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Sautéed Brussels Sprouts With Bacon

Kossar's bialy and lox, with a slice of tomato, red onion and some capers on top.

spicy mustard, coleslaw, thousand island dressing

I tend to lurk here and let the house culinary expert (my wife) do the talking from a position of knowledge about the various topics of cooking addressed at Serious Eats; however, as someone who has been paid to write and has been published (and I bring this up not to brag, but rather because it's important to present your qualifications before jumping to conclusions), I found myself unable to pass on this post without commenting.

Writing is serious business. These days, the ease in which one can create a blog leads one to believe that the minute her blog "goes live," he is a writer. And he is; however the difference between being a writer and being a writer whose work is publishable is a huge one. While you might think that you have to be literate to have your work published, it is not always the case. (I've worked on manuscripts written by the wife of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author that bordered on unreadable due to the frequency of typos and grammatical nightmares -- and her books sell well. But she has two huge advantages -- a husband who is well-respected in the business and great editors (myself NOT included) who made her what she is today.

Assuming that you are not fortunate enough to have such a connection, you should concentrate on your writing and make certain that it is as strong as possible. Based on your initial post, it's clear that you'd benefit from a solid review of the basic tenets of grammar and sentence structure. Take a writing course. Then take an editing course. All the while, work on accepting constructive criticism (which might be the most challenging part of the process). It hurts to hear that your writing stinks. (Not saying that yours necessarily does; just speaking from experience. I’ve taken many writing and editing courses over the years.)

Another aspect that will likely determine whether you are a success or you are a failure is whether you are able to maintain the balance between your ego and your actual talent. While it’s important to have a healthy level of beli”ef in your talents, the line between talent and delusion is a fine one. You can call yourself a “chef.” You can call yourself a “writer.” But are you really a chef? Do you run a restaurant?

Ruhlman recently wrote a blog entry about the terminology in which he said, “Even I am called a chef, and worse, celebrity chef, in enough publications to be sufficiently alarmed by the muddy waters here. I am not a chef, though I have cooked for money and cooking remains part of my work. The sinister Bourdain is a writer and television host and producer, not a chef, though he once was. Rachael Ray was never a chef and never pretended to be.” And here’s someone who could call himself “chef” without anyone blinking an eye, and yet, he doesn’t.

Next, it’s crucial that you find your voice and ensure that said voice is both original and compelling. I read your “Paula Dean is trying to kill us” rant and was both underwhelmed by your argument and unimpressed with your writing. Your arguments, such as they were, were not well thought out, and not supported by many facts. You made your point in the first sentence and spent the next several hundred words both repeating yourself and weakening your argument by writing at a level that I would not expect from a bad stand-up comedian, let alone a “chef” educated in the world of food.

The “I’ve been to Savannah twice…” setup to the paragraph about which I’ll soon comment reminds me of Homer Simpson’s comment, “You know what I like about you English? Octopussy. I must have seen that movie… twice!” When I read that sentence, I hoped you’d follow with a stronger argument.

Instead, you wrote, “I'm amazed at the amount of people that flock to 'the Lady and Sons'. I peered in through the window and saw a buffet. A buffet. This woman is a culinary tyrant and her resturant has a buffet.” I’ll ignore the typos and grammatical issues for a moment and focus on your argument, which was weak. You claim that you’re shocked that people flock to her restaurant, not because the food is inedible, but because she is “a culinary tyrant and… has a buffet.”

The question that immediately came to mind was “how does a ‘chef’ criticize a chef (or at least a woman who was a chef for a long time when she ran her kitchen) without tasting going in and TASTING HER FOOD? In addition, one of my favorite restaurants in New York City, Churrascaria Plataforma (a top-rated Brazilian rodizio) has a large buffet in the middle of the floor on which you’ll find incredible sushi, terrific salads, and other gourmet hot and cold entrees. Accordingly, anyone who has had a similar experience to mine with certain buffets will read that sentence and, if you’re lucky, tune your piece out. (If you’re unfortunate, they’ll consider you a hack.)

Research is crucial when writing non-fiction. Paula Deen (spelling counts when you’re attacking someone) does not have a chain of restaurants in Savannah (which would make her one of the “independant” restaurants you claim she is overtaking.) It seems to me that Paula’s presence in Savannah likely helps her fellow restaurateurs since most visitors are likely not to eat every meal at her restaurant. People who never would have visited Savannah were it not for The Lady and Sons and Uncle Bubba’s Oyster House are exposed to other eateries in town.

Understand that I’m not defending Deen or her cooking (I’m lactose intolerant and while I’m amused by her show, I could never eat the majority of the items she cooks; however, I can watch her show and be inspired to make dishes that will have similar flavor combinations without using all of the butter and sugar that she does), after having read your piece, which manages to be bitter, vindictive, puerile, and (painfully) humorless at the same time, I’m more likely to defend Paula Deen against what feels like an attack of her character, especially when said attack uses (and I say this generously) anecdotal evidence to “prove” its point.

When Ruhlman and Bourdain write a blog post in which they brutalize their fellow “chefs,” they do so with both wit and elegance, and do so in such a way in which it is clear that they are basing their opinions on fact.

Understand that I don’t consider myself an expert on either cooking or writing; however, I’ve been writing professionally for more than 15 years and cut my teeth as an editor at my college newspaper before that for four years. I’ve also edited more than 100 books, both fiction and non fiction, and currently edit a major music Web site. I’ve achieved what I have because I’ve written more than two million words over the years for various publications and am fortunate to have been wise enough to listen to others when they criticized my work.

I’m sure that, with time, you’ll achieve success. For now, keep writing and listening to the criticism of people in whom you trust. And for the love of god, get to a bookstore and purchase a copy of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. :)

StudentStomach, I mean no disrespect to you when I say that if you ever took a home economics course in high school, you know significantly more about cooking than SLoP does.

Pliant, with a side of crispy bacon

Big Ed's BBQ, Aberdeen, NJ

Pliant with a little crisp... oh, who am i kidding? Just give me bacon. I don't care if it's been boiled.

Start off with toasted, seedless rye. Spread on a thin layer of dijon mustard. Place a thin layer of fried onions on the mustard. Then a layer of bacon. Then a thin layer of leaf lettuce. Follow that with the ham, thinly sliced (because the real flavor is in the surface area) and repeat the above steps backwards until you place the final slice of toasted rye on top. Then slice in half, add a half-sour pickle from a pickle joint on the Lower East Side of NYC and we're all set.

The crispy side of pliant. I want the chewiness but I don't want it to feel raw.

This has been a fascinating thread. I'm anti-Wal-Mart. I can count on one hand the number of times I've been in a Wal-Mart and that is due to an active decision not to spend my money there.

I won't echo, but I will second many of Brooke29's reasons and will add the following problems that I don't believe have been mentioned:

1. Wal-Mart is notorious for not wanting to pay overtime. They will schedule their employees for work weeks that are not 40-hour weeks in order to avoid the possibility that an employee will need to work overtime. (By keeping people part-time, it also helped for a long time to keep many of its employees ineligible for company health care plans.) The company has also been sued in the past for forcing employees to work more than 40 hours, but having them clock out at the 8-hour mark, so that they don't pay O/T. I won't go into the litany of stories about this, but a quick Web search will pull them up. In addition, the top managers in each store receive sizable bonuses for keeping their yearly payrolls below a certain figure. That is why you often see Wal-Mart stores less organized/dirtier than some of their competitors. Their staffs are smaller and since so many of them are not full-time employees, they take less pride in their place of work.

2. Related to the payroll issue, when employees reach a certain hourly wage, the managers feel pressure to get those employees off the payroll. Since they cannot fire a person without cause, they start doing things like changing the employee's shift, lowering the number of hours for which they are scheduled, give them jobs that they cannot/do not want to do (i.e. a 60-year-old cashier is suddenly transferred to parking lot shopping cart collection duty), etc. The managers then become extremely inflexible when the employee asks for a "favorable" schedule. One of two things then happens:

a. The employee quits
b. The employee is fired for insubordination when they complain about the shift in hours, change in duties, etc.

This allows the company to keep payrolls low.

3. For those who say that Wal-Mart brings jobs to communities where there are none, often, this is a direct result of the way in which Wal-Mart does business. Wal-Mart is (I believe) the largest importer of Chinese products in this country. The products being made in China by factory workers who make several hundred dollars a year, are products that were formerly made by American employees in U.S. factories; factories that closed down because the were unable to compete with their Chinese counterparts. Wal-Mart's corporate culture of getting the lowest priced products onto the market comes at the expense of American jobs. Wal-Mart then comes in and pays minimum wage to factory workers who used to make four-to-five times as much, plus health care and a pension. The U.S. has a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China -- which, even those without a degree in economics know -- is bad for the U.S. economy and its long-term stability.

4. Finally, Wal-Mart is a socially-insensitive company. Some of you might be aware of the Nazi t-shirt scandal from last year, when it was discovered that the company was selling in its U.S. stores a shirt emblazoned with a totenkopf -- described by Wikipedia as "a military insignia featuring a skull above crossed bones. It is distinguished from the similar traditions of the skull and crossbones and the Jolly Roger by the positioning of the bones directly behind the skull. For a long time in widespread use in several countries, its association with aspects of Nazi Germany has led to its decline." It took several months for Wal-Mart officials to even agree to tell its stores to remove the shirt, and for more than a year after that edict came down from corporate the shirt was spotted on Wal-Mart shelves across the country. The company also had another Nazi-symboled t-shirt on sale several years ago that was removed. In addition, just yesterday (Wednesday 12/12/07). Wal-Mart removed "[t]he panties, which were sold in the juniors department, [which] seemed to suggest that girls don't need money, they just need a sugar daddy — in this case Santa Claus.The hipster briefs — carrying the slogan "Who needs credit cards ..." on the front and "When you have Santa" on the derriere — caused an uproar among parents, who called for the $2.96 drawers to be pulled off the racks."

I could continue, but this post is already long enough. Long story short, Wal-Mart is not just a bad company, those who support Wal-Mart by shopping there are hurting themselves, and the United States. You can find farmers almost anywhere. You can find farm markets almost anywhere. Wal-Mart organic is a crock (that has also been proven.) Don't be a sucker.