Tess

I feel really limited by not being able to taste the food, but it doesn't look to me like Stephen is clearly better than Lee Anne, and Tiffani may be the best. That was funny seeing them cook with KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce. I wish they would show more of the downtimes. The junk food challenge was good too.

I was thinking that the "ick factor" of becoming known for massive copying would be the most effective deterrent, but then the people who are the worst offenders probably don't care, and I doubt whether a lot of customers do either. Look at all the people who like to carry knockoff purses.

This thread about fresh pineapple has some ideas similar to the Roy's one. Pineapple infused vodka is very good for making what some bars call a Stoli Doli; that's what I do with the inedible cores.

My memorably bad business dining experiences have all been with colleagues who don't treat restaurant staff very well. I had this one very senior colleague who always pulled waitstaff's chains to the point where it would take over the whole meal, especially if any of the servers were female. He would start by putting his menu aside as if he was ready to order, and then when the server came he would act all pseudo-flustered like he was a little kid and she was a teacher trying to pick up test papers and he wasn't done. He might get her to come back three times before she got an order out of him. While someone was opening a bottle of wine he would say, "We always send the first bottle back." (We got a corked bottle once and he didn't send it back.) He made all staff stand around while he told jokes and flirted with the women. One server went slightly ballistic and asked, "Is he always like this?" Luckily, he thought that was cute so her tip didn't suffer.

There you go.

My feeling is that if you really knew how to cook Japanese, hot foods rather than just the sushi/sashimi continuum, you could probably come up with a cooked meat or seafood dish that could have Latin components added to it. Ceviche would certainly be the raw fish option; you could make something like poke or zuke with Latin vegetables and seasonings-- which I guess was what Harold and Lisa was thinking, but they would have been better off marinating. But I think meat would be better, simmered or a cutlet. Katsu with salsa, anyone? (I don't think the other three teams' dishes were all that obvious either; the two best just made it look that way.) Or I guess you could make something sushi-like with a Latin topping or filling, but could you eat it walking down the street?

I was surprised that Lisa and Harold lost because I wouldn't have thought either of them was dumb enough to make that seared tuna thing or leave a crucial ingredient at home. I guess someone had to screw up and maybe the Japanese/Latin thing was a bit more of a reach than some of the others. Miguel was one of my favorites but I'm almost done with him after he put all the responsibility on Andrea like that, before and after. I'm only "almost" done with him because he was so cute in the junk food contest. Whatever one may think of Stephen and Tiffani, they both worked very well with their partners as far as I could see, and came up with some really good food. Seeing Stephen dressed like that giving out street food was funny; maybe he does have a bit of a sense of humor about himself after all.

I like Adagio very much for roibos tea, which is the only thing I've ordered so far. I found them on Amazon while looking for a good price (they are imexpensive compared to my local places, even with shipping) and as a nice bonus got an offer for $5 off the first time I order from them directly.

Is Stephen the first to openly flout the rules of a challenge (i.e. using fresh herbs in the immunity challenge)? When it comes to how the people look on the show, I'm always wondering how much editing and advice from producers factor into it. My view of Tiffani goes up and down wildly, for instance and I wonder if, like Santino Rice and Wendy Pepper of Project Runway, she's been somewhat encouraged to act like a jerk-- Stephen too, of course. The last two challenges, they made it look like Tiffani was taught a lesson about respecting your customer, which was cool but I can't quite believe it was real. I do like her cooking, and she made creative use of the microwave this time.

I'm with Corina Zappia; it's insulting to women. I also think it's funny that Jennifer Weiner is the spokesperson for this diet wine, since she makes a point of being unapologetically plus-size. In my opinion the name is doubly ironic because it's a dumb diet idea. To cut calories, just drink less wine that tastes better. Or if you really want an alcoholic drink with no additonal sugars, you can make a spritzer with lemon vodka or something. But no, this is another product made to make people feel like they are being virtuous.

I don't agree very much with any of the statements you posit, and certainly not with the idea of charging royalties. As a customer, what I want to know is whether a restaurant is what it claims to be. If someone claims to be an innovator and they're really more of an imitator, that's not good. Not speaking for anyone else here, but I have fewer expectations along those lines when it comes to restaurants like Outback and things like the fried onion.

That's what I figured you were talking about. People just go nuts over that stuff and it's not available on the mainland that i know of. I bet it would do great. Identify it as Hawaiian.

That is a much better article. I do feel sorry for him and I agree with the person in the article who said he acted dumb and naive. I also think that "at no time did I claim" business is probably the literal truth as he sees it; his misrepresentation was by omission. I'll bet he was really under the impression that he wasn't doing anything out of the way. I'm really interested in finding out how widespread this phenomenon is.

That's exactly how it seems to me. If I ate at a restaurant and only found out later that a large percentage of dishes had been copied from a single place, ingredient for ingredient ad well as technique, my reaction would be, "Wow, that's deeply uncool." I also thought the Guardian article was misleading in not bringing out the number of dishes involved. If the situation was what they suggest I, for one, would have no problem with it.

I think the garlic shrimp would go over great.

Interestingly to me, Slate ran an article recently about how the fashion world is coming to terms with this issue. As with cooking, you can't just cut and paste the rules from literature, scholarship or for that matter music into these fields because (in my opinion) the nature of the product is so different. That doesn't mean no rules can apply. As for the argument about "no harm no foul"-- this comes up all the time in every kind of discussion about copying and it's usually obviously ungrounded.

That surprised me about the octopus too. I think it's one of those indications that the show isn't primarily for people who are very much into food. They're trying to gain a much wider audience (and possibly even promote restaurant dining) so they don't want to have something that could really be a turn off. Also, if they used brains or one of the other things I was guessing, some of the contestants might have been stumped about the basic cooking of the things, like how done they needed to be etc., and I don't think they want to show people either looking in reference books, or cooking something that might give you food poisoning. I hate it when they turn the contests into a freak show and basically show the heavy hands of the producers. They make it seem like the material is not interesting enough on its own. Patronizing is the right word, for sure.

What to say? I watched it. As usual I thought the immunity challenge was more interesting than the elimination one. The top five people all made octopus dishes I would have liked to try. I thought the wine guy was starting to look a little one-note, as they like to say on Project Runway. I lost interest during the second part and didn't even listen to the blah blah blah that led to the elimination of whatsisface. I did like it that the one contestant with kids influenced that menu and the monkey dogs with pureed fish were a pretty good idea. Is that for real about shortening the simmer time by putting in a cork, like Cynthia did?

I know people who will drive to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Ill., for the Todai seafood buffet. In my opinion, that's not completely unreasonable for the desserts and a few of the hot items. Most people say they go for the sushi but I think the sushi is crap. Personally, I see no reason to go to Todai since Mitsuwa with its food court is right down the street. Woodfield also has the usual PF Cheesecakes, as well as Shaw's Crab House. Shaw's is a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant; I like it. Also, if you want to go to Ikea and have the food there, it's right on the edge of Woodfield.

The mention of salmon in sorrel made me wonder again about where you draw the line at which you have to give attribution. I think previous examples were miso cod and molten chocolate cake, both of which have passed into common currency. Are some recipes so simple that you don't need to attribute them? I would suspect that with anything that's quickly summarized as "x in a sauce of y" (both main ingredients being fairly straightforward) and where you could pretty much figure out how to cook it without going in the kitchen is commonly duplicated without attribution. I mean, we're not talking about your grandmother's pinch of nutmeg that she leaves out of the recipe when she writes it down for you, but with something more complicated-- or am I wrong?

I think he shouldn't, but he might be. I can see diners who are not that well informed (or even some who are) dismissing a dish after having a worse version of it, especially if the quality of the ingredients isn't there or something similar.

You're probably right, but ultimately I don't think we should care whether people have the understanding. It's still wrong. ← Oh, absolutely.

Do you think that in the last 20+ years the dynamics of plagiarism have changed? That theory makes sense on a lot of levels to me, at least with regard to literature and scholarship. But in 1982, I'm guessing most plagiarists knew they were doing something wrong. In today's cut-and-paste culture, it really seems as if a lot of people do not have that understanding.

That simmer in syrup method looks good. I bought some mixed dried berries that were delicious but too dry and chewy to do much with. I didn't think of stewing or simmering; I just put them in a jar and covered them with brandy. After a couple of weeks they were soft and the brandy had turned into a nice syrup. Good on ice cream, not so much for oatmeal I guess.

Hey, they're having trouble getting people to stop cutting and pasting at Oxford. If the concept of plagiarism is too much for people with two or three A levels to A, the situation seems pretty hopeless. I was going to say that chefs should know when they are copying enough to need to credit someone, but probably a lot of the worst offenders sincerely don't think they are doing anything out of the way. As for the black cod, that's a great dish but I somehow feel it's too simple of an idea and execution for plagiarism to apply.