marybennet

Best wishes to Shirley!

I’m so sad about this. I liked her a lot on tv—something always so fun about her hair, her clothes, her presence—and I have loved for years one of her recipes. “Wedding chicken.” My boyfriend just made it. She’s a chef who affected our table. https://www.foodnetwork.com/fnk/recipes/wedding-chicken-7151729.amp

Agree. And I loved the way it used (assumed) our knowledge as viewers of two seasons of the show. It had all the more power because all that work was behind it. Beautiful.

The latest episode of The Watch podcast includes an interview with Gail Simmons, who said Danny’s was unquestionably the best meal, that his dessert was the best dish of the night, and that the editing exaggerated their quibbles about his dishes while missing things they didn’t like about Dan’s food.

The last episode of The Dish with Kish is now up on Bravo. Mei Lin makes Danny’s dessert, which has a nearly Katsuji-level number of ingredients. Looks great! Episode fun.

Leche de tigre is a kind of ceviche or aguachile — it’s a name for the citrus that cooks the fish. So the record remains and it’s still season 21!

I read? or saw? Kristen saying some time that she eats more of the dishes she doesn’t like, trying to figure out what’s wrong. Maybe that was happening with Tom with Dan’s dish, and Dan misread what it meant.

The cane and braces are prosthetics, and his deciding to wait until the kitchen is clear is his choice or the consequence of the way the running of the chefs disables him. An accommodation would be production finding a way to help him carry things when one hand is occupied with his cane. An accommodation is a change in work circumstances to make those circumstances less disabling for the person who has a disability. Or it’s my making sure there’s a way for my blind student to hear test questions that other students are reading.

I kinda loved Paul Bartolotta for saying “I’ll always remember that pozole” to Manny as he left.

The question about whether Reena might have participated in a beating is a good one. But let me say sorta the same thing in a different way. What’s good about the show, I think, was its showing almost all of the based-on-real-people people complexly and with context. What that meant to me was that almost any of those kids could have been, at different moments, a victim or a perpetrator. The one exception, maybe, is Kelly, whom I think the show portrayed without any of the sympathy it displayed toward everybody else. I listened to one of those podcasts (an episode of Murder in the Rain), and it said that Kelly has never expressed remorse. So that might be what makes her unforgivable in the eyes of the show. But she also sounded to me like she might be mentally unwell, diagnosable. And that’s a complexity the show neglected.

Yes, I've wondered (but have been too lazy to check) if they are using a different director or directors this season. The pacing seems off to me. Unpopular opinion: I like restaurant wars. (Ducks.) I like that they have to think about a million things at once (food, creativity, decor, hospitality, balancing your treatment of VIPs with your treatment of not-VIPs, worker relations, what to do when people are waiting, . . .) the way I have to do in my work, the way most of us probably do.

Venus is Iranian, and the slogan she used in her last interview (“Woman. Life. Freedom”) is the motto of the Kurds in Iran. Maybe also used by the recent women’s movement in Iran? So there is a real politics to what she’s saying about being a visible Iranian woman, presumably something she cares about in the real, not-Survivor world.

I had risotto for the first time when I lived in the Bay Area. I hadn’t known what it was even. It was a simple one with a few mushrooms, and oh, man, was it great. The rice you use to make it (Arborio) is sturdier, which is what keeps a well-cooked version from becoming too gloopy. I’ve made it since then, and what’s really hard is knowing when it’s hit the right spread-on-your-plate level without going over. Not sure I’ve ever gotten it exactly right! But it still tastes good.

There have been articles stating that's a change this season, that while a QF win will no longer confer immunity, an EC win will be what grants the winning chef safety in the next round, but the flip side is that QF performance will be a factor in the EC deliberation. But I have not registered that being mentioned yet on the show itself. I may very well have missed it, though, so if anyone can confirm ... I have read that, later in the season, Tom and Gail are going to join Kristen in judging the quickfires, and that that's when the quickfires will start to factor into decisions about who wins and who goes home.

Just fyi re what we were all wondering about about the grocery bill, Jim Smith, who was on the Beyond Top Chef podcast about this episode (I’ve been cleaning closets and listening to a million podcasts), said that in his season, Charleston, you couldn’t take something off the grocery bill once it had been scanned. Don’t know if that’s still true. He said his Alabama restaurant was recently featured in Conde Nast Traveler. Good for very sweet Jim! Anybody remember the chicken livers with strawberries?