The Apostate

This might be my favourite show so far. Best line: Harold, "So you told her 'I'm not your bitch, bitch'? Dave, "Yeah, Bravo already holds the licence'

Morons, Absoloute, irredeemable, morons. Pandering to the stupid and ill-informed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't McGee cover this in "The Curious Cook" and dismiss it as bad science? Perhaps there is new data? Or are they just re-hashing the same stuff?

Gastrique used to mean a sauce based on a vinegar or game stock reduction (or so I was taught), although the current fad is to apply it to almost any reduction. 'Slow' is whatever your chef tells you it is(usually at the top of his lungs), and that can have more to do with his mood at the moment than your speed on the line.

This is definitely a trend in restaurants, one which I cannot begin to fathom. One the one hand I had a customer who ordered a ribeye steak topped with bleu cheese and almost immediately went into anaphylactic shock after a single bite, nearly dying on the dining room floor. Turns out he is severely allergic to penicillin and yet he never bothered to consider what foods might contain it (the ‘bleu’ in bleu cheese being Penicillium roqueforti ). On the other hand I had a customer who demanded a list of ingredients for several items due to her “glucose” intolerance. “Glucose?” I asked. “Yeah, you know, wheat and stuff”

As everyone in the restaurant trade knows, this is the slowest time of year. So, last night the owner and I go over some odd jobs to keep the staff busy, one of which is to clean up and organize the downstairs liquor room. While down there, we find a bunch of old collapsed and dirt encrusted cartons, which obviously haven't been touched in decades. The boss says to throw them out. I checked them out and and they seem to be mostly german whites (Mosel) from the mid-sixties (the building was a german restaurant in a former incarnation) with a couple of sparkling burgundies (New York) and some splits of french champagne, all mid-60's vintages. Does anyone have a guess as to wether any of it would be worth saving? Most of the labels are dry rotted and nearly unreadable, so this is about all the information I have.

Really?I always assumed that he was just reading off a prompter or laptop. As I recall, they had an inaugural 'making of Iron Chef' show where he introduced some of the people who were prompting him via earphone during the tapings. Or am I recalling that inaccurately?

Nothing like a tough gizzard to make having a metal pipe shoved down your neck feel like a Swedish massage! And then the force-feeding followed by slaughter! I don't know which is more fun, eating the foie gras or being the duck that gives it up! In my experience, both sides in this debate have an unfortunate bent for ludicrous oversimplification. I eat foie gras, I have friends who won't. We all agree, however, even at the top of the food chain, there is merit in avoiding needless cruelty. Whether foie gras production falls into that category is a legitimate question. Building up straw men and knocking them down ("The beautiful irony here is that anti-foie advocates' anthropomorphizing of geese is actually one of the most grossly human-centric things they could do") or falling back onto glib observations ("Food chain. Top. The end.") brings very much illumination to the discussion. ← Acutally, no straw man there. Anthropomorphizing geese is - by definition - a human-centric thing to do. Your (glib) observation is that the feeding process used for foie gras must be painful. Why? Because it seems like it would be so - would you like it if it were you? But - again - you're not a goose. Neither am I. Geese aren't people. Do you know that it's painful for geese other than a glib human-centric assumption that it must be so? Without that, I don't think you have a leg to stand on that this is cruel. The strawman that "if you eat foie and support its production you must like kicking cats and torturing dogs" only works if the production of foie is as painful a process as being a kicked cat or tortured dogs. Do you care to provide any evidence of that based on anything other than applying human feelings to geese? I'm not saying no evidence exists, I'm just not aware of any. ← Precisely my point. As an example, while it would undoubtedly be considered cruel to force a human to stand barefoot on a chunk of ice, in freezing temperatures, all day long, there is a flock of geese across the street who have, quite contentedly, been doing exactly that all day long with no apparent ill effects. Human and animal physiology differs so greatly that I cannot consider foie gras production methods to be cruel or inhumane without more evidence than an apparent lack of resemblance to a “swedish massage”.

This is what happens when humans transfer their own feelings and experiences onto animals, mistakenly assuming them to be the same. My son (a doctoral candidate in microbiology) assures me that the digestive system of waterfowl is entirely different from our own. Due to the fibrous nature of their diets, they have evolved a much tougher and less sensitive tract (consider the texture of gizzards) making it highly unlikely that they truly feel any discomfort during the feeding process. Just my two cents.