End of Gypsy dinners in Seattle

It was such a good time, it was bound to come to an end. Could anyone have predicted it would be an inside job, though? Today, Gypsy Dinners as we know them came to an end. Someone narked on the the associated cooking school, Culinary Communion, where most of the dinners took place, noting that it served wine to its students. This is a no-no in the Nanny state of Washington: as people paid for the class, so in effect they are paying for the wine, and the school did not have a liquor licence. So the school was fined, and threatened with random auditting. An email was sent out placing all wine and drink classes on hold until locations can be found.
To be on the safe side, Gypsy dinners were cancelled. Below is the emailed announcement:

April 10, 2008 (8 days shy of 4 years)
Camelot has ended. We wake up, we go
to work, we come home, we occasionally eat out. Most lives are fashioned after
this pattern. Most restaurant's lives are as well: make food, sell food, clean
up, go home. Sometimes, a very magical sometimes, restaurants are able to
trancend the merely ordinary and in doing so, transform to some small degree the
lives of its patrons. Gypsy has been this magical place for many many people.
New friends, new ideas, new love, a salon of creativity. But as with all things
destined to touch hearts, evil waits to take it away. We have been betrayed.
Gypsy as we know it was too scary a place to exist, so now it doesn't. We are
going much deeper underground. Those who really know how to get ahold of us,
please email (please don't call us), we will start a new list, a more protected
list. Dinners are cancelled for all intents and purposes. And to the traitor to
the clan we offer you this: May you never sleep well, may laughter sound bitter
in your ears, and may food always taste like ashes to you...this is our Gypsy
curse. You have destroyed a good thing.

Of course, they will be back, more cloak and dagger than before, and not so "wink, wink, nudge, nudge (secret dinner coming--be there)".

We got turned on to our first dinner a few years back and sat with a riot of a table. To tell you the truth, I wanted the office to supply me with a blackberry so I knew instantly when a dinner was announced--although I quickly learned that even if I could afford the dinner, I could not eat like that except once in a blue moon. One of my earlier blog entries, and certainly the most googled, regards the dinner prepared for Anthony Bourdain, where I got to eat at the rehearsal dinner. We made some great friends through the network that developed, so it is truly sad that it seems as though someone, for some disgruntled reason, told authorities all sorts of things just to ruin the party for the rest of the community.

Everyone will have to be more careful, more secretive, maybe even more selective. The inspiration and drive of Gypsy will bring it back stronger than before, but it will be different, less innocent.

Top Chef cookbook, or recipes to diminish your brand

The first article I read this morning was Betty Hallock's review of Bravo's Top Chef Cookbook. I enjoy the show as much as anyone (but not enough to watch it live--thanks, Tivo!). And I have made quite a few recipes, enough that I could strongly say that the show was never going to be Top Cookbook. Recipes were full of errors, with steps omitted, incorrect quantities of ingredients listed, or just blatantly poor instructions given.

Hallock wastes no time in butchering this downed cow of a cookbook (Michael Ruhlman, if you are reading this, please consider "Downed Cow Cookbook" for Golden Clog awards worst cookbook). She laughs at (not with) the "Top Coifs" and trivia pages, and then asks "But can you actually cook from it? Would anyone want to?" She lists the trite diagrams, advice, lists of ingredients, and further trivia, before dismissing the idea that anyone would want to prepare losing dishes, and the more gimmicky challenges.

She tries a few recipes, notably Marcel Vigneron's curried lamb kabobs, which she says were good. But the intern's attempt at a Quickfire winner Sunflower Seeds & Carrot Loaf, with Cilantro, Sesame & Squirt is "wretched", despite guest judge Suzanne Goins (one of my favorite chefs!) declaring it the winner on the show. This looks like one of the overpriced treats we give our pet bunnies, so maybe we will prepare it for them, minus the Squirt.

We tried to have a dinner club based on the Top Chef recipes. But after so many miserable attempts by some talented home cooks, we gave up. And if the recipes are dubious, then the computer printing method is heinous. Clicking the Print it button puts a single-page recipe on two pages, with the right side cut off. It is basic software programming--like the recipes, does anyone at Bravo test these things before they make them public?

Below are a few examples of recipes I tried at home.

Once I made the hot diabetic (Sam) Spicy Shrimp Ceviche with Chili Pepper Popcorn. This called for 6 oz medium uncooked shrimp to be "cooked" in a mixture of sliced red onion, 1 cup red wine vinegar, and 1/4 cup of sugar. A 1/4 cup of the mixture is placed over a salsa verde made with the juice of one lemon. This was his entry for Anger as part of Seven Deadly Sins Challenge. Ummm, it was more like envy or Sour. This was so acidic and sour that I could have used it clean the kitchen floor. There were far too few shrimp for the number of servings listed (was the wrong shrimp size listed, or the wrong quantity?)

I put it in a martini glass here, but also tried it in little Japanese bowls, where it took on a more Asian look, with the greens mounded to one side, the popcorn to another, and the shrimp and onions nestled amongst them. Either way it was barely edible.

But I did end up with a bag of popcorn. I hated popcorn until this day. Microwaved popcorn tastes nothing like stove-popped, nor does anything from the cinema, no matter how fancy they claim it to be. Since that day, we have been popping popcorn in duck fat, confit fat, bacon fat, foie gras fat, EVO, and browned butter. Duck confit fat remains our favorite though the experiments continue.

Remember Howie at the barbecue challenge? When he and his previous rival seemed to find admiration for one another over each other's meat? (sorry for the innuendo) He made a Braised Pork Shoulder with Yuca Sour Orange Mojo, that although it didn't win, somehow seemed more appealing. Reading the actual recipe, though, was less appealing and created doubt from the get go. For 6-8 servings it called for 6# pork butt, 5# yuca, 1 1/2 gallons of chicken stock, and a gallon of orange juice. I made some adjustments along the way, and the dish was OK.

Bravo and Top chef producers--get on the ball! Monitor the comments made by your readers, consult with the chefs, hire staff away from Cooks Illustrated's test kitchen to properly test your recipes, and correct the website. The goal is to keep eyeballs, not repel them.

I had high hopes for Dale's Colorado Rack of Lamb (better known as lamb in duck fat). It is pretty ingenious, yet so obvious, that I am sure a lot of talented chefs are kicking themselves over not having thought of it first, or more likely, not getting into the public domain first. The recipe looks OK, but somehow it fell short. I might try it again, but I can tell you that it certainly deterred me from some of the more adventurous recipes like Marcel's Sea Urchin & Meyer Lemon Gelee.

For being so annoying and in your face himself, Marcel's Cucumber and Radish Salad with a Citrus Yuzu Vinaigrette was surprisingly subtle and delicious. A friend would call it "precious food" but in this case the careful arrangement and attention to knife skills increased the overall flavor and appreciation. I would have made more of these for a dinner party, but didn't want to invest in those metal rings. However, Martha Stewart on her show with Ripert, said just make them out of used plastic water bottles or plastic food containers. She is so crafty as Boloud pointed out twice. BTW watch out for salt in prepared yuzu juice. It is not always listed.

It is surprising that so many people involved (chefs, producers, sponsors, et al) are letting their hard work and talent go down the drain, or into the garbage. You work hard to establish a brand, so why let it go down the tube because of a complacent editors, producers, and pissy webmasters? Take your balls back guys, rework your recipes until they are perfect, and then release them. The magic of television only works on TV, not on the taste buds.

Locavore and the bigger picture

National Retail Federation (the Voice of Retail Worldwide) in its trade magazine "Stores" has legitmized the "locavore" with the April cover story on the growing movement, calling it "a zeitgeist of 21st century retailing that describes the way an increasing number of people shop which, in turn, is impacting the way supermarkets stock their shelves."
This is the magazine that usually covers items like the effect of the current economy on affluent spending.

A more informed article, and adding several shades of gray to the matter appeared in the New Yorker by Michael Specter "Big Foot: In measuring carbon emissions, it’s easy to confuse morality and science". He turns common sense of buying local on its head when he interviews Adrian Williams, an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. "He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. 'The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,' he said. 'It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.' Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO2 to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. 'This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,' he said. 'There is no one number that works.'
Three examples are cited:

New Zealand apples v. United States or Norther European apple
The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New
Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were
raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the
U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New
Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the
energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also
helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable
sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2.
New Zealand Lamb v British lamb
Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch,
found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat
to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide
emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part,
that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most
grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States).
Air-shipped Kenyan roses v Holland roses in England
Williams and his colleagues recently completed a study that examined the
environmental costs of buying roses shipped to England from Holland and of those
exported (and sent by air) from Kenya. In each case, the team made a complete
life-cycle analysis of twelve thousand rose stems for sale in February—in which
all the variables, from seeds to store, were taken into consideration. They even
multiplied the CO2 emissions for the air-freighted Kenyan roses by a factor of
nearly three, to account for the increased effect of burning fuel at a high
altitude. Nonetheless, the carbon footprint of the roses from Holland—which are
almost always grown in a heated greenhouse—was six times the footprint of those
shipped from Kenya. Even Williams was surprised by the magnitude of the
difference. “Everyone always wants to make ethical choices about the food they
eat and the things they buy,” he told me. “And they should. It’s just that what
seems obvious often is not. And we need to make sure people understand that
before they make decisions on how they ought to live.”

Of course, if we didn't insist on tasteless giant strawberries in the dead of winter or roses in February then all of this would be moot, now wouldn't it? Buy local, buy seasonal.