Sports talk radio, Emile’s cooking class

I really need to stop listening to so much sports talk radio. I get too riled up and it’s not good for my soul.

Here’s one of my biggest pet peeves – callers who complain about the attention some subject is getting and say, there are more important things to be worry about. They apply it to all sorts of stuff, like the steroids issue in past years. One caller said that about the Duke lacrosse team rape scandal. We should stop giving it so much attention, there are more important problems in the world that we should be talking about.

Uh, hello? You’re listening to and calling in to a sports talk show. And you’re telling us that there are more important things in life to worry about? Here’s 25¢. Go buy some perspective.

In other news, our group had a reward day in which we took a cooking class at Emile’s and shared lunch together. I enjoyed it a lot. What’s most interesting for me is seeing how restaurant chefs operate in the back. It’s crazy – they have just 5 cooks for a 100 seat restaurant. The coordination involved is amazing.

Anyway, he advocates that even for home cooking, that you arrange things with a spreadsheet, to ensure that dishes are prepared at the right time. He’s also big on arranging things so that the host isn’t in the kitchen the whole night during dinner. I’m a big fan of that. I dunno, when I’m eating with people, what I care most about is spending time with people, not the food. So I’m sad when the host is just caught in the kitchen. Seems to defeat the purpose of eating together.

Also learned some interesting tricks they have. The oil they use for grilling is only available to restaurants, some soy-based oil with a really high smoke point. But they also use this 90-10 blend, 90% canola oil, 10% olive oil. They do that because apparently canola is cheaper, and also has a higher smoke point than olive so you can grill at a higher temperature. But it has no taste, so they use 10% olive oil to add some flavor. Interesting trick. I think I’m gonna adopt that. You know, for all those times I cook.