Top Chef idea

You know what I want to see? A spin-off of Top Chefs called "Home Cooks" or something.

You know how people who are really good home cooks sometimes are told they should open a restaurant? The purpose of the show would be to help someone do just that.

I'd want it structured more like TC Masters, with qualifying rounds and then "playoffs" and finals, and with a rating system like theirs as well. I'd also like to see some more generous time limits, or the addition of sous chefs or something else to acknowledge that home cooks aren't always the fastest preppers, and take the focus off of speed a bit in favor of letting them see what they could do. And the prize would presumably be both money to go towards opening a restaurant (or catering business, maybe) and the aid of someone who knows the ins and outs of opening restaurants to help them set up their place and hire the right people and such.

The challenges could be similar to what they do now, so long as they got the extra time or extra prep help I mentioned above. Plus I'd probably want to give them basic reference guides—not recipe books, exactly, but things like "this is what goes in basic sauces at these ratios" and "here's a basic white cake mix", and "here's a list of basic substitutions". A bit of a cheat sheet seems reasonable for people who don't spend as much time with cooking as professionals do.

Anyhow, I think that'd be interesting to see.

Alone in the Opinionsphere

Apparently I am the only person on the entire planet who actually thought Ben's kid's dress was cute. I find that weird. I understand the people who thought it was plain, because most of the details were very subtle, but seriously, how can I be the only person who thought that a) lavender was a nice alternative to pink and b) it suited the girl's colouring really well?

Eh, oh well.

So, there's no PR this week, so I'm going to go ahead and try to get episodes 2 and 3 filled in, and then starting next week I'm going to try to actually get readers, gasp, by submitting my write-up for episode 7. Maybe I'll even throw in a "highlights" section for the pre-runway bits.

Now to be fair...

I have noticed a trend lately in U.S. fashion shows to use a) more women who look like they're naturally lean rather than starving themselves, and b) models who actually are a bit larger, albeit still not anything like average size. I've even noticed some of the shapes of clothing looking more adaptable to different body sizes (fewer microbodices, looser construction, etc.).

But I'm not going to stop thinking model size choices are odd just yet.

Cocktails

I'm reading a book in which a PI is posing as a bartender. The author was careful to note that she had experience, which is good as the waitress-to-bartender ordering shorthand she depicts is a bit opaque, even to me, who was once fairly interested in cocktails and thought about being a bartender.

I never did it, though. I decided that customer service in general wasn't for me (I waitressed for the longest 6 weeks of my life once—never again). But I used to know what a lot of those drinks were, I'm sure of it. Not so much anymore.

See, over the years, I've pretty much... not exactly stopped drinking, but I don't really do it much at all (and these days the meds I'm on mean drinking in any quantity's a bad idea anyhow). I maybe go through couple bottles of Kahlua a year (some of which ends up being drunk by my SO), plus the occasional other drink if I'm going out, and by "occasional", I mean, really, honestly. It adds up to maybe a drink a month.

All of which means I can't really play 'stump the bartender' anymore. Chances are if I go for a drink it'll be something mundane like a margarita, or at least not entirely uncommon, like a Sloe gin fizz. I used to be able to come up with slightly more obscure drinks that I genuinely liked (I once stumped an admittedly fairly young bartender with Brandy Alexander), but the thing is, if you're going to do that, you should know what's in them, and I don't remember anymore.

I don't know if I actually care about that or not, but it does make reading a book with a bartender in it a little odd.