Burgers! Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I do love burgers. And the burger has gotten a lot of culinary attention over the past few years. Locally, we got Burger Jones, we got our first few Five Guys, we got some Smashburgers... even the fast food places are pretending to step up and offer better burgers.

And now we have MyBurger, down near the Whole Foods just west of Lake Calhoun, on Excelsior Boulevard. And if you've been anxiously awaiting a sort of middle ground between Five Guys and Smashburger, you are fucking well set.

Well, I'll be damned.

So Cathy's sister sent me this... thing around Christmastime. It is a roughly three inch square of, I shit you not, CHAIN MAIL. As a D&D nerd who's spent time around SCA as well, I'm very familiar with chain mail. So why did I get a square of it in the mail?

Apparently, to clean my cast-iron pans.

One of the things I like to do is pull inspiration from much better cooks than I am. If I have a fabulous dish at a restaurant, I'm tempted to try to rework it, and if I can get at least 60% of the way to a mindblowing dish, then the result is still going to be damn good.

Time for a little something new from the deep recesses of the local Costco. A huge fucking bag of kale.

This would, under normal circumstances, be way too much kale. I mean, I like kale. But I like it CSA style - one bunch every couple of weeks or so. Or, in the off season, buying a bunch for a specific dish like calo verde.

This, however, is a pound and a half of kale. A pound and a half doesn't seem like a lot when it's, say, in butter form, but a pound and a half of kale is a bag the size of a small torso. But there are a couple of upsides.

The saga continues. In the back of my mind, I'm making sure I have at least enough time for three other projects today, including tomorrow's YAD and tonight's live-tweet of the Next Iron Chef finale.

1:45 PM: The squash is out of the oven and the fridge is clean. Everything seemed done at an hour twenty (the delicata came out at the one hour mark) so I'm now just letting that cool on the cutting board until I'm ready to deal with it further.

With one exception, I haven't cooked for a week.

One week ago today, I made up an epic batch of char siu. It took a triple batch of the marinade, six and a half pounds of pork shoulder, and had to be cooked in two batches so as not to dirty two racks. Some of it went into banh mi that night, some of it got stashed away for a near-future project, and most of it ended up in the freezer for future consumption.

Yeah, I've been watching this too.

We're, what, four weeks in? Five? I think four. It's the early days of a Top Chef season, nobody really gives a shit. You spend the first month just trying to figure out who you like and dislike, the second month waiting for the mediocre people to leave, and the third month paying attention.

And it's down to four. Falkner, Chiarello, Zakarian, Guarnaschelli. Which means my final four predictions are one for four. Feh.

Since we last talked, there have been two episodes. The stupid fucking storytelling challenge, which saw Samuellson finally put out of our collective misery, and the awesome fucking food auction challenge, which unfortunately sent Anne Burrell home.

So, back in September, and yes I'm clearing a certain amount of mental backlog, but back in September, Penzey's sent out their monthly catalog. And it had two coupons. One was for a free bottle of their new spice blend, and one was for a free gift box you could give to a teacher which had a small bottle of cinnamon and another large bottle of their new spice blend.

So, we're four eliminations in, and my predictions are doing... OK.

As you recall, my original call was:

Falkner
Irvine
McMillan
Spike
Zakarian
Guarnachelli
Hughes
Chiarello
Burrell
Samuelsson

Week One saw Spike leave. Week Two saw Irvine get the boot. Week Three, poor Chuck Hughes got cut, which makes me sad inside. And last week, McMillan left. Which means, in the first four weeks, three of my bottom four got cut, plus the guy I deliberately ranked higher because I liked him. That's not fucking bad at all.