Chef Mojo

Gone Fishin'

In case you haven't noticed, I'm not posting these days. I've decided to give it a rest for awhile, because, quite frankly, the news just sort of speaks for itself.

Garrison Keillor Is An Ass

From the Chicago Tribune

A day to remember
Garrison Keillor
January 21, 2009
One simply wanted to be present. Freezing cold or not, a crowd of 2 million, whatever—solemn warnings about tight security, long lines, traffic jams, cell phones not working. In the end, one wanted to be there on the Mall before the Capitol on Tuesday at noon amid the jubilant throng and see the man take the oath of office—our first genuine author-president.

(Emphasis mine)

Hold on there, cowboy. Not by a long shot.

Hey moron, let's try Thomas Jefferson, to begin with. 1782. Notes On The State Of Virginia, one of the great observational histories written up to that time. Sounds like an author to me.

Or, how about Theodore Roosevelt? He managed to publish The Naval War of 1812 upon his graduation from Harvard in 1880. Of course, Harvard wasn't dumbed down then like it is now. He wrote it as an undergrad. It's still the definitive book on the subject. Yeah. He was an author.

Woodrow Wilson. Congressional Government and Constitutional Government. And numerous other books. Yep. You guessed it. Author.

Kennedy's Profiles In Courage doesn't count. He didn't write it.

Those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. 

Garrison Keillor is a bloviating fool, skating on the ever thinning ice of past, questionable talent. He wouldn't know real authorship if it crawled up his ass sideways.

I mean, really. Obama's pieces of masturbatory fluff are going to stand up to serious histories and analytics from people far more talented and intelligent than he could ever dream of being?

(Via Ace)

Classy

Hey, I just want to take a moment to send a shout out to the asshat schmuck that knocked the driver's side mirror off The Lady's ride this morning.

This is the third time this has happened to us in the last  five years, and it's getting old.

So whoever did this? Karma's a bitch...

UPDATE:

Well, I take it all back. It turns out that when The Lady got in the car, she spotted a note down low under the windshield wiper, with name, number and offer to pay for the damage. Given the make of the car, it was not possible to see the note from the outside.

I gotta say, this really makes me feel less pessimistic about humanity in general.

Accidents will happen, and an accident is just an accident. Owning up to it like this is a good thing and a sign of good character. The title of this post was meant to be snarky, of course. But now, we can go with the literal meaning.

To the person who did this, thanks for doing the classy thing.

It Puts The Lotion In The Basket...

Yeah. That's the kind of day I'm having.

I'm Proud Of Myself, Dammit.

I managed to go a whole 36 hours without once posting on what a lying, cheating, rat bastard, shit-heel sonofabitch John Edwards is.

See? I knew I could do Chef Mojo without injecting politics into the equation!

Huzzah!

Dining Tip For The Ladies

And this goes for some of you gentleman, as well.

When you are seated at your table, and the waiter hands you a menu and takes your drink order, instead of breaking into non-stop conversation for the next half hour and giving resentful looks at the waiter as she tries to take your order time after time, try this.

Be quiet, sip your iced tea, read the menu, make your selection and order your damn meal.

Then start talking.

See? Everybody wins. Waiter gets the order and gives it to the kitchen. Kitchen does the meal, sends it out to the table. People at the table are babbling merrily away as the meal is placed before them. Everyone is happy.

Try it sometime.

Background Noise

I make my living purchasing ingredients, preparing and cooking them and selling the finished product to my customers. It's a simple procedure in concept. Hell, it's pretty simple in reality if you know what you're doing. Simple, however, can mean long hours in a hot, noisy and chaotic environment where professional cooking is concerned.

I have a tendency to pull a bubble up around myself at work in the kitchen in order to shut out the chaos around me. It allows me to zone in and concentrate at the job at hand. Food is my joy and I treat it with respect because I know that what is placed in front of the customer is an extension of myself.

I work clean and efficiently. My hands can seem like a blur of shimmering steel at times or slow and meticulous at other times. It's all the same to me; years of practice and repetition have given me a set of skills and a degree of confidence in the practice of my craft that allows me to go out to a table knowing that there is a high probability that the table has really enjoyed their meal.

I follow the rules as best as I can, which can be rather difficult as the rules constantly change and the enforcement of those rules is arbitrary at best and vindictive at worse. There is a nerve jangling tension between my craft and the bureaucracy that hangs over my head. Sometimes the health codes are an ass, but in the end I approach it from the point of view that common sense rules over everything. The health department gets pushed out into the background noise and I move on to the next task. I must be doing ok; I've managed not to kill anyone in 22 years of professional cooking.

Simple. Purchase quality ingredients and take good care of them. Prepare and cook those ingredients in a clean environment and in an efficient manner. Do that in such a way and with such skill that the customer won't bat an eye at shelling out 32 bucks for a pair of crab cakes.

But simple has been morphing to complicated with each passing year in this business. When I come out from inside my bubble, I'm assaulted by a cacophonous world that insists that it just can't be so simple.

Cooking is no longer cooking. It is a storm of competing philosophies roaring up against my craft, staggering me with it's force. Politics, environment, morality and just plain silliness scream in my face like a gale.

Buy local. Use organics. Fear the latest outbreak of salmonella or e.coli. Don't use corn based products, but - oh noes! - there's not enough corn now to feed the masses because we're turning it into ethanol. We're running out of food. How can you serve that to rich people when poor people are starving. Or getting fat. Which is it? Do you know what the carbon footprint is on that Australian wagyu beef raised by Greg Norman? Greg Norman raises beef? I thought he made wine. Hell, I thought he was a golfer.

That food is making you fat. Clogging your arteries. Raising your blood pressure. It's got salt. It's got refined sugar. It's making you hyper. Jeebus, don't give junior that candy bar! He'll be bouncing off the walls! Your meal is making you feel depressed. Guilty. Infantile. You're being a pig.

Alcohol is killing you. Alcohol can extend your life. Chef, I can't have brandy in my sauce because I'm in AA and even though the alcohol is cooked out it's the principle of it and all.

Animals are people too! But it's ok if they're not factory raised, injected with hormones, fed corn, fill the rivers with shit and are just generally miserable. You've got to let them be happy before you kill them. Y'know? Like pets you can eat. Nevermind. Meat is death.

Agribusiness is killing us by feeding the world. We're using too much fuel to transport the food, to manufacture it. It's evil because it's corporate. Better to return to our roots. Back to a time that was more simple; when we lived on the edge of starvation but everything was bucolic and unicorns roamed the earth under the benevolent eye of Gaia.

And into all this noise wades the chef. Sometimes - often, actually - chefs become the noise, embracing the culture and notoriety of their craft, taking it to absurd limits, becoming the gatekeepers of culinary reality. They are everywhere and nowhere. They impart wisdom and common sense on the one hand, and with the other, hack each other to bloody chunks in rude arenas of foolish faux-gladiatorial spectacle. The practitioners of a craft should not lose themselves in arrogance and rudeness. After all, it's not rocket science. By the same token, it's not mortal combat, either, though sometimes it feels that way.

It should be enough to just cook food and to pass on what should be a simple thing not fraught with fear and angst. It should be enough to enjoy the meal of your choosing without the background noise invading your senses. It should be enough to be content after that meal, smiling at the memory of taste. It should be enough for the experience of eating to be both private and social; a matter of taste in more ways than one. It should be enough, but it isn't, with increasing frequency. Arrogance eminates from the kitchen and rudeness from the floor set off by boorishness from the customer. Or the other way around. Take your pick.

Frankly, it gets harder to be simple with each passing year in this business. As I often say, "Goddammit! Why can't everyone just leave me the f^*k alone and let me cook!"

So, as I head out the door today towards another service, I'll leave you with this thought.

The Smiths - of course that's not their real name - are coming to dinner tonight. They are a wonderful, sweet elderly couple, and they come to the Inn every Saturday evening, usually without fail, at 7:30 on the dot. They always sit at table 5 near the window. She has sweet tea and he has unsweetened; he's diabetic. They are always gracious and appreciative of what I do for them. I always visit they're table and talk about just about everything under the sun. They tip well. Mrs. Smith always gives me a hug as they're leaving, and she always says, "Sweetie, you take care, hear? Have a good week."

It's the Smiths of the world that keep me doing what I do. Or the gay couple from DC last night, looking for a quick getaway from the city and buying the cheapest room and being utterly blown away by their dinner. Standing at their table sharing my craft and trading stories of our favorite DC haunts. The world is suspended at times like this, and the background noise becomes blessed silence as I commune with my diners and they with me.

You take care, hear? Have a good week.

(Cross posted at Daily Pundit as a Weekend Cooking Thread)

While preachers preach of evil fates...

I'm hoping something good comes of Live Earth, Al Gore's global revival meeting concert extravaganza.

If it turns out that this is the fitful twitching of the '60s before it shuffles off this mortal coil into the vale of complete irrelevancy, then it will have done a great service.

While cruising the blogosphere this morning (Interesting aside: My automatic spellcheck in Firefox just flagged "blogosphere." Ok. Added to the dictionary...), I'm finding lots of amusing stuff about Live Earth, including one piece in which Reverend Al invokes the prophet Bob:

The Live Earth concerts, which start this Saturday, July 7, are also one last chance for Baby Boomers to relive the “flower power” activism of the ’60s. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, former Vice President Al Gore invoked music icon Bob Dylan to promote the importance of these concerts. Citing Dylan’s ‘60 anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Gore rambled: “What’s the old Bob Dylan line? ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows’ - what’s the rest of it? - ‘for the times they are a-changin’.”

But there’s just one problem with invoking Dylan to hype the global warming scare. And that is that Dylan himself has expressed skepticism — to the same magazine — to the notion that global warming is a catastrophe. When he was asked by Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner in the magazine’s 40th anniversary issue if he worried about global warming, Dylan replied with an unexpected rejoinder. He asked Wenner, “Where’s the global warming? It’s freezing here.” Wenner, who has blanketed Rolling Stone and his other magazine Men’s Journal with doom-and gloom climate change stories (that often bash CEI), quickly moved on to other topics after he received his comeuppance.

Yet Dylan’s latest statement may signal that in the global warming debate, the times are changing. Even independent-minded celebrities are now questioning the establishment media orthodoxy that the debate over global warming and its effects are all but over. In a phrase familiar to those who study pop culture, it appears that the global warming scare may have “jumped the shark.”

(emphasis mine)

I love Dylan. Dylan can say stuff like that, and Jann Wenner, grinding his teeth, has to print it because it's Bob Dylan. Bob is a walking, living, breathing hypocrisy barometer. Needless to say, Bob is not hanging out with Reverend Al today.

Here's hoping that this is the high water mark of Reverend Al's Apocalyse Now. Half filled arenas and stadiums featuring musicians, actors and politicians howling out in mass hysteria the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Tulip Bubble of 1637. But this isn't an economic phenomenon so much as an attempt to create a religion with all its attendant dogma out of whole cloth, slyly co-opting junk science and false reason to achieve it's aims.

Well, Al, let's throw a little Bob back to you, shall we?

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

That's one thing from the 60's that'll never lose relevancy...

(via Malkin and cross posted at Daily Pundit)

The Episcopal Church Is Really Weird...

Via NRO comes this vexing little article about a woman priest of the Episcopal Church who proclaims that she is both Christian and Muslim.

Shortly after noon on Fridays, the Rev. Ann Holmes Redding ties on a black headscarf, preparing to pray with her Muslim group on First Hill.

On Sunday mornings, Redding puts on the white collar of an Episcopal priest.

She does both, she says, because she's Christian and Muslim.

Redding, who until recently was director of faith formation at St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral, has been a priest for more than 20 years. Now she's ready to tell people that, for the last 15 months, she's also been a Muslim — drawn to the faith after an introduction to Islamic prayers left her profoundly moved.

Her announcement has provoked surprise and bewilderment in many, raising an obvious question: How can someone be both a Christian and a Muslim?

Well, now. Isn't that special?

The article continues, spinning a strange story that's mostly leaving everyone confused. Except the Bishop, of course:

Redding's situation is highly unusual. Officials at the national Episcopal Church headquarters said they are not aware of any other instance in which a priest has also been a believer in another faith. They said it's up to the local bishop to decide whether such a priest could continue in that role.

Redding's bishop, the Rt. Rev. Vincent Warner, says he accepts Redding as an Episcopal priest and a Muslim, and that he finds the interfaith possibilities exciting. Her announcement, first made through a story in her diocese's newspaper, hasn't caused much controversy yet, he said.

And you think the Episcopalians are confused?

Some local Muslim leaders are perplexed.

Being both Muslim and Christian — "I don't know how that works," said Hisham Farajallah, president of the Islamic Center of Washington.

But Redding has been embraced by leaders at the Al-Islam Center of Seattle, the Muslim group she prays with.

"Islam doesn't say if you're a Christian, you're not a Muslim," said programming director Ayesha Anderson. "Islam doesn't lay it out like that."

Islam doesn't say if you're a Christian, you're not a Muslim. Huh? Try telling that to Mahmoud.

Mom, I think it's time to pack your bags and catch the last train before it leaves the station. The Episcopal Church has gone from being charmingly eccentric to being flat out weird, and it's just a thin hair away from being mind bogglingly stupid.

Hell

Hell is having to go to the scary laundromat in Scottsville, and upon arriving, finding out that the AC is shot. On a day when the heat and humidity rivals Panama.

But tomorrow, The Lady and I are picking up Mom and heading to Savannah for John and Michelle's wedding, so laundry must be done.

However, since I was last there, they've installed a video game for the tykes. It's in constant demo mode and it's extremely annoying. X-Men vs. Street Fighter. Oh, how I hate it.

Hot, humid and noisy. Very noisy. One of the washers I was using sounds like a 737 on takeoff during the final spin cycle.

After an hour and a half, I left the scary laundromat wringing wet with sweat. It never felt so good walking into the apartment.