Um... WHAT?

So, I'm over at Passive-Aggressive Notes, when I come across this entry regarding a note put on the artificial sweetener drawer at some office. The note reads "HOW ABOUT GOING TO THE GYM INSTEAD" [ALL-CAPS and lack of punctuation preserved from original].

My initial reaction was: But... what? I mean, you... Do you... Ummmmmm.

Or, translated: Seriously, what the hell? Did non-overweight people stop using artificial sweeteners? Was there a memo? I wouldn't have gotten it, being overweight, but... was there?

Because, I mean, even leaving aside diabetics (and contrary to popular opinion, it's possible to be skinny and diabetic), what about someone who is generally in reasonable shape who just is trying to keep their unnecessary calorie intake to a minimum? I mean, sure, unless you're a serious coffee fiend or drink a lot of tea you probably aren't using a lot of calories of sugar, but even a moderate coffee-and-or-tea drinker could easily be adding 100, maybe 150 calories a day that way. Even if you aren't "dieting", that's not a bad reduction. Or if you don't care about that, it's not a bad way to reduce calories in one area that you can use to have a bigger piece of pie or a couple ounces of pretzels without increasing your overall intake.

Seriously. Do people ever stop to think... about anything?

It's like people who mock someone ordering a diet coke with their fast food. It doesn't matter how many calories the food has, you still are consuming fewer calories if you skip the sugared soda. That's how math works: when you subtract a number from a starting value, your result is a smaller value than the one you started with. (Unless you subtract a negative number, but food typically doesn't have negative calories.)

It's really not that hard

Tonight's Top Chef involved needing to cook for a vegetarian. This was a twist on what looked like an otherwise straightforward dinner party, so I do understand the chefs being thrown for a loop at first, but they got to go straight into looking through the non-meat products (fresh ones from a Farmer's market, Tom Collichio says in his blog, so probably plenty of good choices even aside from anything they normally had on hand). But the dishes were not, really, all that great. Many of them looked a lot more like appetizers or sides than entrees, and almost none of them included a protein.

Why proofreading is important

The other day I got curious about the whereabouts of past Top Chef contestants, and happened, in my searches, to come across a restaurant run by Season 5 contestant Stefan Richter. The restaurant has a menu, so I thought I'd take a look at it and see what he was offering.

I'm not going to critique the food choices; that's not really the point. I am, however, going to note that it's a really, really good idea to hire a proofreader for one's menu, even if it's just the online version. This particular version of the menu (I'm working off screenshots on the assumption they'll fix it at some point) contains a number of misspelled words, missing commas, and missing spaces. It's really pretty amusing, which probably wasn't the point of putting it online.

For instance, I'm pretty sure there's no such thing as "haricotvert red onions". Sure, I can parse that into what they mean (I assume they mean both green beans and red onions), but it's sort of jarring as one goes along. And I think that "cauliflower puree roasted shallots" is simply missing a comma, though I did find it entertaining to try to decide if they were coating shallots with puree and then throwing it all in the oven.

But I have to admit I'm not entirely sure how to parse "pan seared john dory with lentil parsnip ragout, baby spinach, extra virgin olive oil and micro greens". Are they just serving some olive oil on the side? Is it a spinach, olive oil, and micro green salad? Is the spinach on the side and the olive oil just on the micro greens?

Among the various things they're offering are: sandwhiches, sourkraut, sunchockes, bannana split, and 'redwine icecream lolipop', which... well, let's just say I had an image for a very, very scary anime series, okay? You're lucky my scanner is broken or I might try to share the image. (And, yes, I've reproduced those words accurately.)

But the one that finally made me and my sweetie crack up was when I read 'aged smoked goud'. It really shouldn't have been that funny, except I said "I guess they just dropped the 'a' from gouda." And then he said, "Unless there's such a thing as 'goud'." So I looked it up, and said "Not unless they're offering smoked Indian dudes."

It was... uh. It was really probably a lot funnier if you were there. Trust me.

Anyhow, I imagine they'll get that cleaned up at some point, and while the food doesn't seem to be much to my tastes (a few items excepted), I imagine there will be some happy customers. Even if some of their smiles are at the menu, and not the food.

Not a Top Chef

I'm not watching Top Chef this season. I freely admit I got bored of it, which seems weird because I really do love cooking shows. Maybe I just like them better when there's less manufactured drama. I find Iron Chef (the real one, not the American version) and Alton Brown pretty entertaining, for instance.

That doesn't mean I'm totally disinterested, though. I'm reading the recaps over at Television without Pity, which I do for shows I've seen as well because they're frequently really funny and point out things I missed. Right now, because I'm bored, I'm noodling through some of the old recaps, and I just got up to season 3's "reinvent a classic home dish as an updated, healthier dish" challenge, which I really liked.

Now, I'm not a professional chef and never will be, but I do like to cook, and I'm fairly good at it. I'm actually a lot more familiar with the classic home dishes than upscale food, in fact, and cooking healthily is usually a goal of mine (nothing wrong with occasional unhealthy food, mind you). So when they did this I thought about what I would make, and I'm thinking about it again now that I'm reading the recap. I don't know if I'd be able to come up with this stuff on the fly, but then, I'm not aiming to be a contestant. I haven't tried any of these (though some use elements I've used before). I actually am planning to try some of them since typing it up made me hungry. :D I think, though, they'd work reasonably well.