Top Chef Texas, Episode 10: Never Boring

Still Life with Bacon and Eggs after Ty-Lor

Picture of Wit

Whenever I sit down in the morning to peruse my weekly copy of the New Yorker - fountain of all wisdom, source of excellent movie reviews, and provider of much-needed giggles and grins - the first thing I do is flip to the back page where the results of the cartoon-caption contest are posted. I always check to see whether anybody I know has won, since several individuals of my acquaintance are apt to submit suggestions on a regular basis. Not me, I hasten to add: my mind goes infuriatingly blank when presented with a drawing of a giant badger sitting on a bar stool or any of the other surreal situations likely to spring from the fevered imaginations of the magazine's famed artistes.

This morning, I was greeted by an excellent surprise. Although there were no familiar names among the finalists, there was a caption of such transcendence, such on-the-nose zeitgeist-mirroring, such perfection, that I share it here. It's the second one down, in case you are unable to guess:

Michael Hicks of New Orleans, LA, I salute you!

Photo Finish

Loyal readers are well-aware that I enjoy peppering my gluten-free scribblings with photographs, both for instructional and aesthetic purposes. Tragically, in some unfortunate cases my pics have turned out so badly that postings about their subjects had to be abandoned in order to preserve my reputation as a cheerful perfectionist. The image of Risotto alla Scozzese, for example, taken to commemorate the inauguration of my freshest batch of lobster stock, looked like a heaping bowl of pink oatmeal. A plate of Spaghetti Carbonara, immortalized as a tribute to De Boles corn spaghetti, was - how shall I put this delicately? - let's just say 'indescribable' and leave it at that. The portrait of my Yorkshire puddings (six less-than-impressive fawn-colored dough lumps) failed to convey the success of an otherwise triumphant g/f baking experiment. Cream-hued and brown-ish foods are definitely a challenge to the would-be food-porn artiste.

The latest victim of my amateur efforts was Monday's bowl of brown sushi rice, easily my poorest pictorial striving to date. No matter what I did, the result was uninspiring, unappetizing, and unworthy of these carefully designed pages. I include it below so readers may judge for themselves what I was up against.

Bowl of Brown Rice (a severe case of the blahs)

Never one to admit defeat, I was nonetheless a bit unsure of where to turn. Fortunately, help arrived in the nick of time. Just last week, Andrew Scrivani published in the New York Times an article called 'How to Shoot Ugly Food,' which I had printed out and tucked into Moleskine's back pages as insurance against just such an eventuality.

Too late to save my previous pics, I was determined to apply Scrivani's wisdom to the current problem. He talks about how difficult it can be to 'take a good picture of an uncooperative subject' - which a bowl of inanimate brown rice definitely is. His advice to the unfortunate food photographer is to make like a seventeenth-century Dutch painter and consider the comestibles as a sort of still life. Now it's been a while since Art History 101, but as the philosopher once said, 'it's just like riding a bike.'

The first thing I remembered about all those Olde Masters was their devotion to lighted interiors. Scrivani writes of the need for lighting to be 'exquisite', which I call wishful thinking as I am severely limited by my basic digital camera, the aperture of which is about the size of - oh - a pinhole, thus necessitating daylight shoots in all but the most unavoidable cases. Fortunately, at this time of year the sun's bounteous rays sometimes stream into the south-facing dining room in a pleasing way. I was able to make use of the beams' play on the table by working at an angle:

Bowl of Brown Rice (after Emmanuel de Witte)

Much improved! But I had barely begun to scratch the surface of Scrivani's insight.

He talks about how he often relies (as a distraction, I suppose) on table settings and 'beautiful props' for added interest. I recalled our good Japanese rice bowls, purchased at great expense from Takashimaya many years ago and, astonishingly, still all accounted for. I transferred a small amount of the rice to the prettiest of the bowls and carefully mounded the grains into a slightly off-center ziggurat, discovering in the process that cold rice sticks to itself better than warm rice. Chopsticks and tweezers proved helpful for creating the pyramid's 'natural' look.

Bowl of Brown Rice (after Willem Kalf)

But still Scrivani has not imparted his entire philosophy. Finally, he urges us to concentrate on elements of 'textural and geometric interest'.

I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille! 

Bowl of Brown Rice (after Abraham Hendricksz van Bayeren)

Now that's a fine-looking bowl of rice.

Tamari and Tamari Creeps in this Petty Pace

Well, Campers, you will remember that when we last visited the soy sauce issue, I had decided to take my life in my hands and affirm that naturally-brewed shoyu is virtually, if not actually, gluten-free. In the same breath I maintained that tamari, an often wheatless variety, was too salty and icky and to be used for most equivalent applications.

What I did not know at the time was that Sir, having broadcast my woes all over his Tokyo office, was inundated with advice from helpful colleagues (and their concerned wives, as it transpired) distressed to hear Bad News From Overseas about their national condiment. As a result, a fine bottle of organic tamari was entrusted to Sir for my delectation: the previous owner claimed it was liberated from his own stores, being surplus to requirements, but I suspect that some sort of elaborate Japanese reciprocal gift-giving ritual had come into play. Sir had, after all, the day before beneficently proffered to his colleagues several bags of exotically foreign Pepperidge Farm goldfish as an office snack.

Confronted by the tamari upon Sir's return Stateside, I was a bit stymied, to tell the truth. First, I double-checked the ingredients label for wheat, to make sure it was the real deal. I am now an expert at identifying gluten-related kanji, which isn't all that difficult since the characters are pretty much the same for just about every grainy word you care to think of. Such etymological economy makes life fairly easy for the gluten-free gaijin.



The entry for mugi in my trusty kanji dictionary:
observant readers will note that all grains use the same root character
and are distinguished by the prefix
(barley is 'great grain,' wheat is 'little grain', oats are 'raven grain,'
and buckwheat I can't figure out at all).



I scrutinized the tamari bottle's ingredients label, and detected nothing untowards:

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say, and I cracked the bottle open. I was immediately assaulted olfactorally by the pungent aroma generally found in Worcestershire or fish sauce. I tipped some out into my marinating dish in order to assess the sauce's other qualities. The tamari was much thicker and stickier than shoyu - positively syrup-like, I would venture to say: instead of dispersing in the dish as expected, it viscously stuck where it landed. I amused myself by practising my calligraphy, an impossibility with traditional soy sauce:

Tamari in hiragana - note the condiment's syrupy consistency,
eminently suitable for artistic endeavours

Tasting the tamari, I discovered it was indeed very rich and salty, though not so unpleasant as to be unusable. All it needed was a bit of diluting and doctoring to make it into a nice accompaniment for the butterflied pork I was preparing to grill. I cast my eyes around the kitchen, where they lit upon some dry vermouth (left over from my weekend stock-making project, about which more will be revealed in due course); some apple juice (it was either that or peach/cranberry, which might have been good, too), honey, and some peanut oil. I whisked it all together, tasting and adjusting as I went, and came up with a pretty excellent marinade, if I do say so myself. I soaked the pork in it before grilling, then boiled up and concentrated the remainder as a last-minute glaze. I'm pleased to say, the result was quite oishii.

I am therefore revising my position on tamari. It is certainly too strong to use straight up for sushi, sashimi, or in a salad dressing, and needs extensive manipulation for use as a marinade or sauce. Having said this, one can be 100% certain that it is gluten-free (provided it is the wheatless variety), and that is welcome news. I still maintain that good shoyu is safe and will continue to employ it where necessary.

But that's just the kind of girl I am - stubborn to the last.

Next up: I celebrate the onset of cold weather by cranking up the Wolf and taking stock of my situation.