I got the new issue of [The Art of Eating](http://www.artofeating.com/) this week, and a letter from David Downie voiced a complaint I’ve heard before:

> During my travels in America I have been treated to so many overloaded, over-spiced, over-complicated dishes at homes and in restaurants that I’ve simply stopped commenting on the phenomenon.

Downie, who lives in Paris, contributes regularly to AoE (he writes about unsalted Italian bread in this issue). Something tells me he wouldn’t have approved of tonight’s dinner.

Dinner consisted of the remainder of the homemade poblano sausage, formed into patties and served on toasted buns (Franz cornmeal kaiser buns, which are great, and wouldn’t Franz the Cornmeal Kaiser make a great Sesame Street character?). For sandwich toppings, we had sauteed mushrooms and homemade tomatillo-chipotle salsa.

Downie doesn’t provide any examples of what he’s talking about, so it sounds to me like he’s elevating a personal preference–or perhaps a matter of physiology–to a moral standard.

Naturally, I wouldn’t profess to like “overloaded” or “over-spiced” food, but I think Thai food is one of the world’s greatest cuisines. I doubt this is a controversial sentiment anymore, and certainly not in Seattle. What makes Thai food special is often described in shorthand as “hot, sour, salty, sweet,” but that’s only half of it. Thai food is the culinary equivalent of Extreme Programming: it’s what you get when you take all of those delicious qualities and turn them up to eleven.

Now, part of the reason I like Thai food is the same reason I like any food: I had a good experience with it, and it resonated with my personal palette of psychological quirks. But another part of the reason is purely physical: I’m a nontaster. That is, I’m physically incapable of tasting the chemical known as PROP. Seventy-five percent of the population finds this chemical unpalatably bitter. My fellow nontasters and I could chug it like Miller Lite. Nontasters, who have far fewer tastebuds than average, tend to have a high tolerance for spicy and bitter foods, as well as extremely sour foods like grapefruit.

I can’t say for sure that Downie is a PROP taster, but it seems likely. He goes on to say:

> Instead of tasting the subtle flavors and rejoicing in the nuances, the respect shown for the unmediated flavors of the ingredients, this distinguished writer found blandness.

The key points that I think Downie is missing are: the cooking of different countries can be great in different ways, and often a nation’s greatest strengths are also its greatest flaws. America’s penchant for big flavors gives us the Big Mountain Fudge Cake with one hand and barbecue with the other. To take this metaphor in a totally gross direction, we can’t just amputate the fudge cake hand. (Big Mountain Fudge Cake is a nasty-looking dessert served at a chain restaurant. I saw it on TV. I am not opposed to fudge cake in general.)

Also, of course, America offers among the world’s best and worst food, and if you come looking to pick a food fight, you’ll find plenty of material.

I went to Paris once. I could have come back complaining that the vegetables were all overcooked, the food was bland, and everything was larded up with too much butter and cream. That would have been silly. Right?

Lara Ferroni, Seattle-based publisher of [Cookbook 411](http://www.cookbook411.com/) (and Roots and Grubs reader), has started a new blog called [Still Life With](http://www.stilllifewith.com/), all about food photography. If you’ve been wondering how to improve your food photography, ride along with Lara and she will no doubt explain it all.

On the other hand, if you’ve wondered why Roots and Grubs has few photos, I can explain that. A few years ago I was writing a column for eGullet called Desperate Measures. Their policy was that every article they published required a photo or other illustration.

One of the editors was Ellen Shapiro, a very talented professional photographer. She patiently explained the basics of closeup photography to me, told me what kind of lighting to buy, and gave many hints about presentation and props. I ended up taking some pretty good pictures, such as:

Apparently I did especially well with starch.

Anyway, these days there’s just no way I’m going to haul out the lights and shoot several dozen exposures of, say, the delicious cheesy grits I made for breakfast yesterday. Sure, I could forget the lights and post photos that aren’t as good, but when it comes to pictures, I’m too much of a perfectionist to do that. And my camera has terrible low-light performance.

But maybe I’ll pick up some tips from Still Life With.

My least favorite chore growing up was emptying the dishwasher. It’s still no fun.

Loading the dishwasher, however, is a treat. It’s like a puzzle. Plus, I get to sing along to my iPod while doing it. I suspect this is very entertaining, because I will sing along with equal gusto to male and female vocals, and it’s possible that my impression of Kelly Clarkson is less than entirely convincing. (I can still love “Since U Been Gone” without having my hipster doofus card revoked, right?)

Before I talk about my dishwasher loading principles, here are a few thoughts on the subject of washing up, from the late Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food:

> A better way of regarding [washing up] is as the climax of the whole cycle (gathering, preparation, cooking ,eating) and as a piece of ritual which should have engaged the attention of anthropologists and the like to a much greater extent than the questions which have tended to preoccupy them, such as whether food is boiled or roasted. The purification of the utensils has to be the final, culminating stage of any meal, the stage which in effect sets the scene for the next meal and permits life’s processes to continue.

Yep, that’s pretty much what I was thinking while loading the dishwasher last night and singing along to the debut album by Seattle pop-punkers The Lashes. Anthropologists and the like, prepare to be schooled, bearing in mind that I have a basic model of dishwasher and have been using it for less than two years. Hmm, maybe I should be schooled. Anyway, this is what I’ve learned.

##### Matthew’s Dishwasher-Newbie Hacks

1. “Top rack only” seems to have no meaning. If an item is light and likely to be blown off the bottom rack, place it partially under something heavier.

2. The drying cycle exists only to waste energy and your money. It may get your dishes dry ten minutes faster. It may also melt your plastic, if it ends up on the bottom of the dishwasher. Before you tell me to rethink the first rule, the time this happened, the piece of Gladware blew off the *top* rack.

3. Plenty of items are dishwasher-safe but dishwasher-stupid. Most pots and pans fall into this category. If something is going to steal the space of, say, five plates, and it’s not totally encrusted, wash it by hand.

4. Don’t put small bowls that could fit on the top rack on the bottom rack until the bottom rack is full. The bottom rack is the big-and-tall section. Svelte Pyrex custard dishes just make the big plates feel bad.

5. Most foodstuffs don’t need to be rinsed off particularly well before going into the dishwasher. Eggs and flour are exceptions.

6. It would be so cool to have one of those institutional dishwashers with a 90-second cycle.

7. If you’ve put in many years of hand-washing, the dishwasher will make you soft and complacent. I love being soft and complacent.

##### Normal Roots and Grubs office procedure

1. Go to coffeeshop.
2. Fire up weblog editor.
3. Type new post. Hit “post.”

##### Roots and Grubs office procedure, 15 March 2006

1. Go to El Diablo Coffee Company.
2. Order decaf Cafe Cubano.
3. Informed that they are out of decaf beans, order regular Cafe Cubano, which consists of a double shot of espresso over sugar. (My usual caffeine intake: one English breakfast tea per day.)
4. Fire up weblog editor.
5. Start typing new post.
6. Save as draft.
7. Start typing another new post.
8. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until lunchtime.

[Union](http://www.unionseattle.com/) is a downtown Seattle restaurant helmed by a freakishly talented young chef named Ethan Stowell. Most nights, Union serves delicious and expensive things like venison loin with brussels sprouts and bacon, or wild sturgeon with french lentils. Stowell is particularly brilliant with fish.

I had dinner at Union on Sunday. Dinner consisted of four bowls of chili.

You see, Stowell is not one of those chefs who believes that his high-end cooking is the end of the story. So on select Sunday nights, he collaborates with some of his regular customers to produce what he calls Sunday Dinners. The first one I attended was Oktoberfest-themed. I went in expecting Union’s refined take on traditional German favorites. What I got was huge platters of sausages, sauerkraut, wienerschnitzel, and pickled herring. Delicious, but nothing refined about it.

In the same vein, last Sunday was Union’s first annual chili cookoff. Professional chefs squared off against members of the public, including several of my friends. Unlimited beer and Fritos were included with dinner.

There were fourteen chilis to taste, and I got through most of them. I’d never been to a chili cookoff before, and it answered something I’ve long wondered: is there really much difference between good chili and great chili? I’ve been cooking chili since I was a kid, and I’ve learned that if you put some beef, tomato sauce, chili powder, and onions into a pot, it’s going to come out pretty tasty and pretty much like the last pot you made, whatever the recipe.

But at the cookoff, it was very easy to sort the chili into three tiers. Some of the chilis were bland. Some of them were quite good (many of these featured a lot of bacon). And one of them was simply awe-inspiring. I love chili, but this chili, #8, was better than I had believed a chili could taste. It was extremely simple, just chunks of beef in sauce, but the sauce was magic. It was spicy but with an unexpected and perfectly balanced acidity. It won by a landslide. (Ethan Stowell’s chili came in last.)

The magic chili was made by Steve Smrstik, the tattooed chef of 35th Street Bistro in Fremont. Yesterday I sent out some frantic emails trying to track down the recipe. That quest is still in progress. But I’m dying to make Smrstik’s chili my house special, and not just so I can say, “Who wants another bowl of Smrstik?”

Union’s Sunday Dinners strike me as savvy marketing, the equivalent of Amazon making money by turning a shopping site into a community site. Admittedly, I have no idea whether Amazon–or Union–is making a profit these days. But even though I can’t afford to eat at Union very often, the Sunday Dinners make me feel like a participant in the restaurant, not just a diner but part of an ongoing and occasionally goofy project.

Now, I have got to get my hands on some Smrstik.

**Update:** Hsiao-Ching Chou covers the cookoff in the P-I, and Smrstik isn’t talking. But he did say it was made with pork, not beef.

**Update 2 (3/17/06):** I just got email from Smrstik and he’s working on getting the recipe into publishable form. Stay tuned.