→ February 6, 2014
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Top Chef, S11 finale.

My list of the ten prospects who just missed my top 100 was posted yesterday for Insiders. I also wanted to repost the link to my review of the cooperative game Forbidden Desert, which appeared on Paste magazine’s site a few weeks ago. I’ll be chatting today at 1 pm as well.

The Top Chef season 11 finale did not feature the two best chefs of the season, despite the judges’ claims to the contrary. Shirley had the better record coming into the penultimate episode, and from our distant vantage points (i.e., we can’t taste the food), she had the best combination of execution and creativity of anyone this season. Nick struggled through the last few episodes in New Orleans, and Nina never showed the kind of vision or inventiveness that I would expect from a Top Chef winner.

* The final elimination challenge: Take over a restaurant and make it your own for the night with a four-course menu.

* Padma is in spaghetti straps at the start. Oh, hello there.

* And then the bikini shot – Padma emerging from the waves, brushing her hair back from her face, wearing less than a fat quarter’s worth of fabric. The clip is completely gratuitous, of course.

* Nick says that he quit his job to come on Top Chef, and that winning the top prize of $125,000 would be “a kick-start to owning (his) own business,” which I can confirm that he does now, opening Laurel in Philadelphia in November. So that might have been a clue.

* Padma arrives with string bikini top on and a bunch of eliminated chefs behind her. Nick gets to pick his three sous first, and then Nina picks her three from the six who remain. He chooses Jason (they’re friends), Louis (the most technically sound chef, in Nick’s view), and Brian (saying he clicked with Brian in Restaurant Wars). Nina takes Shirley (duh), Stephanie (who says “I got those TC jitters again”), and Travis (whom she keeps calling one of the “gossip girls” … not entirely appropriate). I think she might have the stronger team, although Jason could be a lot better than we thought, and we didn’t see anything from Travis to make me think he’d be a real asset here. Janine, Carlos, and Sara were passed over. I’m not shocked – Janine wasn’t there long, the other two weren’t strong on fundamentals, and Sara didn’t come off as a team player.

* Nick wants to highlight classic and contemporary French technique. Meanwhile, Jason is already showing a better attitude – perhaps he’s aware he came off poorly the first time around.

* Nina seems to be planning with a broader palate, but still is going for Caribbean ingredients fused with Italian cuisine. She wants to do two extra “surprise” courses.

* The chefs chop at Kumu Farms, “Maui’s source for specialty farming,” as well as Whole Foods Maui, which must be the best Whole Foods on the planet. I wonder if the fish is still flopping around when it enters the store.

* Nick wants to do another panna cotta and do it well this time. Is it just me, or is panna cotta kind of overrated? It’s an eggless custard, thickened with gelatin rather than the proteins and emulsifiers found in egg yolks. That gives it a funkier texture – think strained yogurt versus those thickened with starch or pectin – and robs it of some flavor.

* There’s no ice cream machine in Nina’s kitchen, so she has to call an audible based on what she’s already purchased, making zeppole instead. That’s a big move from custard (semi-freddo) to fried dough.

* There’s a lot of protein on Nick’s menu – three savory/meat courses and then panna cotta. I understand this is a competition, not an actual restaurant, but we don’t need to eat anywhere near that much meat, nor would I want to. After two of these courses I’d be screaming for a vegetable dish. Meat is a luxury good, not an essential part of every meal.

* Tom asks Nick if his food is too subtle compared to Nina’s spicy food. Nick responds by dumping a bottle of hot sauce on Tom’s head and screaming “IS THAT TOO SUBTLE FOR YOU?”

* Nina says she prefers a cheese course to dessert. I knew I didn’t trust that woman.

* We get a little temporary drama as Nina has to continue braising her goat into day two to get it tender enough. Apparently braising goat is normally an “all-day affair.” I’ll take her word for it on that.

* In something of a surprise, Nick’s sous all seem to like working with him. Brian says he’s a “great leader.” The waitstaff won’t feel the same way by the end of the night, though.

* On the start of day two (before service), Nina checks the goat and pronounces it “chewy as fuck.” All righty then.

* When trying to explain the menu to the servers and offer them tastes of the various courses, two servers are absent and Nick demotes them before wandering off swearing. This, kids, is known as “foreshadowing.”

* The judges arrive. Gail appears to have brought the amuse-boobs to dinner. I’m not actually complaining about this. She also looks like she might give birth before the dessert course.

* Nina starts with an amuse-bouche: Breadfruit with whipped foie gras butter and curry salt on top.

* Nina’s first course: tuna and escolar tartare with tomato water, basil, and jalapeño. Escolar shouldn’t be eaten raw – the fish contains wax esters that cause severe stomach upset in some diners because our bodies can’t break them down. There’s no surefire way of reducing or eliminating them in the fish, but they’re absolutely at their highest levels when the fish is still raw. The judges appeared to have rendered their decisions before running to the bathrooms, so Nina isn’t hurt by this and they all love the dush.

* Service at Nick’s place is struggling. His expediter is either absent or clueless, or maybe he just did a lousy job of training the staff.

* Nick’s first course: Hamachi and tuna crudo with green apple wasabi, celery, and Maui meyer lemon. Once again, his fish is a touch underseasoned and needs a few grains of sea salt. You’d think by now he’d be a madman about this stuff.

* After dinner, Janine will be trying out for a part in Love Shack: The Musical, Featuring the Songs of the B-52’s.

* Nick’s second course: Sweet shrimp bisque with scallop noodles (made by Jason), shaved abalone, and daikon noodles. Chef Paul Bartolotta, one of the diners at the judges’ table, says the dish is “not sweet.” I may have missed something here in the chatter, but that’s not what “sweet shrimp” means, is it?

* Nina’s second course: Roasted goat sugo with orecchiette, cherry tomato confit, whipped goat cheese, and arugula. The goat, after all the drama, ended up perfectly cooked and seasoned. Tom says he’d come back for this dish. I love the sound of this – she did something very Italian at heart, but replaced the typical game meats you’d find in this (rabbit, boar, duck) with a very Caribbean element in goat.

* Nina’s third course: Spice-rubbed swordfish with squash puree, braised kale, and smoked onion jus. It sounds like some overpowering flavors over the mild, delicately-flavored fish (which has a meaty texture but not flavor), and the judges all say the same thing. I’m a purist when I have swordfish, which is rarely anyway – brushed with olive oil, seasoned with salt and black pepper, served with a squeeze of lime juice. It doesn’t need much more than that.

* Nick’s third course: Seared kombu-cured duck, shaved compressed kabucha squash, hijiki, and ginger. The duck is inconsistent from plate to plate – Emeril says his is chewy – but is packed with flavor and Nick did a great job rendering out the fat, which is nearly always my complaint when I order duck and don’t love it. Hijiki is a sea vegetable that grows on coastlines of China, Japan, and Korea, but apparently is high in arsenic and several countries recommend against its consumption. Good times.

* Nick’s fourth course: Caramelized white chocolate panna cotta, almond cocoa crumble, shortbread, and passion fruit and papaya puree. Delicious but not quite jiggly enough. I’m just writing what they said, people.

* Nick’s servers didn’t put spoons out even though we saw him ask them to do so. Something very weird is going on over on his side of the house. Are the servers deliberately ignoring him, maybe because he’s being rude to them? Or are we missing something entirely?

* Nina’s intermezzo (a between-courses offering, a palate-cleanser in this case): Compressed dragon fruit with ginger simple syrup and frozen papaya.

* Nina’s dessert: Chocolate zeppole, passion fruit anglaise, macadamia nuts. I want this recipe; she does (or did) something very similar to it at her restaurant. Tom says it’s not a complete dessert and it seems like a weak ending to her meal. I’ve asked Nina about the zeppole on Twitter, as I’ve never seen chocolate zeppole but want to try them out. They’re the Italian version of fried dough or beignets, nearly always yeast-raised and very airy and doughy inside. When I was growing up on Long Island, we’d go to Italian festivals all summer and get zeppole, three or six to a bag, coated in powdered sugar.

* Watch What Happens Live preview: Nick looks like he’s going to work out, Nina looks like she’s going clubbing, I look like I’m changing the channel.

* Tom says Nick’s sweet shrimp bisque with scallop noodles was the “best dish I’ve had all year.” The judges do seem more enthusiastic about Nina’s food overall.

* How do the judges eat this much? I’d be asking for a bucket by this point.

* And here we have Nick’s meltdown. Yes, someone out front screwed up – the prompt appears to be a table that never got its first course – but screaming “God damn it!” and slamming the counter in the kitchen ain’t solving a thing, buddy. First off, it’s not even clear whose fault this is; did Nick fail to train the staff properly, or does he just have a couple of screw-ups? Second, and more importantly at this point, blame is totally irrelevant when you are faced with a problem that requires a solution. Find the problem, figure out how to fix it, and drop everything to make it happen. (Jason appears to get this better than Nick in the heat of the moment.) If your staff in this challenge is a car of idiots, so what – you’ll never have to see them again. Solve the problem and move on.

We’ve seen this from Nick way too often during the season. He’s great until something goes wrong, but after that he loses his mind. I’ll confess I see a lot of myself, at least my old self, in this. Whatever the cause – anxiety, anger, control issues – you can’t go through life with a permanently elevated heart rate. Meditate, get therapy, try medication, whatever, don’t do this to yourself or to the people around you.

* Padma’s fabric accessory looks like a stack of Kayan neck-rings from Burma. Weird fashion choices across the board here – I haven’t even gotten to Tom’s super-casual shirt under the blazer.

* Judges’ table: Nick glosses over the service issues; it’s great that he didn’t just blame the staff, but maybe admitting he overreacted just a touch would have been smart. His first dish was a touch underseasoned. His second dish had no scallop flavor for Padma, but Tom adored it and Padma does this eye-roll that would make my daughter envious. Emeril’s duck was undercooked, but it sounds like no one else’s was. Nick doesn’t like panna cotta to be jiggly, but all the judges say it should be jiggly, so he needs to get … never mind. He should just make it more jiggly next time.

* Nina’s meal started stronger, but ended weakly. Tom asks if they should judge her on the two mini-courses too, and she says yes (why not?). Her crudo had really broad flavors and beautiful colors; other than the escolar, I’d eat this in a heartbeat. Her orecchiette with goat was “awesome,” “killer,” and Gail said it was one of her best dishes all season. Nina knows already that her swordfish dish didn’t really gel, and concedes that dessert isn’t her strong point, calling what she served “a bite,” not a full dessert. After that much food, though, isn’t a “bite” a good thing? Do you want a thick slice of a flourless chocolate torte or a heavy bread pudding after all that fish and meat and rich sauces? I wouldn’t.

* Back in the kitchen, the world’s smallest violin plays for Nick as he tells Nina that he didn’t win because he wasn’t perfect.

* Course by course: First to Nina. Second to Nina overall, but Tom disagrees. Third to Nick. Fourth to Nick by a huge margin. Hugh asks which chef delivered a better overall experience; Padma says they should consider service. Hugh is evidently pissed off about Nick lashing out the way he did (and rightly so). Tom says Nick was more consistent start to finish. Padma says Nina’s two extras were “amazing,” but Gail wishes she’d put that energy into the main four.

* Tom asks everyone for the worst dish of the night: Emeril says the duck, but the others all say the swordfish or the panna cotta.

* And the winner is … Nick! I’m surprised, based on judges’ table, but Tom tweeted more details this morning:

So the inference that Nick opening a new restaurant in November was a clue he’d won the show turned out to be accurate. I hope he set aside a little of that money to take up yoga, though.

* Nina leaves with a great quote: “I’m a role model for people in St. Lucia now.” She handled finishing second better than Nick handled winning. And she didn’t tell anyone to “suck a dick” in this episode.

* Overall, I wasn’t thrilled with the season as a viewer. We didn’t get the kind of wildly inventive dishes that have characterized great seasons or great individual chefs – there was no Blais, Voltaggio, Qui, or Kish anywhere here, not even an Izard. Louis may have been able to bring that, but his exile to Last Chance Kitchen seemed justified, and only there did we see evidence of a chef who’d worked under Thomas Keller and had both the technical chops and the respect for ingredients that characterizes the best Top Chef winners. Shirley topped my rankings for much of the season and it sounds like she was eliminated in a fairly close call one step from the finals. It just wasn’t an ideal set of contestants this time around, and the chefs most likely to blow us away didn’t get to the final matchup.

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→ February 4, 2014
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Sherlock, season three.

Sherlock, season three, executive summary: fun, amazing, disappointing, in exactly that order.

When your seasons are just three episodes long and each one of them is the length of a short feature film, it’s hard to build up longer story arcs or engage in large-scale character development. For the third season of Sherlock, Mark Gatiss’ and Stephen Moffatt’s adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s character and stories into a modern setting, we do get some surprising alterations in Sherlock’s character, but unfortunately some of it comes at the expense of what makes him who he is: The deductions.

(I’m assuming if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with the series already; you may want to start with my reviews of season one and season two.)

We last saw our titular hero taking a dive off the edge of a building in a staged suicide attempt that was intended to foil the evil plans of evildoer Moriarty and save John Watson, a riff on the short story “The Final Problem,” where ACD killed off Holmes, only to bring him back a few years later in response to public outrage over the character’s death. We knew Holmes didn’t die here, but the first episode had to, as it were, un-kill him – and the writers had a bit of fun with it, posing increasingly preposterous solutions before showing what might be the actual one, only to have Holmes himself cast doubt on his own explanation of actual events. (Gatiss has pointed out that there are only so many ways to jump off a building and survive, so I think we can accept Sherlock’s last answer as the correct one.) “The Empty Hearse” thus brings Holmes back to life, to London, and to Dr. Watson, the last of which provides some of the series’ darkest comedy to date – as one might expect Watson to be a little peeved that his BFF faked his own death and disappeared for two years without a word. The series of reunions that bring Sherlock back, more or less, to his old circle of partner-antagonists takes up the bulk of the episode, but we do get an actual case, this time an act of domestic terrorism that Sherlock has to stop both by deduction and by action. The balance of intellectual crime-solving, the interplay between Sherlock and Watson, and the filling in of the blanks of the previous season’s cliffhanger differs greatly from the formula for the previous six episodes, but Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) carries the extra weight beautifully and the episode felt like an appetizer for the remaining two parts of the season.

The second episode, “The Sign of Three,” was a high point for the series, perhaps my favorite episode to date, in large part due to a tour de force performance from Cumberbatch, balancing Sherlock’s discomfort with social situations (here, as the best man in Watson’s wedding) against his intense fascination with the puzzle of any case – here, two mysteries that intersect at the wedding in a third incident that Sherlock has to try to prevent while giving the traditional speech. Cumberbatch owns the screen, pushing the boundaries of the character, mostly showing more humanity through his evident affection for Watson (hey, the short stories were one of literature’s original bromances), radiating huge quantities of energy through his voice, his body language, and his facial expressions as he first stalls for time and then solves the case without ceding the floor. It’s a peculiarity of the episode that Watson is relegated to a side character in an episode devoted to his own wedding, but as great as Martin Freeman is as the good doctor, we are here to see Mr. Holmes do his thing, and in “The Sign of Three” (an allusion to the short novel The Sign of Four) he does it superbly.

That peak made the third episode, “His Last Vow,” an even bigger letdown than normal. Sherlock has disappeared again, this time for a shorter period, and Watson finds him working undercover, in the middle of a case, with the target the media magnate Charles Augustus Magnussen, a blackmailing version of Rubert Murdoch who holds a trove of damaging information on virtually everyone of importance in the Western world. The client is unclear, at least at first, although the case eventually takes on a more personal aspect for Sherlock, leading him to an emotional reaction that puts his ability to solve the case rationally in jeopardy.

Aside from the return of Janine (played by the Irish-Pakistani comedienne Yasmine Akram) from the preceding episode, “His Last Vow” fell short in every aspect that has made this series so great. The interplay between Holmes and Watson is limited, and strained when it occurs; the rapid-fire His Girl Friday dialogue that populates most of the first eight episodes is nearly absent here, and their chemistry with each other is short-circuited by Watson’s ire over Holmes’ initial disappearance and later by the personal nature of the case. We get very little of Holmes’ deduction, and what we do get is short of the mark. Lestrade doesn’t appear – in fact, he’s in far too little of this season overall. The villainous Magnussen is too odious, comically repugnant beyond the point of realism. I don’t wish to spoil the twist, but my understanding of that method of information storage is that it works for short-term storage but not the kind of long-term solution Magnussen would require.

So while “The Sign of Three” was revelatory, a leap forward for the series by developing its central characters while meeting or exceeding its previous standards for intelligence, the rest of the season was a disappointment. Had “The Empty Hearse” been the only deviation from the series’ main formula, the season could have been as good as or better than the first two, but the decision to craft a melodramatic finale that deemphasized Sherlock’s essential Holmesness did not succeed.

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→ February 3, 2014
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The Last Dragonslayer.

In case you missed anything, here’s the full set of links to the top 100 prospects package. The piece on 10 prospects who just missed the 100 will now run on Wednesday, rather than today.

I’m a longtime fan of Jasper Fforde’s novels – the Thursday Next series, the two Nursery Crimes books, and the dying-for-a-sequel Shades of Grey – and just tackled his first young adult novel, The Last Dragonslayer, last week. The first in the “Chronicles of Kazam” series, the book is quite Ffordian, just without the sex and swearing we’re used to from the Thursday Next books, yet still very ffunny and still willing to address big themes like death, moral choices, and greed.

Set in an alternate version of our world where magic exists (albeit in decline) and the U.K. has splintered into the Ununited Kingdoms, The Last Dragonslayer revolves around 15-year-old Jennifer Strange, the temporary manager of the Kazam employment agency for sorcerors and, as it turns out, the next in the line of dragonslayers. Here be dragons, or at least nearby, thanks to the Dragonpact that set up boundaries between dragons and humans – but the dragon nearest Kazam is dying and every human wants to rush in and claim some of the soon-to-be-unoccupied land. Fforde loves to riff on capitalism run amok and spares no one here in his assaults on human and corporate avarice, not even the local idiot King of Hereford, who believes Jennifer should be acting in his interests as one of his subjects.

Strange herself has no magical abilities, although she’s running the shop at Kazam, which rents out the services of its various mages for things like home rewirings and pizza deliveries (all those magic carpets have to find some use). She’s the ideal Ffordian hero: uncertain, underconfident, stronger than she realizes, female yet not overtly feminine, and fiercely loyal to her friends and to her principles. One of those friends, filling the role of Pickwick the dodo, is the Quarkbeast, whose only dialogue comprises the occasional interjection, “Quark.”

The successful completion of Jennifer’s mission involves more cunning than fighting, and she outwits several opponents to her half-formed plans to try to do the Right Thing, even though she’s far from clear on what that is. The story moves quickly, unfettered by much in the way of subplots – the missing owner of Kazam will likely wait for another day to resurface, and I imagine we’ll hear more of the origins of both Jennifer and her fellow foundling “Tiger” Prawns in a future book – with plenty of the dry wit that makes Fforde’s books such a pleasure to read. I think it’s appropriate for ages 8 or 9 and up, but wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to any adult.

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→ February 1, 2014
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The Supper of the Lamb.

Robert Farrar Capon was an Episocopal priest who, like me, had an abiding if entirely amateur interest in food and cooking, and he combined both of those passions with his love of writing in the seminal “culinary reflection” The Supper of the Lamb, a peculiar tome that isn’t quite a cookbook, isn’t exactly a book on faith, but weaves them together with some truly superb High-English prose. Capon passed away in September at 88, but this book is now back in print thanks to Modern Library.

While The Supper of the Lamb is more about food than religion, at least superficially, you’re going to get a heavy dose of one if you want to get to the other. Capon’s faith is traditional and unapologetic, and he’ll jump from comments on biodiversity and evolution to marveling over the depth and breadth of God’s creation. In that sense, it’s a narrowly themed book – Capon expounds upon God’s infinite grace, and he’s not going to stop to ask if you’re completely along for the ride.

It’s a ride worth taking even if you’re only interested in the other half, however. Looking at our world and the bounty of edible items within it with a greater sense of wonder will, or should, improve our appreciation of the plate before us, and help us reorient our thinking away from processed and packaged foods and more toward cooking with the foods available in nature. Capon’s approach is no-nonsense – while conceding a few guilty pleasures from the supermarket, he rails against the trend, already evident in the 1960s when he wrote the book, toward outsourcing home-cooking to big corporations and toward a disconnection between us and the things we eat.

The book revolves around the lamb supper of the title, an allusion to the marriage supper of the Lamb found in Revelations 19, and to the central dish of the work, “Lamb for eight persons four times,” a dish that pays homage to the meat (a whole leg of lamb) by using every last bit of flavor it has to offer, including soup made from the bones and trimmings. Capon uses this series of recipes as a departure point for his meditations on faith, grace, and useless kitchen tools.

It’s not, for me at least, a book from which to learn about cooking; if you learn anything from Capon about food, it will be about the philosophy of the kitchen and less about practical tips or techniques. I enjoyed his writing more than any other aspect of the work, though, as Capon was erudite and witty, such as in his praise of the cleaver (even now a scarcely-seen knife in home kitchens_:

A woman with cleaver in mid-swing is no mere woman. She breaks upon the eye of the beholder as an epiphany of power, as mistress of a house in which only trifles may be trifled with – and in which she defines the trifles. A man who has seen women only as gentle arrangers of flowers has not seen all that women have to offer. Unsuspected majesties await him.

Capon despises the double boiler, as does Alton Brown today, and he praises wooden utensils, as does Michael Ruhlman, although the two disagree on the utility of the wooden spoon. (Ruhlman prefers wooden spatulas for scraping, and I concur, using silicone spatulas – unavailable at the time of Supper‘s publications – in applications where a spoon might be more functional, such as scraping the bottom of a saucier.) He talks about white and brown stock, how to make them and why you need to do so if you want to cook real food and to not throw away all that flavor in the bones. (One shudders to think at what he’d say about the modern proliferation of boneless, skinless, flavorless chicken breasts.) He speaks in praise of wine and discusses the ideal corkscrew. He goes on – and on – about the making of puff pastry and its highest form of expression, the strudel dough, which seems like an inordinate amount of work even to me, who thinks nothing of curing my own bacon or making my own preserves.

Capon’s techniques were quite modern for his era, with a sound understanding of the science of the kitchen underpinning most of his suggestions, but his dishes read as very dated today. So does the chapter on hosting a proper dinner party, where Capon even argues for asking guests to come in black tie. It was a different era, I suppose, and for that I give thanks.

Next up: I just finished Jasper Fforde’s wonderful young adult novel The Last Dragonslayer, which is pretty much a regular Fforde book without all the swearing, and have moved on to George Eliot’s Adam Bede.

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→ January 31, 2014
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Top Chef, S11E16.

Almost all of the the 2014 top 100 prospects package is now posted for Insiders – the post on the ten guys who just missed the 100 goes up on Monday – so here’s the full set of links in case you missed any of it:

Back to the Top Chef finale…

* Louis was the Last Chance Kitchen winner, taking eight straight challenges to re-enter the competition.

* Sam Choy, who made the infamous clam flan on Iron Chef America, is in the house. We have a quickfire … involving spam. That’s disgusting. I don’t care if it’s popular in Hawai’i; it’s anti-food. I can’t believe Colicchio would tolerate this. It contradicts everything he seems to stand for.

* Padma is wearing her 1970s royal blue jumpsuit. I assume Charley is on the speakerphone.

* Louis: “spam and eggs is awesome, nothing better than that.” Are you insane? That’s better than eggs and BACON?

* Seriously, look at that stuff. Cylindrical meat? What part of the animal does that come from? Do you think it was organic? Grass-fed? How much of the contents are fillers, chemicals, things you’d really rather not ask your liver to break down for you? I’m done now.

* The chefs all seem to be using santokus for their mise en place. I do own one and probably should use it even more – it is tremendous for vegetable prep, at least for “gross” cuts. Mincing with one feels trickier because of the straight blade.

* Shirley makes spam fried rice at home. What the fuck is wrong with these people. I guess I’m not done after all.

* Louis is quick-chilling his mousse in a bowl of ice. I thought you were supposed to just dump the ice into the mousse…

* Shirley makes a spam musubi (like nigiri but with grilled spam in lieu of raw fish), but deconstructed, with spam oil-infused rice, nori, cuke slaw, crispy spam, and basil.

* Louis wraps his spam mousse into a torchon, with garlic, chives, scallions, snap peas, beech mushrooms, and togarashi. Padma says, “It’s very silky in my mouth.” I swear she says these things on purpose.

* Nick makes a spam broth with pancetta, seaweed, dried shrimp, fish stock, clam juice, and quail egg. I’d love to be a judge on Top Chef someday, but I am glad it didn’t happen for this episode. I’d be running over to the ocean to purge after each dish.

* Nina makes a breadfruit and teriyaki Spam croquette with a sour orange and mango slaw on top.

* Nick wins, the quail egg smoothing out the somewhat oversalty dish. Sam says it was “Spam like I’ve never seen it before.” And like I’d never want to see it again? Anyway, Nick wins $10K, but not immunity, of course.

* Elimination challenge: Cooking with canoe crops, plants brought to Hawai’i by Polynesian explorers about 1700 years ago. The chefs are limited to those ingredients, pork shoulder, a few kinds of native fish, and some basics like onions and garlic. It’s a double elimination challenge, so only two chefs will go on to the finals. The winner also gets an advantage going into the finale, although we don’t find out what that is even after the winner is named.

* Tom is wearing seahorse shorts, which I guess is the new business casual. The guys rowing in the giant boat with the canoe crops are only wearing loincloths, which Nina calls “thongs” – not without reason.

* Shirley points out all may taste very similar because of same pantry. Sweet potato/turmeric puree. She and Nick doing pork shoulder

* We finally get to see Gail’s baby bump. I approve of this. Hiding her behind furniture would have been kind of insulting.

* To the food … Louis serves grilled opah with sweet potato and a coconut, turmeric, and onion sauce. The judges credit Sam with promoting opah as a food item. Tom’s is a little undercooked, but others’ dishes are perfect. Gail hadn’t had purple sweet potato before – neither had I before going to Hawai’i in 2012, and it’s a revelation, the best sweet potatoes I’ve ever eaten. I imagine they either don’t travel well or farms there don’t produce enough to ship them to the lower 48.

* Nina’s dish is also grilled opah, here with a taro root and coconut puree along with a turmeric, sugar cane, and habanero sauce, and a breadfruit chip somewhere on the plate as well. It’s perfectly cooked, of course, but the sauce was spicy and Tom feels like it threatened to overpower the fish.

* The rhizome in question here is pronounced TUR-meric. Not TOO-meric. A TOO-meric is what Arnold claimed he didn’t have in Kindergarten Cop.

* Nick serves opakapaka (also called Hawai’ian pink snapper) with jalapeño and crispy chicken skin, along with a pork jus sauce. He gets praise for incorporating texture contrast between the skin and the fish. The regular judges are joking that Hawai’i relaxed Nick. Maybe a month away from you guys relaxed him too…

* Shirley made a Maui honey-glazed pork with sweet potato-turmeric puree. Everyone loves the pork – braised, browned, and glazed perfectly. But the whole dish is sweet other than some pickled onions. I’m assuming that was meant to be her acidic component, but no one is talking about that. It reads as sweet (honey) with sweet (sweet potatoes).

* No one hit it out of the park, based on what we heard from the judges. At this point Nina feels like the only lock to advance.

* Sam sharing some Hawai’ian wisdom: breadfruit makes you “really gassy” with “blue flame action.” All righty then.

* We’re back to the chefs watching the judges’ discussion on the big screen. Tom says there were “little mistakes here and there” in all chefs’ food. Louis’ fish wasn’t cooked evenly from dish to dish. Nick’s fish was nicely cooked, but the jalapeño may have been too strong. (Give him a break, you’ve been killing him for underseasoning all season!) Nina did a great job layering flavors, but had a similar issue with too much capsaicin. Shirley’s pork was really flavorful; Emeril loved how it was cooked, but Tom says the plate was a little too sweet and needed a sour/acid note. The judges didn’t telegraph anything here that I could tell.

* When they bring the judges in, we mostly hear more of the same. One thing that stuck out was the praise for Louis in having the confidence to do a simple dish – I just finished The Supper of the Lamb, and the author, Robert Farrar Capon, has a passage about just that point: It’s harder to do simple well than it is to to complicated well.
* Padma looks like she’s going to be sick and they haven’t even sent anyone home yet.

* Winner: Nicholas. He gets the advantage in the finals, but we don’t know what it is. I will say he was like a different person in this episode – less touchy, not whiny, more upbeat. I’m sure he saw or heard feedback during the time off (based on previous seasons, at least) and realized he had to take it down a notch.

* Louis is eliminated first. He tears up, saying he wanted to win for his son. I get that, but your son will love you no less for coming in 4th.

* Shirley is eliminated too. Damn. I thought she had the best season to date, although I can see, based on the judges’ comments, why she went home. She says it’ll be “hard to face (her) family.” I sincerely hope that’s all in her head and that she won’t be berated by her husband or mom for finishing third.

* So we have Nick vs. Nina in the finals. Nina makes fewer mistakes. Nick cooks more ambitious dishes. I’m picking Nick, which is like going for upside rather than probability. He’s more likely to screw it up, but the history of the show favors chefs who are creative and bold.

* All I remember of the preview of next week’s episode is Padma in a tiny string bikini. Not that I’m complaining, but I really was just here for the food.

Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed and powered through the top 100 prospects stuff this week. It was a grind to write it – over 38,000 words, all written in the last 15 days – but I’m happy with the results, and I hope all of you are too.

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→ January 25, 2014
→ By

The Man Who Knew Infinity.

Ramanujan was one of the most remarkable and prolific mathematicians who ever lived, a self-taught prodigy who grew up in modest circumstances in south India during the time of the British Raj, rediscovering the previous 150 years’ worth of number theory while also uncovering over 3000 theorems and identities of his own. “Discovered,” in a sense, by the far more famous English mathematician G.H. Hardy, Ramanujan moved to England for about five years, where his work finally received a wider audience, but where he also contracted an unknown illness that eventually killed him at age 38.

Robert Kanigel’s biography The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan tells two main stories – that of Ramanujan himself, and a partial biography of Hardy, whose professional life was thoroughly altered by his time working with Ramanujan and to whom we owe most of the credit for what we know of Ramanujan’s life and work today. It’s a very strong, even-handed biography of Ramanujan, sympathetic without becoming patronizing, but was extremely light on its discussion of the math itself, with just a few cursory discussions of some of his findings that still bear his name today.

Born in southern India in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu, near the city of Madras (now known as Chennai), Ramanujan was a member of the Brahmin caste, the highest social stratum in the caste system, but was born into a poor family and received only a basic education. His mother was domineering and remained deeply involved in his life even into his adulthood and arranged (by her) marriage, only, according to Kanigel, supporting her son’s obsession with mathematics when it appeared it would at least bring him fame – and bring her fortune. Ramanujan failed out of university twice because he couldn’t be bothered with any coursework other than mathematics, but in that subject he was light-years ahead of his professors, filling notebooks with conjectures and equations, most of which he knew intuitively to be true, but couldn’t have published – even if he’d had access to such outlets – because he didn’t need to or understand how to develop the proofs.

In 1912 and 1913, Ramanujan, at the encouragement of some of the few Indian nationals in a position to advise him, sent letters with copies of some of his work to three English mathematicians, only one of whom responded: G.H. Hardy, at the time a professor of maths at Trinity University at Cambridge. Hardy was a purist, a mathematician who studied number theory (the study of the behavior and properties of the integers, with a special emphasis on prime numbers) for its own sake and overtly disdained any branch of “applied” mathematics – that is, math that had a practical purpose, such as the math required in physics or engineering. Hardy was open-minded enough upon seeing Ramanujan’s letter that he overcame his skepticism about an uneducated Indian clerk coming up with mathematical insights that took Western experts over a century to develop and wrote back, asking to see more of Ramanujan’s work. (There’s some irony in Hardy’s hesitation and the other mathematicians’ rejections of Ramanujan, as number theory has its own tradition in India dating back over 1500 years.) The subsequent correspondence led to an invitation for Ramanujan to come spend two years with Hardy at Cambridge, two years that turned into five before ill health sent Ramanujan back home to south India, where he died shortly thereafter.

Kanigel’s presentation of the life of Ramanujan leans toward the personal rather than the professional side, focusing extensively on his upbringing, cultural opposition to much of what he did and wanted to do with his life, and on the non-professional side of his life in England. The emotional cost to Ramanujan of traveling to a foreign country where he’d face outright prejudice but also would struggle with differences in language, weather, and, most importantly for Ramanujan, food. The devoutly spiritual and nominally Hindu mathematician was a strict vegetarian, but had great difficulty adapting his diet to the abysmal food of World War I-era England, where to cook something implied cooking it to death, where all flavor and texture was safely removed from the item to be consumed. Hardy was Ramanujan’s mentor in maths, but not in life, as Hardy does not (in Kanigel’s telling) have any close emotional ties to anyone but his sister once their parents had passed away, and with Ramanujan’s wife in India for the entire time he was in England, Ramanujan lacked for friends and for anyone who could help him look after himself. Kanigel reports on the speculation that malnutrition contributed to Ramanujan’s illness and decline, but his book was published before the 1994 report that he died of an amoebic infection in his liver common in India at the time he lived there.

I also found Kanigel’s mini-biography of Hardy, essential to the story of Ramanujan, fascinating. Hardy’s a great figure for biographers, appearing in one of my favorite books about math, Prime Obsession, for his role in attacking the unsolved Riemann Hypothesis. (Ramanujan’s pre-Hardy work was remarkable, but he did make some mistakes, one of which involved Riemann’s zeta function; Ramanujan assumed the function had only real zeroes, not complex ones, but its complex zeroes lie at the heart of the Hypothesis.) He’s also ripe for caricature, something Kanigel avoids entirely. A lifelong bachelor, Hardy was obsessed by numbers, but also had an equal passion for cricket (and, after a stint at Princeton, baseball). He was a strict atheist who once set out a goal for himself to craft a disproof of the existence of God convincing enough to convert most of the general public, and a pacifist who fought persecution of Trinity colleagues who spoke out against British involvement in World War I. Hardy viewed Ramanujan with great pride, almost as a father would view a son, someone with limitless natural talent whom Hardy could mold into one of the greatest mathematicians the world has ever known, and he was diligent about assigning credit to his protégé whenever possible. He brought Ramanujan to the world, yet it also seems that Ramanujan brought much more out of Hardy than we’d otherwise have had.

My lone criticism of The Man Who Knew Infinity is its scant treatment of the math in question. The reader of a book like this probably has an appetite for math, and the author has merely to explain the theorems or identities under discussion, not to teach them or prove them. Kanigel does very little of any of this, only dipping occasionally into discussions of continued fractions and some of Ramanujan’s explorations of the nature and frequency of prime numbers. Kanigel appears to have skipped the mathier material in favor of asking open-ended questions about the source of Ramanujan’s inspiration and culpability for his illness and death.

Kanigel’s epilogue discusses the final years of Hardy’s life, but it is his discussions with Ramanujan’s widow, Janakiammal, that punctuate the book’s last handful of pages. Still alive at the time of the book’s publication in 1991, Janakiammal spent a long part of her life as a widow in obscurity and poverty before she was rediscovered several decades after her husband’s passing, eventually reaping rewards, both honorary and monetary, before her death in 1994 at age 95. Her few comments evoke a great bitterness at how her husband’s legacy was underappreciated and how her own life was adversely affected by that and by quarrels with Ramanujan’s family.

Next up: The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Robert Farrar Capon, a chef and Episcopalian priest. The 1967 book is a classic of the food-writing genre and was reissued in 2002 as part of the Modern Library Food series, edited by Ruth Reichl.

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→ January 23, 2014
→ By

Top Chef, S11E15.

My review of the cooperative boardgame Forbidden Desert, from the designer of Pandemic (reviewed in 2010), is up at Paste magazine. I held my regular Klawchat today as well.

On to the semifinals…

* We get a few quotes up front from three of the remaining chefs. Of interest, Carlos says he came “to cook and not to make friends.” Sure, you want to win, but you can cook AND be nice to everyone else too. There are no style points for being a jerk in the kitchen. (Except for Michael Voltaggio.) Shirley, meanwhile, points out that Carlos always does Mexican food … and goes so far as to say “I think I can beat him” if they’re facing each other in the finale. I think she’d wipe the comal with him, but it’s not in her nature to say something like that.

* Quickfire: No immunity, finally, just the prize of a new Toyota Corolla. This quickfire has two parts, with two of the four chefs eliminated after the first part. Gail’s half comes first: Create one “perfect bite” on a cocktail fork, including sweet, salty, sour, and spicy all in one bite.

* Okay, I may have been wrong last week – Gail isn’t as far along in her pregnancy in these episodes as I thought when I accused the editors of hiding her belly. Still lookin’ fine, though.

* Random musing: If Shirley were a native English speaker, would it have been evident from the start how good she is? I’m asking that of myself, not just all of you. I may have underestimated her because she couldn’t express her culinary vision as well in English as other chefs – but that’s my problem, not hers, and it’s clear now that she has as much vision and creativity as anyone else this season.

* Carlos is grilling mango for his bite. I’ve had lots of grilled tropical fruits, and have grilled pineapple and peaches with success, but man do those things burn quickly. You’re not trying to use heat to coax sugar out of cells and then caramelize it; the sugar is already there, and if you’re not fast, you’ll end up with charcoal.

* Shirley drops a sort-of-boardgame reference, saying “I feel like I’m playing Jenga” trying getting everything on to each fork.

* The food: Carlos serves grilled mango with shrimp and a chile de arbol glaze. Nick serves beef deckle (the cap of a ribeye) with aged balsamic vinegar, purple potato chips, and yogurt. Shirley makes a tataki-style flank steak with fresno chilies, crispy onions, mint, and a black pepper cherry sauce. Everything falls off Gail’s fork, unfortunately, so while Shirley tries to fix it I doubt Gail got the full effect. Nina does a shrimp escabeche with potato aioli, pickled shallots, and fennel.

* All four were good – I wouldn’t expect any less by this point in the competition. Shirley’s bite had a little too much soy, and Nina’s was a touch greasy. That leaves Carlos and Nick as the winners.

* Tom’s half of the challenge is built around what he says is his inspiration in the kitchen – great produce, not meat. The chefs must showcase red bell pepper or eggplant and have to run up to the podium to grab the one they want, which I hate because it has nothing to do with cooking. If the contestants included a chef who was plus-sized, or in a wheelchair, would they alter the challenge? What if one of the chefs could Apparate? Well?

* I hate that they don’t use the blender lids. Nick is sticking his hand into the blender while it’s running. That’s about as stupid and dangerous as failing to vaccinate your kids.

* Carlos makes just one dish – fried red pepper soup with fennel, basil, and onion. Tom seems taken aback by the spice, but otherwise likes it. Nick does the eggplant two ways, cut like a scallop and roasted, and pureed with rosemary, sesame seed, sriracha, and tahini, all topped with chili threads.

* Nick’s was a little underseasoned, so even though Carlos was about half as ambitious, he wins. I don’t get that at all – they rewarded the chef who played it safe.

* Elimination challenge: Create a dish that reflects your time in New Orleans, what the city means to you, yata yata yata. Basically make a dish that reflects some local ingredients or cuisine and hit it out of the park. Guest diners include Grant Achatz (who needs a haircut), Andrew Carmelini, and Douglas Keene. The winning dish will be featured at all of Emeril’s New Orleans restaurants.

* Nina plans to make BBQ shrimp and trout amandine, both very standard New Orleans specialties that would show no creativity on her part, just execution.

* Shirley plans to build her dish around west lake fish in vinegar, a traditional dish in Hangzhou, a coastal city in east-central China, saying its combination of sweet, sour, and spice reminds her of New Orleans flavors. We see her banging stalks of lemongrass with the back of her knife; I just learned yesterday afternoon from the newest issue of Bon Appetit that you need to do that to release some of the aromatic oils in the stalk before chopping it.

* The four chefs go to Emeril’s namesake restaurant, where he’s in the kitchen overseeing an extensive dinner for them, served at a chef’s table in the kitchen. Can you imagine what seats at that table might go for at auction? Emeril could probably fund a lot of cleanup in the Ninth Ward that way.

* Emeril’s BBQ shrimp comes out with some petite rosemary biscuits. I’ve had BBQ shrimp a few times – it’s shrimp drowned in a pool of its own vomit, assuming shrimp vomit is basically garlic butter. Emeril’s version looks way more refined, with the shrimp glazed in the sauce rather than subsumed by it.

* Showing the chefs get out of bed is not fair. That’s a reality-show staple that needs to die. If someone shoved a camera in my face at 6 in the morning they’d be extracting the camera from someone’s small intestine.
* Nina tells Shirley “you really don’t want to make a mistake at the end.” This, kids, is known as foreshadowing.

* Nick is once again trying to do too much, overthinking his dish, even though he knows that’s his downfall. This is the definition of insanity, right?

* Carlos making a seafood tamal, but without corn – so it’s really a seafood mousse, cooked in a banana leaf. I’ll give him credit for doing something ambitious and a little out of his comfort zone, but this doesn’t sound remotely appealing to me.

* Nina has changed her dish and is now making a riff on BBQ shrimp with malfatti dumplings, usually made with ricotta and herbs or spinach rolled in flour (and/or mixed with bread crumbs) and quickly boiled like fresh pasta before they hit the sauce. Tom seems excited for these, as Nina has nailed Italian foods every time she’s cooked them (although I think malfatti are actually American in origin).

* Nick says “I don’t know if Carlos has grown much at all” during the course of the season. This from the guy who threw a hissyfit about people touching his pots in the last episode.

* And Nina forgets to plate her malfatti. Who saw that coming? Oh yes … everyone.

* Nina does serve a pretty good dish after all – pan seared speckled trout with baby veg and barbecue sauce. Tom remembers the malfatti, asks Nina where they are, and Nina suddenly looks like she’d rather fall into a black hole than be standing there at that moment. Tom ends up saying that the dish didn’t need the ricotta and might have suffered from it, although I think any twist on BBQ shrimp has to have some kind of bread component, whether it’s pasta, biscuits, fresh bread, or something else (waffles?).

* Nick’s dish is lengthy: a shrimp-based broth with shrimp dumplings, charred cobia, roasted bass, tuna confit, fresh herbs, fried rice, and I think something else too. Grant says the dish needed a little flaked salt on top to finish it – Hugh said the same thing about one of Nick’s dishes in an earlier challenge, I believe. The good news for Nick is that he cooked all of the fish correctly even though each required a different method and different cooking time.

* Carlos’ seafood tamal is served without the banana leaf, a brick of seafood mousse with chunks of crab folded into it, topped with a saffron cream sauce and pickled okra. Everyone likes the concept and the fact that he left the shellfish in chunks rather than pureed.

* Shirley makes a seared black drum with Zhejiang vinegar-butter sauce, a sauté of “hidden” holy trinity, braised celery, and mushrooms. She wanted to make the diners feel like they could be on West Lake in Hangzhou or on the bayou of Louisiana. Grant adores everything about this dish, including the story. I’d put big money on her winning the challenge based just on what we see of the diners’ comments.

* I don’t pay much attention to Watch What Happens Live, but the episode that aired after Top Chef last night had Laura Ingalls and the Douche as guests.

* We go straight to judges’ table this time.

* It quickly becomes apparent that the two women nailed their dishes. Nina’s plate didn’t need the malfatti, which apparently she never even cooked. Shirley is showered with praise for every aspect of her dish. Nick’s fish wasn’t seasoned properly, yet again. Carlos’ dish gets dinged for lack of acidity (that’s Gail’s frequent complaint) and, once he’s out of the room, Emeril points out that his tamal was “not so warm” because Carlos chose to serve them without the banana leaves to keep them hot.

* Padma totally draws it out, but Nina and Shirley are the top two. Shirley’s in tears, saying “I’m really happy to find myself,” and now she’s got Emeril tearing up too – and that’s before she’s named the winner of the challenge, too.

* Padma makes a salient point in the discussion of who to send to Last Chance Kitchen, asking why in the semifinals they’re still talking about Nick’s failure to properly season his food. Tom doesn’t seem to have an answer for that.

* Carlos is eliminated. Nick “just stepped it up a little bit more” per Tom, which I interpreted as a comment on the higher level of difficulty in his dish. Also, maybe the fact that Carlos’ mousse looked like baby food had something to do with it.

* LCK: We don’t know. Louis overcooked his fish a little; Carlos underseasoned everything but his fish. I’m guessing Carlos but I’m not sure.

* Rankings: I’ll include all five, since we don’t know who won LCK, leaving me with Shirley, Nina, Louis, Nick, Carlos. I’d give Shirley even money to win at this point, especially given who’s left. If I knew Louis had won LCK, I might have him second over Nina, just because he’s much more likely to do something inventive than she is, while Nick will do something inventive but likely err on execution.

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→ January 21, 2014
→ By

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The titles listed in Bloomsbury’s 100 Must-read Classic Novels (actually 99 novels plus Chekhov’s short stories, which is totally cheating) were largely familiar to me before I’d even started working my way through the list, skewing strongly toward classics of British literature (42 of the 100 titles were by British authors, plus five by Irish authors). The list’s creator, Nick Rennison, did show one clear and regrettable bias in his selections, however, with several titles that advocate political change toward socialism, generally to the detriment of their value as works of literature. News from Nowhere was one such title, a dreadful utopian novel that, like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, is the prose equivalent of an actuarial table. Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, published three years after the author’s death, resembles an actual novel more than News did, with real characters and proper plots, but there is so much sermonizing and so little character development that the book amounts to little more than 600 pages of didactic sludge.

Tressell, the nom de plume of the Irish-born writer Robert Croker (later Robert Noonan), based The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in large part on his own experience as a house-painter, working for subsistence wages while the merchant class and politicians grew rich off his and his colleagues’ labors. The title refers to these workers, who give so freely of their efforts to enrich others and seem, in Tressell’s view, to acquiesce to a system that is designed to exploit them and perpetuate that exploitation for generations. In that, Tressell was partially right – England’s labor laws were heavily stacked against the working class until the Labour Party took power in the 1906 election, before which a trade union could be held liable for losses resulting from collective actions such as strikes. Even as Tressell was writing his manuscript, completing it in 1910, the situation was only beginning to improve for the “philanthropists” of Great Britain.

Labor protection proved the solution to many (but not all) of the ills Tressell attacks in his novel, but his extreme naivete about human nature led him to advocate strong socialism, with little or no ownership of private property and penalties on savings or investment, rather than fair labor practices. Tressell has the two socialist characters, Owen and Barrington, deliver tiresome lectures to their fellow painters about the evils of capitalism and the benefits of socialism, all founded on now-discredited beliefs that people would still continue to expend maximum efforts when all incentives for good work or for ingenuity have been removed. By removing the possibility of large gains for the large sacrifices involved in inventing or developing new goods or processes, innovation will slow, and funding for high-risk projects (like most startups) will flow to countries where the potential for high returns still exists. Socialism as Tressell describes it has been tried and failed in countless economies, so reading his prescription for a command economy like those that collapsed across Eastern Europe and that have only enriched those in power in Africa is sadly comical.

Tressell’s awkward satire is actually more effective when he attacks the hypocrisy of those who profess to be Christians, mouthing the words of their Messiah while doing quite the opposite. Tressell limits his attacks on the religion itself – although I’d infer from his text that he was a nonbeliever – and instead focuses on those who preach the Gospel while doing nothing to help the less fortunate, and often would use their working hours to keep the lower classes in need of basic assistance like food, lodging, or medical care. Tressel’s primary antagonist, the painting-firm owner (and thief) Rushton, is found in the streets spreading the Good News – and making sure he uses these words to keep the poor and unemployed from banding together to try to improve their situation. It’s easy to see a parallel in the sliver of the U.S. electorate that professes ardent belief in the same religion and yet votes against programs that might help the very people Christ implores His followers to help.

Tressell also falls into one of the worst traps for the would-be satirist, violating what is now Roger Ebert’s First Law of Funny Names: Funny names aren’t funny. Tressell populates his novel with obvious and unclever puns, like rival painting outfits Pushem and Sloggem, two-faced philanthropists Crass and Slyme, the ineffectual city councilor Dr. Weakling, and the venal landowner and MP Sir Graball D’Encloseland. Satire need not be hilarious to be effective, but the failed attempts at humor here only serve to further insult the intelligence of the reader who might not have already given up in disgust at the author’s ignorance of basic microeconomics.

Next up: I’m about 2/3 of the way through Robert Kanigel’s The Man Who Knew Infinity, the story of the Indian-born mathematician Ramanujan, whose brief life was marked by enormous insights into number theory despite his lack of any formal education in the field.

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→ January 16, 2014
→ By

Top Chef S11E14.

Today’s Klawchat was a bit short, but I’ll do a big one on the 30th when my top 100 prospects package is up.

Right after last episode’s elimination, the remaining chefs are in the kitchen, Shirley crying on Nina’s shoulder, Nick looking hollow. Nina says to the two of them that they “should be proud” because their chef-leader, Dominique Crenn, planned an ambitious menu. Nick’s response was telling: “Cause I sent Stephanie home, I should be proud of that?” We would have been far better served seeing that scene in the previous episode – and Nick especially would have benefited, as there would have been a lot less speculation about him tanking the challenge on purpose.

* Quickfire: Roy Choi, the “king of the food truck,” is back. He’s the genius behind the Korean taco craze. Also, emphasis on “craze,” as Choi is a little nuts. The challenge is for the chefs to create their own takes on a po’ boy sandwich, as Choi did with tacos, and they have just 20 minutes to do it. For reasons no one can quite understand, the winner gets immunity again. I’m glad we’ve learned from last week’s mistakes.

* Is it just me or are there more obvious product placements in this episode than before? Dunkin Donuts, Morton Salt, and Reynolds parchment paper all get loving close-ups in the first ten minutes. I guess it beats subliminal placements.

* So each chef is doing something related to where s/he grew up. Nick’s is a New England version, with fried shrimp, mayo, sriracha, fennel, and pancetta. This sounds a lot like a New Orleans fried shrimp po’boy, just with different toppings. Not that that’s a bad thing; I just don’t see it winning a challenge.

* Shirley does a Chinese po’boy, with sauteed catfish and what I think is a mirin-ginger-garlic-black vinegar-soy glaze and a cabbage slaw. (I wasn’t clear if all of those ingredients were in the glaze.)

* Nina goes Caribbean, with a deep-fried mahi po’boy with a mojo aioli and pickled onions. I have no idea why you’d deep-fry mahi mahi. That is a gorgeous fish just grilled with salt, pepper, and some citrus juice. Frying just hides it.

* Brian goes Korean, with an Asian lobster po’ boy with gojuchang aioli, yuzu, and pickled napa. Can you really pickle something in under 20 minutes? At that point, isn’t it just marinated?

* Carlos goes Mexican with an al pastor (pork) po’boy with chile guajillo, pineapple, onion, and garlic.

* Choi hammers them. I didn’t see this coming at all, but he says “y’all fucked this shit up,” that they cooked without soul and didn’t take advantage of the giant blank canvas. Carlos’ al pastor lacked flavor. Nick’s was too salty and wasn’t balanced. Brian’s didn’t taste of gojuchiang. Nina’s didn’t pop for him. Choi liked Shirley’s, praising the pickled veg, the catfish, and the hints of black vinegar, but says it “didn’t represent her as a Chinese chef.” I don’t know what that means. Anyway, she wins Least Prize and gets immunity.

* Elimination challenge: Who’s the big winner her tonight in the kitchen? Oh, it’s Jon Favreau. He’s working on a film called “Chef” about a chef who has lost his culinary “voice,” so he opens up a food truck and goes cross-country with his son. The challenge is to reate a dish representing a turning point in the chef’s career that led him/her to discover his/her own culinary voice.

* Brian reveals that before turning his life around, he had a problem with alcohol and eventually had a DUI and spent 24 hours in jail. Twenty-four hours for putting the lives of everyone else on the roads with him at risk, as well as anyone else who might have been in his car. That seems fair.

* Why are they hiding Gail’s pregnancy? Are they concerned about messing up the storyline? Also, Gail had her baby last week and named her … Dahlia. That’s a lovely name, except it immediately evokes the nickname for one of the most notorious unsolved murders in U.S. history, so maybe she could have picked another flower?

* And why are they captioning Shirley when she’s talking? If you can’t understand her, you’re not trying. Eric Ripert was harder to grasp and I don’t remember him getting the dang-furriner treatment.

* Nina says Nick overthinks everything and has a short fuse. Hard to argue with either point there.

* Nick’s being dickish in the kitchen, yelling at Carlos (but really at everyone, even the imaginary chefs in his head), “do not move my pots, do not fucking move my pots, do you understand me?” They’re not your children, Nick. They can tell you to fuck off. I kind of wish Carlos would, at this point; he shouldn’t have to take that from Nick.

* Nina was planning to make agnolotti, a delicate filled pasta, but as she rolls her pasta out it’s breaking and sticking in the rollers because the kitchen is so hot. She switches to fettuccine, which is fine, but why not try to chill the dough as you work? I have flexible ice packs that I can unroll and lay under a half-sheet pan to create a quick-cooling surface for doughs that are getting too soft on the counter. Roll, chill on the pan, roll again. It’s a little unwieldy but it works, since the gap between “too warm” and “just right” is very small.

* Brian, the drunk-driving genius, is shown spraying the open grill with what I assume is cooking spray, causing flare-ups. This is also incredibly stupid, as spraying a combustible aerosolized product over an open flame creates a temporary flamethrower. It can’t directly make the can explode, as the pressure in the can prevents the flame from getting into its contents, but it can also melt any plastic parts, and if you get too close to the flame or drop the can, then it can and probably will burst. So, you know, try an oiled paper towel instead, Lavoisier.

* Carlos is making pork belly, searing it first and then braising it. I don’t quite know the dish he’s making, but I would think you’d want to sear it afterwards, no? (EDIT: See the comments for more on this; I understand the point of the initial sear, but that presumes you’re using the same vessel, which I don’t think Carlos did.)

* Nick wants to toast some quinoa, so he puts it on a sheet pan in what he thinks is a 275 degree oven. However, you can see that the oven’s dial is all the way at the maximum mark on the right-hand side, and a subsequent close-up confirms that it’s at 500 degrees. Needless to say, people like white quinoa and red quinoa but blackened quinoa is not yet a thing.

* Shirley can’t believe Brian used boneless skinless chicken breasts. Neither can I. They have so little flavor of their own that you have to marinate them for hours to get any flavor at all in there – preferably cut up into cubes – or slice them into cutlets for breading and frying. Otherwise, they’re like plain tofu with better texture.

* They’re cooking and serving at Cafe Reconcile, opened in 2000 as a program to teach at-risk kids the basics of cooking and food service. Emeril’s foundation is involved, so he’s one of the judges. Almost 2000 students have graduated from there. A few work for Emeril now. The kids are the servers for the challenge, and they’ll also get to taste the dishes.

* Shirley is up first – she does seared snapper in a crustacean broth with silken tofu and napa cabbage. Everyone loves it. The fish is cooked perfectly with a perfectly crispy skin. She used leek and fennel, which is also the filling in the bacon-wrapped stuffed trout recipe in Hugh Acheson’s A New Turn in the South. I made that recipe the other day, using bronzino instead of trout, and other than using bacon that was sliced too thickly to cook fully (my error) the results were amazing.

* Nina’s dish is fettuccine with charred calamari, pine nut gremolata, and crab meat. Again, raves all around. The woman can clearly make pasta. And this isn’t her usual tropical/Caribbean flavor palette.

* Brian makes a chicken anticucho, a Peruvian dish of grilled, skewered meat (usually beef), that he serves with twice-cooked potatoes, feta, and a walnut pesto. Emeril’s twice-cooked potato is still raw inside, and Tom loses his mind over Brian using boneless, skinless, flavorless chicken breasts. Seriously – if you know how to break down a chicken, buy the whole bird. You’ll pay marginally more than you would for the breasts alone, and you get the remaining parts, the skin, the bones (for stock), the liver, and, if you’re into that kind of thing, the heart and kidneys too.

* Carlos makes his braised pork belly with a sweet potato puree and a chipotle tamarind glaze. It was one of the first dishes he put on the menu when he opened his own restaurant, and this might be the most praise he’s gotten for a dish all season. Emeril says you can taste every element, and Tom says they all have a purpose. I need a report from one of you who’s been to his restaurant.

* Nick’s concept was to showcase carrots in a slew of different ways, something he did at his previous job when they switched to a tasting-menu format. He builds it around a seared hunk of yellow-fin tuna, serving it with several preparations of carrot and some fennel pollen dust. He told them about the missing quinoa, which may have been a tactical error (don’t tell them what’s missing, let them figure it out themselves). The sauces and oils are good, but the whole plate is underseasoned, especially the fish, and of course there’s no texture contrast on the plate. The kids liked the other four dishes, but they don’t like Nick’s at all, one calling it “not nasty … but too gooey.”

* Judges’ table: All five chefs go in, to see five judges all crammed behind the judges’ table. If they all roll over, will one fall out? Also, Gail looks very good when pregnant. Not that you’d know she was from watching the show.

* They don’t specifically say who’s up and down, but the top three were Nina, Shirley, and Carlos, and all three got universal praise. Nick’s lack of texture and lack of cohesion on the dish put him in the bottom two, while Brian’s protein choice, raw potato, and overall heaviness put him there.

* Winner: Shirley, aka Girl On Fire. Carlos was very slightly behind, and Nina was also safe. That’s Shirley’s third elimination win, matching Nina, and her fourth Quickfire win, one more than Brian (who also won one as part of a team of six).

* Tom, right before one of the two remaining chefs gets the axe, says, “one of you will have to reconcile with…” something I couldn’t hear because I was groaning at the awful pun. For shame, Colicchio.

* Brian is eliminated. I would guess Nick survived because his dish was more ambitious, although the judges don’t explain their reasoning. On the other hand, I’m a little surprised there was no holdover from last week, where the judges might have used Nick’s dish, the worst of that episode, and his refusal to surrender immunity as deciding variables.

* LCK: This should have been the tater tot challenge, but instead it’s the skin-and-bones battle, with chicken, duck, and pork available (no meat, just the skin and bones). Neither uses duck skin, which shocked me, as that would be my first choice to cook or to eat. Louis roasts his vegetables under pork skin, serves it with crispy chicken skin and a warm poached egg yolk, and nabs what Tom calls the best thing he’s eaten all season, so Brian loses despite cooking a pretty good dish himself.

* Rankings: Shirley, Louis, Nina, Nick, Carlos. Louis’ comeback has been impressive, but what’s clear now is, befitting a former Thomas Keller protegé, the man can really cook him some vegetables.

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State of Wonder.

Thursday’s Klawchat had a lot of Hall of Fame talk plus some prospect content. The Top 100 prospects package will run the week of January 27th.

Ann Patchett’s 2011 novel State of Wonder marks a return to form for the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, Bel Canto, where she pays homage to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain while drawing on the real-life hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru. In between those two books, Patchett wrote just one novel, the embarrassing Run, a not-even-thinly-veiled love letter to then Senator Barack Obama, whom Patchett clearly hoped would run for President and win. That novel lost all of what made Patchett special, even in the quality of her prose, but State of Wonder brings everything back together.

Marina Singh is a pharmacologist working for a major drug researcher that has been funding a long-running development project deep in the Amazon basin, where the women in a tribe of natives, the Lakashi, maintain fertility well into their 70s. The eccentric researcher running the project, Dr. Annick Swenson, has cut off nearly all contact with her benefactors, and another researcher sent to locate her and report back on her progress, Marina’s colleague Anders Eckmann, died of fever while still in Brazil. Marina, who studied under Dr. Swenson over a decade earlier before an incident pushed her out of obstetrics into pharmacology, draws the short straw and has to go track down her former mentor, but finds that her mission is more complicated in both a practical and philosophical sense than anyone realized.

The lead characters in State of Wonder, Marina and Dr. Swenson, stand alongside Patchett’s best characters from Bel Canto and The Magician’s Assistant as smart, three-dimensional personas. Their thinking is complex and real without becoming unrealistic; Dr. Swenson is a genius, and a different sort of person, but her character is logical and thinks and behaves in logical ways. Marina’s back story is more involved, and her character, while very intelligent, is less mature, and she’s still grappling with the fallout from that incident that caused her to switch her specialty during her residency. (The novel would also pass the Bechdel test if it were made into a film.)

Marina spends a few weeks in the (real) Brazilian city of Manaus before finding Dr. Swenson and heading into the remote jungle location of the research labs, encountering some oddball, entertaining side characters that make up for some of their two-dimensionality with their injection of humor. But Patchett’s renderings of the settings, both Manaus and the Lakashi region, are beautifully detailed, and she represents the natives, by any Western definition a “primitive” people, without resorting to condescension over their way of life, even though it would likely be warranted.

Patchett has commented in interviews that her book was inspired by several films, notably Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (TL;DW), but there’s also a clear evocation of Evelyn Waugh’s demented A Handful of Dust, where one of the protagonists, Tony Last, meets perhaps the worst non-death fate of any major character in literature, all in the remote jungles of the Amazon basin. (Patchett slips in some Dickens references which make the allusion to Waugh obvious.) State of Wonder also steps back from the overwrought political leanings of Run, instead presenting soft arguments, pro and con, on environmental subjects and treatment of isolated peoples like the Lakashi, without detracting from the central story, one of delayed emotional development for Marina. Her professional success hasn’t been mirrored by happiness, and Patchett matures her without giving her a forced Hollywood ending. Marina ends up having to make a choice with huge moral implications before leaving the Amazon, the kind of decision that ages you emotionally when you face it but that was necessary to conclude the story without turning it into a saccharine mess.

Next up: Still slogging through Robert Tressell’s socialism-pamphlet-cum-novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

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