Only in America

What a horrendous day it is turning out to be.

Mike and I went to El Exquisito and had fried pork lumps, moros, yuca, plantain, Cuban bread, and espresso. Then we went to Gordon Food Supply, purely for the fun. Mike thought he had died and gone to heaven.

We’ll be heading out to see An American Carol shortly.

Here’s a clue what the day has been like:

In addition to a gallon can of Hershey’s syrup, I’m holding two S.W. “Red” Smith products. Mike bought the Big John sausages, and I bought the pickled pig’s feet.

The syrup was just for show.

Now I have to go to a conservative movie, with a loaded pistol in my pocket.

I love this country.

By the way, Mr. Walken is annoyed. Guess we should have picked up a ham.

I’ll Ride Behind it on the Vincent Black Shadow

Mike has just gotten off the plane in Fort Lauderdale, so he’ll be here in an hour, and soon afterward, we will be hitting El Exquisito for a Cuban feast. I’ve been messing with domain issues all morning, so I haven’t eaten much of anything. I am READY.

Mike is a great guy to dine with, because he is one hundred percent enthusiasm. Even at Man Camp, I sometimes hear whiny things like, “Are you really going to eat that?” With Mike, you never have that problem. Mike understands.

I can’t wait to see An American Carol. It has occurred to me that David Zucker and the Friends of Abe might be the beginnings of an entertainment homologue to Fox News.

When Fox arrived on the scene, it had no competition. Conservatives were nearly invisible on news channels. You know how it was. You’d see one liberal after another, and then, to appear fair, they’d wheel Bob Novak out in a cage, and people would poke him with sticks. And Fox took the lead! Because it had the best programming? No, sorry, I wish I could say so. They do a lot of solid work on the other stations. The reason is the cultural difference. Centrists and conservatives can watch Fox without feeling like they’re under attack by lying weasels.

Right now, it’s tough to find movies that don’t reflect the amoral, America-hating coastal culture. It may be that there is a pent-up, unsatisfied desire for entertainment people who aren’t effete socialists can watch. If that’s the case, An American Carol will succeed, even if it’s merely okay. If it’s really good, it could be a monster hit.

I’d kill to work with these people. I wish they had been around twenty years ago. I would have moved to California and slept in the gutter in front of David Zucker’s house to get an interview.

These days I wouldn’t move to California unless the alternative was being boiled alive.

By the way, Christopher Walken hasn’t blogged yet today, but he is awake and full of Bosco and responding to comments. If you haven’t read his blog yet, you are already into him for a thou. And the juice started running in July.

I Better Buy a Lottery Ticket

Finally, a decent review for my book: CLICK.

I am Dirtier Than Sheryl Crow’s Right Hand

I got a hilarious comment on one of my other sites. “Mrcleankitchen” says:

Man your lame and at the same time filthy. Who would want to eat something that has lots of filth you lazy ass wana be chef!? Dude hav you ever heard of microbial bacteria, free radicals and food born diseases?! I hope the health inspector shuts you down!

I may be a lame “wana be” chef, but I “hav” heard of microbial bacteria! I’m enjoying a big bowl of them right now, smothered in free radical sauce!

I hope you don’t think I took this slander lying down. Here is my response:

“Ha! You’re clearly a fanatic! You’re like those nuts who tell me I should give the toilet brush a good shake before using it to stir the soup!”

Do health inspectors shut down kitchens in people’s homes? They probably should, but I don’t think they do. I’m probably safe.

I don’t know which filth he’s referring to. Maybe the beef-aging stuff. Hey, I can’t help that. Beef has bacteria, and when you age it, they’re going to grow.

You have to wonder if this guy has ever eaten cured ham, cheese, yoghurt, kefir, or a tasty aged rib eye. You have to wonder if he has ever had a European beer, fermented in an open container. How about bread? How about wine? You can’t make those things without microbes.

He probably lives in a bubble and plays Trivial Pursuit all day. I should have replied “MOOPS! MOOPS!”

Here’s a tip: never play a game where you can only win if the game’s owner hasn’t memorized all the answer cards. Unless you own the game.

All my life, people have criticized me for being paranoid about germs. It’s so weird, being taken to task for my filthy ways.

Let me inject this quasi-non sequitur:

MOUSEBENDER: It’s not much of a cheese shop, is it?

WENSLEYDALE: Finest in the district, sir.

MOUSEBENDER: Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please.

WENSLEYDALE: Well, it’s so clean, sir.

MOUSEBENDER: It’s certainly uncontaminated by cheese.

I stuffed my book with safety disclaimers. I feel like Philip Morris, recommending that people avoid my products.

Sondra found a great video at Redstate, and they got it from Youtube. You need to see it. It shows Republican lawmakers in 2004, telling Frank Raines Fannie Mae needs regulation. Raines is black, which is one reason the media won’t even mention him, let alone point out that he destroyed Fannie Mae. Members of the Black Congressional Caucus appear in the video, ranting emotionally about how the hearing is a lynching. Raines says the homes unqualified minority borrowers are living in are incredibly risk-free investments. Ho ho. Smoking gun.

He has to be a crook or just plain dumb. House prices were going up at an unsustainable rate in 2004, and anyone who passed fifth-grade math should have known it. Can you believe a guy considered capable of running Fannie Mae didn’t realize that? Hard to swallow. Maybe he’s just a socialist nut, and he saw the crash coming, and he didn’t care, because he wanted the rest of us to buy houses for minorities. Which is what we’re doing now.

He and his buddies were fined millions of dollars over illegal accounting methods, and he was, essentially, fired. So I think “crook” may be the correct description.

Prices had to adjust downward, and that means the houses were not risk-free investments. If the bank lends you X to buy a house, and you default, and the house is worth 0.75X, it’s not a risk-free investment.

Running Fannie Mae was risk-free for Frank Raines, however, because he is now out of the picture, and he is extremely rich.

Republicans failed to control Raines. They probably should have done more. If so, that’s very bad, and they deserve to be blamed for it. But it looks like Raines is the cancer. The Republicans are just the doctors who failed to cut it out. And the Democrat politicians are like “helpful” buddies who sneaked into the hospital and gave the patient more cigarettes!

It’s funny how the public is willing to believe that A) Republicans are racists, and B) Republicans caused the financial crisis by pushing for loans to unqualified minority buyers. Maybe we are the Racists That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. We have to work hard to improve and perfect our racism, because I just don’t see how giving free houses to poor minority members is advancing our evil cause.

Big Bag of Happiness

Here’s a good Sabbath question. Is it okay for a Christian to make a Costco run on this day? I sure hope so, because I just went.

I had to get more Costco cheese. I just had to. I’ve been making glorious little pizzas so good they should be sold by prescription only. And I needed that marvelous Costco mozzarella.

I have most of a big bag of Publix mozzarella, but it’s not good enough to use. I don’t know what to do with it. I bought it as an experiment. I guess I can freeze it. It will be fine in pasta.

Can you freeze cheese? I guess it must be possible, since every grocery sells frozen pizzas. I’m thinking I might make a big batch of sauce and then freeze vacuum bags of sauce and cheese. Just enough for one pie. I could staple the cheese and sauce bags together, so they’d make little one-pizza sets. That would save me a lot of time.

I also got flap meat.

I managed to refrain from buying Kirkland Champagne and Dewar’s 12-year-old Scotch. I deserve a pat on the back for that.

Adequate, but not Great

Today someone was asking about the Publix bagged cheese I said I was going to try on a pizza.

It’s not great. Costco bagged cheese is wonderful, but this stuff is nothing to write home about. It seems better than most of the bagged cheese from major companies, but the texture is a little too much like vinyl for me.

The Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella from the deli counter still seems like the best bet. I make them slice it thin, with none of that annoying plastic between slices, and I apply it two slices deep.

Ecstasy

My new thing is to make a small pizza for lunch. I only use a cup of flour; the pizza is about ten inches or a foot wide.

I just made one. After I ate it, I couldn’t get up from the chair. I just sat there, marveling at how good it was. I would marvel for a while, and then I’d think about something else, and then suddenly I’d say, out loud, “DAMN that was good.”

These are the little moments a cook lives for.

One of the most important parts of making a pizza with commercial sauce is forcing yourself to add enough water. You have to have a sauce that won’t hold a peak after you pull a spoon out. It seems counterintuitive, but trust me, it’s crucial. That’s what I did today. And I went easy on the cheese. I used King Arthur bread flour, without oil. I smeared oil on the outside while it rose, but there was no oil inside the dough.

I wish I could have another, right now. But lunch is behind me and I have to go back to poisoning the yard.

More Slaving, for You

It’s shocking how far I will go to help my adoring fans.

A while back, I tried Costco bagged cheese on pizza, and it was excellent. Today I decided to try the bulk bagged cheese they sell at Publix supermarkets. If it’s any good, I’ll write it up at Manly Grub.

I’m only putting it on half the pizza. I can’t risk a whole bad pizza, so I’m doing a half-and-half job with Boar’s Head sliced mozzarella.

One Good Dish Doesn’t Make a Restaurant Credible

Even though I had steak for dinner last night, I am tempted to have it again. One of my Youtube videos got a comment that makes me want to thaw out a prime rib eye.

I was fed up with people making the ridiculous claim that steak should be “rested” before serving. Steakhouses don’t do it, and it makes no sense to begin with. Steak should be very hot on the outside, and you don’t get that if you leave it sitting on a plate for five minutes. It’s just dumb. It should be obvious.

Humoring the people who entertain this notion, as though it were worthy of respect and consideration, I made a video. I took an aged choice rib eye, cut it in two pieces, and ate it. I ate the pieces five minutes apart, so the second one got to rest. And as I could have predicted, the first piece was better, because it was hotter on the outside. All the BS you hear about the juices redistributing themselves…none of that stuff happened.

It was a good test. Perfectly valid. Not as conclusive as, say, 50 tests, with different cuts. But reasonably scientific. Two pieces of meat, from the same steak. One for a control. One rested. We’re not talking about a subtle, evasive piece of data, here. Not something that requires a particle collider and a supercomputer. My test was more than adequate.

Some guy who claims he worked at the Peter Luger steakhouse in Brooklyn left a comment, saying I didn’t know what I was talking about. In the video, I pointed out that Peter Luger doesn’t rest steaks. He said that was because their steaks were aged four weeks, so they had less “blood,” and they didn’t need resting. HELLO? In the video, I said I was using aged meat. And where was his evidence that non-aged meat needed resting? Where was his test? There wasn’t one. And who eats non-aged steaks anyway? Why would you ruin a good prime steak by eating it without aging it? I’ve done it in the past because I didn’t know any better, but it’s a very stupid thing to do. When you pay for prime, age it yourself or make sure it’s aged before you buy it. A fresh piece of prime will be surprisingly tough and flavorless. I avoid buying individual steaks now, because you can’t age them. I buy rib roasts and put them in the cooler until they’re perfect.

The Peter Luger religion is a pet peeve of mine. I’ve been there, and you know what? It’s a bad restaurant. That’s not a subjective statement, either. There are solid objective criteria this place fails to meet. First, the service is bad. This even extends to their unwillingness to take credit cards, forcing customers to walk in Brooklyn at night with hundreds of dollars in cash on them. Second, the atmosphere is horrible; they serve you on wobbly tables with no varnish or cloths, and it’s loud, and as one reviewer put it, it’s like eating in a frat house. Third, a lot of the food is bad. I was served cold rolls that probably came from a bag bought from a cheap restaurant supplier; you can do better in any grocery store. The salad is a big nothing. The sides are boring and not particularly well prepared; you can get better stuff from Birdseye. The sodas are tiny, and they sling them at you with little glasses half-full of melting ice. The steak was fantastic, but it’s also fantastic at restaurants that aren’t total failures in all other regards.

There are problems with the steak. For one thing, they don’t offer a variety of cuts. They really push the porterhouse. Guess what? It’s not necessarily the best cut, and it’s not what a lot of customers want. It’s a filet and a strip, separated by a bone. Filets lack flavor. Strips aren’t all that tender or juicy. If I were going to have a filet, which is not my first choice, I’d want it by itself, wrapped in bacon. If I were going to have a strip, well, I wouldn’t, unless it was something I fixed at home because it was cheap. Some people like rib eyes; I think it’s the best cut on the cow. Some people like Delmonicos. They have a right to their opinions. It’s stupid to pretend you know better than a sophisticated customer.

Here’s another horrible problem with their steak. You can’t order steak for one. So they cut the damned thing up when they bring it to you. I was appalled. I’m not a four year old. I don’t want a waiter cutting my steak, letting the juice and the heat out. Ridiculous. Give me a steak that’s the right size for one hungry human being.

People complain about the wine list, too. I wouldn’t know. I’m not a wine drinker. But when the cheapest steak costs $81, the wine list ought to be top-notch.

Here’s another insult. They sell steak sauce. It’s nearly the same thing as French dressing. In fact, they recommend you put it on the salad as well as the steak. Why would you prepare quality steak and then encourage your customers to ruin it with sauce? And this sauce isn’t even good to liven up a cheap steak. It’s nasty.

If I were rich, and I lived across the street from this place, I could see going there once in a while for lunch, just for steak and a baked potato. But to sit down and eat dinner with other people? To be treated like a hog at a trough, when I should be getting a pleasant all-round dining experience? Never. Not in a million years. For less money, I can go to Ruth’s and get a gorgeous cowboy rib eye, a baked potato, creme brulee, and a succession of perfect martinis. At home, for $26 per steak, plus a few bucks for a potato and dessert, I can outdo Ruth’s, eat my dinner with friends or a DVD, and end up with about four dishes to wash. I’d have to be an idiot to settle for Peter Luger’s.

People say it’s worth it to put up with the crap at Peter Luger’s, just to get the steak. Sorry. Incorrect. The other high-end steakhouses are just as good. The last steak I had at Ruth’s was magnificent. And any reputable grocer or butcher can sell you prime beef that will age and cook just as good as anything they have at Peter Luger’s. The stories they tell about special beef are just hype. Even if their beef is marginally better, aging and cooking are ten times as important as the quality of the meat. My home-aged choice bone-in rib eyes are better than the prime steaks a lot of restaurants serve. If you get a typical piece of prime, age it well, and cook it properly (a cinch), you’ll beat the professionals. If all you care about is steak, you might as well fix it at home and save yourself a trip.

If meat quality were that important, Peter Luger would use Kobe beef. And they don’t.

The ignorance of reviewers who kiss up to this place is amazing. One guy bragged about being able to eat his steak with a butter knife. If you can’t cut your prime steak with a butter knife, you got cheated. You can probably get by with a butter knife, even at low-end places like Outback. Which happens to be a restaurant I like. Good solid food at a reasonable price. The earth doesn’t move, but they don’t charge you $81 for something you don’t want, either.

I guess I won’t have a rib eye tonight. I’m just not hungry enough. I’ve been getting such great results with cheap Costco meat, I’ve saturated my steak receptors.

I’m considering trying to age a pile of Costco flap meat. That stuff is excellent for the price, and you can buy a big wad of it suitable for aging. I’ll bet it would be phenomenal. It requires a certain amount of sawing and chewing, but aging would tenderize it a lot, and the flavor would improve. Slap a little homemade chimichurri on it…oh, yeah.

When the emperor has no clothes, it’s best to be honest about it. It preserves your credibility. Having been to Peter Luger’s, I will never be able to trust any reviewer who gushes over it. “It’s a classic New York experience”? So is a mugging. Which is much less expensive.

When you criticize this place, you risk attracting fanbois who claim you don’t know what steak is supposed to taste like. Yeah, I got similar remarks when I criticized $5000 stereo cables. Highly credible.

Guess I better start thinking seriously about dinner.

I Need This

It’s Boliche Day. Winn-Dixie put eye roast on sale, so I snapped one up, along with a very long chorizo to stuff in it.

This is a wonderful Cuban dish. The best way to fix it is to use a pressure cooker. Regrettably, it’s not all that unhealthy.

I’m putting the recipe up at the forum.

The Almighty Costcolio Wants it ALL

I need a Costco intervention. I made a run today, and I could probably list ten types of too-big-items-I-never-needed-in-the-first-place I almost bought.

The platter of prosciutto and mozzarella in little bite-size rolls…I still want to go back and get it.

I made a decent score, with some reluctance. The prices on beef were good today, so I went against policy and bought a loaf of New York strips. Usually I buy rib eyes, but I find that Costco rib eyes usually have a big island of solid fat in the middle, which adversely affects the bargain. The beef is good, but that wad of fat is somewhat annoying. So we’ll see how strips taste, after a week of aging. At $5.29 per pound, they would have to be awful for this to be a bad deal.

I need to start buying pork loins. They’re huge and cheap, and what is a pork loin? A loaf of tasty boneless chops.

I found a wonderful item. Kirkland Champagne. From France. REAL Champagne, supposedly. It’s $25 per bottle. I didn’t buy it, but I felt the pull. Wine Spectator gave it a 90. How bad could it be? My favorite Champagne, at prices ordinary humans can afford, is Bollinger Brut. I wonder how it rates on the Wine Spectator scale. I’m still waiting for Kirkland beer. They say it’s on the way.

I bought Costco gas for the first time. Not a fantastic deal, at $3.94 for premium. But at least it was convenient.

My biggest problem with Costco is my South Florida location. Florida Power and Light is the worst power company on earth, and only a fool would rely on a deep freeze here. You can count on losing your power for several hours once or twice a year, with or without hurricanes. If you can’t freeze a lot of food, Costco doesn’t work optimally. Sad. I freeze a few things, but I can’t do what I would really like to do.

I got a crazy idea today. I decided I was going to satisfy a lifelong curiosity. I was going to buy one or more S.W. “Red” Smith products and try them. You’ve seen this stuff, sitting on the counter at convenience stores. Big jars of red mystery fluid, containing eggs or sausages or pigs’ feet. My mom used to love those pigs’ feet.

I have never been brave enough to try that stuff, but curiosity is killing me, and think what a conversation piece one of those jars would be. But it turns out Costco doesn’t sell them. I had Costco confused with Gordon Food Service.

Some day.

The Smith factory is about 20 miles from me, believe it or not. So if I gave them a bad review, they might drive down here and pound me.

I bought red potatoes. They were so cheap that even if I have to throw out two-thirds of them, they’re still a good deal.

It’s too bad the local Costco doesn’t sell ground chuck, which is my favorite type of ground beef. I’d get ten pounds, mix garlic and salt in, and freeze some third-of-a-pound patties. Burgers just aren’t as good, when the salt and seasonings are only on the outside. Before making patties, I could also let the meat sit in the fridge until it got a little brown. Let’s face it. Slightly funky burgers are better than fresh ones.

Here is an informative quote from a story about the Smith company, which belongs to people named Foster:

Complying with USDA regulations for all meat businesses, the Fosters recently hired a lab to test the shelf stability of their sausage by having a piece injected with listeria, a bacteria that sometimes grows in meat and dairy products and can be fatal to humans.

”After a particular amount of time soaking in our solution, it actually killed the listeria,” Jonathan Foster said. “It’s the perfect hurricane food . . . depending on your taste.”

Maybe I don’t need a freezer. Maybe I need a big barrel of vinegar.

The company is now run by two brothers. Here’s a ringing endorsement:

”If you didn’t grow up eating them, say as a child, you probably won’t become a customer,” Jonathan Foster said, adding emphatically that pigs feet are not an ethnic food, but a regional delicacy favored in the southeastern United States.

In fact, the brothers themselves haven’t sampled the product.

”We keep telling each other that late one Saturday night we might dare each other to do it,” Foster said.

Good God, boys. You have to do better than that. Maybe I should run up there and talk to these guys.

Talk me out of going to Gordon Food Service.

Two Things With Which I Am Intimately Familiar

I just got back from Costco. Good news: the beef is still cheap. They have boneless rib eye loaf for $5.99 per pound.

Got home and checked out Weather Underground (sounds like a candidate for favorite site of Michelle Obama), and it looks like invest 94L has decided to punish me for making fun of hurricane season. It jumped up to 60 miles per hour today, and it is expected to manage a hard right turn, just for the purpose of getting at me and knocking the plantains off my trees.

One bright aspect of the situation: right now, the projected path is a straight line that puts me right in the north eyewall when the storm hits. That’s good, because these things never take straight lines. Although this one might manage, if it thought it had a shot at me.

The computer models say it won’t be anywhere near me, but the forecasters have decided otherwise, possibly indicating that someone has alerted them to the fact that I ridicule them every year.

By the way, Fay ended up near Pensacola, proving once again that nothing draws tropical cyclones like Ward Brewer. The government should pay him to move to a shack on the Yucatan Peninsula. I kind of wish he were in Denver today.

I don’t think the storm will be a problem for me. But it will probably bring us more rain, just when I was hoping to see the humidity go below 70% for ten or fifteen minutes.

I found a weird item at Costco. Premade falafel balls. I had to try it. You nuke them. They’re made by some vegetarian company, no doubt staffed by smelly faux-socialist hippies. But falafel is something hippies are actually capable of doing right, unlike brushing teeth, looking for work, or applying deodorant. Still, I don’t recommend them. I just ate a few. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re not particularly good. They have no spiciness to them. Falafel should have some heat, damn it.

Costco has Frank’s Red Hot sauce in what appear to be half-gallon jugs. Now I know where to go when I want to make wings. Frank’s is one of those moderately cheesy products I like in spite of its cheesiness. If you like weak but fairly tasty hot sauce–a good thing, because you can apply a ton–Frank’s is a fine choice.

Gables Eatery has the Right Idea

I just treated my father to dinner at an interesting restaurant: Randazzo’s Little Italy, in Coral Gables. It’s a red-and-white Italian joint, which is pretty much the only kind I like. If pink vodka sauce turns you on, swell, but like I said in my book, in my opinion, if a color isn’t in the Italian flag, it shouldn’t be on the plate.

This place has two big-screen TVs playing Godfather movies over and over. The music? Sinatra. Louis Prima. Connie Francis. Too funny. And the menu is consistent with my philosophy. It contains helpful little reminders, like, “This ain’t a health food joint.”

I ordered the spaghetti with Sunday gravy, which means tomato sauce. It came with two meatballs the size of a baby’s head, plus sausage, plus ricotta, and I would guess the portion they gave me weighed about three pounds. No exaggeration. I was hoping to try the cheesecake, but the spaghetti did me in. And it cost me $26, so I should have expected no less.

Very comfortable place. I’d go again. But I would order something smaller.

It’s kind of irritating, knowing how to cook. In the old days, I went to restaurants and ate the food and generally figured it was okay. Now I always find something wrong with it, because I’ve had such great luck with my own recipes. I think these guys should consider putting a little butter on the spaghetti. Butter has magical qualities.

If you’re ever in the Gables, you might want to drop by the place, have some food, and watch Fredo get whacked.

Convenience

I’ll tell you what’s sad about being a cookbook author. You may forget to shop for normal food, but you will generally have ingredients for nutritional disasters on hand at all times. Which is why I am about to make another pizza. It’s either that or drive to Winn-Dixie to check out the on-sale meat.

I’m almost angry at Winn-Dixie for discounting meat all the time. I used to go into the store and buy what I wanted. Now I feel like I’m not allowed to buy anything that costs over six dollars per pound, and I try to stay under two dollars.

Finding out that Costco cheese is actually pretty good has been a problem. I have several pounds of it, and I bought a couple of cans of delicious Stanislaus Super Dolce sauce the other day, and I feel like I have an obligation to eat all the cheese before it turns green. So I have to eat about three pounds a week. I also want to test it in calzones, so I have to make some of those this week. I think calzones should be less demanding, because my big concern with the cheese is that the low fat content will cause it to scorch, and inside a calzone, scorching isn’t an issue.

Thank God I don’t have ricotta, or I’d be making calzones with that, too. When it comes to calzones, I like pizza sauce, mozzarella, and maybe ricotta. But it seems like most pizzerias just use ricotta and maybe some crap to season it.

It’s a shame I didn’t go into calzones in the book, because you can make absolutely anything into a calzone, and they’re fantastic. If you have the book, just decide what you want to calzonify, make a 14-16″ circle of my dough, plop the ingredients on one side, fold the other side over, and seal the edges together by wetting them with water and pressing. If you haven’t made a cheesesteak calzone, your life has been wasted. Or a pan con lechon calzone. Oh. Oh.

I have been told that Paula Deen uses cottage cheese in lasagne. Sounds horrifying and WASPy, but I can’t argue with her reputation. Maybe I’ll put a spoonful on the pizza somewhere to see what it’s like.

Mike may be coming into town this week. He could definitely help me get rid of that cheese. Is it immoral to feed your excess cheese to a friend, knowing it’s just as bad for him as it is for you? I guess. But sometimes you have to look out for Number One.

It’s funny, but there are some TV chefs almost nobody criticizes. It seems like some chefs can’t manage to write a single recipe that pans out for home viewers, but others rarely fail. Paula Deen and Alton Brown seem to fit that description. You never hear anyone say, “I tried Alton Brown’s recipe for X, and it was disgusting.”

I would be really uncomfortable if I had a successful show and a string of restaurants, and most of my food was bad. I guess I’m nuts.

Pizza is imminent.

Not Surprising

I would appreciate a couple of small favors.

First of all, as I said Friday, a TV executive has expressed interest in the rights to my cookbook. I don’t know if there is any point in pursuing this or not; I am now told that the idea is for me to sell the rights to them, and they’ll hire a professional chef to do the show. You can see the problems with this. I’d get a little check for the rights, and then I’d be gone. The show wouldn’t be very good, because I’m what drives the concept, and I wouldn’t be there. The show would probably have little relationship to the book, so it wouldn’t be very helpful in terms of sales.

The obvious concern here is that if I don’t go along, someone will take the idea without paying for it, and they’ll do a bad show, and I won’t get squat.

So I would appreciate it if you would include me in your prayers, to prevent that from happening. This idea has a lot of potential, and I’ve worked very hard on it for a long time, and if it is taken away from me, I’ll be at square one.

Second thing: someone I know has been harassing me for a while, and it has been very distracting. I won’t go into details, but it’s basically a hopeless attempt to squeeze money out of me. And this person has done a number of risky, wildly self-destructive things in the process. Help me out and join me in praying that this person has a change of heart, accepts salvation, and learns to use God’s power to be a positive and healthy force in this world. And of course, please pray that the situation is resolved without harm.

If you could help me out here, I would truly be in your debt.

More

This, from reader JeffW:

Praying here also. If anyone finds time, my wife could also use some prayer. Due to cancer in an ovary, she just had an Oophorectomy (like a hysterectomy except they remove the ovaries too). She is “clean” now, but we’re in the recovery stage (1-week down, 5-weeks to go).

Just when I think my problems are important.