Bella

It truly is lame. I record it, then come here to see if any of the five segments stood out as interesting. I think for the last episode, I FF'd so much of the show that I only watched about 10 minutes, total.

I've quit watching this season. Nigel should have a 4-episode mini-competition just for tappers. I'd watch that, and we wouldn't have this nonsense of trying to integrate them into a larger, more diverse group.

Whenever I have to do a working lunch for one of my clients, they order from Potbelly's - great salads!

I thought she opened Pig and Khao over a year ago, though. DH and I thought about going there on our last trip to NYC and opted not to because it wasn't getting great reviews.

Quiznos sales plunging article. The outlet I see most often is nextdoor to a semi-upscale (does that make sense?) steak and seafood restaurant that is enormously popular. The restaurant was there before Quiznos, and I thought it was a stupid place for a sandwich shop. If the restaurant is too crowded, people aren't going to say "a 45-minute wait to be seated? Let's skip waiting in the bar area and have a sub instead!" IOW, they're not going to get spillover, and they're not going to be a destination. Some of these franchises evidently expand for the sake of expansion, and it comes back to bite them.

I just looked online and Qdoba is much bigger than I thought - 600 outlets in the US and Canada. Yet when I try to find locations on the website, it won't tell me anything except the closest ones. Weird. Anyway, yes, it's good and you should try it.

There's a chain that right now just operates in the Washington, DC area - it has 18 outlets all in DC, Maryland, and Virginia - called Qdoba. Great Mexican food, I love it! It's sort of like Chipotle's, but the ingredients seem fresher. I hope they do well enough to expand further and make tons of money for the people who had the concept.

I don't know how these things happen. I just unlocked it. If you ever see that it's locked again, let me know and I'll ask the site admin how/why that keeps happening.

Cinnabon is like crack to me. OMG, that smell drives me nuts. I make a "Cinnabon" ice cream, which is my regular cinnamon ice cream with melted butter added.

No description.

Another "not a monster" challenge. They listened to us!!!

Two episodes in, I don't think we're getting sufficient traffic to warrant separate episode threads. So let's use this thread for episode discussions.

Oh, dear. Opening a restaurant is expensive and risky enough. Not figuring out before opening night how you're going to be able to serve your meat the way you want it is a huge mistake.

So ... I picked up some ravioli filled with gorgonzola and fig. I'm thinking of a brown butter sauce to go with it; the package just says to serve it with "your favorite sauce or butter." Any other ideas?

I think the male-female age difference might have been viewed differently in previous eras. One of my 6-or-more-times great grandfathers ran off at age 21 with a woman who was 28. They went on to have 6 children. The interesting thing is that we believe, but have thus far not been able to prove, that this was a case of a privileged young man from the South falling in love with one of his family's slaves and running away with her to one of the Northern states that did not recognize slavery. The details of the story fit that scenario, but we don't know anything about the 6-or-more-times great grandmother other than her age and her first name - Celeste. I've occasionally wondered, if the situation was as we believe, whether Celeste loved her husband or just saw an opportunity for freedom, and whether that even mattered. She had six children with him and didn't murder him in his sleep, so he was obviously someone she trusted.

We went out and had Italian last night. I ordered linguine with clam sauce, DH had the special (some kind of fish, side of linguine), and we shared a wonderfully dense dark chocolate mousse. If I could only have one dessert for the rest of my life, that would be it.

But he's not going to be on the show proper this season. He's going to be doing "Last Chance Kitchen" play-back-in coaching, which I believe is going to be on the web only. It's in the media thread.

Vaughn is what we call "an eggshell person." You can't win with them.

Excellent article - thanks for bringing us the link.

I talk to my clothing every day, doesn't everyone?

I'm actually surprised we don't hear about this kind of thing more often - not sloppy drunk, but a bit over the limit. It's still wrong, it just seems like a potential occupational hazard.

Given that I spent all of Monday morning listening to a presentation about the details of NASA's FY14 and likely FY 15 budgets, I have to go all wonkiness on this. The White House likely would not put up the money for this because of the way budgeting works; there is seldom that kind of discretionary spending allowed. (There's a whole, whole, whole lot less discretionary spending in government than most people think.) However, the private foundation that stemmed from the First Lady's obesity initiative might have put up the money for the lunch lady episode. Sorry to nitpick - you're fundamentally right, but the details are probably different. [/wonk]

Is anyone ready for Food Network snark that's not about Lenny? ::holds hands over ears because the applause is so loud:: This is not about FNS directly, but it relates to many discussions we've had about how this show serves as an example of the network's overall decline. In fact, I believe that any one of the posters here could have written the second question down, and probably the response as well.