jhlurie

Sticking with the fruit, does anyone really want to eat a Grapple? It sounds like you have to fight it before you eat it. It's actually NOT a hybrid by the way. It's just soaked in grape juice. Seriously. And for that they charge about $1 per. They should call it "Crapple".

This maneuver is what is known in the Reality TV biz as a "Trump". Tuck the winner away somewhere out of sight and hope people forget about him or her. Trot them out when you need to promote the next edition of the show, but otherwise neutralize them. Even if Michael IS really working at an important Ramsey restaurant, one must suppose he's not going to get near Ramsey personally all that often, no matter how much ass kissing he does in that kitchen. I suppose there's also a motive that they are praying he might actually become a bit closer to the "Master Class" chef they proclaimed the winner would be by the end of the show, which he probably is not. By the way, apparently some propaganda supposedly written by Michael will be posted on the FOX Hell's Kitchen site after the show airs on the West coast. They had a notice up tonight that the winner would show up there. Did you really see Michael as more likeable? I saw him as a huge weasel and ass kisser. I actually respect the first more than the second.

I'm bumping this as a reminder that the 2 hour finale is airing tonight. Starting right now, in fact, on the east coast.

I'm a HUGE spicehound, but for some reason with THIS particular place I disagree. It may be the items I usually eat there (mostly Tandoori chicken items and the Dosas), but I like the "fresh" taste these folks manage to attain. The Kasturi Tikka is the best example of this. It's an herbal kind of spicing, but totally absent of any "kick". But it doesn't need it. I would argue that the lamb needs to be better spiced though. It needs it more than the chicken--even moreso because the chicken is so perfectly cooked here.

Thank you, Mr. the Cook. May we please have some more? Maybe it was Gunter? Are those fruits being grown locally in Walton County, you think, or are they being shipped in from elsewhere in Florida (or possibly even Texas)? I'd tend to think that Atlanta, in comparison, would definitely be getting mostly non-local citrus--stuff from Florida, of course. The question really is does Walton County have access to locally grown goods--the assumption being that local stores frequently get the pick of any crop and the lesser stuff is shipped off to some central processing facility to be split up between everyone else in the country, including of course Atlanta.

On first reading this topic, I doubted there was really any acceptible answer OTHER than taste, because otherwise the other senses have no appropriate context in relation to food. There's no sense in processing them, because without taste, food is only fuel, whereas the lack of any of the others doesn't necessary do that. But then it occured to me that the tactile sense is the only one which is unavoidable. Think about it. The visual component can be easily masked with a blindfold, or by just not looking. The aural blocked by earplugs. The olfactory eliminated by noseplugs. Even taste can be easily blocked, or at least highly altered, by the presense of a countermanding taste. I suppose you'd still be tasting SOMETHING, but it would be a lie. But short of nerve damage or medication, you can block the tactile. So it could be argued that the "most important" sense is the one you can never escape. Smell is the sense I'd not WANT to surrender as part of my eating experience. I doubt it's the most important, but it's often the most pleasant.

We've had various threads on this theme over the years--each one usually starting out with a story similar to Danielle's. Predictably, a lot of very divisive and sometimes contentious extremes in opinion pop up fairly quickly--the whole debate over "standards vs. snobbery". We've also had many threads about chain restaurants--how they fit into our culture and IF they should fit into our culture. Those can get pretty hot too. I'm not going to drag up or merge in any of those countless older discussions, but I WILL ask at this early point that we try and not make this discussion as contentious as some of it's predecessors. Hopefully I'm just being paranoid and we'll all be able to argue the standards vs. snobbery debate with cool logic and even tempers. Thanks in advance.

I've had it, the real thing, recently. There's very little about it that seems habit forming, beyond it merely being a fairly strong drink. The supposed hallucinatory effects seem to be limited to some very quick visual blurryness. It was fairly pleasant tasting, but that could indeed have been due as much to the sugar we dumped in it as the substance itself. I've yet to see NR yet, but well... my assumption has always been that this is being intended as "Infotainment". Bourdain doesn't like to be heavy-handed with the Info half of that, but its not like he's going to put something out that's totally vacuous. As has been said by many others, he's definitely depending on people subscribing to the cult of Tony though. That's not a dig. It just means that I think it's pretty apparent that you have to like Tony to "get" what he's doing. Is he copying Dave Attell? I doubt it. Mr. B. has been this person far longer than Attell has been, and he's probably a much more interesting version.

Just a periodic reminder, folks. Please only post wrappers you photograph or scan yourself. We've had to delete a few recent posts from users who embedded photographs directly from manufacturer's websites. Toliver, as always your sweet tooth amazes me. Keep up the excellent work.

Frankly, reading over his ENTIRE piece on the Travel Channel website, instead of just those few sentences alluded to by Jim, I think it becomes even clearer that Tony is making the exact same argument against Jersey stereotypes instead of supporting them. Aside from the fact that the Sopranos references are clearly a joke, and his comment about New Jerseyans having to have a sense of humor, he also pretty much directly comes out and admits that he's not being representative. And the following seems to be a pretty clear message that we should revel in the humor of it, rather than let a lifetime of indignities get under our skins. I'm assuming the show is what? 45 minutes of footage? Realistically there's only so much he can put in, and as I said before he's got to make it interesting and try to create a story about contrasts. For every shot of Bobolink Dairy he needs a Bada Bing/Satin Dolls. For every scene of how vibrant and interesting the Ironbound area of Newark can be, he might have to show a part of the Jersey shore that meets the expectations of how run down most people assume it is. Montclair would have been nice. Hopefully he got there, but if he didn't it's hardly going to misrepresent the state to not show it. I mean hey... apparently he went to Mitsuwa market in Edgewater for his Asian Invasion, and well... these days a Korean Supermarket (like Hahn Ah Reum) would have been much more representative of the Invasion than a Japanese one. But that isn't going to invalidate the segment he did--it's still going to be showing a piece of Jersey that most outsiders don't even know exists.

Bourdain and Shaw both in the same week? Egad! I do have to say that my biggest objection by far to the Bronx Chop is that the restaurant involved feels they have to use lowercase letters for their name. Ellen's picture is priceless, by the way. I've seen Steven with that look before too. Usually when he's trying to figure out how to make a fast getaway. He's looking for a quick exit, and the place was probably a few Bronx Chops poorer when he slipped out the door.

As he recently revealed to our own Rachel Perlow, that "istan" would be Uzbeckistan. He also recently finished shooting a Las Vegas episode, which apparently included him jumping out of a plane with an Elvis impersonator.

Ah. See that's why we slipped that "London vs. Newark" question into Rachel's interview. Alas, he chose London. We should have made it Reykjavik vs. Newark, or maybe Bora Bora vs. Trenton.

Well, to be fair, he has the following statement as part of all of that: Also, in our own brand new interview with him, there's some very relevant stuff on his feelings about his long-time home state: I haven't seen the NJ show yet (although Rachel Perlow has), but I think he confirms that the appeal for him, and the focus of that episode, is nostalgia. Tony probably wasn't going to classy restaurants when he was a teenager. Although he does also say that he included some fine dining content, so that doesn't sound like it's "all Bada-Bing, all of the time". No doubt he could have weighed the show even more in the fine dining direction, but if he did, let's be honest... why would The Travel Channel have wanted to produce it? They're more interested in what makes a location unique. Frankly, if "middle America" doesn't understand that The Sopranos isn't representative of every person living in New Jersey, then well... surely we can unfairly pigeonhole them back in retaliation somehow.

{Chuckle} You folks are probably being rendered speechless by all of this. I mean... man's got a lot to say, right? Personally I was surprised he was so calm about PETA. One burning question remaining for me is... why "Jack"? I know that wasn't his decision, but dammit I want to know!

I first heard of the old movie being a promotional gag when I listened to the commentary on the 25th anniversary edition of the DVD. (The commentary is by the five child actors, now all grown up and working as veterinarians and such - it's priceless.) I think one of them (or maybe one of the accompanying documentaries/making-of featurettes) mentioned the link to the Nestle marketing behemoth. ← Well, the problem with that theory is that Nestle didn't own the line until many years later. So if that's what the folks on the DVD said, they were wrong!

I doubt it. Bourdain isn't that uptight, and he certainly knew what he was getting into when he optioned the book. He stated here once that he'd been surprised by the actual deal that went down, but that's hardly the same thing as an admission of disapproval. As for Hell's Kitchen, U.S., I've come around to the point of view that everyone involved knows it's kind of a joke, and nobody--especially Ramsey--really expects to make a commercial success out of whoever "wins". The idea is that, at most, they are creating somebody they will march out to the public, as Donald Trump marches out his so-called "Apprentices", and that's about all this is. That isn't to say that Ramsey is giving false opinions--he's probably taking that part at least seriously enough that he feels compelled to use these chuckleheads to illustrate a real lesson or two. Then again, he's not going to win any sensitivity awards for constantly harping on Jimmy's er... weight issues. He's probably getting more hate mail for that alone than everything else put together.

The classic blowtorch, for oxyacetylene welding, uses acetylene, which yields something in the range from 5800°F to 6300°F, depending on the gas pressure and oxygen mix. Apparently it's the hottest commonly available torch. Underwater torches use hydrogen, believe it or not. There are some other compounds, called LPG and MAPP, which are occasionally used for these industrial torches. Mind you, it's a bit insane to use any of these for cooking. I don't think they burn clean enough anyway. The "cook's torches" I see advertised seem to use butane, in other words plain old lighter fluid (which burn around half as hot as acetylene, which is still plenty hot), but I think they might make propane and kerosene ones as well.

A little poking around and I found this: http://www.verybestkids.com/brands/wonka/aboutBrand.aspx If correct, it claims that the whole thing began with a company called Breaker Confections, in the 1950s. IN 1965, Sunmark Companies bought Breaker, who in turn was purchased by Nestle in 1988. The name change between Sunmark and Willy Wonka Brands happened in 1980. That doesn't discount the idea that the original movie was made to sell the candy, but it makes you wonder that if that's true, why they waited so long to change the name. Also according to that site, no such thing as a Wonka Bar existed until 1998. Also, of note is the fact that Wonka/Sunmark DID have at least one smash success, at least in my neck of the woods--Everlasting Gobstoppers (introduced in 1976). Every kid I knew around 1977 ate Gobstoppers (in my original post I didn't know this was a "Wonka" product--it's certainly not mentioned on their website as part of the current movie promotion).

Okay. It's weeks later and I STILL haven't seen any Coke Zero ads. Am I watching too little TV? Has anyone seen them?

I've seen this stuff for years. And I imagine with the upcoming release of the movie remake (retitled from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory back to the original book title of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that there's probably a marketing blitz of unparalleled proportions ready to be unleashed on us. But I don't get this stuff. Contrary to the song, very little of the Wonka Brand stuff I've seen is chocolate. And frankly, very little made by Wonka brand has seemed all that good, at least to me. Laffy Taffy? Pu-lease. Nerds? Not for me. Runts? I don't even know what those are. Heck, even SweeTarts don't appeal to me the way they did when I was a kid. The Wonka website says that there is indeed a chocolate Wonka bar sold, but I think I've seen it in a store rarely to almost never. I know Wonka is currently a division of Nestle. Have they always been? Was there a purpose to this brand at one point, or was it a skeezy marketing device for inferior candy from day one?

If a restaurant offered real maple syrup for an additional price, it would be wrong to sneak your own syrup inside. This would be like sneaking your own wine into a restaurant to avoid paying for it. Since a corkage fee for syrup would be impractical, you'd probably be justified in purchasing the house brand at least for a taste, and then deciding if it's an accpetable syrup. Of course, if you flat out don't like the house maple you'd be left with little recourse other than to smuggle your own inside. I suppose it depends upon how hardcore you are about your choice of syrup with your breakfast. ← You do realize I was joking, right?

For years I've contemplated the possibility of starting a habit of bringing my own maple syrup with me to pancake/waffle houses. I'm not eccentric enough yet to actually follow through with this, but I'm starting to get there. I've even got a little 4 oz. bottle all scoped out for the purpose. Theoretically I'd keep it in my glove compartment. I'd love to see some assistant manager somewhere yell at me for popping that bad boy out and accusing me of not wanting to pay whatever $3 fee they normally charge for a thimbleful of mapley goodness.

Some earlier discussion, courtesy of the wondrous eGullet search facility: Probably in your range - Good Butcher Shops In Bergen County May be in your range - Butcher Needed - Morris County Pretty well out of your range but might be interesting reading - YOUR FAVORITE BUTCHER Southern/Central NJ Out of your range - Stockton butcher, in Saveuer Magazine? (reading the topic it's actually in Sergeantsville, not that this will make a lick of difference to someone from Hoboken! ) Would be in your range, except the person asking was actually in Central NJ, not Northern - Butcher recommendation in Northern NJ Pot Luck - Best Butcher Shop in New Jersey

It's not so much that I can't tell the difference as much as that I don't often use rice as a stand-alone item. If I am using it, it's more often as part of a casserole-style dish or for fried rice or something like that where, at least to my palette, I'm not really tasting the rice itself. I've got some expensive Jasmine Rice in my cupboard, and I do use that when I'm actually in a mood to taste rice. Again, it's a matter of diet, taste and priorities. If I did eat rice daily I'd probably think pretty differently. But I wasn't raised with it as a staple of my diet. Suzy mentions "frozen vegetables" as a cheap item. At one point I wouldn't have agreed with that but as time goes on I've realized that flash freezing is indeed a pretty reliable process. It actually evens the playing field, I think, because that little flavor penalty I think you pay hits every specimen pretty much equally--be it Bird's Eye or SuperDuper Generic Brand. The only thing is that the expensive brands tend to have better assortments/medleys. Frankly, frozen veg selection is one where I'm driven mostly by store sales.