Green Bean Gramophone

The kind of week I'm having (I'll be 'Fessering for free one week next semester, because my employer can't come up with the scratch to cover payroll) the last fucking thing I need is dumb shit like the below, but Homer trawled it, I and I can't pass up the bait:

As our amuse-bouche for Thanksgiving, we asked three local chefs to deconstruct that Turkey Day icon, the green bean casserole: Nana executive chef Anthony Bombaci, Lola the Restaurant executive chef David Uygur and Screen Door executive chef Fitzgerald Dodd.

Don't know deconstruction?

Consider Humpty Dumpty: He got deconstructed. Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven? Deconstructed while you were nodding off in English.

Now chefs have wrapped their brains around the same concept of breaking things down to their elemental parts. But food deconstruction, a high-minded concept of the culinary cognoscenti, goes a step further: It takes those elements and reshapes them into something totally unrecognizable.

So a deconstructed Caesar salad might look like romaine leaf soup next to anchovy pâté, a poached egg and fried parmesan crisps artfully arranged on a plate.

Deconstruction is like the ultimate insider foodie joke. Except that in the right hands, it can be seriously ingenious.

"It's like disassembling a model," says Mr. Bombaci, who deconstructs early and often. "You take it apart and put it back together. You keep the components, but change the form." Hard things might become soft things. Hot might become cold. Protein might become an airy foam.

No. No. No. Whe have been here before, more than once. But to reiterate -- taking it apart and putting it back together is what deconstruction is not. Can we hope that the new administration will past strict new laws against journalists from provincial newspapers attempting to gussy up jiveass holiday features by using theoretical concepts of which they have not even the slightest grasp? As an upside, if Kim Pierce ever finds him/herself on Death Row, this article, what with the Humpty Dumpty and "Raven" resets alone, would demonstrate an IQ sufficiently low to prevent capital punishment. Even in Texas.

The receipts themselves are pretty much like you would figure. Imagine a mise for  making green bean casserole, then take those ingredients and stack them on the plate in some way that recalls modish platings from the golden age of cocaine and shoulder pads for women. In general, and especially if you work in a Dallas restaurant that was probably named after a stripper, a variation on my Memo to Girls Who Are Not Karen O (Attn Girls Who Are Not Karen O: Stop Fronting Like You Are Karen O) is in order. Attention Chefs Who Are Not Grant Achatz: Stop fronting like you are Grant Achatz.

Comments

[Paula]

Hmm. My brain's been all broke lately, and then that damn Ferran Adria book totally mind-bended my headspace... I'm gonna read through some of that and see if I can put together what I think in proper fashion.

(Translation: Interesting. I am currently an idiot.)