the chefs reduced the salt in their dishes. Is it unfair of me to expect a show that’s all about food, with chefs and judges who talk about fresh ingredients, to understand that for a person with normal blood pressure, salt is not a problem? If you’re not eating processed foods, and your blood pressure is fine, you’re not eating too much salt. I could understand saying that part of the challenge for the chefs is to force them to amplify flavors without salt, but please, stop repeating the myth that salt is unhealthful.

* The chefs only get two and a half hours, including prep time. They did know ahead of time, so they could plan accordingly, but on the flip side, the mise en place must have taken up half of that time.

* Lindsay and Sara are making meatballs. Sara switches to turkey, but other than seeing them come off the grilltop a little flat we don’t get much more info on them. Lindsay goes with veal and lamb. Why lamb in meatballs? That has to be the fattiest meat option available. I don’t really like lamb – just lost my taste for it all of a sudden – but when I’ve had ground lamb dishes, I always find them a little greasy. For a low-fat challenge, it seems like an odd choice. Lindsay binds her meatballs with Greek yogurt, which sounds weird, but she gets props for using chickpea flour, which I think is an underutilized kitchen weapon – I’ve used it for a slew of things, including savory crepes and fresh pasta. I’m also eager to try her quinoa and black pea salad with a garlic-parsley vinaigrette. (But did she really use garlic powder in the dish?)

* Grayson and Chris end up with chicken salad sandwiches, Grayson’s choice because Chris was too busy pondering the true meaning of “block.” Chris kills the mayo and uses a tofu emulsion, reminiscent of Alton Brown’s egg-less Caesar salad dressing, so not only is it lower in fat but it’s now friendly to people with egg allergies. Grayson is crunched for time, as always, but her choice to make the sandwiches to order turns out to be her trump card over Chris. I did think Chris’ watermelon salad side dish, with a frozen pineapple slush poured on top, looked far better than Grayson’s trendy watermelon salad with feta and whatever you lost me after you put goat cheese with watermelon.

* Paul and Ed push the envelope, of course, with their takes on a Korean dish called galbi, grilled beef ribs first marinated in a salty-sweet mixture and often cooked table-side in restaurants or at cookouts. I’ve never had it, but you pretty much had me at “beef ribs.” Ed refuses to tone down any of the fat other than trimming the short ribs, which is kind of a fool’s errand because there’s so much fat laced in the meat itself, and then pairs it with a white-flour steamed bun. Paul switches to ground turkey, mixes in eggplant, and serves it in a lettuce wrap with a white-peach kimchi and a nonfat yogurt-miso sauce. Paul says at judges’ table that he added eggplant for the fat, which I assume is just nerves talking because, um, it has almost no fat. Ed, meanwhile, has to deal with kids stealing his bread, which is also probably a sign it’s not health food.

* Winners: Paul, Lindsay, and Grayson. Tom loves Paul’s kimchi. Grayson stands up to Tom at judges’ table and I think rendered him speechless. Paul wins again, no shock, but he did have the most out-of-the-box dish, including the things he did to maintain flavor while losing fat, and apparently executed it.

* Losers: Ed, Sarah, Chris, although the judges say nobody really flopped. Sarah kind of gets a pass for a good dish that wasn’t as good as her competitor’s; the biggest complaint was uneven mixing of the salad, which sounds like a terrible nitpick. Ed loses to Deep Blue, but also gets points off for punting on the healthful part of the challenge and bullshitting the judges. Chris J. is the pretty obvious choice for elimination here, and I think he was the worst remaining contestant, at least in odds of winning the whole thing. Grayson blames herself for picking chicken salad, which didn’t play to Chris’ strengths, but he was there for the decision on what to cook and didn’t come up with a valid alternative.

* Last Chance Kitchen: Mystery Box challenge. Bev and Chris make almost identical dishes. Tom doesn’t say so, but I think the deciding factor may have been the white anchovy, which Bev integrated in her dish, but Chris didn’t after suffering chef’s block.

* Final three: I’m sticking with Paul, Ed, and Lindsay. I still think Sarah is too limited – both of her dishes in this episode were Italian-plus, at best – and Grayson is probably the weakest chef remaining. Looks like we’ll get a re-entry from LCK after next week’s episode.

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→ January 23, 2012
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Folks, This Ain’t Normal.

I’m not a big fan of polemics in general, since, regardless of subject matter, they all tend to share two traits: They are poorly written and lightly evidenced. Joel Salatin’s Folks, This Ain’t Normal: A Farmer’s Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World fits that description perfectly, with a complete lack of footnotes and scant detail even in anecdotes that should, in theory, help prove his points, and while Salatin is clearly a bright guy, he’s no writer, and whoever edited his book didn’t do him many favors. Yet despite those glaring flaws, and the clear bias with which he writes (one to which I’m sympathetic), there’s still a fair amount of value to be had from reading Folks… because of the questions his arguments on agriculture and our modern, unsustainable food supply will raise in your mind.

Joel Salatin is a self-described “environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer,” as well as a libertarian, a Christian, and to some degree a bit of a chauvinist, so 350 pages of his thoughts will inevitably contain something to aggravate any reader – a tactic, however, that can have the positive effect of causing readers to investigate Salatin’s claims further to try to debunk them. He runs an extensive, traditional farm in rural Virginia called Polyface, pasture-raising livestock; eschewing the use of pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically modified crops; and employing a holistic approach to land management that relies on natural processes and diets to maintain soil quality, limit water usage, and minimize his carbon footprint.

Salatin follows three main tracks, ignoring some of the extraneous rants in the book such as his thoughts on child-rearing, that are relevant to the consumer:

  1. He explains why industrially-produced food is inferior in quality, safety, and environmental impact to food from individual farmers practicing his style of agriculture.
  2. He blames government regulators, generally in cahoots with large-scale industrial food producers, for masking the true costs of industrially-produced food, making it less cost-effective for small-scale farmers to start and grow their businesses, and limiting those local farmers’ access to markets through suffocating regulations. He even saves some ire for the government’s relationship with Big Oil, since cheap fuel distorts the market for local food, to say nothing of cheap fertilizers.
  3. And he ends every chapter with advice to the consumer on how to improve his/her impact on the food supply, including many admonitions to grow as much of your own produce as you can, as well as to raise chickens in your backyard for their eggs*, feeding them kitchen scraps and using their manure for compost.

* One of our daughter’s best friends in kindergarten has chickens in her backyard, and her mom gave us a half-dozen of the eggs last week. I have never come across any egg with shells that strong, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a greenish egg, which apparently means the hen was an Araucana. The yolks were also very well-defined. If my daughter and I weren’t both so allergic to feathers, I’d set up a coop right away.

As I mentioned earlier, however, Folks, This Ain’t Normal ain’t a great read. He backs up virtually none of what he says unless he can discuss a specific experience at Polyface; at one point, he mentions a centrally-planned city in China that grew up practically overnight, with 250,000 people and gardens on nearly every rooftop, but never mentions one minor detail – the city’s name – without which the story is much tougher to verify. You may nod your head at first to his arguments about corrupt regulators, market externalities, nanny-state policies, or the hijacking of the term “organic,” but his arguments consistently lack evidence. I think most of what he says is right – our government is way too involved in the food supply, and our policies on food and oil have led to poor land usage, soil mismanagement, the inevitability of water crises, and substandard products at the grocery store* – but it would be tough for me to carry out any of these arguments myself based solely on his book.

*Another rant: Have you ever had a truly pasture-raised chicken? The chicken breasts are small, while the legs are larger, because the chickens are more active, building muscle in the thighs and drumsticks (well, what eventually become the drumsticks), while burning off the calories that, in a caged bird, would otherwise lead to larger breasts. (Stop snickering.) I happen to prefer dark poultry meat anyway, since it has more fat, leading to better texture and less dryness, but it’s also a lot more natural; industrally-raised birds’ organs can’t keep up with the muscle growth in the breasts, so they must be slaughtered earlier so they don’t die of organ failure. And, as it turns out, pasture-raised cows and chickens produce more healthful milk and eggs than feedlot or caged livestock does, just as compost-raised produce contains more nutrients than fertilizer-raised produce.

Folks, This Ain’t Normal at least encouraged me to continue what I’ve started in our yard, composting and growing regionally and seasonally appropriate crops, and to be smarter about what I buy and where I buy it. Salatin mentioned The Cornucopia Institute, which ranks organic dairies and organic egg producers on how true their claims of organic practices are. (In Arizona, the executive summary is: Organic Valley and Clover = good, Horizon and Shamrock = bad.) They’ve also led the fight on behalf of almond farmers who want to sell raw almonds to the public, winning a lawsuit allowing California almond farmers to challenge a USDA regulation that forbids the sale of almonds that haven’t been treated with a toxic fumigant or at very high heat, a regulation in response to a salmonella outbreak at one of the nation’s largest industrial nut producers. This kind of policy – where the sins of a large corporation lead to regulations with fixed costs that crush smaller producers – is exactly what Salatin targets when he rants about intrusive, anti-farmer regulations. I had never heard of the Cornucopia Institute before picking up his book, or many of the other books he mentions (such as Gene Logsdon’s memorably titled Holy Shit: Managing Manure To Save Mankind), so Salatin’s book did at least achieve one goal – forcing me to reexamine the food my family eats, from how it’s grown to where we get it. But had he researched and supported his book with more hard data or secondary sources, Folks, This Ain’t Normal might have become a classic in its narrow field.

Next up: As I mentioned on Twitter, I’m working my way through Raymond Carver’s short story collection Where I’m Calling From – and yes, I’m aware of the controversy over his editor’s role in changing some of the text.

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