What a crock

It's been a while since we looked in on the Madness that is Williams-Sonoma ( beetubs, this week's posts, at large , skew v. West Coast, WTF?), but to be sure, the brain-damaged elves have been busy in their workshop. It's a repush of the $250.00 crock pot, now advertised as the magical indoor device that can produce BBQ. The receipt for the short ribs is reasonable enough (Except for the $13.00 BBQ sauce.* I think I'd rather pay for sex than buy BBQ sauce from a mail order outfit in California.) But you can braise short ribs until Daniel Boulud shows up at your house wearing nothing but a toque and a smile,** and you still won't have BBQ. Heck, you can ask these guys, but BBQ is a noun, and not something that happens in a crock pot. This sort of indifference to meaning damages the whole enterprise. If they are this careless w/ BBQ, who's to say that the potholders are not actually rags soaked in kerosene?

And it's spreading -- reader Chapman passes along news of the Slider Station mini burger sensation. Considering that the slider urge usually hits when one is too drunk to cook for oneself, this one is an accident waiting to happen.

*And calling a BBQ sauce "Southern style" is about as useful as calling a wine "European style."
**8-10 hours, usually, depending on the wind.

Comments

[Pat Darnell and Friends]

Poor Romans in the countryside most often lived with their whole family in one room of a small apartment building. So they didn't have a separate kitchen. Instead, they cooked over a small fire or on a charcoal brazier, either in the courtyard or in their room .... Poor Romans who lived in the city generally didn't have a courtyard, so they cooked on the brazier in their room, or they bought food in restaurants or from street vendors, already cooked.

"There weren’t very many rich Romans. Most people were poor. But some rich Romans were REALLY rich and they liked to show it by having a lot of slave cooks make them very very fancy dinners, and then inviting a lot of their friends over to eat with them."

Hang in there this has a point --

re: Barbecue/ BBQ
One complicated meal involved stuffing a chicken inside a duck, then the duck inside a goose, then the goose inside a pig, then the pig inside a cow, and cooking the whole thing together... [Source clik HERE]

[sazerac attack]

My favorite absurdity from them was a branding iron for your grilled meats.

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/cw140/index.cfm