I am still cooking and eating and travelling. I am also just really, really busy. ‘Tis the time of year and all that. As soon as I get a moment, I’ll post our pictures from New York. We dined well, if fairly cheaply.
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The European tour class is going like a house afire though my numbers have dwindled, unfortunately that means my budget has as well. You can imagine the pouty chef here as you choose. Still, it is fun, though more work with the brain-twisty, food-budget maneuvering. We were in Russia, Belarus, Georgia and the Ukraine last week. The menu is marked to help decipher which dish is from where.
A Western Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Georgian Menu
Yaitsa po-minsk
Beet puree
Byefstroganov
Kartoshka po-moskovsky
Lokshen kugel
Yaitsa po-minsk
Eggs Minsk – Belarus
10 hard-boiled eggs
1/3 cup soft butter
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
2 tablespoons heavy cream
3 tablespoons finely chopped dill
1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
2 teaspoons paprika
salt and black pepper to taste
4 tablespoons bread crumbs
3 tablespoons grated cheese
anchovy filets, soaked and halved
Peel the eggs and cut each in half, carefully preserving the white to be stuffed. Remove the yolks and set the whites aside on a tray or plate. Place the yolks in medium-sized mixing bowl and add the butter, mayonnaise, cream, herbs and paprika. Mix and then taste for seasoning, adding the salt and pepper according to your personal taste.
Chop four of the egg whites very finely and fold them into the yolk mixture. Fill the remaining whites with the yolk mixture, mounding the mixture attractively.
Preheat the oven to 400°F. Mix the bread crumbs and cheese together. Lay the anchovies in a crisscross across the yolk mixture on each egg half and sprinkle with the crumb and cheese mixture. Brown for ten minutes in the oven and serve hot.
Beet Puree – Georgia
1 pound raw beets
2-3 cloves of garlic
½ cup shelled walnuts
½ teaspoon salt (or to taste)
½ cup fresh cilantro leaves
½ cup flat-leaf parsley
½ teaspoon ground coriander
3 teaspoons red wine vinegar
Preheat the oven to 425°F and wrap the beets in foil making a lose parcel so air can circulate but seal the edges well so stem can build up in packet and soften the beets. Roast the beets until soft, this can take up to 2 hours depending on the beets. Check after an hour to see where they are on the road to tenderness. Carefully open the packet and pierce with the tip of a sharp paring knife. There should be little to no resistance. Allow the beets to cool completely in their parcel before you proceed to the next step.
Peel and chop the garlic and add to a food processor and pulse to mince. Add the walnuts and salt and pepper and process again until everything is a fairly fine rubble but not pasty. Peel and roughly chop the beets (wearing gloved to avoid being dyed beet purple) and add the chopped beats to the processor with the herbs and the ground coriander. Continue processing until you have a fine paste. Add the red wine vinegar, pulse to mix and taste. You may need more vinegar if the beets are very sweet. You want something that approaches a relish with a balance of sweet and sour. Decant the puree to a glass bowl (to avoid pinking any plastic containers, but avoid metal because of the vinegar) and refrigerate for at least to hours up to overnight to allow all the flavors to marry.
Kartoshka po-moskovsky
Moscow Potatoes – Russia
2 ¼ pounds medium-sized potatoes
4 tablespoons melted butter
1 small onion, very finely chopped
5 tablespoon sour cream
salt, to taste
2 oz. red caviar (salmon roe) (we used yellow North American lumpfish roe)
Peel the potatoes, though if you have well-washed new potatoes you can leave the skins on. Bake in the oven at 350°F until they are almost soft. While the potatoes are baking, sauté the onions in a small amount of additional butter until meltingly soft. Set aside. When the potatoes are ready, cut a “lid” off the top of each potato and hollow out the centers using a melonballer or small teaspoon. Mash the lids and centers with the melted butter, the sautéed onions and the sour cream. Season the mashed potatoes to your taste with salt and pepper. Place the mashed potatoes in a pastry bag fitted with a large star tip and fill the potatoes hollowed out potatoes mounding the filling just slightly. Place the filled potatoes shoulder to shoulder in a baking dish and place under a hot broiler just until the ridges of the mashed filling begins to brown. Remove the potatoes from the oven, sprinkle with the caviar and serve immediately.
Byefstroganov
Beef stroganoff – Russia
1 tablespoon mustard
1 teaspoon sugar
salt and black pepper to taste
2 pounds of beef filet (or other tender cut), cut across the grain into thin slices
1 pound mushrooms
1 pound of onions
16 ounces of sour cream (full fat, to avoid splitting the cream)
Mix the mustard, sugar, a pinch each of salt and pepper and 1 tablespoon of water together into a thick paste and set aside. Give the mushrooms a good rinse and slice them about ¼” thick. Peel and julienne the onion into ¼ inch strips. In a skillet large enough to hold all the final ingredients, heat enough oil to just cover the bottom of the pan and sear the strips of beef in batches, setting aside on a clean plate.
After the beef has all been seared, add a small amount of additional oil and brown the onions and mushrooms, cover them and cook gently for about twenty minutes. Uncover and allow any accumulated liquid to evaporate. Add the meat back to the pan with the mushroom and onion mixture. Season the mixture with salt and pepper and add the mustard mixture. Cook until mustard mixture has coated all the ingredients in the pan and seems to have slightly thickened. Turn the heat to a bare simmer and add the sour cream. Stir gently until the cream has warmed through. Do not allow the mixture to boil or the cream will break and become grainy. If this happens the stroganov will still taste wonderful, it just won’t be quite as attractive. Serve immediately with hot, buttered egg noodles or boiled potatoes.
Lokshen kugel
Noodle bake – Jewish Ukrainian
Generous 1 pound of ribbon noodles made with egg
Salt to taste
4 eggs
7 tablespoons of sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon
1 pinch of nutmeg
2 tablespoons honey
7 tablespoons butter
1 ¼ cups raisins, soaked in hot water for 15-30 minutes
1 cup walnuts or almonds, roughly chopped
butter for the baking dish
Boil the noodles in lightly salted water according to the package directions. Drain them and rinse under warm water. In a large mixing bowl, beat the eggs with the sugar. Add the cinnamon, nutmeg, honey and the softened butter. Mix well. Fold the noodles into the egg mixture with the raisins and walnuts. Place in a greased ovenproof dish and bake in a 350°F oven for 45-60 minutes. Can be served either warm or cold according to personal preference.
Variation: The bake tastes even better (I know it’s hard to believe) with a finely chopped cooking apple added to the mixture with the raisins and nuts.
January has already been a busy month. My cooking classes started in Murfreesboro. We are doing a culinary tour of Europe and it has been a blast to prepare menus and hang out with the new crop of home cooks looking for some entertainment and new ideas. We started in Sweden, land of my foremothers, with a perfect cold weather menu. We were in Denmark last week with a revised vision of my International Class final project menu. I am doing all the cooking in about 2 and a half hours, so I couldn’t be quite as ambitious.
I also helped host a couples baby shower for CSG and the Carpenter. Their bouncing baby boy is due on Valentine’s day and Ms. Te, CSG’s sister, another friend of CSG’s and his wife and I wanted to do something for them before CSG got too close to her due date. We had planned an English tea for a Sunday afternoon. The party was in Columbia (45 minutes to an hour out of Nashville) at the friend and wife’s lovely 110-year-old home that they have completely renovated and decorated. Ms. Te and CSG’s sister helped get all the food set up. Ms. Te frosted and decorated the cake and CSG’s sis put the fruit tray together and made duck punch (rubber duckies afloat on Sprite and blue raspberry punch). I have to admit that I am more than dubious of blue food, but it did look cute and aside from that vaguely chemical taste of fake raspberry flavor, it would be a slightly sweet fun punch for kids’ parties too. I think it might be nicer with the blue Jones Soda or something not so sickly sweet as the Blue Hawaiian-style fruit punch.
Who really needs an excuse for currant scones and clotted cream?
My classes at the community college have started as well. That’s been a challenge. Both my classes are online, distance learning courses. One of them I taught as a ground class last semester and the other is a new course for me. The material is fairly straight forward but there have been issues with content management and deployment. That is perhaps the most optimistic way to phrase it. Things seem to being ironing themselves out for the most part and I seem to be fielding fewer phone calls and emails from students who are having trouble actually getting to the content itself. That is a happy thing.
Last Thursday I also had the opportunity to see Peter Reinhart speak and make bread at the Viking Store in Franklin. It was very inspiring in many ways. I am determined now to try to make vollkornbrot, 100% whole grain rye bread. I love those dark, dense middle and eastern European breads. We had the opportunity to head home with a whole wheat and a rye starter but I think the cold in the house has kept them from doing what they are supposed to do. I’m going to give them a stir today and try to feed them tomorrow. Reinhart was mostly as I imagined. I bought his Sacramental Magic in a Small Town Cafe book back in college and was greatly inspired by the work Reinhart and his wife Susan were doing. Along with Edward Espe Brown’s Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, I was inspired to cook for others. I’ve always liked cooking, the space it offers for meditation. It really is difficult to be distracted with minutiae when you have a knife in your hand dicing peppers for hours at a time or even the seemingly tedious act of babysitting something that needs to be stirred continually until finished. I, not so secretly, love those things and do my best deep thinking doing prep work and handwashing dishes. Both books are infinitely worth the price of admission if you are at all interested in the deeper meaning of work in the culinary industry. They are both, in essence, about really feeding people in a way that soothes physical as well as spiritual hunger. As one is Eastern Orthodox and one is Buddhist, I don’t think you need to subscribe to a particular theology (or theology at all necessarily) to gain from their philosophies.
In that vein, I am cooking dinner for 6 people who bought a North African feast dinner I donated to the silent auction at our UU church. I haven’t met any of them yet, so it should be an interesting evening and, I am hopeful, an opportunity to make some new friends. My mom will also be here this week so I may get thrown out of my own kitchen (happily) a little bit. I am hoping to entice her to make chicken and dumplings before she goes. I have tried and tried to make them like she does and they just aren’t as good. But, I suppose that is the order of things.
If you are interested in having your very own Swedish night at home, here is our menu and recipes from class. The Danish class was very similar to the one I posted during culinary school. Just do a search in the handy box above for Denmark.
A Swedish Menu
Pickled Cucumbers
Janson’s Temptation
Äppel Fläsk
Köttbullar
Cardamom Coffee Cake
Pickled Cucumbers
½ cup white wine vinegar
2 tablespoons water
¼ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon white pepper
3 tablespoons sugar
3 tablespoons minced dill or parsley
2 medium cucumbers (or one English cucumber)
Combine all the ingredients, except the cucumbers. Wash and dry the cucumbers but do not peel them (it’s therefore important to try to buy unwaxed cucumbers, if possible. The English ones in plastic wrap are nice for this). Slice the cucumbers as thinly as possible – they should almost be transparent. A mandolin or other type of slicer can be helpful for this step. Place the very skinny cuke slices in a non-reactive dish, glass is best, and pour the dressing over and refrigerate for at least three hours before serving. It is traditional to serve the pickles in the dressing but they are a little more refined drained. Also, a safety note: these are not preserved and will only keep a few days in the fridge, but as a new batch is easily made and there are rarely leftovers, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Janson’s Temptation
Serves 4-6
This is not an everyday dish, but something for the smörgåsbord or a holiday meal.
6 medium baking potatoes
10 anchovies in brine
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
2-4 tablespoons butter
generous 1 cup of heavy cream
Preheat the oven to 325°F and lightly butter a 8 x 8” baking dish, preferably something attractive enough to go to the table. Peel the potatoes and cut into thin strips, similar as to how you would cut them up for fries. Soak the potato strips in cold water for about 30 minutes to help remove some of the starch. This will make the potatoes crispier. Meanwhile, cut the anchovies in half and reserve the brine. Fry the onions gently in half the butter until golden brown.
Drain the potatoes and dry with paper towels or a clean dish towel. Layer the potatoes with the anchovies and onions, beginning and ending with the potatoes. Pour over half the cream over and dot with the remaining butter. Drizzle over about 4 tablespoons of the anchovy brine. Bake for 25 minutes. Pour over the remaining cream and the remaining anchovy brine up to a tablespoon, then bake for another 20 minutes. This is traditionally served with ice cold beer to cut some of the richness.
Äppel Fläsk
Smoked bacon with onions and apple rings
Serves 4
2 to 4 tablespoons butter
1 pound Canadian bacon
2 large red, tart cooking apples, unpeeled, cored and cut into ½” rings
2 large onions, thinly sliced
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
In a heavy, preferably cast-iron, 10 or 12” skillet, melt a tablespoon of butter and fry the bacon until lightly browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside on paper towels to drain. Sauté the onions in the butter remaining in the pan until soft and translucent. Add the apple rings to the pan and cover. Simmer over a low heat for 5 to 10 minutes, shaking the pan at intervals to prevent the apples from sticking.
When the apple rings are sufficiently cooked (they should offer little to no resistance when pierced with the tip of a sharp knife), return the drained bacon to the skillet. Cover the pan and simmer an additional three to five minutes to warm the bacon through. Grind pepper liberally over the contents of the pan and serve immediately. Traditionally this dish is served right from the pan, so a cast iron pan is especially nice. This is a great lunch dish or an easy weeknight supper with a crisp green salad.
Köttbullar
Swedish Meatballs
Serves 4-6
There are as many recipes for meatballs as there are cooks so feel free to improvise as you feel. Make them small for a starter or buffet and larger if for an entrée.
2 tablespoons butter
¼ cup onion, finely chopped
½ to 2/3 cup fine dry breadcrumbs
1/3 cup light cream or half and half
¾ pound ground beef (round steak is a good choice)
¼ pound veal
¼ pound ground lean pork
2 teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
1/8 teaspoon cloves
1/3 cup butter
¼ cup boiling water
Heat the 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan large enough to later cook the meatballs in (it’s nicer not to half to wash all the pans). When the butter has melted and the foam has subsided, add the onion and sauté until soft and golden. Meanwhile, soak the breadcrumbs in the cream. Combine the onion, breadcrumbs and cream, meats, salt, pepper and cloves and blend thoroughly but with a light hand. Overworking the meat mixture will result in tough meatballs with an unpleasant chew to them. Shape the mixture into small, evenly-sized meatballs, wetting your hands as necessary to prevent the meat mixture from sticking (ladies and gents, I also recommend taking off your rings for this as well). Heat the remaining butter and again wait for the foam to subside. Add the meatballs and sauté until browned on all sides, shaking the pan to turn the meatballs and keep them from sticking. When they are well browned, add the boiling water and simmer over the lowest possible heat for five minutes. This helps to insure that the meatballs cook all the way through. If serving as an entrée, make a cream gravy in which to serve the meatballs, otherwise set them out with toothpicks for a buffet.
Swedish Cardamom Coffee Cake
1 ¼ cups milk
1 package (scant tablespoon) dry yeast
¼ cup lukewarm water
¾ cup sugar
6 ¼ cups sifted flour
½ cup room temperature butter
¼ teaspoon salt
3 egg yolks
2 to 3 teaspoons ground cardamom
For the topping:
2 teaspoons cinnamon
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ cup chopped nuts
Milk
Put the milk in a small saucepan and heat it just until small bubbles appear around the edge of the pan (this is called scalding the milk). Remove from the heat and allow to cool to lukewarm. Dissolve the yeast in ¼ cup of lukewarm water and allow to proof for five minutes or until bubbly. Add the cooled milk with 1 tablespoon of the sugar. Beat in 3 cups of the flour. Cover and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until double in bulk or about 1 to 1 ½ hours. After the rise, add the butter, remaining sugar, salt, egg yolks, cardamom and 3 cups of flour. Reserve the ¼ cup of flour for kneading the dough.
Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead with floured hands until smooth and elastic. Place in a buttered bowl and turn to butter all sides of the dough. Cover and allow to rise until doubled in bulk, again about an hour to an hour and a half. Divide the dough in half to make two cakes. Divide each half into 3 equal portions and roll each of those portions into 16” long snakes. Pinch the three strips together and braid then pinch the braided end together. Place cakes on an ungreased baking sheet. Let the cakes rise until doubled in bulk or about 45 minutes. Set the oven to 375°F about 20 minutes before the braids finish their rise and make the topping. Combine the cinnamon, sugar and chopped nuts and set aside. Brush the braids with milk, gently, and sprinkle over the topping. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. Allow to cool completely and serve with milky coffee.
I am sitting here on my couch (love, love wireless) and watching The Martha kit out a craft armoire. As if. My house is the size of a perfectly cozy postage stamp. I have a craft gift bag shoved in a closet near the sewing machine about which Keifel likes to remind me that I never use. Be that as it may, I am pondering how it got to be 3:30 on a January day when just yesterday I was busting my behind trying to get all my orders done for Thanksgiving and then Christmas.
I have been insanely busy but happily so. Classes are about to ramp up in Murfreesboro and then the following week here in town. I have a day job lined up in February and work on a new project that I am really excited about and will let you know about here when it is ready to go out in public.
Many people find January depressing because the fields are long brown and spring seems a long way off, but I love the winter (though I am not crazy about the cold feet my new house offers). It is an excuse for long cooked things when you don’t care that the oven has been on all day heating up the house. I love wintery salads with bitter greens and oranges and the exotic fruit that shows up in the market. Blood oranges, meyer lemons and other unique citrus fruits are in their brief seasons. It’s a good time to plot summer gardens and projects for the year. It’s also a good time for lighter fare after the excesses of the holidays.
Admittedly the holidays don’t have to be excessive, they can just be nice. Here’s a photo retrospective of some of what I got up to for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Boxing Day.
A big little turkey, some pumpkins and leaves packed for a trip
A non-traditional Thanksgiving dinner with a pork with mole, pablano corn pudding and avocado salad
Christmas cookies getting ready to go to Keifel’s work
A winter wonderland birthday cake for CSG’s work buddies and my first use of edible glitter
Boxing Day spread
Boxing Day dessert spread
Best Wishes to everyone, whichever winter holiday you are celebrating. I say celebrate them all : ) Have a wonderful long weekend with nearest and dearest and eat fabulous food and drink fancy drinks (but not too much). Love love.
Foodieporn will be back next week with pics of what I’ve been up to.
I haven’t actually eaten a sandwich today, but I have been pondering this concept for two or three days now. Why is it that if I slap together a sandwich it tastes pretty good (I can make a killer sandwich), but if someone else throws down some white bread with PB&J it is undeniably better. I don’t want to tweely suggest that it is made better with love or something like that. Plus I’d like to think I put some love and attention into my own sandwiches. I would like to know if this is true for everyone. I do wonder if it is more true for people who cook professionally or who usually do all of the cooking where they live. It then might taste better simply because you didn’t have to make it to eat it. That makes sense to me.
Not that these are terribly deep thoughts, but I am feeling more philosophical with Keifel out of the country. It always makes me nervous even though he does have his green card now and it shouldn’t be a problem. I worry anyway. And when I worry actively on one thing it tends to leak all over everything else. And it gives me migraines. Dammit.
I have often bemoaned the fact that I sometimes feel like my brain isn’t being used for the greater good (I have bemoaned this here in previous posts which you may have skipped for the high pitched whine they emitted). Not that feeding people isn’t sometimes complicated and it is almost always noble on some level. It’s just that well… should I have used my intellect for rocket science or cancer research or a cure for spinal cord injuries? I spent all this time being a humanities major and writing about my own “pain” as a poet. Talk about some cringe-worthy reading. You’ll have to trust me on this one. Then I worried about being what I thought I was supposed to be, because I’d received this great free education and blah, blah, blah. Maybe I just can’t be satisfied with whatever it is I am currently doing. Maybe that is a good thing and avoids stagnating at a phase. I am not equating doing this thing, here, now with futility, just suggesting that maybe constantly having true contentment just out of reach is a good thing. Of course, being content in my relationship and in myself aside from work-type issues may be the reason I have the luxury to be philosophical about the work-type issues in the first place. Okay, I’m done staring at my own belly button. Want to see the cake I made for a friend of Keifel’s at work for a Thanksgiving birthday?
Hey, look! It’s a… fat unicorn on a Ferrari logo.
Having previously worked in the chaos that is television, I know that I don’t like to be the center of that particular spotlight. However, that does not mean that I don’t like a pat on the back now and then. I had the great fortune of asking a question at the right time and a great thing came of it. I saw that a certain food writer and culinary celebrity was going to be in our berg for an event and emailed to ask if he would come speak with our culinary arts students at the community college. He said yes and came on Thursday this week. He spoke for about 45 minutes about his training and writing and what is important to all chefs, cooks and people who eat. He then answered student questions for about 45 minutes. They asked great questions and he took all their questions seriously and gave thought provoking answers that I think made a positive impression and reinforced what we are trying to do as instructors. He stayed a little while after that for pictures and book signing. (Yes, I did get my picture made with him). It just goes to show it never hurts to ask.
Also, this week, due to Keifel’s pimping of my culinary talents, I am baking some festive goodies for peeps from his office and the Apple store. I decided to do my shopping at the new Whole Foods because part of the selling point of the desserts was that they were all natural and mostly organic. The butter, flour and sugar were all cheaper than the stuff I had been buying at our regular grocery store (which I still like a lot but, you know, it’s hard to compete with a place with a coffee bar and whole fish on ice). So after my cavalcade of shopping (yes, it was just me, but it seemed a sufficiently grand word for the occasion) I am making pie crusts and ginger cookies tomorrow and all the stuff that won’t keep as well Monday night for Tuesday delivery. My house will smell, to borrow a phrase from Nigella, of nutmeg-y goodness far into next week.
Zombies and Mummies and Ghosts, Oh My!
I spent the better part of the weekend putting together three small cakes for a friend for Halloween gifts. Having completed them late last night, but with time to spare to watch Nigella Express from the DVR (my previous opinion is solidified) and put together my recipes for my class tonight, I find I am fairly pleased with my first effort with fondant. Admittedly I have a long way to go. But as pastry and cakes is not my specialty area, I don’t know that there will be loads of additional practice.
Of the three cakes, one is orange with orange buttercream, one is spice with maple buttercream and one is chocolate with ganache. The orange and spice are covered with white chocolate fondant (purchased) and the chocolate is covered with dark chocolate fondant. The fondant itself is not terribly “all natural” though it is at least made with couverture chocolate and not “chocolate flavored.” Which is good, as it was bloody expensive. I made the cakes and buttercream from scratch. I forgot how time consuming making real buttercream is but it tastes really good and buttery where as, I am certain, if I had made the decorator’s buttercream suggested to me where I bought the fondant, my cake would taste like plastic nastiness. I know that “buttercream” made with shortening and powdered sugar is easier to work with but, yuck, it tastes like shortening with powdered sugar in it. Though I wanted them to be spooky and beautiful, I wanted them to taste good as well.
I was a little disappointed with the chocolate and orange cakes. They both had issues in the recipe & method which I recognized but trusted the cookbook writer. I know better. I think we would all like to believe all cookbook recipes are tested and retested, but they are not. Typos can also creep in that significantly change the equation, especially when baking. The chocolate one-bowl cake from The Martha’s baking book had too much water and it rose very fast and cratered in the center. Easily leveled when I torted the cakes, but still annoying. The orange cake was from a British cookbook collection that generally has been very good, but the method was completely wrong and even realizing that, I followed it anyway and the center of the cake had more butter than the edges and when I torted it there were hard spots in the center that were just butter, I think. It also tasted a little doughy from the trimmings. I tried to console myself with the fact that I really don’t like orange flavored anything and moved on. The spice cake was perfect, looked perfect, tasted perfect and had enough leftover to make a few cupcakes along side.
Overall, I think this one is my favorite. Simple. A little spooky and, well, chocolate.
I hope everyone has a Happy Halloween with the desired balance of tricks and treats.
*edited for retouched photos (tech guy)
My bad habits aside, I did watch the premiere episode of Nigella’s new show. I wasn’t disappointed but I wasn’t overwhelmed either.
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I was pulling for Casey to win the Top Chef finale, because I wanted to see a woman win the money and the title and the bragging rights. After she choked on the final challenge and having seen Dale’s amazing looking dishes and hearing his wherefore and why he had applied to be on the show, I really wanted him to win. I was rooting for the “big gay chef” (to borrow his own words).
I have often said that the real downside of this program is that we can’t actually taste the food and we only see the dynamics of how they interact through the “vision” of editing. Though Hung came across as, frankly, an inconsiderate shit, it was clear from the beginning that he had skills and though I didn’t agree that we never saw his personality in his food, I thought he lacked some of the fire of some of the other contestants. Though he was my last choice of the final three, it is equally nice to see him win as compared to another “white guy” chef. I started to say hetero, but I honestly don’t know about Ilan, or Harold for that matter. Looking at my students they are not overwhelmingly men, or overwhelmingly white. When I worked at Hotel Chi Chi, white males were definitely in the minority even in the F&B-side management. But still, the majority of chefs we see that are recognizable to, for lack of a better term, non-culinary professionals seem to be mostly white males (the Food Network stable of women cooks, I think, isn’t the same as chefs).
I don’t lose sleep over this, but I think Top Chef tends to throw it into relief by the numbers being roughly even at the beginning and 1 in 4 toward the end. I don’t think it’s a sign that women aren’t as good as chefs, I think the amazing women currently working in the industry is proof enough of that. I don’t even think that it goes to some outdated notion that women aren’t as competitive as men. I don’t honestly know what I think it means, but it’s intriguing and a little worrying for some reason. Worrying mostly because I think shows like this, that appeal to amateurs and professionals alike, may have an impact on perceptions about the industry and about the people in it and I don’t think the women come across as well if in all three seasons the final four has been one woman and three guys (gay or straight).
I am hopeful there will be a season four, and no I am absolutely not interested, that isn’t remotely something in which I want to participate. I’ll be rallying for a competent woman to kick some cheffy ass. And, I do hope they bring back Padma. Whatever the internet buzz on her on-set shenanigans or lack of talent, I think she’s interesting, she seems to have a palate, can cook in her own right, and she is drop dead gorgeous. I also hope we will get to see more of Ted Allen next time (as Queer Eye is ending) and Anthony Bourdain should be on at least every other week. His comments always steal the show.
All in all, despite me burnout on reality TV, I think Top Chef is the best of a mostly bad bunch, but I would still rather see some solidly written dramas, comedies, documentaries, whatever, slide into the time slots of these shows as a whole. I doubt that is going to happen any time soon as they are so much cheaper to produce than something with a decent script and some competent actors.