Hello. Today, in addition to the Daily Fluff, we have . . . er . . . nothing. I'm sorry. My bad. I meant to have begun a regular review of Top Chef: Masters today, but unfortunately, work intervened, and it will have to wait until later this week, when I can catch up on last night's episode. Having seen the first episode, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about this show, since it features high-profile chefs in Top Chef challenges--a neat way to mix up competition from the now-played-out Iron Chef format.
Speaking of Iron Chefs, I recently finished reading Heat, which spends a great deal of time following the career of Mario Batali, with the author working in the Babbo kitchen, then going to Italy to learn pasta and butchering. (Quick review: As food-oriented books go, it's pretty interesting, and the writing is very good. However, if you're not completely passionate about food, it gets a little tiresome to watch someone meditate on it at such length, and you may run out of patience by the time you get to the Dante-quoting Tuscan butcher.)
Anyway, Heat opens with the author hosting a dinner party in his home, to which he has invited Mario Batali. His wife asks him something along the lines of, "How could you invite a famous chef to our house for dinner?" And I found myself agreeing with her to some extent. Imagine that you've invited a world-famous chef to dinner this week. What on earth would you cook? Going by the account in Heat, Batali is a fantastic guest, who arrives bearing armloads of alcohol and gourmet treats, helps clean and cook, dispensing tips along the way, and gets everyone drunk and invites you to share the Commissioner's box at the Giants game the next day. But even in light of that, I'm not sure if it's worth the trade-off of having to prepare dinner in front of a world-class chef. I don't have a go-to dinner that I could confidently fall back on, and I know better than to try to do something daring and new in this situation. I suppose I would go with the, "my ethnic grandmother handed this adobo recipe down to me," route--on the theory that if it isn't good, you can still get points for authenticity if you fail on taste. (Because under the circumstances, I don't know if sending out for Dominos in the case of total disaster is an option either.)
RSS Feed
