chiffonade

DH cringes every time he sees her pick up a knife. As for me, what drives me batsh*t is when she sticks her index finger out over the back of the blade of a chef's knife. Arghhhh! Wrap, Sandy, wrap! Wrap that finger around the bolster! For humanity's sake!

The funny part of that is what she was using was fior di latte NOT bocconcini. Fior di latte are much smaller. When she was slicing the cheese, DH said, "Why doesn't she use the larger fresh mozzie?" I was thinking the same thing. It was only after I visited TVFN and saw the recipe called for bocconcini that I realized someone bought her the wrong cheese to use and she didn't know it because she didn't mention anything about the size discrepancy. Why do I know so much about cheese? My dad worked for Polly-O for 38 years. When it comes to Ricotta, Mozzarella, etc. my bro and I know that stuff like the back of our hand!

Kitchen Confidential Cast Bourdain Comments With Alice being the last successful (non-reality) TV show based largely on a restaurant - I'm hoping there's paydirt here. Foodies need something to watch! The Restaurant was a joke. Emeril's short-lived sitcom was God awful - and the unfortunate "last work" in the career of Robert Urich. At least with Bourdain's book as a springboard, the plot lines will be interesting!

Another pub whose photos suck is Fine Cooking. As incredibly valuable as the information might be, the photos aren't the least appealing. Saveur OTOH is beautifully shot. From the non-food pix to the recipe depictions, more than once I've run to the store because of an article I read in Saveur OR because a picture was so inviting. I've found Gourmet to be passable in the food photography department. Where I find it falls short is all the high-ticket selling it does. I buy cooking mags for recipes and food information, stories, etc. Not to buy yachts and Rolexes.

I have no idea whether or not I've ever replied to this thread but here goes: Current Faves Ina Garten Michael Chiarello Stephen Raichlen (BBQ Guy) Mario Batali Daisy Cooks (PBS - Puerto Rican Cookery) Sarah Moulton (more for attitude than cooking) Martha Stewart (not really a chef but a helluva cook - can't wait for the new show) Old Faves Julia The Frugal Gourmet Galloping Gourmet Pierre Franey Madeleine Kamman David Rosengarten (from the heyday of TVFN) Two Hot Tamales Can take or leave... Giada Dave Lieberman Amazing but Don't try this at home... Thomas Keller Collette Peters Jacques Torres DETEST Sandra Lee (for sooooooooo many reasons) Good Chefs/Cooks but totally played out and/or lost credibility Emeril Bobby Flay Rachael Ray Rocco DiSpirito

You left out the Kitchen Aid mixers. Every time she changes the color of the kitchen, the Kitchen Aid will match. I cringe every time she uses a KA to mix some ridiculous box cake or other abomination.

A tchatchke is defined as a "cheap showy item," but has come to mean a decorative trinket that bears some emotional connection to the owner. i.e.: If you go to Disney World and have enough money left over after buying food and drinks to buy yourself a Mickey Mouse Snow Globe - you have just purchased a tchatchke to commemorate your visit.

I work in an office and I sometimes can't get by without bleeping 3x in every sentence!

It's so great to see an American excel to the levels of Thomas Keller. I love his respect for food. There's more than a little OCD going on there...though it seems to his benefit.

The GR portrayed in RKN is not a cartoon like the ultra high handed hothead in HK. This is what I mean when I say the US exaggerates everything "Reality TV" to so far past believability, you're left asking "WTF?" I have never, ever seen a chef verbally abuse a customer the likes of which GR does in the interest of "dramatic effect" except on the old ep of I Love Lucy where she asks for ketchup for her snails. (Not to his or her face, anyway.) In places where you might not be the only restaurant in a 50 mile radius, word of mouth and customer service are too dependent on the customer being king. It's a good thing this show isn't filmed in NYC or GR would have gotten his ass kicked by a customer by now...And I'm talking about women customers. As for drill sergeants at boot camp, soldiers are being trained to survive war. As metaphoric as a kitchen may seem to a battlefield, it just plain isn't one. Yes, a firm hand is necessary. I'm sure Thomas Keller would not have made The French Laundry a household word if he wasn't a tough SOB; however, you want to come away feeling like you've learned something - not like you've had your pancreas ripped out of your ear.

I particularly love two food mentions in The Simpsons: Apu takes Marge to her first warehouse store and she exclaims: "This is a fair price for twelve pounds of nutmeg." Homer is in the Kwik-E-Mart and Apu has put on sale several pounds of "not so fresh" shrimp. Homer bargains with Apu about the price and begins eating. As Homer eats, he begins turning colors. Partway through the pile, Homer realizes the shrimp are spoiled and utters, "Something wrong with these shrimp (chomp chomp), they weren't fresh! (chomp chomp) MUST FINISH!" After which you hear sirens as they speed Homer to the hospital.

Babette's Feast Eat, Drink, Man, Woman American Cuisine Eat This New York Chocolat Big Night Tortilla Soup (Hispanic remake of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman) Woman On Top Like Water For Chocolate Pieces of April Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe?

Loved Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and we're loving HK. It's a bit extreme but that's the way we do reality in the US - we have to make it so ridiculous as to be a caricature of itself. I wish they had just let him be him (as he was in RKN). Still very high handed and at times abrasive but not over the top like this. The chef coat on the meathook is a nice touch and a downright poetic ending to every show. I'm anxious to see how Elsa does after nearly passing out in the first show when he sampled her dish (which was one of the few he enjoyed). I'm glad Dewberry is gone - his skin was not near as thick as it needed to be to take that kind of pressure. A pastry chef usually works alone in an empty kitchen (with maybe a prep cook or two) and Dewberry was just not suited for the line. I think Dewberry found a certain degree of "relief" being jettisoned.

The world may not cease to exist, but the scenario would look a lot like Scrooge on Christmas morning (after the epiphany).

I've loved cooking shows since I used to scan my seven or eight channels with my wire-attached remote control in search of that overhead shot of someone stirring a pan. Nine out of nine and a half times, it was the Frugal Gourmet on PBS. These are some of the reasons I gravitated to cooking shows... * It was a subject that interested me. * I felt that cooking was a valuable skill. * I wanted to learn new techniques and dishes. * I felt like in some way, the cooking host/ess was a "kindred spirit." * I have always maintained that food is more than gasoline for the body. TV Cooks are generally passionate people who love feeding their friends and famlies well. (Until, of course, Sandra Lee came along.) I loved watching the old Julia shows and how she made seemingly shee-shee dishes seem..well..do-able. I loved the Frugal Gourmet (scandal or no scandal) and how he associated food with spirituality and family. I love any cooking segment that features Martha Stewart because she uses top-shelf ingredients and her kitchen is The Playboy Mansion for the foodie. I love Ina Garten because she has a real desire to achieve the utmost flavor in her food - and she's not afraid to use a bit of butter to get there. I loved Pierre Franey because of his almost comic book appearance. Daughter was a baby when his show aired and she knew the theme song. The show would start and she'd stop dead in her tracks and say, "Look mommy, it's Pew-R Fraynee!!" Even if I don't intend to make any of their food - like the chocolate spectaculars created by Jacques Torres, I'll watch the show because I might pick something up that I will use - or translate an idea into something feasible for me. What drives me crazy...Hmmmmmm.... * TVFN's Over-Emerilization of its network. Emeril Lagasse has the right to make two statements simultaneously: TVFN made my career; and TVFN ruined my career. * I once watched a show featuring Debi Fields (Mrs. Fields' Cookies). She had her lion's mane of hair hanging all over the place. Then, the camera zoomed in on her open hand to showcase an ingredient and you could see where her nails ended and the fake nails began! WTF? * Sandra Lee - This hack flies in the face of all the work put in over the years by people who really cook to get the rest of the world to see it's a worthwhile undertaking. Cake mix and Pillsbury Tube Dough, my big Fat Italian A$$. Further to this... * The DUMBING DOWN of TVFN. It was once a haven for real cooks who wanted to learn real techniques by respectable well-known chefs. Now it's a festering ground for junk like Unwrapped, The Secret Life Of... and of course, Semi-Homemade.

I yearn for the gas five burner beast from my apartment in Brooklyn. Four burners and one plunked right in the middle. I moved to SW CO and found NOTHING BUT GLOWING COILS. (Bogus!) We opened a small restaurant and I was back to gas. (Yay!!) Then we moved to FL and I have electric again (Boooo.) Fire is a cook's beautiful friend. Glowing coils are a very ugly third runner up. There is nothing like a flame roasted pepper done on a gas stovetop. When they would go on sale in the summer, I used to have 3-4 peppers on every burner - and yes, I looked like a mad scientist. Tilt a pan and try to coax flavor out of garlic into oil over a glowing coil! You can do that with a flame! Also, when you turn off a gas burner, IT'S OFF. For real. Off as in, it's immediately ceased generating heat. Not so with glowing coil. Dual fuel ranges are $$$$ but they are indeed the best of both worlds. Flame on top and self cleaning electric oven below. Nirvana.

TVFN, in its infancy, was a true haven for people like me who cruised PBS in search of that overhead shot of someone stirring a pot. Like all others, it was a network with growing pains (An exercise show...A couple of game shows...) but its heart was in the right place... That is no longer true. TVFN is focused less on quality and more on quantity. It has embraced its "business end" and desires no longer to be a safe harbor for people who actually cook. The "lowest common denominator" is really putting it mildly with garbage like Semi-Homemade, et al, being aired. With TVFN pulling From Martha's Kitchen, another of the more worthwhile shows is now gone. It's getting to be more about the buck and less about the art. It's a shame.

We went to a beautiful new Belgian Brewery here in the Tampa area, called St. Sebastiaan. One of my cooking teachers at Kump, Ruth Van Waerebeek, was Belgian and I was anxious to try this place. (Florida is full of chain restaurants and it was nice to see an independent. I was intrigued.) So we drive all the way to this Brewery and the place is gorgeous. We looked at the menu and did some ordering. I spotted Belgian Fries on the menu and insisted we order them, remembering that Ruth would NEVER refer to a fry as "French" but insisting the Belgians invented them. DH ordered some of the artisan beer. It was delicious. We ordered the beer soup which was made with the brewery's own Belgian beer. Although the color was disconcerting, the flavor and mouthfeel were excellent. I had no idea the soup would be the high point of the meal. DH ordered a shrimp pasta special. The "shrimp" were canned salad shrimp. (The "chef" must have been taking cooking lessons from Sandra Lee.) The pasta was barely sauced - and I don't mean in a Mario Batali sort of way - I mean dry and tasteless. Daughter had snacked just a little earlier so she wasn't all that hungry but did spot in the side dish list potato gratin which is one of her favorites. The gratin was served warm, not blazing hot from the oven, as it should be. I'd much rather have food served blazing hot so I could make the choice to let it cool slightly on my plate than have that decision be made for me and serve something like potato gratin at body temperature. I ordered a chicken dish that wasn't half bad but the piped mound of mashed potatoes was horrible. (They were billed as "Mashed Potatoes" - nothing else.) These were roundish-mounds of mashed potato that had obviously been piped in advanced and left in a warming oven. Mashed potatoes don't have a crust. I stuck my fork in (broke through the crust , tasted it and decided that it needed no further exploration. Perhaps the worst disappointment was the order of Belgian Fries. When I ordered them, I expected a huge basket of piping hot freshly fried golden brown potatoes, salted and served with home-made mayo. What I got was barely a saucer of obviously mass produced, frozen bagged pale FRENCH fries that were served warm. DH never sends anything back but he and I both wrote e-mails to the restaurant. I suggested the Brewery get a copy of Ruth's book Everybody Eats Well In Belgium and grab a few recipes out of that. I pointed out that anyone who knows anything about the food industry knows that potatoes are almost free and should never be skimped upon when measuring portion sizes. I pointed out that Belgian Fries are a pride of Belgian Cooking and should have been treated as such. Neither DH nor I ever received a response - and of course, we never darkened their door again. http://www.saintsebastiaan.com/

I'm sure it'll be viewed as a cliche by now but I feel that way about the old Joy of Cooking. No matter how many cookbooks I get, I refer to that one as the "deciding vote" about many subjects.

As much as I adore Saveur magazine, the website is pretty useless. I won't even visit the Cook's Illustrated website because I think they have plenty of gall to charge top dollar for the magazine and then not even let magazine subscribers enjoy the full benefit of the website without squeezing more money out of us.

So last season was basically about the drama-queen-front-of-house staff. This season will be about the behind-the-scenes-financial people. Maybe next season, Rocco will cook.

. o O (Rice.) Mine always comes out like glue. Bleah. The only rice I can make is risotto. And rice pudding. But that's it.

Maybe this will help: http://www.cahe.nmsu.edu/pubs/_e/E-215.pdf It's a PDF file - I tried to copy the info and paste it here but it didn't work. Print it out and keep it - it has a lot of valuable info including baking adjustments. Fudge is a bear to make at altitude, the stuff never seems to get to the point it's supposed to get. I lived @ 7,000 feet and water boiled at 198 degrees.

Food! He was never found guilty of any wrong doing. (perhaps that ought to be in big bold letters?) And to boot, the leading complaintant (I think, I may need to re-research this to be precise) that brought suit for this alleged improper behaviour was also a former employee of his deli operation, with a documented personnel record of theft from Jeff Smith! So, add that grain of salt into the mix and give the man the benefit of the doubt. My apologies, but I understand the legal system very well. Former employee caught thieving bringing suit along with fellow buddies for alleged impropriety.... </rant> I do appreciate the teachings of exploring other cultures and that food was more than cooking and fuel for the bod. That is to his credit. I'm with you. I was always under the impression that in the US, the burden of proof was on the accuser. Those "grains of salt" of which you speak may or may not have been withheld because of the ages of the accusers. Nonetheless, the career of a real cooking and food advocate, and a pioneer, was destroyed by this scandal.

Does anyone know how to e-mail him or contact him by mail?? I've always wanted to drop him a line.