This season the publicists are only doing conference calls instead of single interviews. 

Sadly this means less one-on-one interactions for me, ergo less chances for me to ask my weirdo chef-obsessed fan girl questions. 

Happily, though, it also means no audio, ergo, no gritting my teeth through sound editing my own giggly doofusness and wondering why I ask such weirdo chef-obsessed fan girl questions and why can't I just be normal for once?

So here's last week's Top Chef Premiere Live Thoughts (unedited, meandering), Recap (less meandering), conference call notes with eliminated chefs and my weekly Gourmet/No Way column.

The schedule will be Prediction columns on Tuesday, recaps on Wednesdays, eliminated chef conference calls Thursdays, and Gourmet/No Way Fridays.  We always have polls where you can pick favorites and you can leave comments here or there if you have questions you want me to ask.

As yet I have no official chef crushes, but I will keep you apprised of any developments.

If you are not that kind of person, or just find yourself in the mood where you want one perfectly cooked piece of delicious steak or a big plate of really exquisite and hearty pasta, you might find the Poppy experience less than satisfying.

Luckily for me, I have a sky-high need for stimulation and new sensory input (good, bad and all shades in-between), and went to Poppy with four entertaining friends who are up for culinary adventures and overall good sports. So we all had a wonderful time and want to go back again.

Four of us at the table had eaten at The Herbfarm while Poppy’s chef and owner Jerry Traunfeld was there. All of us had a really special and memorable night there on our respective visit. We definitely came to Poppy with high expectations, but also a lot of goodwill towards the chef.

We started off with eggplant fries, little gorgonzola cherry-sage puffs (the puffs were a tiny dark bread with a familiar flavor I couldn’t quite place in the two bites it took to eat), and gravlax remoulade on coriander potato cakes. The fries were the biggest hit at the table, but that’s like saying the supermodel was the most popular with the boys. I mean, anything in fry form is going to be a winner. The little puffs were nice as well.

The gravlax dish was good, but I couldn’t help but compare it to the revelatory gravlax/latke dish I had at Art of the Table, which was one of those dishes that...did something to my head. If you like to cook, sometimes you can taste something that opens up this new world of flavor and flavor combination. It makes you realize there is this heretofore unrealized harmony of taste, and inspires you to try to cook something that is such a delight and surprise when you first taste it. So let’s just say the Poppy gravlax had a tough row to hoe in impressing me after that.

So everyone probably knows this, but for my parents who read this but don’t live in Seattle, I’ll let you know that Poppy’s thing is that rather than individual courses and entrees, the main part of the dining experience is organized into a thali, a collection of little dishes that all come together.

On our night, our thali included the following:

• Carrot coriander soup - simple, spicy and delicious
• Beet and yogurt salad – um, you know how I feel about beets, but actually the table, which included beet-likers (some might question why I would befriend such people, but I try to reach out to these poor souls on a regular basis, hoping my positive influence will put them on the right path eventually), uniformly did not care for this dish.
• Persimmon, huckleberry and fennel salad – I found this nice, some really like it a lot.
• Scallop with a cider sauce and a little I believe parsnip or other root veg puree (forgot) – this was for me the best dish of the night. I think I am falling in love with scallops in general, and these were cooked nicely, with a delicious flavor from the cider sauce.
• Cauliflower with apple and celery – also nice, I think a couple folks said this was their favorite.
• Squash with toasted coconut – this was great, sweet, spicy, and the toasted coconut was an unexpected addition; that flavor and texture made for a beautiful contrast.
• Duck – only Will got this (you can swap out the non-veg dishes) and it was apparently good, didn’t appear to be mind-blowing.
• Fennel-lemon chutney – okay.
• Chestnut, leek and porcini blintz – this was one of the veg swap-out dishes. Kind of underwhelmingly, but not unpleasant. I just sort of forgot about it as I was eating it.
• Chanterelle and borlotti bean gratin – I didn’t have this, but I think it too was decent but not mind-blowing.

So okay, you look at that rundown and it would appear there were only a few dishes got us excited, which could seem kind of negative. That’s why I wanted to position this quasi-review with the caveat that, to me, the dining experience can still be wonderful even if some of the individual pieces might be underwhelming.

For one thing, I recognized that my expectations might have been out of whack. Eating the food of chef with a career and reputation like Jerry Traunfeld, I think I half-expected each thing on the plate to open my mind up to some new world of flavors like that gravlax at Art of the Table. If you’re waiting for revelations, it certainly set you up for being underwhelmed.

That said, the whole thali concept – lots of little bites – means that even if an individual item or dish isn’t the best thing you’ve ever eaten, that’s okay. You still have the fun of bopping around the tray, trying the other items, comparing it to something else, mixing the flavors, etc.

So there were three savory dishes that I really liked a lot, only one of which really made me all swoony from the deliciousness (the scallops). But it was still extremely satisfying because when I wasn’t swooning from deliciousness, I was nevertheless having a positive experience, that of culinary adventure and novelty.

We also had some of their house cocktails. My Turkish Delight (orangey) and 622 (Manhattan-y) were nice, well-crafted, not quite as exciting as I hoped. Carolyn’s Elite on the other hand, made with St. Germain elderflower liqueur, was delicious and floral (my first reaction was it tasted like a sexy cough-drop, in a good way), and the level of inventiveness I was sort of hoping for in my drinks.

And now on to the desserts, which were probably the best part of the evening for me, and not just because of the sugar involved. As noted previously, Dana Cree, who taught at the cooking school when I was working there, is in charge of the sweets at Poppy. She just continues to impress me every time I eat something of hers. She, like Dustin Ronspies, the chef at Art of the Table, always seems to put flavors together in a way that is somehow both familiar and yet new, sophisticated in their restraint and yet wholly satisfying.

I asked my server what the most adventurous dessert was, and he recommended the butternut chiffon with bay cream and hazelnut. The dish is somewhat reminiscent of pumpkin pie, but taken to a level of sophistication and complexity that elevates it way past that comfort food. Carolyn went rhapsodic, saying it had everything you could want in a dessert, and she’s not even a pumpkin pie fan.

Doggie got a malted milk chocolate ice cream, which was delicious. Will and Carolyn got a dessert plate that included the chocolate terrine with ginger (nice), fudge (really nice), plum soup (simple and slightly addictive despite its simplicity), and a cinnamon caramel ice cream that depressed me.

Not because it wasn’t good, it was beyond good, but because since I am now obsessed with making ice cream, it was...it was like going to see Glenn Gould perform after learning to play Chopsticks on the piano. I know what I want to achieve in my ice cream; it’s what’s going on in that cinnamon caramel ice cream, so perfectly cinnamon-y and so perfectly caramel-y, sweet, but not too, simple yet somehow complex and interesting at the same time. What is depressing is I am about one million gallons of ice cream experimentation away from having anything approaching that skill and who knows if I have the natural palate anyway. (Choked sob.)

Our server was excellent, helpful and enthusiastic about answering our many questions. It’s always great to have a server who can see that the table is open to trying new things and wants some direction and who provides the right information to help you make a decision.

We wound up sitting there for over three hours. Okay, not quite the six hour experience of The Herbfarm, but the bill for five with all that food, wine and cocktails was about what it would be for two at The Herbfarm, so you could say it was a bargain.

So, to reiterate, if you are going to go to Poppy, go with an open mind, curious palate, and short attention span, and make sure to bring your most adventurous and good-sport friends. Leave room for dessert, order that sexy cough drop cocktail and while you might not find your favorite savory dish in the whole wide world, I am pretty sure you will still have a great time.

But maybe Obama represents an entirely different threat! A threat to your beets! Apparently, he can’t stand them.

So I've decided to start my own unfounded internet rumor.

Maybe there is a crazy dystopian future ahead of us, but rather than Second Amendment rights being stripped, or wealth being redistributed, the real terror will come when they come to burn down your beet fields!

Oh wait.  Can you burn down a crop of root vegetables? Hmm. Maybe he has a team already working on the logistics.

(Of course, as a card-carrying beet-disliker, this is all fine by me. If the fundamental beet-related fabric of our nation is torn asunder, I, for one, would welcome it.)

• Advanced Prep: Most biscotti can last for about two weeks in a tightly-sealed container or can be frozen.
• Method: Kind of biscuit-y

Once I discovered my oven issues, I thought, maybe it’s time to give biscotti another chance. It was sort of like discovering your friend who’d been acting erratically had some sort of...mild concussion or hormone imbalance or other legitimate physical reason for being such a very bad time.

But it does still take a while to rebuild trust, so I couldn’t jump just totally jump back in wholeheartedly. So I went with a savory biscotti.

It didn’t register, though, that this savory biscotti called for my favorite thing: cutting fat into flour until you have coarse meal. Sigh.

So if this is what I started with...

...is this coarse meal?

Well, it’s what I went with. I was reluctant to take it any further as I didn’t want the butter to melt from the room temperature and the action.

The dough it created was very sticky and difficult to form into the usual biscotti logs with my hands, even floured. Using two plastic dough separators though, I was able to successfully prod them into shape.

The rest of the baking process is the same as the usual biscotti process: bake in logs, take out...

...cool slightly, cut into the biscuits, re-bake.

So how so they taste? Um, super good. Really super duper addictively good. The large quantity of black pepper adds a spicy almost floral flavor that is a delicious contrast to the richness of the parmesan cheese. Extremely yum.

There are a couple reasons why I wind up making Epicurious recipes so often despite the legion of cookbooks that I own. One is that my bookshelf doesn’t have a handy search function. No matter how many times I yell “SAGE” at it, the books refuse to fall off the shelf and land open to recipes using sage.

The other reason is I do often find the reviews of other users are very accurate to my experience. Unfortunately, about half of the time, I only realize they are accurate after the fact.

Like in this case, I read a review beforehand saying they halved the recipe because the yield is large (5-6 dozen), but afterwards wished they’d hadn’t.

Well, I too halved the yield, and I too wished I’d hadn’t. They are now gone, and I am a little forlorn about it.

Despite the coarse meal dilemma, they are not very difficult to prepare, so I think I might be making another (full) batch, putting some into the freezer. They are also delicious cut further into cubes and tossed into a salad as a crouton.

Yesterday: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Wednesday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

• Advanced Prep: Can be made two days in advance (although it's super fast so not a big deal to whip up day-of).
• Method: Quick bread with a smidge of kneading.

Of all the recent little savory breads for company, the Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads from Epicurious were probably the easiest: no biscuit hand needed and very little kneading involved. Despite the ease, they were quite tasty and seemed to be successful with folks. Other than the fact that you bake them in batches, they are also very quick. Just mix up the ingredients, knead a few times, roll out and stick in oven.

The picture that accompanies the recipe on the Epicurious site makes these look like they will be lavosh-like in their crispiness.

In actuality, they have more of a saltine-type texture, a mixture of crispness and soft flakiness.

Two of the three big pieces I made were actually not particularly crispy at all, mainly because I didn’t roll them out thin enough. I brought the flatbreads over to Will and Carolyn’s, and Will noted he actually liked the almost biscuit-y texture of the thicker pieces. Personally, I liked the crisper ones, but they were both tasty and slightly addictive after a while.

If you think you would also like a crisper texture, I recommend rolling them out verreeee thin, even if it makes the dough larger than the 10-inch diameter the recipe notes. If you have a good pizza stone, you would probably want to use that instead of the baking sheet called for.

I think the addictive element to these was thanks to the large amount of rosemary, olive oil and sea salt in the recipe. I might have oversalted a bit...note to self: sea salt is nearly invisible when sprinkled onto a damp surface, so you don’t have to keep sprinkling until you can SEE it. It’s there.

Other than the fresh rosemary, the ingredients in this recipe are ones most folks usually have on hand, and with how quickly they can be thrown together, this could be a good choice for last-minute entertaining.

Tomorrow: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

Yesterday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

• Advanced Prep: Can be made three days in advance.
• Method: Yeasted bread.

Oh god YEASTED BREADS.

(Teeth gnashing, clothes rending)

I really thought that kneading dough was going to be some kind of hardcore A.D.D. torture, like waiting in line without any reading material or getting out of a car (don't ask, it's an odd tic but I'm not the only person with A.D.D. who feels like that) or listening to someone NOT GET TO THE POINT once you've already figured out what their point it.

Everyone has felt an itchy impatience at some point, so it might be hard to really grasp what is so doggone special about the A.D.D. itchy impatience that makes it an actual thing as opposed to, you know, just poor discipline against impulse control.

I guess the best way that I can explain it is that it's that itchy impatience times one million to the point where it feels like actual physical pain and jabbing a rusty nail into your eye to distract yourself or running into traffic/murdering another soul to make it stop are actually momentarily considered as reasonable solutions.

So I have NO idea why I picked a recipe that involved kneading (SCARY MUSIC PLAYS), but I did.  And then I kneaded some dough.

And surprise surprise!

I liked it!  I liked kneading dough.  It was NOT A.D.D. torture, it was actually one of those lovely no-thought mind-clearing activities that feels like a balm or salve for the usual itch of the racing mind.

Nevertheless, I still didn't do it for long enough, nor did I let them rest for quite long enough.  So the breadsticks' texture was a little off. They were still too taut and sproingy to form nice shapes.Instead I kept feeling like I was baking the breadsticks for Naked Lunch or something. 

Or Eraserhead!  Actually, these are the breadstick version of the Eraserhead baby.

Despite the issues with texture and, um, appearance, they were still tasty enough.  I made them for dinner with the Long-Distance Gay Husband, who was in town for a bit, and he happily noshed on them dipped in a cheese dip I made based on the cheese part recipe for Gruyere Rarebit.  He ate enough of them that I knew he wasn't just being polite.

(Quick aside on the Rarebit Dip.  I stole the idea from the delicious Homemade Pretzel and Welsh Rarebit appetizer served at Quinn's.  I liked the one I made - and it was quite easy - but think I personally would prefer it made with Cheddar rather than Gruyere next time.  I also think that cheese would work better with the herb flavor.  But I might just not be enough of a Gruyere fan, so take that with a grain of salt.)

LDGH said he liked that the breadsticks were very flavorful from the herbs used.  The rosemary was definitely the more prominent note, so if you want more equal flavor from the thyme, you might want to up that herb a bit.

I did change one major thing about the recipe - I used regular all-purpose flour instead of bread flour.  The Bread Guy at the cooking school always said that though it seems counterintuitive, bread flour is just too tough to use in bread.  He always recommended using regular all-purpose flour.  So I did. 

I'm not sure how that might have impacted the structure, but I think like my first little bread effort, the main texture issue was more about my mechanical efforts, not the recipe. I will try this one again and would recommend it as a relatively easy and very tasty breadstick.

Tomorrow: Crisp Rosemary Flatbreads

Yesterday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

Epicurious Recipe: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

• Advanced Prep: Make biscuit dough rounds in advance and freeze the dough, bake on day-of.
• Method: Biscuit, obvs.

Since the majority of my rather minimal overall experience in the kitchen has been focused on desserts, you might think the transition to savory baking would be welcome, but it's not.

What I like about dessert baked goods is their cakiness.  (Or, you know, their being actual cake.)

But what I generally like least in a savory baked good is cakiness.  I want chewiness or crispness or flakiness.

And my assumption about the path to chewiness, crispness or flakiness has been that it is paved with Patience and Attention. 

It requires a good "biscuit hand," or willingness to knead and knead and knead no matter how bored you are and how that boredom feels like being covered in fire ants that are as irritated with covering you as you are with kneading that damn dough.

So while the Bread Guy at the cooking school was one of my favorite teachers for entertainment value, I would always watch the students dutifully kneading, and think, "F that!  I'll just buy the Bread Guy's bread at the store."

But I don't know. I guess I decided to try some biscuits. 

I think mainly because I had some buttermilk on hand and needed to use up some self-rising flour that's ticking down to an expiration at the end of this year.  I plugged those ingredients in Epicurious's search and found this recipe.  It has the extra added bonus of using up the cornmeal that has also been languishing in the fridge.

What I hate about biscuit or pastry recipes are instructions like: "Add 1/2 cup chilled butter and rub in with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal. Add buttermilk mixture and stir until moist clumps form."

"Coarse meal"?  "Moist clumps"? 

I was on a Kaypro at age 5.  My mind works in zeros and ones.  I don't know how to follow these kinds of directions.  What is the diameter of a piece of coarse meal or a moist clump?  What percentage of the mixture has to have that diameter, and, ergo, what percentage that looks different is acceptable?  I get very Rain Man about this shit.

But I tried it, and I guess it seemed to work okay.

I'm making my own attempts to be more frugal, so I did resist the urge to buy a biscuit cutter and instead, used the can from some pineapple juice I already had on hand.

I made the dough, cut the rounds, and froze them per the instructions I found on the Modern Beet blog.

The first one I cooked from frozen tasted good and had a nice texture, or so I thought. I was less pleased with the ones I then baked on the night of Book Club.  They still had a good flavor, but were less fluffy than I was expecting. 

I have no idea if this is due to my being more ham-handed than biscuit-handed, the recipe not being as good as it could or the time in the freezer.  I suspect user error is most likely culprit. 

The flavor was very nice, though, with the tang of the buttermilk and scallions, the crunch of the cornmeal, and of course the lovely salt-and-peppery-ness of the whole thing.  I think I will attempt these again to see if I can improve my part of the process, and see how that might improve the output. 

If you are fortunate enough to already have a nice biscuit hand, I'd recommend giving them a go.

Tomorrow: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

I've been reconsidering this cycle lately. I learned a lot from my time with too many jobs, mainly that I never EVER again want to be that busy and chaotic. I think for years I’ve been juicing my need for stimulation by putting myself into high-stress situations. It might be a negative jolt to be overscheduled and frantic, but it’s still a jolt. And if stimulation is a greater basic need for you than comfort or calm, you’ll keep making that choice even if it makes your life seem objectively worse.

Cooking has been such a revelation to me because it reminded me that rather than looking to stress for stimulation, I can (and should) look to creative work to fulfill that basic need.  Obvious, perhaps, but I can be a little slow at grasping the obvious sometimes.

And let’s face it: stress, like junk food, is a heck of a lot easier to come by in the typical American life than fulfilling creative work or a healthy meal.

Of course, back to the original point of this post, that creative stimulation is only a positive if it doesn’t go all out of control when harnessed to an impossible ideal.

So, now armed with the knowledge of this more positive stimulation, and the desire to have a more calm and peaceful life, I had the opportunity to try a new approach when cooking for a few dinner guests and events recently.

In the past, cooking for company descended quickly into a 20-hour cook-a-thon. I planned a menu FIRST and think of budget only after I’ve gotten attached to an idea (usually grandiose, usually involving a bunch of ingredients I didn't have on hand).

Now, I wanted to see if I could START with keeping budget and time in mind first, and plan the menu around it. (Again, remember I generally only figure out the obvious after an absurdly long period of trying out the totally not obvious and/or ridiculous.)

Some things worked, some didn't, but the consistently successful element were little savory flavored breads that I could make a few days before the event.  These little breads came in handy: not only were they delicious, they are - as restaurants well know - something you can throw into the maw of your hungry guests as you get the other elements to the table.

I found a few successful recipes, and I’ll be posting the recipe results over the next few days. I picked them for a few reasons.:

• They are highly-flavorful, so much more satisfying and exciting to the palate than plain bread. The flavors themselves in these recipes are simple yet sophisticated and so most are suitable for even a fancier-time party.
• With maybe one exception, the ingredients called for aren’t too unusual if you have a reasonably well-stocked kitchen and access to a store like Trader Joe’s.
• You can make them early, at your convenience, and spend the time the day of on all of the more a la minute type of items.

Here are the recipe results I’ll be posting this week.  There are a few different baked good prep methods represented, in case you are already a baker and have a preference or want to stick to a method you feel comfortable with.

Tuesday: Buttermilk Biscuits with Green Onions, Black Pepper and Sea Salt

• Advanced Prep: Make biscuit dough rounds in advance and freeze the dough, bake on day-of.
• Method: Biscuit, obvs.

Wednesday: Rosemary and Thyme Breadsticks

• Advanced Prep: Can be made three days in advance.
• Method: Yeasted bread.

Thursday: Crisp Rosemary Flatbread

• Advanced Prep: Can be made two days in advance (although it's super fast so not a big deal to whip up day-of).
• Method: Quick bread with a smidge of kneading.

Friday: Parmesan Black Pepper Biscotti

• Advanced Prep: Most biscotti can last for about two weeks in a tightly-sealed container or can be frozen.
• Method: Kind of biscuit-y

After that quiche (which I was forced to pour into a pan, scramble, pour back into the cooked shell and serve to my Book Club as the world's least attractive egg dish.)...

...I started researching possible causes related to one of the two Epicenters of Failure: the oven. (The other Epicenter: the ice cream machine. More on that some other time.)

The obvious starting point is the temperature. Step one was testing my oven thermometer.

You do this, per the instructions on this grilling website, by bringing water to a boil and immersing your oven thermometer into the boiling water. It should, ideally, register within a few degrees of the temperature of boiling water, 212 degrees.

My supposedly high-quality, less-than-a-year-old oven thermometer? Never got above 180. That's thirty degrees off.

That means when I have been thinking my oven is at 350 degrees, it's probably been closer to 380. I think this would explain why my baked goods have had a tendency to be burned on the outside while the inside remains undercooked.

I was very excited to discover this recently on a day when I had three different baking projects going.

Unfortunately, as I was knee-deep in three different baking projects, I momentarily lost the tiny grasp on common sense that I usually have, and accidentally adjusted in the opposite direction. That is, I set the oven temp so that the thermometer would register 30 degrees OVER the target temp, which would actually be 60 total degrees off. I didn't actually regain my common sense until the final project was in the oven.

As you can probably guess, the night was another sad float drifting listlessly down the street in the disappointment parade, more overdone outsides and underdone insides, but that's okay! A possible solution is in sight now that I can once again do simple math.

Another small and easy fix I learned about is adjusting the temperature selector knob on your oven itself. If you find it is running high or low, you can often take the knob off and make an adjustment on the underside to adjust for that. Full instructions in this article here.

Mine doesn't appear to be very exact (only offers "hotter" and "colder" options),

but after feeling very frustrated at my inability to improve the quality of my output, I'm just happy for any additional control at all. I will report back after the next batch of baking projects as to any improvements.

In the meantime, if you, too, have experience the heartbreak of disappointing baked goods, take a squinty-eyed look at your oven and oven thermometer. They might look innocent but be acting in secret cahoots to undermine your baking.

(One last oven temp tip: when using a glass or dark non-stick pans for baking, reduce the oven temp by 25 degrees.)

In that vein, I recently picked yet another recipe based solely on the level of discomfort I felt at the idea of it: Sage Ice Cream.

Sage? Really? Somehow that just doesn't seem like it could work. Ergo: I must try it.

The Epicurious recipe the ice cream is a part of is a complicated composed dessert with pumpkin cake and a cherry-pumpkin compote.

I really didn't want to get that crazy with it, so I instead picked a different pumpkin cake and modified the recipe, posted below in the Satisfactory Pumpkin Cake Recipe.

The pumpkin cake turned out well, I think, and the sage ice cream was surprising good. My friend Clay tried it and enjoyed it too. The sage flavor is subdued while still present and mingles well with the lemon in the recipe, giving a mild piney roundness to the flavor. It's in a custard base, and I think the richness of the egg works well with it; I wouldn't try this flavor with a Philadelphia style.

The sage ice cream works really nicely against the highly-spiced pumpkin cake, which has a hint of orange citrus flavor as well.

All in all, this is a grown-up and sophisticated flavor that is nicely balanced by the homey warmness of the traditional pumpkin flavors. Maybe not something to serve to your more conservative of eaters (i.e., young children), but a nice selection for a dinner with your adult foodie friends.