Automne

That's another thing. Nancy Fuller will visit orchards and other farms as well as antique stores and such frequently. It fits her schtick as being a farm girl descended from generations of farmers and using family recipes (or "rules"). Fuller herself is clearly wealthy, but it doesn't seem like she's putting on airs because she has that family history. There's just such a disconnect between the schtick Ree Drummond wants to cultivate (a homesteading wife and mom of hard-working ranchers in an extremely rural area) and the reality (no different from the stay-at-home mothers in the wealthy suburb where I'm from). It's one of the reasons I stopped reading her blog (aside from the deletion of comments that aren't adulatory and downright sycophantic). It's all so artificial.

While I'm not too keen on kids making appearances on food shows, I did have to laugh at the younger granddaughter's (Bailey, I believe) reaction to the Raggedy Ann doll just sitting there staring. She wasn't wrong. I also want to make the whole wheat crackers. And I love upside-down cake and peaches, so I might make the cake while the fruit is still in season.

I caught part of an episode today when waiting for Farmhouse Rules (the one where Ree makes a pancake bar). She's frying up sausage and it's the pre-package pre-formed patties one gets at the grocery store and it just irritated me. She calls herself "The Pioneer Woman." She doesn't have a 9 to 5 job; she's the stay-at-home wife of a multimillionaire rancher. She has a team of people to do all the things that she fronts as doing all on her own. Why is she not grinding up her own sausage? Why is she so dedicated to making quick meals and using shortcuts? Gah. Farmhouse Rules was like a salve after that PW episode.

I'm glad Eddie won, though I'm not on board for another BBQ show (unless like I said in another post, the focus is more on smoking). I would have been pissed if Dom won. He had been given far too many chances when he's the idiot to go on a show to win a food show with crippling stage fright and an inability to work the camera. Above all else, that's kind of the requirement in order to be on TV.

I agree with all of these comments. Instead of these inane competitions in an attempt to produce unnecessary drama (the drama is the concept itself "Who is going to be the next Food Network star." Do it right and you don't need anything else), have the contestants establish their show concepts right off the bat and spend the next 12 episodes cultivating said concepts for each remaining contestants. Part of that cultivation can be directing the contestants away from well-paved roads and into less traveled territory. How many of the full set of contestants were doing Italian cuisine as their concept? When Giada DeLaurentiis is still on the network with new shows and a whole bunch of other chefs have done Italian cuisine (as well as that Extra Virgin show and My Grandmother's Ravioli on Cooking Channel), Italy is well-covered. Do we need another grilling show? No, Bobby Flay pretty much covered that. Now, dedicate a show to smoking and have grilling take more of a backseat, that I can get behind. I just got a smoker and I want to smoke everything I can find; I would love a show to inspire me. There are surprisingly few cookbooks dedicated to smoking. Rue was doing African cuisine. I would fucking kill for a cooking show dedicated to African and Caribbean cuisines; not even PBS has that. Ethiopian cuisine is really gaining traction, but that's such a drop in the bucket when Africa is such a huge continent with vastly different regions and so many different influences thanks to the natural environments and colonialism. And that leads me into the point about the idea that the host needs to talk about him/herself, their family, their home, their dog, etc. I'm not really all that interested in seeing or hearing about the personal lives of food hosts. I want to be educated about food. Tell me about the Indian influx in Uganda influencing cuisine until Idi Amin kicked them out of the country. Tell me how the recent migration of Chinese workers in Nigeria and elsewhere is starting to impact the local cuisine. Tell me why smoking onions before battering and deep-frying them is the best way to serve up onion rings. I don't need to know that this dish you're preparing is Kid X's favorite. Why do I care? I don't have kids nor do I want any, so you've lost me right there. Not only that, even if I did have kids, kid tastebuds are not universal. My hypothetical children might really hate your kid's favorite meal. You think Jade DeLaurentiis is going to like the same foods Todd Drummond does? Have mentors to truly coach the contestants in improving their presence. If they're so bound and determined to use sitcom actors that haven't been relevant since the mid-1990s, here's a better use for them. Valerie Bertinelli, Tiffani Theissen, Alfonso Riberio, Melissa Gilbert, Trisha Yearwood, et. al. can draw from their decades of show business experience and give some valuable advice and guidance in how to be comfortable on camera. Everybody keeps telling Arnold to breathe, but nobody is there helping him do that. That's not something he can learn to do on his own in a few weeks, but Yearwood, being a singer, could probably have some valuable advice and warm-ups to help Arnold really slow down and breathe. There's so much potential for FNS, but they're so focused on an outdated ratings system and appealing to a demographic that's just going to go buy the prepackaged convenience products that have bought advertisement airtime, that there's almost no point. Especially since there have been how many seasons and how many winners/runners-up have encountered any sort of success? It's like American Idol; after 15 seasons, they can only really boast about Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood having made it. Not to mention that when 8 hours of the network's airtime are mini-marathons of DDD, GGG, and Chopped, where are they going to put the new shows? I would love for them to put actual cooking shows on primetime during the week (like during the summer and winter when most the scripted fictional shows are on hiatus). I'm a goddamn pastry chef, I almost always work weekends (which means thanks to WETA UK taking the place of WETA Create, I never get to watch the PBS cooking shows anymore, unless they're available on Netflix/Amazon Instant/Hulu). As well as the fact that FN's main demographic spends the weekends shuttling their children around various sporting events and lessons and playdates and whatever you people do with your kids nowadays. Not a lot of people are at home chilling in front of the TV on a Saturday or Sunday morning.

I'm not a fan of Dom, either. If one of the main criteria for being the next FNS is TV presence and being comfortable on-camera, then the guy who has such serious stage fright and can't fulfill that criteria should have been eliminated far sooner than he was. And certainly not given an opportunity to come back for the finale. Especially when Jay and Eddie are so charismatic and can play up to the camera as well as any cohosts. Rue should have come back because out of everybody, she has a more original premise with African cooking. The last time they had that was over a decade ago with Melting Pot.

Yeah, I'm getting really annoyed with all the shows being given to actors and entertainers that haven't been relevant since 1997. Why Tiffani Thiessen, Rev. Run, Tricia Yearwood, and Valerie Bertinelli over actual chefs and food professionals who actually have something to teach and not just trying to rescue a dying career? It's all the same sort of food, too. I would love to have somebody do African, Caribbean, and South American cuisines.

FN is premiering a new show in August called "Great American Food Finds." It sounds exactly like an old FN show called "Food Finds" (with Sandra Pinckney) back during the golden era the network. I used to watch it in college when I had a few hours in between classes and just went back to chill in my apartment. I think it came on after Cooking Live with Sara Moulton.

With Swiss buttercream, after the egg whites & sugar are warmed up, pour it into a mixer and whip to medium-stiff peaks and keep whipping until the bowl is room temperature. Then drop in the butter a bit at a time. With both Italian and Swiss buttercream, the meringue won't fall, but as you're adding the butter, it will curdle. Just keep beating until it all comes together again.

American Buttercream: butter/shortening, powdered sugar, and vanilla whipped together. Because it's basically a dump-and-mix buttercream, the sugar doesn't always get a chance to dissolve, so it tends to be grainy. Italian Buttercream: An Italian meringue (cook the sugar to 248ºF and slowly pour into the whipped egg whites) with butter gradually added in Swiss Buttercream: Similar to the Italian, but a Swiss meringue is made by heating the egg whites and sugar together over a double boiler until very warm when you dip a finger in, whipping it to stiff peaks, and gradually adding the butter. My preference is Italian buttercream because it's more stable and doesn't soften so much in the summer like the Swiss buttercream does.

100% this. Let's also remember that she's unable to provide any of the basics for her own son. This isn't a Gallagher-type situation where the kids are forced to fend for themselves because their parents are useless. Sammi is the parent for Chuckie and yet provides zero stability for him. She doesn't even have a roof over his head (yes, the destroyed RV is Frank's fault, but why is she having a child live in an RV in the first place? The Gallagher kids were managing to scrape together the money to pay the mortgage and taxes on their house when even Fiona was under 18. Sammi can't get some rent money for an apartment in the South Side?); instead, she squats in other people's homes and pulls stunts that should have her ass out on the streets. He's obese and we clearly see why: Sammi uses food as a replacement for actual affection for Chuckie. We've seen Fiona hug and cuddle her siblings, have we seen Sammi do the same for her own son? And what does Sammi even do for a job? She's relying on the Gallaghers quite a bit, so turning in Carl would and should only work to her detriment. She's not the legal guardian to the kids, she has no right to the house, she wasn't even invited to live there by anybody, and oh yeah, she shot Frank in the house in front of three minor children. In fact, Carl witnessed Sammi shooting Frank. Sammi just turned against a kid with a pretty big trump card against her. Assault with a deadly weapon and her calm comment about how a few inches and she could have hit a major blood vessel could get that bumped up to attempted murder.

The Kevin/Veronica subplot bugs me so much. V was normally the rational one, but as soon as she contracted baby rabies, she lost all logic and rationality. Despite the fact that the two were living barely above the poverty line in the South Side of Chicago and seeing how their neighbor and best friend was struggling to raise five kids on her own, one of them being an infant, they're like, "Yah, babies!" They own a struggling bar and an equally struggling porn site, one of them is barely literate, and they're always in danger of their neighborhood being gentrified and being priced out. And at one point, those two nitwits were about to have FOUR babies at once. Then V is so narrow-sighted at what life with babies is actually like. "The same as it's always been, just with two new people in the house?" Really? I don't even have kids and I understand the reality of having kids. Hence why I've chosen to not have any. Hi, we're Homo sapiens. Thanks to evolution and our insistence on becoming bipedal, we come out very incomplete compared to other mammals. It takes us 5-6 months before we can even sit up without aid. Other mammals have some degree of mobility within hours to days of birth; it takes us nearly a year. We're extremely dependent for the first few years of life. Life will not be the same. You have to share your spouse and you don't get to be the sole focus, nor get top consideration. Not until the new people aren't so new and can go five minutes unsupervised without nearly killing themselves. You'd think V would ask Fiona about the realities of child-rearing.

Now that Atlantis has been canceled, I'm all for adding the lovely Sarah Parish into the mix, mostly for how well she works with David Tennant (see: Recovery, Blackpool, Empress Racnoss in The Runaway Bride episode of Doctor Who). I want Hardy to find some happiness somewhere. He spent two seasons with such a heavy weight on his shoulders, a ruined reputation, and near death. Whatever the A & B plots may be for S3, I want to see Ellie and Hardy rebuild themselves and be happy by the end. And for somebody to freaking hug them!

Yeah, look at Mahhky Mahhk Wahhhlberg for example. Committed some heinous racially motivated violent crimes, barely spent time in jail, and gets to continue on to have a successful Hollywood career. And has the nerve to demand to have his record expunged so he can franchise his crappy restaurant in California.

While I think Joe must've sustained a head injury at some point to think he could just slip right back into his old life like he didn't groom his friends' son for molestation and then kill the kid, he can't possibly be stupid enough to attempt to fight in divorce court. His confession could be brought up again and NOT be thrown out. There's also the fact that Ellie would have an entire town willing to go to bat for her. Plus, a family court judge is not going to be willing to put his/her career on the line to allow a potential child molester unfettered access to his underage sons. The best Joe could get would be highly supervised visits with Fred. Tom might be able to reject any visitations, given that Danny was his mate (even if they had a falling out prior to his death).

Completely agreed with the above. His timing on showing up with his smug-ass face was no coincidence; as soon as Fiona tells Angela she's married, Stimmy shows up? What a dick. He's been nothing but a selfish asshole to Fiona. He has lied to her from the very beginning, was never able to provide any sort of stability for her or the kids, constantly disappeared, showed up married himself and expected Fiona to carry on their relationship despite that, had a hissy fit about not being considered when Fiona pursued legal guardianship of her siblings, and then he just shows up again after Fiona has made a clear distance move away from him and demands that she be his again. Stimmy has never respected Fiona one iota and still doesn't; him repeating "I love you" just rings hollow and manipulative. Stimmy wanted to reassure himself that he still had power over Fiona. Here is Gus, a handsome guy with an actual, honest, legal job who actually cares about Fiona and probably would care about her siblings. Stimmy is likely threatened by Gus, especially by Fiona willing to take such a huge step with Gus so quickly, so he pops back up and thinks he can just act like he wasn't gone for a year with nary a text or a call and literally just walk right back into her house without knocking or anything. Seriously, WHAT. A. DICK.

I missed the first half hour, so I'll have to catch up on that later, if anything interesting happened. But we start seeing the cracks in Scumbag Defense Barrister's façade. I loved how Jocelyn laid into her. I see ol' Joss and I have the same pet peeve of women wanting to fall back on the "I'm a poor single mawm!" excuse when things don't go their way, as if those are the magic words to immediately elicit empathy from everybody and has them giving in. The only person those words should be said to is the person who knocked you up because that's his responsibility. Don't say it to me because all I'm going to say is, "So? What's that got to do with shit or with me?" Don't think I'm completely without sympathy; my best friend is a single mom and I help her out sometimes, but that's out of friendship and I volunteer. She never acts entitled nor blames anybody. But I digress. Glad to see SDB wants to let a pedophile child killer go free just to get one over on Jocelyn. If that's how she runs the shit, no wonder her kid ended up in prison. Very little Beth screentime. Delightful. I wish there was a bit more focus on Chloe. I feel in a lot of similar fictional media, the sibling of a murdered child doesn't get a lot of focus on how they're dealing with it. It's something I liked about The Lovely Bones (the novel); the author didn't just focus on the parents' pain, but showed how the sister dealt with having a murdered sibling. It's a unique position that gets ignored a lot of the time. Now Ellie is starting to show some detective skills and why she was originally in line for the DI position. Tom, what in the shit are you doing? Is Nigel starting to warm up to his biological mother now? Poor Hardy. Get that bum ticker fixed, tout de suite!

OT, but playing with Six Degrees of David Tennant, I'm watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl on Showtime Anytime and the actor who plays Lee Ashworth plays Billie Piper's Belle/Hannah's love interest in the third season. I couldn't place him at first, but I had a strong dislike because I knew he played a character I hated on another show. His character on SDoaCG isn't so bad (yet), but his Lee Ashworth is ruining everything.

I knew Hardy's ex-wife and daughter were going to make an appearance this season. The ex is a bitch. Given what Hardy did to save her ass at the expense of his own, she needs to take a seat. The father of the murdered girl needs to have a seat as well. What's with the men of this show, off screwing women that aren't their wives while their children are being murdered? Ollie has become a little cock, hasn't he? You write for a small-town paper nobody will be reading in a year, hunty. Act with some integrity instead of broadcasting your desperation to be picked up by a bigger newspaper. Or do you not remember how the woman you screwed to get ahead ended up running after jumping the gun and writing a story that led a man to commit suicide? Oh, boo hoo hoo, Tom. Quit your bitch crying and go talk to your mom instead of latching onto Mark Latimer. The fool finally realized that he has a family that he needs to be tending to instead of some sort of revenge friendship with the son of the guy that killed his son (in the process of grooming him for molestation). I figured Susan Wright was going to come back. She had to have been called back to testify. Unfortunately, she's given the defense team their alternate killer and a way to avoid putting Joe Miller on the stand. Having watched Gracepoint, I'm having a bit of an issue trying not to get the two shows cocked up together because I've got GP's Nigel expy mixed up and I was about to mention the Danny tattoo, but that was unique to Gracepoint, I believe. So, have they just dropped the Paul/Becca thing? That was odd to bring up in the first episode and then...nothing. It looks like that Jocelyn has macular degeneration, given the blank spot in the center visual field. I like Kate; she's been through the same shit Beth has and is clearly in the shit for it (topped off with alcoholism to boot), but isn't a raging bull, not even to a person that, from any POV other than the viewers', she legitimately has reasons to be. I'm guessing Hardy did sleep with Claire. Did Chibnall watch The Following and take some tips from that show? Kevin Bacon's character slept with James Purefoy's character's wife while investigating Purefoy for the serial killings of young adult females before the series' start. How did Miller not know about Joe beating the crap out of some random dude while on duty? Like, I get not knowing about the clandestine meetings with Danny, but beating the shit out of somebody to the point of broken ribs? I feel like that would have warranted a phone call or something. I wonder if Jocelyn is going to bring up Susan Wright's actual name and history. If she even has the information. Clearly, the prosecution team isn't getting some pertinent information, like not knowing Hardy and Ellie spent two hours in a hotel room the night Joe was arrested. I seriously can't believe the big deal that was made of that by the defense. If it's an ongoing affair like they're hypothesizing, then two hours is not enough time for proper foreplay, sex, cuddling, and talking. Especially if it's part of a conspiracy to have Joe arrested so they can be together, like some Harlequin shit. Lastly, I'm on board with Paul's suggestion. I mean, people really don't think about treating pedophiles with behavioral therapy to prevent them from offending in the first place or reoffending. Otherwise, we have no defense against them and basically are just sitting back and waiting until they molest/rape/murder children to act. Be proactive, not reactive. Not a bad legacy, if you're so desperate to have a legacy for a child.

That's what I think. You see both girls playing in a field of bluebells in a flashback, so that's probably what they're leading to.

Re: Ashworth whining about being recorded: I don't know about British laws, but in America, I'm hard-pressed to think Ashworth had a leg to stand on. He wasn't being recorded in private; he was in somebody else's home and the owner was present and had full knowledge of the meeting and that it would be recorded. It's illegal to record sound in businesses (like the security cameras that record cashiers can't record what the employees say so bosses can listen to conversations; those shows on TV are completely fake because illegal), but AFAIK, it's fair game in private residences by the owner/owner's knowledge/people who live in the home. The only thing would be Hardy and Ellie working an investigation when no longer officers of the law. That's when things get murky and evidence could be thrown out. And yeah, Ellie having that one-night stand was, as one Broadchurch Redditor put it, "Top-quality cringe."

ITV Player was being a bitch, so my thoughts are scattered about since I originally missed the first ten minutes and then ended up missing the rest of the episode, so had to wait a while so I could watch the rest. So when Beth said to Chloe in the first season that she was going to have to act older than she is, she meant that because Beth had no intention in acting like a mother in her 30s, right? Because in the few minutes Ellie and Chloe interacted at all since the big revelation, Chloe asks questions, lets Ellie talk and explain, Chloe listens and forms her opinion. Like adults do. Something that the woman twice her age and is responsible for raising her is unable to do. With all the crap new parents talk, you'd think that a new baby mellows out people. In the case of Beth Latimer, nope. I really hope Beth's opinion is not vindicated. Although the new baby's name is setting up for a Beth/Ellie reunion (Elizabeth = "Ellie"). Welcome baby Elizabeth! With the two parents you have, you're screwed! And congrats, Chloe, you have been promoted to free babysitter/substitute parent! By the way Mark, saying, "We'll get it right this time," is a little shitty to say. Chloe is sitting right there, yo. Maybe her turning out to be an okay kid was like her conception - an accident. Jesus, what evil did Ellie perpetuate in a past life to get this shit piled on her? Ashworth is one dumb motherfucker. Hardy can take your ass in for impersonating a police officer and then he can gather evidence to put your ass away for murder in peace. Pure dumb luck (as it stands right now; I'm sure we'll find out the car break-in and theft wasn't happenstance, but planned by Claire or somebody) prevented you from being convicted of murder and imprisoned. Hardy needs to learn to play up his heart condition until he gets the surgery instead of letting himself get played around by some smug shithead like Ashworth. Even if he didn't kill the girls, he's still a dick. I don't know who started the fight, but a very healthy Ashworth will be viewed as the aggressor against a guy with a life-threatening illness aggravated by physical exertion. Ellie is a much nicer person than I am. After a couple repeated efforts in trying to help the cow, I would have thrown my hands in the air and given in to her wishes. "Welp, your dumb ass forgot your phone in your jump to conclusions. I hope you can waddle your way to your house in time or somebody else sees you, otherwise you're having this baby by yourself in a fucking field. Better hope you don't tear or hemorrhage." Really hate Ashworth. But I think I hate the defense barrister more. What the everloving fuck was that? How is the judge allowing character assassination with absolutely no basis? Ellie went to talk with her detective partner on the case that was just solved and the person who was now pretty much her only friend in the world. Ooooh, how scandalous! Yeah, she's really in the mood to fuck a guy when her husband was just revealed to have killed a kid he was grooming to molest in a little hotel where the room barriers are so thin that a guest called in a noise complaint when Hardy collapsed and other guests called in noise complaints on the defense lawyer herself for talking too loud. A CCTV recording of ONE event that can be easily explained away does not make a long-standing affair. Aside from multiple witnesses that could attest to Ellie downright hating Hardy for the longest time. JOE, being under oath, would testify that fact. This travesty of a trial is ruining the show. I'm pretty sure this blatant jury manipulation would have the defense held in contempt. Juries are not smart; they're actually really fucking stupid. Go look up the Jacklyn Dowaliby murder trial jury for a perfect example. Plenty of reasonable doubt for the jury to acquit the girl's father, but they chose to convict him based on some door damage. They figured that was indication of him having a violent temper, so of course he must have murdered his daughter. Except that the door damaged was not entered as evidence by either the defense or prosecution and was sustained by the previous owners of the house before the Dowaliby family moved in. So juries are comprised of idiots. If the defense is allowed to come up with all these wild-ass tales that can be easily destroyed with simple facts and evidence, why isn't the prosecution doing so? Everybody was saying how amazing Jocelyn and bothering the woman incessantly to get her to come out of retirement to take this case on, but unless we see some epic curb stomp in the courtroom from her, they probably should have let her stay retired for all the good that's doing them. And Joe fucking Miller, letting his faithful wife have her character slaughtered and her life further ruined because of the shit HE did, continues to be THE WORST FUCKING PERSON. GODDAMN I HATE EVERYBODY ON THIS SHOW (except for Ellie, Hardy, Paul, and Chloe).

That's a damn good point. Why didn't the prosecution have that information and use that to argue against the defense's insinuation that Hardy beat up Joe? Hardy had just been given a medical discharge that day because he collapsed while running after a suspect and had to be hospitalized. And he had just been hospitalized not long before that when he collapsed from little exertion. How exactly could Hardy hold up in a fight against a healthy Joe Miller? Is the defense going to sit there and say that Joe did not attempt to defend himself in this shed beating scenario?

This got some chuckles out of me. Especially the "This is not Doctor Who" part and "Ellie is his BFF even though she cries a lot and it's uncomfortable."

Beth's rantings said something about Ellie beating up Joe in order to get his confession thrown out in court so he gets off and then Ellie moving back into her house like nothing happened. Beth wouldn't be going home; her water just broke prematurely. That's an emergency. Either an ambulance will be called or Ellie or Hardy will give Beth a ride to the hospital. And I'm sure Beth will start proceedings to sue Ellie for causing distress leading to whatever happens to the baby (first thing Beth says as she's leaking is, "LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID!" to Ellie). I hope Ellie is there when she finds out Tom has been hanging out with Mark and Beth didn't know. I hope that's the catalyst for Ellie going off on Beth. I really just want that to happen.