Dakki

Patterned, blue on white, both the "everyday" china and my great-aunt's "special occasion" plates.

Turducken. C'mon!

Another vote for natto. Smell, taste and texture all read "spoiled" to me. Funny thing is, I'd actually been looking forward to trying the stuff, since I usually enjoy fermented foods quite a bit.

Yeah but and and I don't see a single person posting "hey, I'm 18 years old and I think Bitchin' Kitchen ROCKS!" Either way, if that chick makes you nauseous you are a man of discerning taste.

A quick vote among my friends who've seen both shows says I've misjudged Bitchin' Kitchen - apparently it's not as bad as Semi-homemade, which I maintain is the height of American kitsch and excellent entertainment in very small doses, much like talk radio. It also says I need new friends, preferably ones who don't watch terrible cooking shows. Anyway, from the last few posts I'm getting the impression it's actually the over-40 crowd who's digging the show and us young 'uns who are hating it. Thoughts?

Because she's the evil monkey from Family Guy.

Funny, these shows get the opposite reaction from me. Semi-homemade is pure unintentional comedy, this other thing (well, the few minutes of I've seen of it) attempts hip and comical and achieves lame and unfunny.

I hadn't heard of this before, but a quick search on YouTube has demonstrated there -is- someone worse than Sandra Lee out there. Just remember, people... the lower pop TV sets the bar, the better us real enthusiasts look.

Absolutely! I can remember a time when there was one kind of tomato, one kind of lettuce, one kind of onion and olive oil was an exotic substance you had to hunt for. We haven't progressed as far as you lucky people in the USA though - we still only get one kind of potato, and peanut oil is an exotic substance I have to hunt for. As some people already mentioned, the Internet has made access to the knowledge base far easier than it was - I basically just wouldn't know how to cook anything but a few Mexican dishes if it wasn't for cooking sites, YouTube and Amazon. As for the average joes eating prepared foods - people who eat frozen dinners (and yes, these exist in Mexico) are people who have better things to do with their time than slaving over a hot stove. Maybe they spend a little extra time with their kids, maybe they take a class, maybe they watch soap operas - the point is that we get to spend that time however we choose instead of having that choice made for us - we just happen to spend that time arguing over the relative merits of fleur de sel and Himalayan pink salt instead of following Ugly Betty's adventures or learning Mandarin. I'm going to risk an e-lynching here and suggest "glorified hobby" is no that bad a thing for home cookery (beyond the most essential things) to be.

You know, that's unwarranted stereotyping and it makes me so mad I could just throw my pocket protector at your head.

Two weeks in and it's driving me nuts. What exactly are you supposed to do sober on a Friday night?

You're right, I get your point. There's a lot of stuff that can't be realistically done without some specialized gear in the modernist repertoire. So yeah, maybe the gap is opening... how's that going to affect us? I'm going to have to think a bit more about the relationship between commercial and home cooking before I give an opinion.

Hasn't it been that way, even before the introduction of modernist cuisine? I'm thinking of salamanders, BTU outputs on stoves and so on. And then there's specialist equipment, like French bakery ovens, wood fuel pizza ovens and those crazy high heat burners necessary for wok hei.

I can make stuff on my fully-manual DeVliegs my competition with their Haas 5-axis CNC machines can only dream of, despite their theoretical limitations - all it requires is a skilled and experienced operator, which is what automation takes out of the picture. It's not an absolute law of nature but a pretty good rule of thumb - the more automated a system is, the less flexibility it offers. See Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line" for a good explanation of how this rule applies to software. One of my current projects involves rehabilitating an ancient flat wire rolling mill. The client owns a very nice, very new, fully automated machine that can put out huge volumes of work with no operator sensitivity - as long as the work is in standard gauges. They just happen to see an opportunity in doing low-volume, high-added-value work in nonstandard gauges - something that can only be done on a fully manual device by a skilled operator. Anyway, those 3D printers and etc. are nice, and like I said in my first post, I think they (and other such devices) might eventually take off in commercial kitchens and with the more gadgety enthusiasts. I just don't think it's going to change how the vast majority of people deal with food.

I don't think the computer analogy holds up very well. Computers (digital ones, anyway) are very general number-crunching devices, where any computer can, in principle, do any calculation (if someone bothers to write the software for it, anyway) while machinery of the kind required for food preparation is highly specific (and the more automated, the more specific). Machine tools (which I know a little bit more about, hehe) are a better analogy, I think. Generally, manual machines are much slower than CNC but far more flexible, and the most flexible (but slowest) are hand tools. The least flexible of all are purpose-built lines or stations that do several unrelated processes; if you make even small changes in the processes you end up having to tear down the line and rebuilding it. So highly-automated tools make sense if you're doing a process (machining a part, slicing bologna, whatever) over and over, while manual machine tools (and to an even greater extent, hand tools) make much more sense if you're doing one-shots or small runs, like using a knife instead of a slicer if you just need enough cheese for one sandwich. Lines or stations that do a lot of different things (assembling a car, building a sandwich) only make sense if you're making huge numbers of identical or nearly-identical assemblies. So... I'm thinking about breadmaking machines. They do several things to the ingredients (mix, knead, proof, bake) and save a lot of time if you make bread often but they aren't very useful for anything else. At the other extreme, you use knives and frying pans pretty much for anything. Somewhere in the middle are gadgets that do one thing, or a small number of similar things, like blenders and food processors. Anyway, I think commercial kitchens that serve vast amounts of identical or nearly-identical foods (like fast-food establishments) would be the first to automate (and to a certain extent they are, in the sense that much of the prep is done by machines in factories and the prepped ingredients delivered to the restaurant), but it's still cheaper to pay some poor chump minimum wage to man the deep fryer instead of building a machine to do it. So I don't see fully-automated consumer kitchens in the short or medium term. New gadgets, sure.

My experience is also that a highly polished edge lasts longer, but that could just be my imagination.

I'm with Chris on this. There's very little practical difference between that neighborhood food fab as described in the OP and calling the pizza place to have something delivered... and here we are, investing time and money to make our own pizza. This may be completely in my head, but I don't think this is the way (home) cookery is trending. Instead, I see people adopting an artisan ethic for their food, rejecting packaged goods in favor of raw ingredients that require more time and effort. This is based entirely on my observation of friends and family so feel free to disagree. I don't doubt all kinds of innovative new gadgets to make food preparation faster/easier/safer will be introduced. Doubtlessly some of them be eagerly adopted by the general population, some will be restricted to commercial kitchens and the hard core of kitchen gadgetry enthusiasts and some will die out after a more or less promising start. In other words, I think the immediate future will look a lot like the immediate past. I do love the idea of Punk Food and look forward to it, though.

Here. I thought it was interesting but as a tea philistine I can't really judge how good the old communist's advice is. How do the local tea fanatics see this?

Okay so "(negative comment) and that's a shame because..." The principle is the same.

1- Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Number 2 should be A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by the same, but I'm not sure it qualifies as food literature per se. There's a good bit about food in it, anyway. Not nominating anything else since I haven't read any food-related stuff nearly as good in the past 10 years.

Funny, I was thinking the opposite. As in, "the restaurant is located between an abandoned warehouse and a junkyard and the service is terrible, and that’s a shame, because the food is much better than it needs to be." That more or less makes nonsense of the literal meaning of the "better than it needs to be" part, but your interpretation seems to make nonsense of the "that's a shame" part of the phrase. I think "better than it needs to be" is just used as a cutesy substitute for "good" in this case. "The restaurant is located between an abandoned warehouse and a junkyard and the service is terrible, and that’s a shame, because the food is good."

Would anybody be horribly offended if I said taking a belt sander to a good knife is like cooking a nicely marbled ribeye in the microwave?

That looks delicious ChrisTylor. BTW, I'm enjoying your blog very much and hope you continue your efforts next year.

THAT'S CHEATING! just kidding. It seems the light is coming from behind the food and to the left; is that right? What sort of light is it? Is this doable with a couple of desk lamps on clamped on a table, maybe?

Lovely photo SobaAddict70. I'm having trouble with the lighting this time of year, since it's usually dark by the time I get home and I'm not very good with artificial light. What do you use? Post-Xmas bbq.