David Ross

This season is a yawner so far. Bring back Hung's Black Chicken with Geoduck please.

I use Lipton Onion Soup Mix for dip and meatloaf. And I hate it every time I do it.

I'll be there and I like Chris's suggestion about the Marriott.

I totally agree. I wanted to slap Ed up the side of the head with a barbecue mop. Just because they are down one person he uses the asinine excuse to pre-slice the brisket and put it covered, in a steam tray. It looked, and I'm sure tasted, like grey beef by-product that was leftover army rations. How was the loss of one cook any different than a real-life situation in a restaurant where a cook calls in sick or doesn't show up for the service shift? You improvise and make do. And in the case of slicing meat, it doesn't matter. He took all that time to ruin the brisket ahead of service when he simply could have waited, displayed the brisket on a cutting board for the diners and then cut to order. He sacrificed quality and time early on when he should have kept it for when he needed to use it--in the moment of service.

Charlie Trotter is closing his eponymous Chicago restaurant later this year. The story was announced in the media over the past week, including this piece in the New York Times. I never dined in the restaurant, although I did encounter Chef Trotter at a few culinary gatherings and I have two of his cookbooks. I never attempted the recipes in the books, but the gorgeous photos of the food set a new benchmark at the time they came out for food presentation and culinary photography. Any thoughts on the impressions that Chef Trotter left on the Chicago dining scene?

Trust me, missing Top Chef for the sake of the "X Factor" wasn't intentional. Maybe I should have watched some forgotten history author debut a talk about Calvin Coolidge on C-SPAN. It would have been far more interesting than the latest television talent show. And.....as I discovered a few days later, something on C-SPAN would have been more intriguing than watching Heather shove that Stroganoff mess in front of the judges. Do you have a dog? Would you serve Heather's stroganoff to your best friend?

Uncork'd is one of the great culinary gatherings every year. Stay tuned for my topic on the 2012 event.

well at least I hope you peel them...

For good or bad, I watched the "X Factor" last night on Fox and missed the latest Top Chef episode. For good or bad......

In January, (I can't make a resolution beyond the first month of the New Year), I resolve to cook all the Holiday recipes that I ran out of time to cook in November and December.

Well, keep your cowboy boots on because I suspect Heather may be around a while. When Padma made a comment at the Judges Table about the strain between Heather and Bev, Collichio shut her up pretty quick with a biting comment to the effect that "we don't care about that stuff," (lack of teamwork, unprofessional behavior in the kitchen, being a wretched witch to work with). In other words, Tom apparently doesn't care if cooks act like Heather as long as they can cook.

How many more episodes of "Heather Hell" do we have to slog through? If she worked in any restaurant kitchen I owned, she'd probably only last through the fish course. One hopes she isn't as rude and obnoxious in "real life" as she's been on Top Chef.

The method, the puny, thin steaks, the gristle and fat I saw, and the posed people in the audience all made me skeptical of who these "Cattlemen" were. I come from a cattle ranching heritage that goes back over 150 years and we'd never cut meat like that nor would we sacrifice it the way the Chefs did. Awful. Just awful.

I've been planning on making this soup for about a month. Missed Thanksgiving and then wanted to tweak the garnishes a bit before I serve it around Christmas. It turned out fabulous. I started with roasting some squash. Added some pureed pumpkin and sauteed onion then pureed the mixture. Added to a saucepot with a bit of olive oil and garlic, then thinned with some cream and chicken stock. The spice was a Ras el Hanout mixture I bought at a local specialty store. To put the soup over the top, I melted some foie gras mousse with black truffle into the soup that I buy every Holiday season from D'Artagnan. The garnishes are a buttered crouton, cranberry-orange relish and toasted almonds. O.K., I'll boast a little and say this is the best soup I've ever made.

How ironic that this topic re-appeared. Tommorrow I'm doing a Roast Pheasant with Calvados and Sauteed Apples. The sauce is a mix of Calavdos, hard cider and cream with a dab of Dijon mustard. I'll be serving it with the sauteed apples, some glazed pearl onions and spaetzle with bacon and toasted hazlenuts. While I'm using farm-raised pheasant, the wild ringneck pheasants here in Eastern, WA, love to scrapple through the apple orchards after the harvest.

I still don't get, nor do I buy, "par" cooking steaks then re-heating them on a grill or any other manner of secondary cooking at a later time. I remember a few years back going on a tour of a kitchen at one of Seattle's "top" fine dining restaurants owned by a well-known Chef. To my horror, there was a baker's rack with skads of "pre-cooked" ribeyes waiting for orders to come in whereby the Chefs would finish them on the grill. While I personally can't understand why anyone would do that, I suppose in some minds it makes sense when you are catering a Cattleman's Ball for 200. But at a restaurant where steaks should be cooked-to-order? Never. That changed my perspective on that particular kitchen and I'd never order a steak at that place again.

How many more cakes does she plan to bake?

I thought the same thing. Maybe it was a metaphor for the "shattered" dreams of Chefs who presented an awful mess. In my years of cooking steaks I've never heard of the "triple-sear" method. They started with rubbery -looking ribeyes that were cut too thin, then they mucked it up with that oddball cooking method-sear on a barbecue, (with a fire that was too hot and needed dousing with bottled drinking water), chuck the steaks in a vat of bloody water, re-sear on an indoor grill then mace the devils in the oven. No wonder Fearing got a medium-well steak. And speaking of Fearing, he had that sh**-eating grin on his face when he chastised the Chefs with his biting criticism. Sort of "I'm smiling. I'm making you think your dish was great. It sucked, but I'm still smiling at you." I loved it.

Tragically, some of the Cheftestants don't take the show as seriously as we do.

I couldn't agree more with you. What's surprising, almost stunning, is that the Chef's don't get it--aka, "changing gears." I am so over seeing a seared dayboat scallop. While it may taste delicious, is that really innovative or creative? Is that the dish that will win you the title of Top Chef? Paul got it right with an innovative take on a maligned vegetable, "Fried Brussels Sprouts with Grilled Prosciutto." And he cooked something.

Most of the fine dining rooms at the big hotels on the strip are offering both Christmas and New Year's special menus. If you want to spend big, meaning over $200 per person, you might want to look at this Christmas menu from LeCirque in Bellagio here. The menu is $145 and the wine pairing an additional $95. Looks very good to me. You might want to call Bartolotta Ristorante di Mare at the Wynn about a seafood menu. That would be the top restaurant in town for a Feast of the Seven Fishes.

According to the folks that are watching "Last Chance Kitchen" (available online), wherein chefs booted from the main show get a cookoff with other booted chefs for a chance to return, Chuy bested the big guy, Keith. So Chuy isn't necessarily out of it for good. Chuy wasn't the only one who could have gone, but he stood out in my mind for his utter lack of good judgement. I found his response to the Judges to be disingenuous. I have to wonder if he was really being truthful when he said he served the cheese/salmon/tamale type dish at his restaurant. If he does have it on his menu, one can only hope that he doesn't muck it up and serve over-cooked salmon with barely melted cheese like he did to the judges. Maybe it gave Tom gas and that's why he was in a foul mood. Chuy is just another example in a long line of lower-tier contestants who pack their knives and go home in the early stages of the competition. It's that age-old problem that Chefs face--poor judgement in choosing ingredients and a dish that won't work within the confines of the challenge and the time limitations--then screw it up through poor execution. My early favorite is Paul. I mean really, how can you not root for a guy who wins with Brussels Sprouts?

Right. Note to self. If you're trying to come up with a clever and attractive and appetizing food dish, probably best not to fashion it in the shape of something that's already pretty disgusting all by itself. Like a half-smoked cigar butt. It didn't come close to looking like a cigar--or cigar butt. It looked like the logs my dog leaves behind on the carpet when he's mad.

5 letters.....A--W--F--U--L.