A couple of weeks ago, through the agency of a friend, I ended up spending the evening in a commercial kitchen preparing food.  The restaurant was closed for business that night, but had a full kitchen going for the dozen or so people who turned out to try their hands at being chefs.  We all cooked various portions of a four or five course meal. That’s me at the left in my chef’s attire chopping scallions for garnish for one of the dishes.

Sad to say, but this wasn’t the first time I’ve ever labored in the back end of a restaurant.  Both MD and I are very familiar with those duties.  One of the truly bad moves of my financial life was investing in a franchise restaurant years ago.  I still don’t know what came over me, but whatever did, it cost me a lot of money.  I distinctly remember how it all happened.  I was sitting in the kitchen of our house in Little Rock going through the mail and came upon a magazine buried in the pile.  I don’t remember now what magazine it was, but it had an article on hot new restaurant concepts.  One of the hottest, and one that was taking Dallas by storm, was a Mexican restaurant franchise called ZuZu.  ZuZu Handmade Mexican Food, to be exact.

I read the article and inexplicably reached around behind me, picked up the phone and dialed the number to get more info.  (A phone call, I might mention, that cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars before it was all over.)  The person on the other end – a honcho from ZuZu corporate office in the Rolex Building in Dallas – painted a wonderful picture of restaurant ownership, and before I knew it, MD, our eldest son and I were headed to Dallas to see a ZuZu restaurant in the flesh and try the food.

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I’m taking a short break from the great Anthony Colpo smackdown to report on all the goings on with the ‘wretched’ choral society and the Beatles concert.  As I’ve mentioned before, MD has been pushing for a Beatles concert since she’s been the president (her three-year term will be mercifully over on June 30, and I’ll have my wife back).  It’s all come to pass with a whole lot of help from a whole bunch of people. And, thanks to all this effort by all these people – especially Brooks Firestone – it has turned into a much, much huger event than she had ever imagined.

The event kicked off last night with a small reception with Sir George Martin.  About 50 people came to a wine and hors d’oeuvres at the Founders Room of the Granada theater.  Sir George gave a wonderful talk about his early career and his first meeting with the Beatles.  At that time non-Sir George was heading EMI records and his specialty was comedy records.  Brian Epstein had arranged an appointment (Martin said he still has his diary, which lists Epstein as Bernard Epstein) and when Martin told him that he wasn’t interested, Epstein looked so dejected, that Martin relented and said, “Okay, I’ll give them one hour next week.”

The Beatles came in at the appointed time, were terrible as musicians, but were absolutely charming.  Martin took them into the control room to listen to their audition recording and told them to tell him if there was anything they didn’t like.  George Harrison promptly said,”For starters, I’m not crazy about your tie.”  The other Beatles were mortified because they thought George may have blown the deal for them.  George Martin, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious.  At the end of the day, he agreed to give them a recording contract.  Then, as he said in his talk, “As we all know, the rest is history.”

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A quick post just to let everyone know that I’m still among the living and that I haven’t given up posting for good.

MD and I have taken off a few days and are in Dallas with kids and grandkids celebrating Christmas.  It snowed like crazy all yesterday afternoon, and, according to the newspapers, Dallas has had its first white Christmas since 1926.  And we were here to witness it.  At left is a photo looking out the back door.  Granted, it’s not a New England eight inch snow or a Colorado two foot snow, but it’s a pretty substantial snow for Dallas.  Maybe it’s a harbinger of good things to come, although the last white Christmas preceded the year in which the Great Depression started.

I’ve been absent from posting because MD and I have been incredibly busy with Sous Vide Supreme stuff.  I just thought we were busy during the developmental stage.  The post-developmental era has consumed enormous amounts of our time.  Especially since our invention had such a nice write up in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago.  We’ve been inundated with requests for interviews from multiple media sources and for write ups for this and that.  And all that is not to mention a week’s worth of filming in Seattle.  We’re making a true infomercial on the Sous Vide Supreme with emphasis on the ‘info’ part.  So many people are unaware of what the sous vide process is, so we’re going to tell them.

We’ve teamed up with chef Richard Blais, whom many of you may know from Top Chef, Iron Chef America and other TV cooking shows.  He couldn’t be any nicer nor any easier to work with – a really great guy who can cook like you wouldn’t believe.  He will appear with MD on the infomercial that will start running early next year.  Below is a photo of the two of them camping it up on the set.

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The long-awaited announcement of what MD and I have been working on for the past couple of years is at hand.  We have developed (along with a team of engineers, designers, manufacturers, business people and a host of others) the first stand-alone sous vide unit made specifically for the home kitchen.  It’s called the Sous Vide Supreme and is pictured at left, getting ready to ship.  The Sous Vide Supreme is the first new category of kitchen appliance since the microwave, so we’re incredibly excited about our role in what we think is a world-changing event.  At least world changing in the same way the microwave was world changing.

For those of you unfamiliar with sous vide, it is a French term meaning ‘under vacuum’ and refers to a method of cooking in which vacuum-packed foods are cooked in a water bath creating a taste and flavor that can’t be replicated any other way.  Though many of you may never have heard of the term ‘sous vide,’ it’s a good bet that you have tasted food prepared using the ‘sous vide’ method, especially if you have eaten at a fine restaurant.

Why on earth would two physicians who made their reputations caring for overweight patients and writing books about diet and nutrition veer off in the direction of manufacturing a kitchen appliance?  As is always said in situations such as this one, it’s a long story.  But not really that long, so I’ll tell it.

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As most readers of this blog know, MD and I split our non-traveling time between Incline Village, Nevada (on the north shore of Lake Tahoe) and Santa Barbara, California.  We don’t have a house in the city of Santa Barbara but in the unincorporated town of Montecito, which is a sleepy little suburb of Santa Barbara (as if Santa Barbara is large enough to have a suburb).  We live on Park Lane, a street well known in Montecito, notably for the giant Eucalyptus trees that line it.  Although there are Eucalyptus trees all over the Montecito/Santa Barbara area, as far as I know, Park Lane is the only street flanked by them.

As most of you also know, I am a man-made global warming/climate change denier. I’m not as much a denier as I am a pragmatist who realizes that even if there is something to the phenomenon (which in my view is far from certain), it’s way, way too expensive to fix in the ways we’re trying to fix it.  And if all of us in the US and the UK (the two centers of GW hysteria) spend the fortune required to keep our respective countries green, we don’t have any control over the people in China and India.  These countries are going to continue to release CO2 in enormous amounts (as will any other populous country that enters its own industrial age) irrespective of whether or not we all recycle, drive electric cars and shut down all our factories.  But, that’s just my view.

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