Barbecued Steak with Blackberry Bourbon Sauce
Blackberry Bourbon Sauce (for barbecued steak):
1 tablespoon grapeseed or olive oil
½ small red onion, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely diced
¼ cup bourbon
3 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
2 tablespoon brown sugar
¼ cup ketchup
¼ cup water
1 cup fresh or frozen blackberries
Jalapeno peppers with bourbon with ketchup to add to the delicate taste of blackberries?
Theresa Visintin (formerly Wong) was on the Marilyn Dennis Show to prepare her steak with blackberry bourbon sauce, and I was curious. It is always nice to have a new take on a steak sauce.
But blueberries with jalapenos and ketchup?
I looked her up and she was booted off Master Chef twice!
The second time, her
...dessert was too sweet because she used too many cherries in her jam.Her recipe is partly the "combining of strange ingredients" that has become the hallmark of Master Chef, which is why I no longer watch it.
But it is also about her background. Anyone who knows blackberries and has regularly eaten them realizes that the ketchup and the jalapenos wouldn't cut it. They would drown the taste of the berries. Maybe the bourbon or a light brandy, and even some bay leaves to add some herbal tang, but not ketchup! You would think that by the time she had made it to Marilyn Wong-Visitin would have figured all that out.
But her recipe is her business. What stuck out was the way she presented the experiences at meals with her Chinese family, who ran a restaurant while she was growing up. Running a restaurant is never easy on a family, but there is always a day in the week, a down time, usually a Sunday when people gather together and have a good meal, cooked by the restaurateur as a treat for the family.
This was not her experience. In fact, it sounds like she never had a pleasant meal with her parents at their home.
She met her husband in Sydney (Australia), who has an Italian background. And she realized what family meals meant when he invited her to his home. People enjoying each others' company as as much as the meal before them.
Her publicly undermining her parents was unpleasant to hear.
But she let us into Asian inter-family relations about which another public figure, the famous Amy Chua, has also disclosed. Chua was aggressively harsh on her daughters to prepare them for music and academic careers, and in the end they both bailed out.
Visitin is on yet another cooking show called on cable TV's Gusto where she hosts a program with two others (whom I've never heard of) called A Is For Apple, which is
a fun, fresh take on a food challenge show genre. In each episode, one of our three hip, young chefs randomly picks a letter of the alphabet and goes shopping for two very different ingredients that start with that letter. Then they come up with one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish that features both ingredients. Kale and kumquats, anyone? Is For Apple is a fun, fresh take on a food challenge show genre. In each episode, one of our three hip, young chefs randomly picks a letter of the alphabet and goes shopping for two very different ingredients that start with that letter. Then they come up with one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish that features both ingredients. Kale and kumquats, anyone?Also, it is a threesome affair, the kind of group creativity which Martha Stewart (and Jamie Oliver) would never accept.
Taste is no longer the criteria, but rather "one crazy (but delicious) mash-up dish."
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Chua's daughters were on the road toward being a musician and a scholar. Both veered away.
Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld manages a college tutoring business, which must be painfully ironic to everyone around her (including mother Chua) that it was that very institution Sophia rebelled against (although my theory is that she was never really quite that good). And like all things Asian, her loyalties go across the oceans and her website has a special section in Chinese for those overseas students.
She once performed at Carnegie Hall.
Lulu Chua-Rubenfeld stopped tennis with the original intention of going "professional"(after she dramatically stopped the violin lessons) and worked at a tutoring job at the New Haven Youth Tennis And Education - not in tennis but for "underprivileged elementary school students in math, reading, and writing." She is in an Art History undergrad at Harvard, I suppose with the intention of going into Law.
I wrote about Chua here, here and here.
Jed Rubenfeld, or Mr. Chua, took up soft porn/soft thriller authorship for a while but that doesn't seem to be on anymore.
Chua and Rubenfeld co-authored a book in 2014: The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America which The Atlantic described it as: "The holes in the Tiger Mom's theory that superiority, insecurity, and impulse control breed success."
He seems to be back at Yale Law, as does Mme. Chua.