Try some salt next time!

After a day of reading, it's Top Chef time!  I'm watching it now, and for the quickfire challenge, the contestants were suposed to peruse Modernist Cuisine (a book I already salivated over when it first came out), in order to create a modernist dish for Nathan Myhrvold, one of the authors. During the commercial*, I went back to Amazon to salivate over the set again, knowing full well that I would never spend $500 on a set of books, no matter how much I wanted to read them,** and went to read some of the reviews that have been posted since I last checked the book out.  For any item, I always read the negative reviews first, since I find criticisms more illuminating than platitudes, but mostly because for most items, there are at least a few negative reviews that are so bad, they are unintentionally hilarious, and make you wonder if the person who wrote them can manage, in real life, to walk and chew gum at the same time.  Except perhaps the person who complained that the measurements were all in grams, and the alarmist who equated the book with a nuclear disaster (to wit: "I love to keep my cooking simple, done by instinct with empirically felt impressions, not in the consultation of an operations manual for a nuclear power plant!"), there was nothing all that illuminating about the book in the comments section.   There was, however, a reviewer who noted that the book was terrible because it tasted awful :)  That was clearly a joke.  I can only hope that one of the comments ("You're not supposed to eat it") was also a joke!

Oh, how I want this set to miraculously be offered used on Amazon for a song!




* I'm not in my lonely, TV-less apartment, and I forget that you can zap past all the commercials when something is Tivo'ed.  This newfangled technology is a far cry from how I usually watch TV, which is all for the best, seeing as how Top Chef isn't (legally) posted online.


** I wonder if I can get the library to get it via ILL.  While I probably could, I feel like I shouldn't, thought that wouldn't be the largest set of books I have ever ordered via ILL.....  I wonder if our public library has an ILL system that has access to this book?