Top Chef: The Grandma Edition

This week, we saw the end of another season of Bravo's Top Chef, with a new Celebrity Chef wannabe crowned as winner. The romance of the chef lives on, and on and on. It's a world of foul-mouthed, tatted-up boys unleashing their vast mental stores of culinary whoop-ass on each other. There's trash-talk, moments of self-doubt, and triumphant, tasty brilliance. I've seen the chef-testants (Bravo's word, not mine) make a dish from the contents of the lowly vending machine. I've seen them fashion potatoes into pasta, and magic fois gras hamburgers. But for all of their creativity and ingenuity, the best Top Chef I've ever known was my Grandmother.

Grandma was a visionary. Long before we started praising those daring French chefs and their use of organ meats, Grandma was serving up her own Southern-fried charcuterie - basically, whatever was on sale at the grocery store that week. The dish made its debut at the Sunday family dinner. If there was a sale on whole chickens, then chicken it was for Sunday and chicken it would be for the rest of the week!

Sunday - chicken, mashed potatoes, and vegetables
Monday - chicken and potato pancakes (made from Sunday's mashed potatoes)
Tuesday - chicken and dumplings served with Sunday's vegetables
Wednesday - chicken soup with biscuits
Thursday - chicken casserole
Friday - No chicken (Grandma was a pre-Vatican II RC, so no meat on Fridays, ever!!!)

My sweet little grandmother managed to do all of this in her floral, zippered house dress and scuffs, instead of chef's whites and expensive clogs. Instead of bravado, she served up daily brilliance with a smile and we were all well fed and happy. She didn't "stage" with the likes of Eric Ripert, but she learned her killer culinary techniques from some of the best cooks she knew: from her sister, Alice, she learned the art of the bundt cake. From her sister, Hilda, she learned how to make the best sheet cake I've ever tasted. From her sister, Lucille, she learned to make the fluffiest and most buttery dinner roll on this earth. And from her mom, she learned everything else. In her younger days, she had been a line cook, actually the cook, for my Uncle Joe and Aunt Helen's small luncheonette. She'd occasionally work there when I was a little girl, and during my summers, I'd accompany her there and watch her in action.

Having never attended The Culinary Institute of America, my grandmother learned by holding her feet to the fire, or should it be the meat to the fire (I know, bad pun! Bad pun!!). She may not have been able to tell you what a brunoise (food cut into a very fine chop) is, but she had the technique to execute it.  Her only kitchen knife, which she used for cutting vegetables and butchering meat, wasn't anything you'll see in a Williams-Sonoma catalogue.

As for food and wine pairings, well just forget that. My grandmother only liked one wine and it was Manischewitz (with one ice cube added). Even now, when I have a bit of port after dinner, I think of Grandma with her juice glass of Manischewitz, and the sound of the lone ice cube clattering to the bottom of the glass as she finished. And so here's a toast to you, Grandma, for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner that you cooked with your own hands just for me. Yelp and Zagat's may have overlooked you, but you have 3 Michelin stars in my heart - I'm just saying:)

The Holiday Jam

I'm always a fan of a good holiday special. Christmas in Washington (c'mon, it's Mrs. Nick Cannon, after all), everything on HGTV (I just love watching new ways to decorate Christmas trees), Charlie Brown Christmas - they're all glittering brain candy. And then came the Food Jammers. For those of you not familiar with the Food Jammers, they are a trio of vintage t-shirted, scraggly-haired hip denizens of a cramped loft apartment loaded with odds and ends rescued from city curb sides and junkyards who have a show on the Cooking channel, the latest spawn of America's push-pull relationship with food.

The Food Jammers aren't recipe jockeys, per say. They like to over-complicate the process of food preparation - for instance hollowing out logs in order to make a Holiday Log Train (complete with a track and wheels) for their feast. I mean, hell, you can venture over to Sur la Table and buy serving platters, but, that's a little too clean and corporate for the Food Jammers. And as the garage band track plays in the background, off they go on a quest for the perfect guinea fowl, chestnuts, and squash in order to round out their holiday feast.

If it sounds like I might have a problem with the Food Jammers, well, maybe I do. But here's really what irritates and fascinates me. These 3 dudes represent the ultimate man-child. They look to be in their 30s, driving the streets of Seattle/Portland/San Fran or wherever in their beater car, with each scratch, dent, and ding a badge of honor in their fight NOT to become The Man. The trio are soft-spoken, overly cooperative creatures, whose SAT vocabularies and sophisticated foodie sensibilities would seem at odds with their personal appearance. I suspect that we've all seen this guy, hell, I dated a HIPSTER version 1.0 back in graduate school.

But these heroes of the Mumblecore, ironic wearers of flannel with unrepentant growths of weird or sparse facial hair seem a bit out of step in the current celebrity food universe.

Celebrity chefs seem to have a lot more testosterone.There are the tatted-up, faux-hawked, iron-pumping, potty-mouthed men of Top Chef who will kick your booty if you dare to talk smack about their mise en place or butchering skills. There's Bobby Flay who brings the fight to you in your own kitchen with his Throwdown show. Guy Fieri, with more rings on his fingers than Karl Lagerfeld, and his Susan Powter Stop the Insanity hairdo, looks like he could scrap if he needed to. And you just know that Gordon Ramsay would and could smack up a chef (that's probably why he yells at them all so furiously - the popo can't pop you for mouthing off at somebody).

So are the Food Jammers a rejection of chef as stud? There's certainly something playful, even child-like about them. They seem to want to play - play with their food, with the systems and processes used to prepare their food.

Maybe it's all Jamie Oliver's fault, with his adorable way of saying "mushy peas", his love of a good pint shared with his mates in his wee tiny flat wearing flannel and Chuck Taylors and OH MY GOD!!!! - this is ALL Jamie Oliver's fault!

Or maybe the existence of the Food Jammers represents a shift in how men in the kitchen are beginning to see themselves. Maybe the Food Jammers are making a new path, one that requires less swagger and more curiosity, wonder and awe at how food comes to your table.
Don't get me wrong, I shall still mock them, but, in the spirit of the HIPSTER, I shall do so ironically and wearing a tattered, vintage screen-printed ring-tee. Ah, but I must go now, for their holiday log train has hit a snag - looks like they'll need to scavenge the wheels off of one of their many skateboards so that the holiday log train will keep rolling.

I'm just saying!