Chef Report

Rachael Ray is everywhere. She’s on TV, on bookshelves and now you can even buy the Food Network personality’s cookware.

To Lansing resident Misty Lane, it’s too much, and through a Web site she has created she has found out she is not alone.
Originally conceived as a joke, Lane started the “Rachael Ray Sucks Community” (http://community.livejournal.com/rachael_ray_sux/) in 2003 half expecting others to share her disdain for Ray.
“I got really fed up watching her show,” Lane said. “I really didn’t think anybody would join.”
The online group dedicated to Ray-bashing existed under the radar for about two years, until web magazine Slate.com ran a piece in defense of Ray in July of 2005 with a link to the site. Now 1,332 members strong, Lane, who has never met Ray, said the community receives about 300,000 hits every month. more…

PEARL HARBOR, HI–Three cast members from the ABC drama “Lost” all agreed Naval Submarine Support Command was the winner of the sixth Pearl Harbor Naval Submarine Support Command’s (NSSC) Culinary competition, Saturday, Oct. 14.

Cast-Away cuisine was the theme for this competition. NSSC along with six submarines competed using dishes made with only ingredients that could only be acquired if they were stranded on an island. Dishes ranged from kalua (earth-cooked) pork, macadamia nut-crusted chicken to blackened shark. The winning dish was goat cheese-stuffed pork tenderloin prepared by Culinary Specialist 2nd Class (SS) Kelly Mathis.

The four judges were Terry O’Quinn (John Locke), Jorge Garcia (Hugo “Hurley” Reyes), Dominic Monaghan (Charlie Pace) and Nigel a friend of Monaghan. NSSC and COMSUBPAC staff members approached O’Quinn weeks earlier when a relative of O’Quinn was frocked to chief petty officer at the COMSUBPAC Chief Petty Officer pinning ceremony.

“I met Mr. O’Quinn at the Chief Pinning ceremony at Sharkey Theatre,” said Chief Culinary Specialist (SS) Juan Hernandez, competition organizer. “I thought getting him and some of his friends from the show to judge the competition would be great.”

Locke agreed and word spread quickly. Mathis, a native of Social Circle, Ga. and a fan of the ABC show said he was ecstatic and motivated to win.

“When I heard they were coming, I was beside myself,” he said. “I knew I had to do something extraordinary. I decided on a dish I saw on a television show, but of course I had to add my own touch.” more…

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Carefully tailored to service the soccer mom crowd racing between work and kids and shopping, “The Rachael Ray Show” is a syndicated daytime talk show-cum-pep rally targeting viewers who are double-parked.

It moves along in energetic rat-a-tat-tat style via a series of manic Rachael McNuggets that casts Oprah’s very own handpicked youngster as a whirlwind of hyperkinetic charisma. Indeed, the opening hour depicts the former host of Food Network’s wildly popular “30-Minute Meals” as a woman in need of

Ritalin to slow it down, modulate her pitch and try a little less hard. Ray has an inherent likability and is certainly easy on the eyes, but she doesn’t talk to us so much as screams and she might want to consider taking a more leisurely approach. As it is, it’s all she can do to keep from using the adoring audience as her mosh pit.

Happy to be here after spending the past five years “talking to vegetables,” Ray emerges to a cool, loftlike brick set (it spins!) and hip R&B theme music. She quickly (everything here is quick) pours herself a cup of completely unnecessary coffee that she sips while reminiscing at the set’s kitchen table. Ray’s occasionally squeaky voice is even more adorably anxious than usual, but the crowd clearly already views her as royalty on Day 1 — screaming wildly with her every breathless piece of jabber. She packs a lot of show — too much, actually — into the kickoff that’s punctuated by her cuddly asides designed to establish a connection with Jane America. more…

CHICAGO — Don’t come between foodies and their foie gras.

That was the message sent by Chicago diners who dug into foie gras dishes Monday, on the eve of the city’s ban on foie gras. High-end restaurants had special foie gras tastings to protest the ban, and even a few down-home sandwich and pizza joints added it to their menus for the occasion.

At the 676 Restaurant & Bar on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, chef Robert Gadsby topped foie gras with Pop Rocks candies, wrapped it in prosciutto, and blended it into hot chocolate as part of an “Outlaw Dinner” that also featured such controversial ingredients as wild morels, absinthe, unpasteurized imported cheese, and hemp seeds. While the seven-course, $140 dinner was completely legal, all the ingredients have been banned at some point.

Gadsby called the foie gras ban ridiculous.

“What’s next?” asked Gadsby, who also hosted an Outlaw Dinner last month at his Noe Restaurant & Bar in Los Angeles, where foie gras will be subject to a statewide ban by 2012. “They’ll outlaw truffles, then lobster, beluga caviar, oysters. There are diners who eat to fill a hunger urge, and there are diners who eat to be dazzled. If you take away the luxury ingredients, how can you dazzle them?”

Chef Ramsay calls both Heather and Virginia upstairs.  Chef Ramsay tells Heather that she started off as a young girl and the way she has matured is amazing and tells Virginia that you can’t buy a palette like she has.  Chef Ramsay tells the chefs that one of them had a very slight edge on the customer comment cards.  Chef Ramsay hands both Heather and Virginia a key and says that the winner’s key will open a door.  Heather’s key opens the door, and she wins the restaurant.  Chef Ramsay says Heather won Hells Kitchen because “she stuck to what she knew best and she controlled her kitchen from start to finish.”      more…

The county Board of Education has approved a ban on junk food, but backed off from a more stringent nutrition policy that would have banned many homemade foods from class.

The new rules that passed unanimously at a recent school board meeting forbid candy, soda and other so-called foods of minimal nutritional value from being sold or given out until the end of the school day.

But homemade sauces, meats and other food that can spoil will be allowed in the classroom after parents protested a move to ban many meals that weren’t bought in stores. more…

Also…

Rochester schools clamping down on junk food

“We are offering fast food consumers what they truly want,” announced Hardee’s last January. That’s when the fast-food chain started switching “to an entirely new menu focused on 1/3-pound, 1/2-pound, and 2/3-pound Angus beef burgers, called Thickburgers.”

“Thick” is right…and it doesn’t apply only to the burgers.

The smallest (1/3-pound) Thickburger has 740 calories and 16 grams of saturated fat. That’s roughly double what you’d get in a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, which is missing the Thickburger’s mayo and cheese (and some of its meat).

But apparently that’s just a snack to those Hardee’s customers who “truly want” the 1,090 calories and 29 grams of sat fat in the 2/3-pound Thickburger. more…

FOOD critics can deflate a chef’s career as fast as a badly-made soufflé but the country’s top restaurants are fighting back and Harpenden’s very own celebrity chef, Jean Christophe Novelli, is leading the way.

The culinary pin-up is the face of The White Horse, a gastropub in Hatching Green, and is one of the first chefs to stick up a rogues’ gallery which names and shames some of the country’s most poisonous critics. (more…..)