Christmas was a quiet one. Usually, about 40 of my extended family descend on one person's home for the day. This time our family was fractured across a couple of countries, so I spent it with my brother and Boxing Day with my partner's family. Felt weird not being surrounded by the cacophony that is my family, but I did crush some excellent naps over the break. I have four tomato plants growing in my greenhouse, combined with the cucumbers and the mystery plant that turned out to be pumpkin, it's a mini rainforest. However, one tomato plant has blossom end rot, apparently a problem caused by a calcium issue, but the true catalyst is infrequent/too frequent watering. The other plants are producing like mad, and they all get watered at the same time, so unsure what my approach is here. They're fussy plants these. Good lessons for the future though, this is the first of many attempts. Strange update. Once upon a time I played a lot of Battlefield V, across two accounts, probably about 1000 hours in it. Enough to be a menace. Back in the day I was in a 'clan' and we'd typically just have a bit of fun in a server, if we ever started to dominate a match we'd split ourselves up to make things even. Since Battlefield 2042 came out, most of us have stopped playing, because it was hot trash and it burned our love of the game. Now we hear that the BF V servers are popular again, and there's a new clan running the roost. Allegedly they're talking shit about us and other old clans, so we've been summoned, to come back for a shitfight. Is it stupidly childish? Yes. Could we ignore it? Entirely. Am I reinstalled and testing my aim? You bet. This weekend the battle begins, the glorious old guard BDSL (Basement Dwelling Sweat Lords) vs the whiny upstarts EZPZ. Oh! So turns out my partner loves, and I mean fuckin' looooves, The Great British Bake Off. It's surprisingly hard to track down, legally or not. Most streaming services don't have it in NZ, and those that do, have like a season at best. I didn't know she adored this show, and apparently she had been trying her best to solve this access issue, on and off, for the better part of two years (we have been together for almost seven..). She finally told me this week, about her deepest desire. I checked which Netflix region had the show (USA does!), flicked my VPN on in our NVidia Shield, changed to USA, and restarted Netflix. Great British Baking Show was the first thing that appeared as a suggestion and my partner lost. Her. Shit. She was wriggling, actually wriggling. I asked, once she had stopped writhing on the couch, why she never told me about this before? Took all of five minutes to rectify. She didn't want to bother me with it, apparently. Which sucks, cause she can bother me with anything and I'll take it off her plate. The new job environment is still paying dividends it seems, my partner feels comfortable coming to me with things she thinks are inane. Reading a book next to her on the couch, cat in her lap, as she critically judges ganache application on the screen filled me with an awful lot of joy.
I've hated me some Bake-Off but compared to nearly everything else it's goddamn Masterpiece Theater. The wife and kid like Bake-Off; I tolerate it because I can see what a cheap, shitty, British production it is but holy fuck we tried some of the other tripe on Netflix and it's goddamn ghastly. I wish you the best of luck in your blood feud. I was only ever mediocre at Destiny and recently befriended a writer at Bungie who also lamented that they're going 100% for the tryhards. HE doesn't play Destiny anymore. I dunno. I'm looping through Cyberpunk for the fourth time but my heart isn't in it. How do you like your Shield? Much of our content runs through an Amazon firestick and it's a wretched piece of shit.
i don't remember my comment on food culture at all but i still agree with it i think - to elaborate more, i mean "food culture" like the media of food, restaurant chef attitudes, etc.: all the crust that rings around the actual cooking and eating. "british food culture" to me seems like it's centered around doing the same old shit that has supposedly been done since time immemorial -but like the scottish clan regalia and emblems were actually 1800s era nostalgizing more than real reflections of the past. the same goes for a lot of other european countries where food plays a big part in nationalism, except england has a misfortune of their national foods being greasy and fried or mushy and stewed. i think the pitfalls of american food culture are interesting because of the stratification between "high" and "low" and "middlebrow"versions of it, and they overlap weirdly. low is chick fil a and popeyes culture wars. high is gastronomy andies making inedible food in big cities. middlebrow is some paste-on-toast shenanigans i dunno, I'm just freeballing it
I think we're all just freeballing it and I think it's interesting. Gourmet Magazine, shortly before it died, lamented the fact that "food culture" had gone from "what do you cook" to "what do you watch." And we're talking an era where they were lamenting the fall of Sarah Moulton (who got her start as an assistant on Julia Child) rather than the rise of Guy Fieri. Their point was that the Craig Claiborne-era New York Times was all about things you make, while the Sam Sifton-era New York Times was all about watching other people make things, eating things made by other people, and watching other people eat things made by other people. Take Allrecipes just as an example - in the interest of grabbing pageviews they turned their site into one you could search for recipes into one you had to "discover" recipes. It makes sense from a "the only way we make money is by randos cruising through and maybe looking at dirt-cheap banner advertising" standpoint and the reason Gourmet is gone is that nobody fucking cooks anymore. It's like "adulting" - bitch, I adult every goddamn day and have done since I was twelve years old why the fuck do you get ten thousand views on TikTok for doing your laundry. Much like social media has gone from participatory to passive, so has cooking. The rise of the "celebrity chef" was well underway by the time Facebook and Youtube hit the scene but the transcendence of knobs like Guy Fieri nailed the coffin shut. Everyone knows Alton Brown, nobody knows Cooking for Engineers because why make something when you can pay to watch someone else do it? After all, if you don't ever intend to try the recipe you'll never know how bland every single one of Alton Brown's recipes is. Every single one of Claire Saffitz's recipes. Every single one of Martha Stewart's recipes. Into this, throw "British food culture" - a celebration of the meekest, mildest, most mediocre cuisine to ever grace a plate. We tried "Bake Off: The Professionals" for exactly one show. It was awful except for two things: (1) the fact that of the six teams, two judges and two color commentators, three people were native-born Britons (2) the fact that they had to do some fuckin' riff on a "treacle tart" and one of the Frenchmen said, on camera, "A friend once gave me the recipe for a treacle tart and I thought he was taking the piss." "This is very good, but it doesn't take like treacle," says the Hong Kong restaurateur whose job it is to denigrate and belittle Hungarians for their inability to properly capture the essence of a dessert that no one but the British will eat. There was a time when British culture was all about conquering, dominating and stealing from people with more color, more flavor, more culture and more history than themselves but that's been one long, slow decline since the Suez Crisis so now the British are all about proclaiming the glory of all the things the British have failed to export to any other region or locality despite a 200 year ability to do it at gunpoint. "Hawaiian pizza is the most disgusting thing the Americans have ever come up with," the Briton said unironically, blissfully unaware that it was invented by a Greek in Ontario, British Commonwealth Nation of Canada, while he gleefully wolfs down a sausage roll. I once mixed Gordon Ramsay waxing eloquent for ten minutes about fucking sausage rolls. He of the aubergine, he of the courgette, he of the fucking chantilly cream (whipped cream with sugar and a little vanilla, because the British think it's okay to eat whipped cream without), sitting there losing his absolute fucking mind over a goddamn sausage roll, which is basically a fucking Hot Pocket without cheese or sauce. There is no one so smugly superior as a British gourmand and there is nothing he's so superior about as British food. High, low and middle-brow American foods took a real kick in the nuts with COVID. I think as soon as everyone was stuck in their own kitchen for a while they recognized that it takes an overnight to make proper cinnamon rolls but you can whip out a bitchin' carbonara in about 20 minutes so it's rapidly become (1) what can you sell (2) to who (3) for how much. Avocado toast is goddamn good and it can be anywhere from white bread and a fried egg to artisanal we-bake-it-every-morning with a poached turkey egg and bechamel sauce. And that, I think, is why Bake-off is so loved: (1) they're all just muddling through, for the most part (2) they are encouraged and told how to get better (3) they're all mutually supportive which is so violently opposed to the Simon Cowell School of Reality TV that it captured an audience that had simply wandered off. Frankly, it's the same formula Master Chef had followed for 20 years before Bake-Off, with the exception that the judges on Master Chef are always dicks. And that, more than anything, is the crime the British must answer for. What the US imported from Britain, and exported to the rest of the world, is the idea that your host must say "you are the weakest link, goodbye." We were squarely on the Julia Child/Bob Vila path until fucking Idol. And it's contaminated food. You aren't any good unless you shit on someone else.
Yeah we both know it's kinda hot trash, but I do appreciate how there's less "aggression" on the show. Yeah they've got to compete against each other, but so many other shows would really ramp up the tension and have contestants slagging each other off over pastries. In this aspect, the show seems more wholesome in their approach. Still, it's reality TV. Can only polish that turd so much. Blood feud has begun - we're up 3 matches to 0. 1 very close match, then 2 steamrolled matches as we got into the groove. Hackusations, shit talking, mini-feuds with players who keep killing each other. I missed the banter. Amazing what muscle memory can retain. Though I'm rusty enough that my aim will vary from nailing every shot for 10 minutes straight, to missing an entire clip on someone who is literally stationary. I can't go back to Destiny, it begun to feel like a second job and whatever story they were trying to tell, fell over a while back IMO. Still, best gunplay I've ever had in a game, BF V and Titanfall 2 coming in close 2nd and 3rd. I have also started a Cyberpunk run, I got the DLC so heading into that. Similar feelings though, just not quite invested. Ah the Shield, tis good! It's one of those "pro" ones, I got it in 2019 I think, and before then I was also using a Firestick. Agreed on it's wretchedness. The Shield hasn't let me down, but it's been for pretty basic use. I've got the usual streaming suspects, Netflix, YouTube, Plex etc. Lets me chuck a VPN in there, lets me cast to it. Everything runs through it. It does have an annoying, dedicated, Netflix button on the remote. I could probably unbind it somehow, but eh. It's almost worth it for the laugh we get when the cat steps on it and whatever we were watching is suddenly interrupted by the Netflix "DUH DUHN" start up sound.
I've mixed entire seasons of Hell's Kitchen and I've mixed entire seasons of Master Chef. What has always interested me is how collaborative an environment Master Chef is - the cast lives in the same hotel for the duration, and they have a little hang-out room where they look up recipes and stuff, and none of it is filmed. Behind the scenes there's a ridiculous amount of camaraderie that Fox deliberately excises. Compare and contrast with Hell's Kitchen - those guys live in the same dorm and they hate each other. Master Chef has to play down how much everyone is just there to have a good time and make friends while Hell's Kitchen has to play down the fact that their contestants are fragging each other. I feel like when you start with amateurs, who know they're amateurs, who have no interest in becoming professionals? You get a bunch of vacationers who are not going to let you ruin a good time. We had to reshoot a couple ceremonial beats on Master Chef once because none of the producers were clever enough to notice that all the contestants were wearing matching chef hats in solidarity with a contestant who had just been (kinda unfairly) eliminated. But I feel like when you start with the grasping influencer "professional" caste you get people who will stitch each other up for a pack of cigarettes. From that perspective, Bake-off can't help but be nice. They shoot that thing Friday-Saturday-Sunday and then the normies go back home and practice. They're constantly reminded of normalcy, they can commiserate with the outside world, they have time to reflect. The stuff that makes it crap is entirely enforced by the producers - "Bakers, you have half an hour to make macaroons!" "Welcome to an un-airconditioned tent in July, let's temper chocolate!" "Yes it's raining absolute buckets but for some fucking reason you are all going to make toffee today because we're British and have no fucking idea how to work with the weather." "That's right, we've failed to give you blast chillers for another season, have fun making the ice cream we insist be done in three hours." If the British weren't a bunch of cheap shits that show would be so much better. I am FPSing vicariously through you, warrior. Give 'em hell.
Tacking a reply on to say I read this Bake-Off/Reality show information, and your other linked discussion, to my partner - who is a dual citizen (NZ and UK passport, most of her family are in Cambridge). It went: -- Partner:... Hmm... Me: Hmm? Partner: Yeah all of that tracks. Plus, you should see the average Brit on a snowday. Crumpling under every individual flake. And why the fuck do they have to manufacture all this difficulty? I mean I know why but why? Baking shit like that should be an art, not something you barely limp over the line for. Give them all the resources, all the time, and let them loose on a project. You'd see some bangers. Ughh! You know how you used to joke you wanted to see a non-tested Olympics? All the athletes drugged to the gills and seeing who's really the fastest person alive? That, but in a baking context. No steroids. Well maybe some. No, no steroids. Time and resources, that's the steroids of Bake Off. Me: Another episode? Partner: Yes please. I do love seeing her demure personality flicker when she gets really wound up about something.