elizabeth grigg - the other fourth meal

Wouldn't it be great if every weblogger warned you when they were going to talk about their latest not-so-greatest consumer experience?

I'll start with the unusual case first. My laptop is back, after being fixed. The warranty was expired last month, but they fixed it on warranty anyway. The tech even snuck in a repair to the monitor screen latch, which is normally excluded. I will buy a Toshiba again just to keep the same support staff. How about that?

Now, here are the situations I should be expecting but somehow don't. This is the "They'll do it every time" dept. (anyone remember that cartoon?)

Flexcar: They automatically withdraw funds on a certain date, so when I had to have them wait a week they treated me like dirt. Then they had another opportunity to treat me like dirt when I found out the hard way that nights between 11pm and 7am were no longer free. This doubled my bill, but did not factor in to getting better treatment, in fact, they were even nastier. I'm sorry guys, it's such a great idea, and I don't know who's abusing the system but it's not me. I hope it works out.

Shark Tale: This got good reviews, and I went, but it was lousy. I don't know what I was thinking. Not only did I waste $9 on my big treat for the week, but I also wasted the 2 hours of time the little one was napping. I could have folded socks, or done anything! As a consequence I'm not accompanying the rest of the fam to the Incredibles right now. I'm sure it's a great movie. It's just that it got great reviews from the same people who liked Shark Tale, so here I am.

Food Tangent: I just sent in the following letter to my favorite magazine for food snobs such as myself. You can pretty much guess what happened. Be warned. (As an aside, I recommend MFK Fisher's "Gastronomical Me", check it out of your library. Her food based trips through France were amazing.)

Greetings,

I am a food and wine subscriber and have had great luck with your recipes in the past. However, I wasted the better part of today on the “Braised Artichokes with Red and White Pearl Onions” by Marcia Kiesel, which appeared in the Nov 2004 issue.

Artichoke hearts are a special ingredient, and those of us who have never prepared them (except for the canned variety) need to be steered clear of recipes like this. They are expensive, and it can be physically challenging to work with the artichokes raw. The recipe calls just for the heart, but only after following the directions you realize you are throwing most of the vegetable away. This is the most egregious error of the recipe. Obtaining artichoke hearts should be its own step, with its own style, similar to adding soup stock as an ingredient, or pie crust for a pie recipe. It should not be included with the recipe itself, leaving the cook to choose their own method of producing them. I myself would have chosen to prepare the artichokes normally, and saved the heart for this recipe later.

With that said, I expect editors of food and wine to weed out recipes that have these additional time-consuming technical errors:
• Ingredient amnesia. Marinate the raw artichokes in lemon water, then also include lemon zest in the sauté, and then finally add lemon juice to the sauté but only at the end. If you want it lemony, decide when to have us add the lemon.
• Ingredient waffling. Saute with lemon zest, bay leaf, and oregano, but then after you’re done you must fish out these ingredients. I’ll give you the bay leaf, this is commonly done, but why not just add less lemon or less oregano and then leave it in the dish?
• Preparation overkill. Braising is a technique of cooking food that leaves a bit of a crunchy part on the edges, in order to enhance the flavor. This recipe called for braising of raw artichoke hearts for two minutes, and then adding water and essentially stewing them. Due to this stewing effect, there was no difference to the texture of the artichoke hearts than if they had been steamed, the leaves eaten normally as an appetizer, and then the heart kept for this recipe. The take-home is, if we are to do the work, make sure it makes a difference in the taste.

I had to throw my artichoke mixture out, because of errors I made in extracting the heart, but not until I was quite irritated by the recipe’s technical errors along the way. Please take my advice to not include raw artichoke heart recipes unless you devote a chapter to the hearts, with pictures, and consider the food waste and the time involved. Above all: does the extra work involved enhance the flavor? We all want our recreational time cooking to be worth our while.

Best,

-Elizabeth Grigg
(Seattle, WA)