THE GURGLING COD

Ripert to NFL? or Jimmy Johnson's Big Chill.

The 7th floor's report that Jimmy Johnson was (back) in the restaurant business and the glorious picture at left raised a few questions:
1) If I, say, wanted to keep track of an athletic contest during my meal at Jimmy Johnson's restaurant, cold I do that? The answer, yes, a "multitude of flat screens." But this led to another question.
2) Why, a) does this restaurant have a Myspace page? And b) why is the restaurant listed as 29 and female?  I imagine that a fair number of Myspace users who are neither 29 nor female describe themselves thus, but a restaurant? Does this restaurant like to "party"? Is this something that we'll start to see NYC publicists do for their restos? ("Thanks for the add, Stone Barns!")
3) First Biden, and now a resurgent Jimmy Johnson. Is the coked-out uncle the prevalent sex meme for the late oughts?
4) Generally speaking, the involvement of an athlete in the ownership and management of a restaurant puts a definite ceiling on your expectations. Consider four restaurants -- Prune, Wayne Gretzky's Steak House, Le Bernardin, and Chelli's Chili. You will notice that the two non-sports-oriented ones are generally more ambitious and held in higher regard for their food than those with a sports orientation. However, think of how much lower expectations would be if, say, someone approached Eric Ripert and said -- we like what you do with a court-bouillon -- would you like to coach the Jets? (That said, I'd hire Gabrielle Hamilton as strength and conditioning coach in a heartbeat.)
5) Finally, if I were to visit Jimmy Johnson's restaurant, would I be personally directed to the restroom?
Good to know.

Is Eustace Tilley peddling his ass?

  I know that everyone is all excited about the done-on-an-iPhone New Yorker cover. (I am still waiting for my print version, but it looks like a still from that  Donald Fagen New Frontier video.) Call me cynical -- there's a first time for everything -- but, I cannot help noticing that the back page advertiser on the last several issues of the NYer is, um, the iPhone. My crack fotoshop team has the weekend off, so please combine the images to the left and right on your own.

Chilling in the Shack.

Danny Meyer reduces the number of good reasons to leave NYC in the summer by rolling out corn dogs at the Shake Shack. Best of all, Rick's Picks Handy Corn* is chilling in the shack as a corn dog condiment option. Have a good weekend, everyone, and be safe. Keyboard Cat works a half day on Fridays, so we have Warren G to play us out, instead.
Warren G "This Is The Shack" Regulate PolyGram, 1994.
*You won't hear Robert Parker saying this kind of thing about wine, but the taste of  Handy Corn is more like receiving a manful hug from its creator than one would think possible.

Let Sonoma in Popeil Melt!*

A recession can do funny things to an economy. Take TGC's Williams-Sonoma. As previously documented, they have a business model based on selling people stuff they do not need at inflated prices. As the keen-eyed cinetrix noted, in these uncertain times, competitors are tweating the W-S model by selling stuff you do not need at low prices -- viz, the taco tee. Also everybody over the age of 8 prefers soft tacos, which obviate the need for this device. But as the philosopher Gloria Estefan once wrote, it cuts both ways. While the W-S ethos percolates down, the Ron Popeil ethos trickles up. In March, I suggested that a certain fictitious hand-operated food dicer/castrator was down with W-S. At the end of May, the wisecrack becomes a reality, in the $49.95 form of the multi-chopper. It is true that iff nobody bought these things, they would not sell them, and it is true that forks were once dismissed as an affectation. The Gurgling Cod does not oppose new kitchen items, per se. But one wonders if selling stuff like this makes serious cooks uneasy about the righteousness of the knives, spatulae, etc.

Sausage nightmare

Now that the iPhone has made us all into VanGoghs, can someone please render the incident recorded in this video as an Hieronymus bosch Bosch-style painting?

The Cardinals' Jason LaRue Nearly Gets Wienered from JoeSportsFan.com on Vimeo.

It's amusing to watch,  but imagine if you were on your way back to your desk after a break, and five enormous sausages almost mow you down. Via TGB.

A recession? Hot Dog!

Unlike the previous information that it is rude to send text messages during a meal, this nugget from the Trib is news. Evidently, the way folks are coping with the recession is by buying grills. Under the best of circumstances, editing a food section is a gig that I bet is like pimping, in that it looks easier than it is. In a recession, a piece of the newspaper that is inevitably organized around consumption has to find the "less lavish than previous, but still involving goods and services exchanged for money" angle. Switching from sirloins to pizzas may be one way to fight a recession, but is it enough to get your mortgage out of delinquency?  It is possible that Norman Rockwell, 85 years ago, may have a more timely vision of cooking out during a recession:

Table talk

Nice as it is to see the SSC all up in the NYT, not all sweetness and light in DI/DO. In a stop the presses moment, experts agree it is bad manners to text at the table:
Dr. Post Senning is here to tell you that it is not perfectly fine. Not at all. So new is the problem that her latest book, “Emily Post’s Table Manners for Kids” (HarperCollins, 2009), written with Peggy Post, covered it only generally, in a blanket ruling: “Do NOT use your cell phone or any other electronic devices at the table.”
In other news, it's also not considered polite to wipe your ass on the tablecloth, no matter how delicious the food. Had I been at the table with the kid texting during Yom Freaking Kippur,* he would be wearing the soup, and the device would have been inserted into whichever end of the digestive tract came to hand first.
One can say that these shorties are coming up in a different world, and that world happens to be one where many, many of their parents are asshats:

That means you, George d’Arbeloff. Or so his wife, P. A. d’Arbeloff, told him after she caught him peeking at the iPhone in his lap during Thanksgiving dinner at their home in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. “I tried to catch his eye,” said Ms. d’Arbeloff, director of the Cambridge Science Festival in Cambridge, Mass., “but he was looking down.”

He may have been scrolling through work-related e-mail messages or, possibly, checking sports scores, conceded Mr. d’Arbeloff, who is the chairman of a Los Angeles-based dental laser company. Because the company is on the West Coast, e-mail messages tend to flood in just as he is sitting down to eat.

“I have never texted at the dinner table,” he said in a telephone interview. “I will admit: I do read e-mails.” He paused, listening to his wife, who was in the room with him. “P. A. says I send.”

A few months ago, a family meeting was convened. The d’Arbeloffs’ 7-year-old twin daughters made their feelings known. Their father agreed to cease using his iPhone during dinner. “I’m 95 percent reformed,” he said.

OK, George D'Arbeloff. Perhaps your fast-paced dental laser salesman business also means that sometimes you have to take a piss in the shower, but that's not something reasonable people would share with a newspaper some people actually still read. Same goes for emailing at the table. These twins appear to have the Matilda Syndrome,** but in general, these are the jackass parents who will produce the cretinous Vikings I will have to throw out of class when they are texting, and they will whine, b/c they do not know any better.***

The aforementioned Susie makes the point here, that her biz is about bringing the family back to the table. Unless the only blackberries in evidence are in a cobbler, however, they might as well stick with the TV trays.

*Confidential to New Orleans: predict the outcome had this happened on Lois's watch.
**Now and again, remarkable children can spring from sources as unpromising as these.
***Verbatim from Spring '08 evaluations: "He was quite intolerant of what he believed to be disrespectful-- a hat on in class, a computer open, a quick text message. As a college instructor, I feel he should understand that we pay to be there and if we fail ourselves by not paying attention, it is our fault and responsibility."

Cream

Considering a cook through a cookbook project. Any nominees? More importantly, I want my entire summer to be exactly like this instrumental cover of the Wu:
El_Michels_Affair_C.R.E.A.M.
That is to say, a summer where I have an internship working in a detective office shared by Charlie Chan and Jake Gittes.

Cure for shame

...as promised a while ago, details on how The Gurgling Cod managed to work past a secret shame. As someone who cooks a fair amount, and knows folks who do not cook as much, TGC sometimes gets branded a "snob" when he expresses surprise at the continuing availability of, say, bottled salad dressing, or commercially prepared mayonnaise. There is, however a golden brown Achilles heel. When a day is the sort of day that demands a steak to banish frailty and to prepare for upcoming challenges, the most popular accomaniment is Ore-Ida Tater Tots. At least once, a friend has accosted me in the supermarket and expressed surprise that such an item would be going home w/ the vegetables and other stuff from the walls. I've experimented with hiding the Tots under, like, a copy of Shape magazine, but it's tricky to sneak it back into the rack as you check out. The concept of Tots seemed to be within reach, and recently I took a deep breath, and did an online search for "tater tot recipes." This one was the one that seemed most promising, even if it meant incurring the shame of becoming an owner of mini miffin tins. That hurdle aside, the receipt worked out well. I skipped the bacon, which seemed a bit much if they are served as a side. They bore a passing resemblance to silver dollar latke, which is not bad. The shape, however, rendered them much more like Crispy Crowns than Tots. A different shaped baking vessel might be good, possibly a silicone ice cube tray, if such a thing exists. They also heated up nicely the next day.
And with that, this, for no particular reason:

The Sysco Kid?

A forgotten asterisk in the last post was this idea: We can wonder if a single person can actually embody the entire local/organic/sustainable movement, but there is no question that a single outfit sums up its antithesis. Sysco, the 26 billion/yr foodservice company. While Dan Barber is paying a Bard dropout to hunt for morels, who is buying, oh, premade omelets from the folks in the big silver truck? If I had the resources, I would dispatch a flunky to the Sysco HQ in Jersey City, and follow the trucks to see where they drop. And War already has a name for the category: