Automne

As soon as I read these comments, the Shriner’s commercial started playing on my TV and I’m a little concerned.

I did! The base recipe I use was given to me by a Peruvian man I used to work with at a hotel. I swapped a bit of the flour for graham cracker crumbs and some of the butter for browned butter and proceeded as normal from there. If you ever find alfajores, buy them! They’re are so good; light and melt in your mouth. They’re usually filled with dulce de lèche.

When I’ve switched up s’mores, I still keep it within the vein of the original. I’ve done alfajores (made with graham cracker crumbs and browned butter) as the cookie and filled with homemade ganache and marshmallow meringue that I toast before topping with the top cookie. And I’ve done Steven Raichlen’s s’mores where the cookie is a chocolate chip cookie.

Bar Louie’s “Restaurants Bite” ad campaign is extremely irritating. One radio ad has a guy talking about how he and his friends are at a restaurant laughing very loudly (“the kind of belly laughs that make whiskey fly out of your nose”) and sounding like they’re being obnoxious. He goes on to say that a manger comes over to ask them to keep it down and “as the laughs stop and the smiles fade, I realized, restaurants bite.” So y’all are upset that your behavior was likely disrupting other patrons and the manager preferred to asking your group to shut the hell up rather than deal with multiple angry customers? But hey, at Bar Louie, you’re free to act obnoxious and loud and they’ll just turn the music up to a level where nobody can hear themselves talk like they’re at a nightclub. Another is the guy whining about how chain restaurants give you the pager thingy to tell you when your table is ready and apparently, his lack of planning (1. Having to wait 20 minutes for a table and 2. Waiting to go out when you’re famished and now getting all hangry) means “restaurants bite.” Clearly, douchebag never went to Bar Louie on a Tuesday night when they have the half-price burgers. Your ass is gonna be waiting a while for a seat if you didn’t get there early enough. Also, Bar Louie is a chain restaurant so who exactly at they looking down upon? A third one is the same guy is at some restaurant with artisanal foods with fancy terms and doesn’t serve bar (oh, I’m sorry, “gastropub”) fare prepped at a central location and shipped out frozen to all locations nationwide to ensure consistency across the board so it can be reheated and served to you means “restaurants bite.” I fail to see what Bar Louie is trying to get at here. Are they berating restaurants for having quality food standards, being organized, and ensuring all customers can enjoy themselves and the ambiance without being disrupted by loud assholes?

To be fair, the camera person was likely in the passenger seat. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve really seen anybody sit in the passenger seat.

I’d be really pissed if somebody I entrusted to take care of renovation duties while I’m off having a baby decided to take extreme creative liberties and blew the budget by covering the entire house in shiplap. The house immediately looks dated now. “Industrial farmhouse” my behind.

This woman just used seasoned salt and in describing it, said that it has everything salt has (so...salt? Sodium chloride?), but with a little extra. Then adds paprika to whatever she was making because she “loves the little flecks of red” and...seasoned salt already has paprika in it. That’s why it’s red. How many years of doing this and she still knows so little about food? Her existence is offensive at this point.

I’m watching the “Waste Not, Want Not” episode right now and it’s already annoying me. First of all, she’s acting like using leftover chicken bones to make stock is some revelation. And then that the stock itself is some secret that she fell upon. “Takes risotto to the next level?” Pawhuska is not so isolated that she doesn’t know that chicken broth is a staple for making risotto. She refers to it as a “secret weapon”. Seriously, she didn’t create something new; TV chefs have been saying to use leftover chicken carcass to make stock for decades. Another thing, and this goes back to my frequent complaint that there’s nothing “pioneer” about her, why doesn’t she use potato scraps and all that for compost, especially since she has a garden? Instead of trying to feed your family scraps and produce close to rotting, compost it and it becomes a benefit for your home garden. And that frittata is making my stomach hurt. Salad dressing in it, really?

Lura! You’ve finally returned! I’m so happy to see you! The “steakhouse” pasta is lifted straight from Olive Garden. I had it the last time I was there. But are we surprised? Ree has not had a single original thought or recipe. A gorgonzola cream sauce can be tasty. A local restaurant that unfortunately closed years ago had a magnificent ravioli Gorgonzola, though my mom liked to change the pasta to angel hair. It was so good and I don’t like blue cheese usually. It truly drives me bonkers that all these bloggers and personalities that managed to weasel their way into becoming food professionals have no concept of flavor profiles. There are numerous cookbooks purely dedicated to that (the Flavor Bible and the Flavor Matrix are my two favorites). Maybe they should sit and study those for a while. Then maybe they’ll stop with some of these monstrosities I see on Pinterest.

Like I said, Ree and the two weirdos from Waco are all about dominating their respective little cities with their empires and not at all interested in building them up. They don’t invest in any business that isn’t theirs or won’t be cutting them a check.

What I find a little interesting is that Molly is exactly what Ree Drummond attempted to sell herself as - a city girl turned country girl. Molly is from Chicago (or its suburbs), went to NYC to attend Juilliard, and then moved to a farm in a tiny town in Minnesota . Except it doesn’t ring hollow with Molly and she seems genuinely down-to-earth (probably because she’s not from a wealthy family and didn’t marry into the 23rd largest landowners in the USA).

Waco and Pawhuska are merely six hours apart. I would not be surprised if Chip & JoJo and Ree started collaborating together on what will become the Gaines channel. Both families are cut from the same wretched cloth of small city domination and “values.”

I have never liked RR and 30MM. My dislike is literally on the record; I was interviewed for an article back in the heyday of the original 30MM run. I like her even less now. She seems so jaded and cynical now and she didn’t even do a stint in prison like Martha Stewart to garner such an attitude. She reminds me of the bitter divorcée I work with whose every word out of her mouth is dripping with sarcasm and strychnine. I don’t these 30-minute or 16-minute whatever meal hack job shows. Give me somebody like Alex Guarnaschelli who not only loves food, but the whole process of cooking and shows how enjoyable cooking can be, not a chore to rush through as fast as possible to make something barely on the side of edible. And like others said, the nutrition on these meals is atrocious. The whole point of encouraging home cooking is to eat healthier, not to just merely recreate fast food at a slightly cheaper price. My other lifelong beef with 30MM is that it teaches rush recipes and not how to really be efficient at cooking. She gives a tip here and there that can be easily missed. Not showing how to batch cook, meal plan, shop at the grocery store, and meal prep in advance. With these speedy meal hacks, just prepping your mise would eat up a chunk of time. Also, she rushes so much that I’m expecting her to seriously injure herself. The last episode I watched had her talking about how a friend of hers who seriously injured herself trying to get the pit out of an avocado, meanwhile RR was removing an avocado pit in a rather dangerous manner.

They truly need to end her show. She has nothing left. Ketchup mixed with ranch to dip carrots in? That’s a recipe now?

That house and land is my absolute dream. I don’t need a big house (though I only would want a bigger home to get a dream baker’s kitchen) because it would be just me and a dog or two. Plus, I totally would compromise house size for that land. That land was gorgeous. Ugh, I live in the DMV suburbs and land and house like that would not be going for nobody’s $12,500. The land alone would be seven figures easy. But it’s so easy to imagine having a grill and smoker set up and inviting my friends over for a bonfire. And small houses like that, I don’t mind the open concept because you actually need it. It’s the 2500sq. ft homes that turn 3-4 separate rooms into one giant room that drives me nuts. And the kitchen is always relegated into a small space of that giant room. I like how Erin doesn’t shy away from colors and patterns, unlike our favorite shiplap-loving farmhouse chic interior designer.

I wish HGTV would give this show a little more love. It doesn’t get the “Let’s fill up air time” marathon treatment that LIOLI, PB, and FU get. It’s not easy to even find a replay of the episode if it’s not the same evening it premiered and they weren’t really showing episodes in between seasons.

Today’s episode was a rerun. I’d totally try the chicken pot pie hot dish with tater tots, but she lost me at that cookie salad. I’ve heard of it before and know it’s a Midwestern thing, but I’m going to pass, thanks. I do wish she’d always keep her hair up and out of the way. I hate when TV cooks leave their hair hanging loose. I do like how the relationship between she and her husband is so genuine and not TV-manufactured like Chip and Joanna or stilted like Ree and Ladd. They’re a young married couple and act like it.

I haven’t watched PW lately because I’m usually asleep or at work when she comes on Saturday and Sunday AM. Plus, the past several episodes I have seen were just clip shows and there will be four back-to-back clip show episodes that use the same damn clips. Is there nobody that sits Ree down and show her how they’re airing her show and say that it’s not a good look to have the evidence of repetitiveness smashing into people’s faces? Because cooking shows are generally a disappointment and Create TV doesn’t show as much as they used to, I’ve taken to YouTube. These are a few of my favorite cooking YT channels: Almazan Kitchen - Outdoor Cooking ASMR Cooking Tree - Korean Baking ASMR Taste Show - Authentic Chinese Cooking

Seriously. I don’t just mindlessly buy something because a celebrity hawks it. If it turns out to be a good product, then sure, but I’m going to do the research first. My first stop is actually checking the equipment reviews on Cook’s Illustrated/America’s Test Kitchen.

Ree’s (and Hyacinth’s) name-dropping of Osage County is so annoying. She started doing that when that Meryl Streep movie came out (that nobody cared about other than it being that year’s Best Way Meryl Streep Showed Up To Work annual Oscar nomination), as if it would make Hollywood go, “OMG Osage County is a real place‽” and come in droves. Like they would’ve had a premiere of the movie there.

Hi everyone. I hate this new reorganization. Reducing forums into topics is a great way to cause bloated topics with hundreds of pages and will discourage new readers or anybody who has fallen behind on a topic.

Nope, Theresa Knorr is still alive in prison.

I want to like her, but I have an immediate bias against bloggers being given TV shows. She’s certainly a palate-cleanser against rich WASPs pretending to be non-pretentious and down-home. But we could’ve kept Amy Thielen, though. And it’s easy to “sleep, dream, and breathe food” when you’ve always done it from the comfort, calm, and freedom of your home kitchen. It’s something else entirely to still have such a passion for food after working in restaurants, hotels, bakeries, and other professional kitchens. And I know it’s an audience thing, but for bloggers to say they have such a “passion” for food, but never go beyond their comfort zone and what they know rings a little false. But I do appreciate the baby steps in diversity on FN. Asians are almost nonexistent on FN/CC and the last time they had anybody Jewish was back in the Melting Pot show days.

A fellow baker friend from culinary school now works at a farm/butcher and just showed off a pie she made using the lard from a pig she slaughtered. YMMV, but I like the whole “using every part of the animal” thing.