Food and Whining - A modest outlet for a mediocrity-weary diner.

Among the many steak house/chop house trends I've complained about in my blog is the Paul Bunyan-scale of their offerings. The steaks are enormous, portioned more appropriately for 4-legged carnivores than us upright-walkers. Steak knives apparently needed to be scaled accordingly. I have yet to see a steak knife be delivered to the table without eliciting a quiet but clear surprise. They seem more like evidence in a murder trial than a dining utensil. We are then forced to wield this serrated, comically-huge implement and pretend it feels natural. They seem a better fit for survival in a jungle than simply dividing a steak into chewable portions. Shortly after being offered this "meat saw", the waiter then asked if I'd like fresh-ground pepper. The origins and usefulness of this practice elude me; for one thing, if I do want some, why do I need to wait until he goes and gets the “Louisville Slugger”? While he/she goes to get it, the food has cooled in the mean time...

Or are they simply getting around to the inevitable and most wides-spread offense? Who's to say? Michael Ruhlman takes on the ubiquitous and offensive Chicken Ceasar. GO>

With all the fuss being made over molecular gastronomy, including whether it is even a technique or style of cooking at all, it was hard to resist dabbling in it myself. Why? Because, obviously, in my decade of cooking for friends and relatives, I've mastered all there is to know about fundamental technique, am in touch with where food comes from having harvested rice, picked apples, slaughtered all manner of livestock, poultry and fish, prepared meals from every ingredient known to mankind, and have a technique for presentation worthy of a show at the Met. Okay, none of that is true. I simply wanted to take a shortcut. While there are plenty of opinions and commentary on the web and in various blog zones regarding the molecular approach to cooking, there is remarkably little in the way of actual, technical advice and instruction; even those from whom you purchase the ingredients. All seem a bit reluctant to hand over much in the way of useful, technical info. Xantham Gum for inst...

As a six-year old, you've begun to understand a few things about the world such as gravity (you know it's there, but not why), wind (handy for various things), walking and presumably talking. Eating is mostly solo activity only requiring occasional parental intervention to open a carton or explain how the hell you eat an artichoke. (They're not really self-explanatory.) It is still a somewhat awkward process as the dexterity for knife and fork requires a bit more practice, slightly stronger (and larger) hands, and a certain tolerance for an intermediary between hand and food. Preparation of food (other than cereal) is largely a mystery usually handled by mom when you're hungry, and occasionally by grandma should you so much as look like you might be thinking about hunger. Grandmothers will usually make you something "just in case". Of all foods, ice cream is one kids understand implicitly. They know all they need to; it involves cold, sweet, summer, and occas...

I've always hated ketchup which may seem odd given its popularity. Not that I am one to hop on the popularity bandwagon, but I love everything else that surrounds ketchup - burgers, fries, and Coke. Where did this odd bias come from? My brother. For as long as I can remember, he put ketchup on everything; two pieces of bread with ketchup in the middle constituted a "sandwich". He ate ketchup on potato chips, mounds of ketchup on fries, ketchup ketchup ketchup. It didn't help that I already had a distaste for so many foods in this country being sweet; of which the worst offender of all time is "Miracle Whip." If you've ever naively mistaken it for mayonnaise, you know the palate-wrenching horror that ensues. If you haven't imagine oily cake frosting. Yeah, nasty. In essence, I had 30 years of prejudice against ketchup. I've done just fine in defiance of it, cringing should it wind up in a burger without my knowledge, but I knew that to truly ...

My first real foray into cooking was on an electric stove. Not the sleek, stealthy modern variety with a black glass surface, but rather a relic of the late 70s featuring those iconic glowing orange coils. The combination of its car-cigarette-lighter technology and analog clock (which continues to keep good time) seems so frank and honest, how could I not love this thing? Those twisting spirals looking not unlike those on a vinyl LP of the same era harkening back to a simpler time when both cooking and music reproduction were performed with flat, spiral technology. As anyone who has cooked on both gas and electric can tell you, the biggest feature missing from those vertigo-inducing coils is immediacy. They can take a minute or so (literally) to heat up and must then, in turn, heat up the pan. In short, the time from "inspiration" to "a pan hot enough to do anything with" is enough to kill the moment. Flame from a gas stove comes out around 2500 degrees (which, ...

Chez Panise stopped serving bottled water. It's good to find validation for a protest I arrived at on my own. I don't do well keeping up with the protests of others. The origins of that protest were formed based on my visit to Fiji where they serve - you guessed it - Fiji water. (Well, to the tourists anyway...) Some enterprising person thought, "Hey... this is a tropical paradise... Why don't we bottle water from here and ship it to people." Fittingly, that person was not Fijian. I can't help remembering the staggering amount of water I had flown over to get to Fiji. The plane flew for something like 12 hours, at 600 miles an hour, and all but the first 4 minutes and last 3 minutes were water. Water surrounds Fiji and, yet, they can't drink it. Fiji water gets here somehow. A pipeline is too long (though apparently more cost-effective than oil), airfreight is way too heavy, railroads... well, the rails would rust. Which leaves a ship. Ships run on oil, bu...