The new Key Ingredient stars Stephanie Izard, who really is just as adorable as she seems on TV. And it’s one of my favorite challenges so far, because she gets thrown a personal curveball and really takes it and makes something out of it that was totally a Girl & the Goat dish:

Nothing else happening this week though I did get a passing mention in Whet Moser’s interesting take on the whole molecular Myrhvold thing, which is well worth checking out. (And apparently the big dogs are still fighting over how to list Key Ingredient here while making sure to leave off my name. Get a life, or a room! Just don’t list it at all, I’m sure the Reader will be fine without the three reader/viewers coming from this source. UPDATE: My wife says it and I am listed now. I can’t work up the energy to go check.)

UPDATE: Kind words from my Key Ingredient teammate Julia Thiel here, as well. Who knew what life my two cents on the B.R. Myers thing would have when I dashed it off one Sunday?

This week’s Key Ingredient is the most prosaic yet… bananas. But there’s a twist to why that’s our challenging ingredient this week, so watch it above and read it here.

Meanwhile, even I’m sick of reading about me by now, but I should say thanks to Mike Sula for this nice announcement of the Beard award nomination at the Reader, and I turn up quoted extensively in Julia Kramer’s rant on shared plates at Time Out, so check that out too.

Exciting news, that Julia Thiel and I have been nominated for a James Beard Memorial Foundation Award in the multimedia category for the Key Ingredient series, which she writes and I do the videos for. Thanks to Julia, tireless food editor Kate Schmidt, Kiki Yablon, Whet Moser, Mike Sula, Geoff Dougherty, John Dunleavy, and Alex Parker, who are the other Readerites past and present I can remember who contributed to getting the series launched, and to all the chefs (19 so far) who have participated. (Sorry if I forgot somebody else.) Congrats also to Monica Eng for her nomination for her terrific work on school lunches at the Chi-Trib.

If you’d like to see the nominated articles/videos for yourself, they are the first three: Grant Achatz with Kluwak Kupas, Curtis Duffy with Chinese black beans, and John DesRosiers with geraniums. If you come here just because you want to find out what Sky Full of Bacon is, click on the “Video Podcasts” category at right to see examples of the main video podcast series here.

Mindy Segal makes stuff with sorghum syrup in the new Key Ingredient, and as Julia says in the print piece, this could be the first one to actually go on the menu… at least it was on there last week and probably still is.

In other news… I’m quoted on the weighty issue of whether the Paris Club stinks (literally) here. And hey… what’s that smell?

In what I can comfortably say is the grossest Key Ingredient yet, Cary Taylor of The Southern uses fish eyeballs in a recipe for an oyster stew, and demonstrates a few finer points of butchering your own fish.

Cary had a lot of interesting things to say, not all of which could go into the video, so be sure to read the article which fills in a lot of details as well. (See, there are two parts to these, made by two different people in collaboration. Freaky, I know. Anyway, if you’re wondering WTF this recurring part of these announcements is about, and you won’t be the first by any means, email me for details.)

As good as Jared van Camp’s dish was in this week’s Key Ingredient, the coolest part was getting to see inside his very expensive, fully HACCP compliant meat curing room, and all the amazing things going on in it.  If we could have done smellovision, I would have.  You get to see it at the beginning.

The full article is here.  (The above video is by me.  You know, in case that information doesn’t appear somewhere you regularly visit.)

By the way, Jared gave Julia and me big hunks of the bacon he made to take home (a most excellent practice I recommend all Key Ingredient chefs follow), and I brought some to WGN Radio for Nick DiGilio to try when we were on his show.  You can hear the podcast of our segment, about 35 minutes, here.

This week’s Key Ingredient stars a chef who learned to make this week’s ingredient, beef tendon, while working for Iron Chef Morimoto himself.

In other news, we are very excited that we have been loved by Sites We Love at Saveur. Read the many kind words, not all of which we wrote ourselves, and see my favorite picture of me with large meats in a beard-net.

And we, which this time actually means two people, specifically Julia Thiel and myself, will be on WGN’s Nick Digilio Show this Saturday sometime between 7 and 9 pm UPDATE: Friday night, 10:30 pm talking about Key Ingredient.

Here’s the latest Key Ingredient by Julia Thiel and me, which includes a video by me, as it always does, every week, that info’s for you LTHForum:

In other news, set your calendar for a week from Saturday, when Julia and I will be on the Nick Digilio Show on WGN Radio, talking competitive chefs and other stuff.

You’ll see why the title, when you watch this week’s Key Ingredient, featuring Jason McLeod of Ria/Balsan, and the stinky ingredient asafetida:

The new Key Ingredient stars Pat Sheerin 95 floors above Chicago, making stuff out of the stuff that makes beer. Read it here.

A while back somebody asked me how the dishes were and I described the end results of the ones so far. This being the tenth one, I thought I’d recap the first ten, and if it we get to 20, I’ll do it again:

Achatz/Kluwak Kupas: like a fermented chocolate, very nice, nothing strange
Duffy/Chinese Black Beans: very faint black bean taste (that’s why I asked him if he thought he’d merely hidden it), beautiful dessert overall
Des Rosiers/Geraniums: nice preparation overall, but winter dry cleaner geraniums didn’t contribute much flavor. Geranium pesto in spring or summer would surely be better.
Foss/Freeze-Dried Saffron: very clean, almost metallic saffron cutting through everything
Posey/Bull Balls: nice preparation but the meat is very chewy. Nobody liked that, though he certainly made it palatable.
Virant/Spirulina: the lemon and the smoking of the sturgeon really worked to make the nori-like taste of the spirulina seem natural, not muddy. Amazingly good, really.
Zimmerman/Lamb Fat: I have no problem with lamb fat at all and this was a great roasty-tasting savory dish, the one that would move most easily onto the menu for me.
Enyart/Natto: Natto actually doesn’t taste bad, but natto+risotto+raw egg was a pretty mushy, oatmealy texture; what made it not seem old-folksy was the heat. Still, more crunch somewhere probably would have been a good thing.
M. Sheerin/Guaje Seeds: He was right, it did need some acid, but it was nice overall and the earthiness of the guajes and beets was a big reason. What I really loved, though, were those popped guajes on their own. I’d eat a bag of those at the movies.
P. Sheerin/Hops: The hop flavor was a little too bitter for me to make a pleasant dish (though it’d be very interesting at a beer dinner, which he actually mentioned in an outtake). However, I loved the malt risotto. Chewy malt and that chocolatey sort of molé, that was great.

What’s been great about doing this has been seeing how these chefs come up with things, on the fly, that you’d never ever have in a restaurant. Sometimes you feel like every combination has been tried (even bizarre things like chocolate and parsnip, have ’em once and you’ll see ’em again somewhere) and yet these dishes, even as I think they often look the same (stuff stacked in a little circular paint stroke of goo), have shown that there are totally new things out there… at least to me.