Casey Thompson, Still Going Strong

Blogging is an interesting endeavor. Blogging about food, photography and Top Chef has given me a fascinating opportunity to reach people half a world away. Now, I'm not naive enough believe that most folks come here for my sparkling wit, the mad photochoppy skills or my recipes for crab cakes. No, I know exactly what some of you are here for. Wait, scratch that. Make that what quite a few of you are here for.

You're here for the photo above. How do I know this? Well...for one this is still America, home of the Free, land of the Hotties and the men who love to oogle them. Also there's my Blogger stat page which tells me the post this picture was featured in is kicking all the other post's ass in terms of pageviews. But my favorite method of gauging what's hot and what's not is my stat counter. Let's just say Casey is an international sensation. But is she a Domestic Threat?



Perhaps only to domestic productivity. Or?? Could the Department of Homeland Security be looking for a new spokesperson for Cybersecurity? What ever the reason, I'm sure Casey would bring much needed attention to our domestic security needs. God Bless America!!

The famous Villa Romana del Casale mosiac dating back to the Diocletian Period (286 - 305 AD).

Chicken Feet Good Enough to Eat

The Chicken Foot Fascination continues. Here in KC the Bo Ling group of restaurants serves Dim Sum on the weekends. It's one of my long time favorite events to either take out of town visitors or carry out to enjoy at home. So some of the dishes at the Top Chef Dim Sum challenge were very familiar to those of us here at the Kitchen. I decided it was time to reacquaint myself Chicken Feet in Black Bean Sauce.

Just like the feet of many mammals and birds, the chicken feet have lots of little bones. They are gelatinous with little meat. Bo Ling's version is spicy and fragrant with star anise and black beans. No nails on these feet.

Now after a little research on preparing chicken feet, I'm wondering if Casey was doomed from the beginning. Most of the recipes I've read call for frying and stewing at least for the black bean version but it makes sense with all that hard gelatinous material that introducing a long wet heat makes the feet much easier to eat.

The real question for me is why didn't Casey use a good pair of sharp kitchen shears to whip through all those chicken nails?

To Ease Everyone's Pain

Oh Casey, it's just not fair.

Quick Doesn't Always Mean Best

Because this is Top Chef All Stars, The Season of Redemption, it was only natural that there would be a Quickfire that featured team food preparation. You knew it, I knew and Casey especially knew it. I'm sure as soon as she signed up for this season she started chopping onions in anticipation. I think I even heard a rumor she was Meryl Streep's stunt onion chopping double in Julie/Julia.


I think we can safely assume she was more than ready for this particular Quickfire. A great Quickfire too. It takes the original Mise En Place Relay Race and ramps up the competitive nature and stress even more. Deceptively simple, four teams of four, prepping three ingredients, whole heads of garlic into four cups of chopped garlic, trim down fifteen artichokes, and french a whole lotta racks of lamb. But that's not the end and finally, they figured out how to keep all the teams in play. Once one team is done with all three ingredients and hits the red button, the countdown clock starts winding down from fifteen minutes. The quickest team off the ingredients now has the entire time to make a dish using the three ingredients. The remaining three teams will have whatever time is left once they finish their prep work. All four team members can participate on all the prep work to get it done. Best tasting dish wins the challenge and $5000 for each member of the team.

If I had to predict which team would have been the fastest off the prep just by team makeup I think I would have gone with the Blue Team. Asshat knows meat and is pretty quick on prep and Tre also looks like he wields a mean meat prepping knife. However Tre shares a little secret...

...which doesn't look good for the Blue Team. He could have taken some lessons from Marcel who is whipping through his lamb with his hammering technique.


Is he using a sharpening steel to do that? Whatever it is, he's right, it's cleaning the meat away from the bone much quicker and cleaner then the other methods we're seeing. Not that it matters right now because the first task that gets done is the garlic by the Fabio and the Green Team. This sends all the other teams into a panic. Except for Tiffani who for some reason decides to use a mandolin to slice her garlic. Slowly and methodically.

Definitely a wtf moment in Blogging Basement Central. It doesn't help that the Green Team just got done with their lamb followed closely by the Red Team completing their garlic task. That leaves the White Team and the Blue Team having yet completed anything. It gets worse for them because now the Green Team is having their last task checked and racing to hit the big red button.

Which means the fifteen minute countdown to dish completion has now begun. The knives start flying for the other three teams as they race to complete their prep work. Still it has to be good prep work as Asshat finds out the hard way...

...when guest judge David Chang rejects his garlic as not being cut small enough. Finally the Blue Team gets done with twelve minutes to go. Actually enough time to put some heat to the meat. Red Team clocks in at ten minutes. The White Team struggles to finally finish with eight minutes and thirty eight seconds. The last two teams realize that raw meat is their only choice and both choose to serve lamb carpaccio. The last eight minutes whip by in a frenzy of cooking and ideas. Now it's time to taste the dishes.

Green Team who had the most time comes up fried lamb with a bizarre colored sauce.

The Blue Team with a pan seared lamb and artichokes cooked three ways.

The Red Team's lamb carpaccio with large flakes of cheese.

The White Team and lamb carpaccio number two.

The low teams on the totem pole? Green and Red. This leaves Angelo confused.

How can this be, the Green Time had the most time but turns out their herb additions blew out the other flavors. Which is also what happened on the Red Team with their cheese addition. The White Team and the Blue Team turn out the be the top two, even though White slapped something together with less than nine minutes. Who wins the big wad of cash?

The Blue Team....except Richard can't wait to explain how he was the leader of the winning effort. (I see a big, sparkly necklace in Richard's future.)

Top Chef Reunion All Star Dinner

Sooo? What was that? This thing called Top Chef Reunion? It wasn't a competition. No money (none that was revealed) was awarded for charity or for chefs. They cooked. They talked. They drank. They ate. I yawned. What did they (the producers) think would happen? That each chef would dance their own personal version of the Top Chef Angry Monkey dance?

OK, Marcel danced a little. But really, it was pretty tame.

My only hope was that the wine flowed early and often.Although my girl Tiff easily beat out Carla for Best TV Face for the night and came up with a new phrase to describe Stefan as a Lesbian Opportunivore......a description that Stefan obviously adores.Oh sure, they relived some of the better moments and certainly some of the worst but was anything resolved? Nothing new was revealed regarding Clippergate. Casey and Carla seem to have no hard feelings towards each other but Casey never explained Caseygate and the harsh comments she made to a Dallas blog. So who came out looking the worst?That's right, Fabio. If this is the future of hosting Bravo TV shows, we're all screwed. It's FOOD Fabio, not foot. Still there was some delicious looking food and who had the most delicious, well thought out food?That's right, Marcel and Ilan, working together as a team and making a great dish that was still warm by the time the boys cracked that dome of salt. Nice job guys.

Will they do another Top Chef Reunion dinner? Most likely since there's still Spit Swappers Hosea and Lea, Anger Management Dale, I'm no leader Sam and Asshat Spike left to sit down and break bread together. Oh boy!

Just in Time for Thanksgiving

Top Chef All Star Dinner Reunion. Or. My title for it, TC Bitchfest 2009. 12 of your most outspoken, outrageous, most fun to get into a fist fight over Top Chef contestants, sitting down and breaking bread together. For some reason, Fabio has been given the Andy Cohen-host duties for the night. Why? My guess is to throw the subtitles producer some work, otherwise, beats me. Now from the previews (available at Bravo here) there's a couple of things I'm thankful for: 1) I don't see Season 4's resident Asshat anywhere at the table. 2) I do see a lot of my favs, Harold, Tiff, Dale, Carla, Lisa and Hung. 3) No Tom Colicchio....yet. I can't say for certain he won't show up. I hope not. What would be the point, to constantly ask the chefs if they tasted their food or complain about too much or too little salt. Shoo Tom, shoo.
What's absolutely fascinating are some of the things that were voiced, at least on the previews. One opinion voiced by more than one chef is that they are tired of being asked about certain things, which...is not unexpected. I'm pretty sure Tiff and Dave are sick to death of their catch phrase. Casey would surely like to forget what she said to a blogger, thinking it was off the record, about her experience helping Carla in the finals of Season 5 only to have it blow up online. Marcel is still a bit prickly (or a bit of a prick, take your pick) about the madness that was his season. But the one thing every single one of these chefs needs to remember is that without Top Chef, a show every single one of them chose to be on, no matter what the consequences were to their careers, without being on Top Chef, chances are none of them would have the national recognition that they have today. We wouldn't know their names, we wouldn't know what kind of influences have shaped their cooking, we wouldn't seek out their restaurants to plunk down our hard earned money and enjoy a meal. As Tiff once said, Top Chef puts butts in the seats. So tune in tomorrow and revel in juicy bitchiness and grown out hair styles because I doubt there will be much discussion about actual food. Unless they've figured out a great way to serve a succulent Roast Rack of Bitch.