Lady T

I will have a couple of newbies with me who've been lurking here -- colleagues and friends from CSO Chorus who want to (a) eat some great Mexican and (b) find out if we're all really as zany as the posts demonstrate and © want to rag on me about the birthday with the '0' on the end. Add two (2) to the tally, pretty please, Maggie.

I never think about it while I'm in the *process* of making the roast chicken come up so it rests for ten minutes while I'm steaming asparagus and pouring wine and checking table settings and such. However, when I come through the front door the next evening after work or rehearsal and the apartment still smells like the south end of Heaven, and I know there's leftover chicken to nibble on while I watch the news and catch up with mail and messages, that's when it hits me that I might not be too awful a cook after all.

I bought Trotter's and Klein's cookbook (RAW) a week or so ago when it was released here in Chicago, and did so deliberately at the signing party at Trotter's to Go, simply to have a look at (and a word with) the authors for once, and to get a sample or four of the food from the book (which CT always does offer, regardless of author). There was no getting around the fact that the food I tasted was delicious. There also was no getting around the fact that the recipes are simpler to assemble -- requiring no long-simmered stocks, sautes, or reductions, for example -- than any I have seen in any of Trotter's previous cookbooks. I will be much interested in experimenting with some of these recipes. Next summer, that is. I believe that Trotter and Klein made a tactical error in doing the book's Midwestern release at the beginning of the cold gray winter, when most of our farmers' markets are closed; Klein may have wonderful local organic produce available to her 365 days a year, but we don't. What point, then, in giving us a book full of glorious eye candy (and the Tim Turner photos are superb) requiring equipment for which I don't have space or budget, and featuring a large number of trucked-in products for which I may have to pay an arm and a leg? Not happening in my kitchen right now, thanks all the same. I went home after the signing party and cooked a risotto with mushrooms and spinach. It tasted great.

But....then how will the whole world be watching? We won't need to watch. We'll be doing instead.

I'm in variations of awe. I'm humming counterpoint to the variations.

It's certainly plush enough. Fresser's much more fun alive, though.

A-twitter my big Size 8 foot, Fress-man: that was arrhythmia. Thought we were going to have to do CPR.

My newest hero! =R= Hmm. Imagine what the pastry staff at Trio's or CT's could do with a batch of Toklas brownies. Better yet: imagine what they'd do after eating a batch of Toklas brownies.

Busboy: The white ceramic coordinates well with a jacket and checks, as I recall; the Wusthof would be for less formal occasions. And you use the cleaver when the job's got to get done fast. My money's still on CT, Soba -- he ain't big, but damn he's intense.

Religious war? People of powerful personal beliefs feeling driven to contention, hmmm? Heh. All right, I'm in a mood for the absurd: Imagine a conflict of gourmandise taken to the streets. Think of the intense, vivid public debates about port-wine reductions versus plain pan gravies, or Plugra butter versus simple Land-O-Lakes unsalted. Innocent civilians forced -- forced! -- to sample and judge competing risotto recipes by wild-eyed savants in Bragard jackets waving impeccably sharp ceramic knives. More yet: blameless hard-working chefs, hijacked by ferocious farmers determined to see their microgreens, and only theirs, reach the summit of the chefs' dainty presentations. Desperate midnight negotiations by owners of prominent new buildings to get just the right chefs working in just the right fashionable Tihany settings. (Damn. That last sounds way too close to the new Time-Warner Building for comfort.) Picket lines outside ADNY with signs reading "No More Fancy Food!" and "Give Us Meat Loaf Any Old Time!" Drive-by wine tastings! The horror! I obviously need to get another cup of coffee. Digression ends.

I can't think of a better scenario for my first visit to Charlie Trotter's than going there with my fellow Heartlanders. =R= This is beginning to sound like an evolving plan. Very well: Hobbes (are you in town around that time, signor?), Edemuth, Ronnie, MatthewB, yours truly...Gentle G, you and the ever-patient Flaca in if we can all make the scheduling work? Aurora? Mags and the Handsome One? You game to take the Travelling Riot as far upscale-and-eccentric as it gets in these parts short of Trio? Edited to clarify: This would NOT be for New Year's Eve, on which night the only place to be for us Heartlanders is gonna be at Guajolote's. I'm looking at the previous two days -- the 29th and 30th of December -- and at Friday, the 2nd of January. Opinions?

Hobbes has been raring to go, as I recall. We should maybe put something together the next time Matthew's in town, Ronnie...?

That's the lady who made us one glorious carrot cake up in Grand Rapids, G-man; also the perfectionist who scrubbed all our beets and apples until they glowed in the dark. I am so there on the 22nd!

That would be the chapter with the handy how-to chart on marking up wine prices?

Maggie does live a stone's throw from Fermilab in Batavia, after all. I imagine for sufficient underwriting, we could arrange to supercharge a bottle like no one's ever seen!

An afterthought: CT's hands out evaluation forms, self-addressed and already stamped, to all its customers with the check after the meal. Adam -- by any chance did you fill that out and send it back? If you were dissatisfied, any service business needs in the name of good practice to know that, and they need to know why. My own experience is that Trotter reads those himself (I have seen this personally, because I used that form once to complain about a minor point. Within three days after I mailed the form back, a Trotter's employee phoned me to apologize abjectly and offer amends, having by all accounts had his ears pinned back by the boss.) If you felt that the food was inadequate, or that the washroom escort was over the top, or the server was looking down his nose at your age or your restraint with beverages -- or anything else, really -- may I suggest that you say so? It won't compensate for the fact that you felt unhappy in the first place, and I don't suggest that it should. I do think that, for the massive bucks, you're sure entitled to hand them some necessary and proper feedback.

Priscilla: Get your collection of Poury Things appraised. Once the Consort gets his attitude revised to view them as a *Long Term Investment* rather than a Waste of Time and Money, his objections will go away and you'll be free to do what you must when a sweet little Poury Thing clings to your ankle and cries to go home with you. If that doesn't work...well, then you can always withhold sexual favours.

You mean 'detroit' isn't the opposite of 'introit'? Son of a gun.

No blame or shame to you at all for practicing restraint with alcohol -- much the contrary! -- but it sounds to me as if you only heard half the symphony, so to speak. One of the wisest and best (and for me, most fun) things to do when confronted by a wine list like the one at CT's -- if you feel so inclined -- is to cast your fate into the hands of the sommelier and let him/her do by-the-course wine pairings for you. Good sommeliers are wizards at keeping the budget under control, too -- all you need to do is to tell them where your limits are. Remember, the wine department has already consulted with the kitchen long since, and chosen wines that can turn fine food into memorable revelations of taste. All the better for your experience, if you can turn 'em loose and let them transfigure the night for you. Think of it another way, maybe: in terms of culinary education -- and who ever has enough of that, hmm? -- you just spent an evening at Oxford with one of the most demanding, idiosyncratic, unorthodox masters on the planet. The Trotter thang isn't always easy to "get", not even for seasoned restaurant-goers. The metaphor can be followed one more step, though. I'd urge you to go back in a year or two -- and this time, grab that expensive opportunity with both hands and learn everything you can. Pelt the server, and the assistants, and the sommeliers, and everybody else on the premises with friendly questions. Start conversations about why the flavors are combined the way they are. Ask about your server's favorite restaurants (at the very least, you might get some neat pointers about possible locations for your next splurge. Or less pricey possible locations that won't require a splurge.). It's true at Trotter's, and at other top-flight places as well, that the more open and interested and receptive you are to the experience, the more you'll get out of it. The odds are that they'll like it that you want to learn some of what they know (and in the specific case of CT's, their expertise is in fact massive). They want you to have a superb evening, after all. Keep going out. Keep comparing foodstuffs and wines, and thinking, and trying some more. There's never an end to the fun, or the learning either.

Coffee all over keyboard!

My late father was a bartender and wine steward. There was no way to hide the evidence from him, not ever. Mom could be distracted or faked out, but Dad got me every single time.

We'll look forward to that, Chef.

Not an option at my place. I have to be warm enough during That Week, or I raise total hell until I am.

Gingerbread, baked the old-fashioned way as a cake. Glorious.

It's a variant pronunciation for "learning."