I agree with you about grilling the Polish sausage, especially after letting them stew in some beer. I made some recently and piled them high with pepperocinis, cucumber, tomato, yellow mustard. Yep, I'm a Chicagoan.

There are a lot of people on this board who can not bear to see the word "sausage" anymore because of the spirited debate that ensued from the Improv challenge. I believe that before we were done with it, we had successfully linked it to the Kennedy assassination -- both JFK and Bobby.

And because it has gone on for eons!!!!!!!

Key phrase from that blog.

"I don't know this for a fact, and Tom said a couple of other things at the judges' table that sure made it sound like they only used chorizo..."

LMAO !!! Wish I joined sooner, but certainly appreciate being a part of a very lively, cool group of people...

Haven't tried the pepperocinis, cucumber, tomato, and yellow mustard, but will this weekend...Tks...

I thought the question about whether polish sausage was used was settled when someone posted a picture of Antonia with a pan containing two kinds of sausages - three sausages are dark red (chorizo) and the other two are light brown in color(the polish sausage).

Walk awaaaaaay........

No kind hearted peeps who feel sorry for a dolt who just wants to be educated about a phrase about love and luggage?
Anyone?
Or has Jim's literary (and film) knowlege surpassed all of our's combined.....
again?

Geeze,
$30 entrees are not that uncommon, even here in Louisiana. Superior's Steakhouse, Ernest's Orleans and 1800^o at Boomtown Casino all have $30-50 entrees. $30 in NYC sounds like budget dining.
(He says, trying hard to stay above the sausage chatter )

Tks She's gone from 'helping' me cook, to being very involved - from deciding how much of this or that (especially w/ our cheesecakes, and spinach / aged parm / ricotta / cream cheese stuffed shells...tasting everything along the way ) to doing the presentations / plating. She's very creative, and I give her a lot of latitude. She said to me not long ago, as we were making tortellinis, "Daddy, all yours look the same, mine are all different" and they were Different shapes, etc. She even had a great idea of a raisin in the pork / veal filling...now that's in our cookbook...

LOL yeah I got the impression that he was one of those sexist old men. I'm guessing that once he got a look at Padma the special of the day became Linguini ala Viagra.

I thought the same thing when I saw the menu. I read somewhere that Mai House's prices are a little higher than Bao 111- Michael Huynh's original restaurant. That doesn't sound bad at all. I was told before that I spend too much money on food- my answer was, if it's food that will make me obsess about it, I will spend the money.

No Movies are shot in sequence. A football game is however. So is a Spelling bee. And so should a cooking competition.

Actually the Hair cut prank was shot in sequence but Bravo re-ordered it, and then cropped it out when they did it too sloppily the first time. Very trustworthy those Bravo folk.



edit: I added in a couple random words I made up on the spot.

Not sure but after 11 long Island Ice Tea's my friends call me Mr. Samsonite.

In the episode Hung himself clearly said that he went first.

Yeah exactly. Pretty reasonable for anything resembling upscale.

Based on Lisa's comments you would think that they were serving unicorn stir fry. And I'm sure, given Lisa's track record, the horn would end up "on the raw side".

Good thing CJ had already been auffed, bringing the hammer down on a french senior citizen would not have been good. Might even get you eliminated but I'd have to check the rules.

Thanks, WAJ!
I don't feel so bad if I am not the only one who does not get it.
Jim likes to have his little jokes, especially on me! (I am sure it is a slam, but he knows I love him anyway - he reminds me so much of my elder brother! I was always the butt of his jokes too !!!!)
He is a little too smart for his own (my? ) good and if he is one of the few who gets it, I do not mind so much!
(I don't mind laughing at myself, I just like to be in on the joke!)

I had said that "somebody had mentioned that entrees averaged $30 apiece." I just checked for my self and found the prices at Mai House to be even more reasonable as long as you stay away from some of the wines. Spike had a 5-course tasting menu at $59.

http://www.myriadrestaurantgroup.com/MHmenu3-6-08.pdf

Nah, there just isn't much to tell. The irrepressible, incorrigible Clairee (Olympia Dukakis) has done or said something to piss off the touchy Ouisa (Shirley MacLaine), and, in trying to win her back over, says, "Oh, Ouisa--I love you like my luggage."

Well FN's TNFN Star was on again and again they kept a person who lost it and walked out of judging like Amy last year! She was ready to go, but they ended up keeping her anyway! They also let this guy skate thru who insisted on poached eggs on a steak and it was raw; the judges actually wiped their tongues with their napkins, but they kept him too! Shane did well so they didn't get a chance to break him down like last week! They seem to be more concerned with the chefs point of view rather than of they can really cook! I guess they saved that one girl because she wants to bring INDIAN food to the FN! Does anyone care? lol!! Oh by the way, their LISA came thru and half won the challenge! Shocking!!

Dagnabit Jay,lets start our own reality cooking show. WAJ can be the host/judge and you and I get to be Bourdain and Gail. We will judge it right each week and if one of those phuckers gets smart with us at judges table,we can use our standard issue cattle prods to get them back in line.

So,what do ya say? Lets get this going!


What should our first QF be?

Nyah, death penalty if you fail a challenge! lol! As for Gail, I finally noticed Antonia stiffed her at JT; they didn't shake! WOW! It's 2 am here and they are replaying show with Season 1 vs Season 2! Now I get to see what a DOOFUS Ilan turned into! Spilling that MANGO was too much! A bad haircut to boot didn't help!

IF LISA IS A CHEF IM THE NEXT PRESIDENT OF THIS GREAT COUNTRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SO SORRY . . .

You'll have to wait until your 35th birthday first. And isn't tomorrow a school day? Time to go "beddy-bye!" Mummy's only going to tell you once and if you don't behave she'll send Daddy up 'n' then you'll be really sorry!


.

Simon, thank you for validating my take on this um dish... ...I'm glad I tried it(more as a get over a "fear" thing than anything else)...But as I said I'll be very content if I never eat it again..

Reminder to self...Page 78... ...Ok, somebody asked if anybody else heard one of the chef-testances' say "Here comes the hack"...Just watched the epi 13, this mornin'(it's like 4 something am)and yes one of the female chef-testances' did say that as an aside if you will...Oh yeah we're talking about Lisa...(disclaimer-I do not HATE Lisa, she's only still here for ratings...But I don't HATE her)...And Yes Lisa, could just have a rippin' great day, and win it all...I hope NOT, but it could happen...WAJ take it from here...
I'm drunk and ramblin'...

PSH

Eri you're new...The light switch is here...The key's are here...Turn out the lights, and lock up when y'all leave ok?...Thanks, and Welcome...
G'night all y'all

PSH

SHUUUSH !!!

It's 10 minutes later and PSH went to bed and left his computer running. Will someone in the neighborhood please turn it off for him. He's had a long, hard day!

.

That's incredibly ignorant of you.

Toad, I think you are taking the analogy a bit too far.

Folks didn't "qualify" for Top Chef through any regional or state competitions (Go State!). They just auditioned. They had resumes, recommendations, they auditioned on and off camera, answered questions, and got "cast" for the season.

BUT... once Episode One begins, it's all sudden death. A spectacular chef gets booted if his/her performance in that challenge is really worse than others. A mid-range or underachieving chef stays, as long as their performance isn't the worst in any particular challenge.

I say performance because it really is over-simplified to say "Worst Dish Goes." A lot of times yeah it is. More often it's more accurate to say worse chef performance leads to the door...

No idea, Kani, I know nothing of the other boards. Or those shows.

I also think it's inaccurate to believe that BRAVO is gay-friendly, gay-oriented, or LGBT-positive. I'm sure BRAVO would like to be thought of that way, but it's inaccurate. I'm sure Andy Cohen tells himself that BRAVO is LGBT-positive, but it isn't.

Not when one closely examines the images and depictions of LGBT people that BRAVO creates and markets. Nope.

Would be like Telemundo building its schedule out of very negative Carlos Mencia stereotypes.

Toad, there are only a few times when it's all about the food. When a chef is bringing reports of conflict and drama and misconduct in front of judges table, Colicchio will remind them that it's all about the food.

When it's a simple challenge and two dishes are facing off head to head, it's all about the food.

But that's still a serious oversimplification that you should pretend you never read. Just forget about it.

It's all about a chef's performance.

That reduces *almost* entirely to the food on the plate. But it includes whether a chef came up with food that's conceptually sound, that meets any mandates, that's is properly executed. It includes whether a chef, in their role on a team, properly and professionally executed that role.

Resist the urge to let others oversimplify things for you.

Whata, I am going to invite you to speak to me as someone with concrete knowledge of cooking.

Tell me in some detail what, from a chef's perspective, was right with that stir-fry, what was wrong with the stir-fry and what would have been needed to correct it. Do you know?

Pooped, I think most cooks and chefs would say yeah... that's wrong.

Most cooking allows for a great degree of variation each time, variation in ingredients, cooking temperatures, cooking times, proportions and ratios, even some variation in the method of cooking. Want to cook ribs? They can be braised, they can be grilled, they can be barbecued, they can be baked, they can be crock-potted.

The moment you mention a dough or batter going into an oven, you are in an entirely different realm of cooking. Not just pastries, anything that starts with a dough or batter and ends to baking. That's a realm where variations are deadly. You want precision in ingredients, temperatures, cooking times, proportions and ratios. You must know to not substitute ordinary flour if cake flour is needed, or must know what to do if you need graham flour and don't have any, you have to know which fats can be interchanged in which contexts, and which cannot...

So no, nobody expects a top chef or any chef to handle all courses, if you include there a dough or batter that's been baked. (Or perhaps steamed too)

Second, I'd have to disagree with you about where Pastry Chefs stand in the culinary world. They stand apart from other chefs, because it is a different profession. But they're pretty esteemed.

Pastries and desserts allow for all the same creativity and innovation and inventiveness that any other form of cooking does. And that's why there are so many competitions for Pastry Chefs. That's why Gail Simmons highlights so many Pastry Chefs in her magazine. It's all very very haute.

I suspect some people here can do crepes, or panna cotta, as Hung did in RW last season. Without any recipe to consult. I know I can do Ilan's tropical fruits in a fruit soup. But I suspect very very few people here can step into a kitchen and, without any recipes of any kind, based solely on memory and training and long experience, whip out high-end Top Chef quality pastries. I just don't see that. The Top Chefs themselves struggle to handle pastry, *most* posters here know far less of cooking than the cheftestants.

True, I'm not sure that a "corrective word" counts if it isn't said to the individual who may need some correction. Too much like Daddy Pants correcting the petulant child hours after the child has left the room. When Daddy Pants is speaking alone in an empty room.

In any case, by the time everyone arrived in Puerto Rico, it was too late to worry or comment on who does or doesn't belong there. These are the final four, deal with it. Now, these are the final three, shut up and cook.

Kristl, given our own national economic trends and the global economic trends, maybe the Big Brains @ BRAVO had better come up with some new reality shows. I'm not sure how much longer the nation's affluent service economy will endure.

Perhaps Top House Painter? Top Auto Mechanic? Top Yard Sale?

Kristl, Hung won me over when he showed he knew how to pair and cook both a geoduck and a black chicken. Which is NOT simply a chicken that is black. That was some very uncommon knowledge he drew upon, to do that, and I was sure then that Hung was going to be interesting to watch. He was, for his talent... and for his mouth in confessionals.

Some of it is, yes Jim. It's like taking some negativity that would, appropriately, be directed at Lisa for her performance, for her interactions with others... even for those facial expressions and body posture standing before judges table... And then her sexuality and physical appearance are latched onto by people to just further inflame the animosity. And yeah... the hate. Magnify the hate.

We have all seen this before and sooo many among us have done this before.

Simon... the specific reason for that as I am sure you know is that pastry and baking is precise... you cannot just throw somthing together and have it turn out ...a pinch of this and a scoop of that does not work. All recipes need to be done verbatum and many cooks (myself included have trouble with that. On the same note many pastry chefs have problems doing entree cooking for that reason also.. they cannot allow themselves to venture beyound a written recipe and so they fail to be as creative as they might be when cooking outside of the pastry world.

Well, all I can say is.... I knew about Mai House long before Spike ever auditioned for it. Folks interested in NYC restaurants and interested in the kind of cuisine served by places like Mai House.... already know about Mai House.

Pushing it a little further... I have yet to hear anyone say that watching Spike's performance makes them want to go to Mai House. Not for the first time. Not for a repeat visit. I think you might find that among many of Mai House's intended customers, having Spike perform on Top Chef has not been any kind of bonus.

I don't know if anyone has answered this yet (because I'm reading backwards from the last post to catch up), but the phrase is actually:

"I love ya more than my luggage".

It's a phrase that Olympia Dukakis used in Steel Magnolias (haven't seen the flick in a few years now). I don't remember the context exactly - she might have said it to rival Shirley MacLaine at the end of the movie (I want to say at the cemetary).

I can't believe Lisa is still in the running either. In fact, I really want to know the name of the restaurant where she ends up working after the show....because I will avoid that restaurant! No way would I ever want to eat food prepared by such a negative, objectionable chef. Bad energy!

Slightly misleading though...

Mai House is not a "restaurant" so much as an informal "dining lounge" - and what they mean by calling themselves that is that you are ordering off a menu where you select and pay separately for your appetizer, your meat or seafood, your rice or noodles, and your side dishes. So, order the seared sea scallop as your appie ($12), sweet and spicy whole red snapper ($29), perhaps plated with some shrimp fried rice ($14) and some some sauteed pea tendrils ($9). That's for an informal "dining lounge" experience. That's still inexpensive by TriBeCa standards though, and by Drew Nieporent standards.

Well, isn't that status quo for this board? Isn't it supposed to be OK to say anything as long as you put an lol behind it lol (like this). Isn't it supposed to be OK to bait people because of past grudges?

Just for the record, I admitted that I was wrong to WAJ once. I don't think I've seen the reverse though. Once he gets his "opinion" set, there's no backing away, even with photographic evidence and verbal evidence to the contrary. Undercooked shrimp becomes "raw" shrimp and it's stated as "fact" over and over again, not as opinion. Etc. etc.

But that's just the way it is on this board. Very mild compared to some boards that I know of. I'll admit that I was annoyed last week when we couldn't talk politics here during a down time. Smacked too much like TWoP for my taste.

Sorry, kidney stones make me cranky.

Nice.......

Kristl, it makes no matter... I put tpsommelier on IGNORE a while ago. It wasn't a reaction to any one message, but I looked at all the past posts and realized that, for myself, it's best to not know they're there.

Sorry TPSommelier... I urge you to put me on IGNORE as well. So you are not troubled.

I sit corrected. Again, the only one I think we've seen on the show was Marisa, who didn't do all that well--but I guess expecting a pastry chef to do well on a show that's mostly about main courses is kind of like taking a world-class sprinter and expecting hir to win Wimbledon.

LOL.....that might have been the scene. Dukakis definitely pisses MacLaine off in that scene.

I think you've nailed it, Jim. I remember when, as a kid, I saw my first whole, dead, featherless chicken in a butcher's case. With the head and feet still on, it was definitely a whole different piece of meat from the usual round blob with tiny wings and drumsticks attached.

And I think I've already posted about my beef tongue experience!

I think we also tend to remember, on seeing a whole, dead pig, that these are very intelligent animals—in a whole different intellectual class from fish, chickens, and even cows. As a result, we tend to anthropomorphize them and develop an empathy that perhaps doesn't exist with other meat sources.

Finally, if you saw Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, you know that in the first season, he raised seven turkeys for Christmas lunch and didn't have any real qualms when it came to slaughtering them. However, when in the next season he raised two pigs, he found himself developing a relationship with them and had a very tough time taking them to be turned into pork.