THE GURGLING COD

Off the wire--Foie it up, Chicago

From the AP, with a tip of the fin to Carlos:

Chicago overturns ban on foie gras in restaurants

     CHICAGO (AP) - Chicago has repealed a two-year-old ban on foie
gras (fwah-GRAH').
     The City Council passed the measure Wednesday to again allow
restaurants to serve the delicacy.
     The food is made from duck and goose livers. Supporters of the
ban complain that birds are force-fed to make their livers bigger.
     Mayor Richard M. Daley had called the measure the "silliest
ordinance" ever passed by the council. The ban went into effect in
August 2006.

See Foie Follies for the whole saga.

A nice day for a white wing

There is no detail of the Jenna Bush nuptials that will not make you stab yourself in the eyes/shred your passport/bang your head on your desk. Taking a non-partisan view, it is possible that the doings in Salado Texas represent the inevitable decline of dignity of the office of President of the United States that began when JFK appeared at his inauguration sans hat, but for fuck's sake, does that explain this?

Catering was done by The Range Restaurant in Salado, Texas. One of the items on the menu was a Texas delicacy called "white wings." On the restaurant's catering menu, this dish is described as "bacon wrapped chicken and cheese bites." I ran a Google search to find a more specific recipe, and thankfully was able to find one on The Bacon Show.

Basically how white wings are made is you place a Monterey jack cheese cube and one slice of jalapeno pepper on a chicken strip and roll it up. Then you wrap a slice of bacon around each rolled up chicken slice, forming a ball. But you don't just stop with one strip of bacon - next you wrap another slice of bacon around the ball in the opposite direction. Using toothpicks to hold the bacon and chicken in place, you grill the meat balls over medium heat for 20-30 minutes, rotating constantly.

If people on meth had appetites, they would eat stuff like this. At best, this is the kind of thing they might have at one of those Mexican places out by the interstate where Elmore Leonard claims some folks show up on Fridays with toothbrush in purse.* If nothing else, we can all agree that this seems like a pretty trashy call for a wedding involving the family of the President of the United States. If you disagree, name another president that would allow Monterey Jack cheese to be part of his daughter's wedding menu.**
*Sadly, a look a  the menu for the rehearsal dinner location suggests that they are capable of doing at least a little bit better than "white wings."
**Besides Andrew Jackson.

So I can see what you ain't doing

Living with a blogger is not all free cookbooks and hilarious press releases. Just ask the cinetrix. The Gurgling Cod is primarily focused on food, while pullquote is about cinema. But the cinetrix has gotta eat, and now and again, The Gurgling Cod will take in a picture show. So it was with great dismay that I learned that Werner Herzog, who should know better, is remaking Bad Lieutenant w/ Nic "Con Air" Cage. The only way this project redeems itself from utter suck is if it means a payday for Schooly D.
Schooly D:  Signifying Rapper.mp3

I miss Bill Biff

At least in the part of the world where Little Rock, AK, is a plausible tourist destination, and before the man himself reached the puppet-show-and-Spinal-Tap level of getting into shouting matches at dirt track dates in West Virginia while campaigning on behalf of his spouse, occasionally one would see a bumper sticker from the Clinton Presidential Library that says "I miss Bill." If I had a couple of Fs in the same typeface, I might throw one on the Codmobile, tweaked to read "I miss Biff," after Bruni's review of Eighty One:

The spectacle is impressive to a point, but exhausting, too. Or so I thought as I sifted through a very busy dish of very articulated veal at the new restaurant Eighty One, which presented veal cheek (braised), veal rack (roasted) and yet another hunk of veal rack (slow-poached in olive oil), not to mention some crispy Ibérico ham and something like a half-dozen vegetables. If ever a dish needed Ritalin, this was it.

Lamb, too, was a dubious triumph of trifurcation: some rack, some loin and some shoulder, for $39, which was $1 less than the veal. I loved the rack, enough to want to spend quality time with it. But my attention was yanked in other directions. I felt like a captive on a cruise, being hustled too quickly to too many ports of call: Acapulco! Puerto Vallarta! Mazatlán! Couldn’t I linger for just a bit?

Cf William "Biff" Grimes, on Olives, back in 2001:

LUNCH is the meal that many restaurants hope the critics skip. The most highly skilled waiters work the more profitable evening shift. The best cooks work at night too. But it was lunch at Olives that somehow crystallized the Todd English philosophy for me.

The defining moment, as they say, came midway through an epic-length flatbread sandwich, a footlong open-face affair with more stops on it than the E line. It featured lamb, large savory chunks of it, but also included a roasted red pepper salad, rouille, cucumber raita and a large mound of whipped hummus. It was not so much a sandwich as a buffet, and it wore me out. On the other hand, like many of Mr. English's creations, it was fail-safe. If you did not care for the red pepper salad, you could move on to the next thing, or the thing after that. Some plates are so complex that it's only when the busboy is clearing the table that you find an important piece of food buried under, say, a giant shaving of Parmesan.

The food is easy to like but hard to respect. The blatancy factor looms large. Mr. English starts with good basic ingredients, which he then subjects to a full-frontal lily-gilding. Any idea that occurs to him is by definition a good idea. He's the Thomas Wolfe of chefs. No sooner is a thought in his head than it's on the plate. His menu bristles with offerings like a jumbo chicken wing stuffed with foie gras and served on braised salsify with pistachio and truffle, or a fig and prosciutto tart in a rosemary crust, enriched and sweetened, almost to dessert level, by sweet and sour fig jam and Gorgonzola cheese. The signature Olives tart could stop with its topping of black olives, goat cheese and caramelized onions, but three ingredients just won't do it for Mr. English, so anchovies, waiting in the wings, are waved onstage.

It would be hard not to write a trenchant and entertaining review of an impressario as self-infatuated as Todd English, but it would be nice for DI/DO readers if they could feel as if they were laughing with Bruni more often.

Tracy Morgan is fond of Cornbread

Tip of the fin to EDSBS.

Party time

For some,  a reason to go on living:
Like Andrew WK’s new party pad wouldn’t have a killer music program? LCD Soundsystem front man, James Murphy, reveals on his label's message board that he’ll be doing a little something there called Special Disco Version.

Exciting news, to be sure, but I am even more curious about the food at a place where Andrew WK is presiding. I'm imagining tasting flights of Cheez Whiz, and pastry trolley stocked with cans of Redi Whip. Nitrous propelled entrees will be harder to execute, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
Foto from the forthcoming No Regrets. The incorrectly spelled tattoo is maybe even worse here because it would not be hard to slip in an apostrophe, suggesting that Partyman either does not know, or does not care that he screwed up the text for his tattoo.

Gordon of Arabia

Fresh off of his call for a fatwa against chefs who would serve asparagus out of season, Ramsay announces imminent hegira to Dubai:

Gordon Ramsay has made so many enemies in Europe and America that now the scabrous chef has decided to flee to Dubai upon his 45th birthday. At least, that’s the gloss we put upon his interview in Time Out Dubai recently. (Did you know there was a Time Out Dubai, by the way? Does Julia Allison write for it?) Ramsay’s plan has a few holes in it, though — the move is contingent upon his restaurants in New York, Paris, and London getting three Michelin stars, which should happen about the same time the post office puts G.G. Allin on a commemorative stamp.* We still expect him to slip away to Dubai or someplace like it, especially given the country's tax-free status and his growing number of moneymaking ventures there (he is said to be planning a gastropub, a bistro, and a cooking school), though how long he’ll stay there, away from the cameras, is something only his ego could answer. (We're setting the line at three months.)

Not sure what sort of local and seasonal produce they have in the desert, but perhaps  Gordo can work with the locals to  make sure that  chefs who do import produce are flogged in the town square.
*That is to say, not soon.

Fishing with Gordon

Gordon Ramsay reaches into the creel, and pulls out a wild-caught, dayboat harvested red herring:

LONDON (Reuters Life!) - Celebrity British chef Gordon Ramsay said restaurants should be fined if they serve out-of-season fruit and vegetables.

"I don't want to see asparagus in the middle of December. I don't want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home-grown," he said after raising his concerns with Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

"Fruit and veg should be seasonal. Chefs should be fined if they don't have ingredients in season on their menu," he told the BBC on Friday.

   

Just on its own, it is a weird mixture of a level of government interventionism only a Canadian could love, and a peculiarly aggro righeousness -- like Alice Waters after a couple of bellinis spiked with Red Bull and HGH. But consider the source. With the restaurant empire faltering, and even Australian Catholics ready to scrub your mouth with soap, what better time to jump on the sustainable bandwagon?

Electric Music; Solid Walls of Sound

We're gonna kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around.

Blessings

Scratch that last post, and the stuff about an uneasy time. Instead, on a sunny Friday morning, the Cod is feeling blessed. Blessed to live in an era of such unprecedented peace and prosperity not to mention general salubriousness, that a senior elected official has the time and space to pursue, Ahab-like, a personal sports-related vendetta. If only this guy had been around in '63, we might have gotten to the bottom of that whole JFK thing.