Making 'Bean'--a $352, 31.5-hour, 175-mile Cooking Odyssey

From yesterday's Trib. I guess I won't be buying the Alinea cookbook after reading this:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi- ... 8684.story

Best line in the print article" "It's not a Rachael Ray cookbook."

It's not that bad. There are certainly a few preps and techniques I will learn and use: The Alinea at Home blogger luuuuuuuvvvvved the butterscotch sauce on "Bacon, butterscotch, apple, thyme" (which I am going to make shortly). I don't expect to make "Bean" or "Lamb, with cubism" or "Rhubarb, 7 textures" but there are some clever, flavorful, maybe even useful things here.

And if nothing else, it keeps your coffee table from floating away.

What I would like to have seen is a chapter from a practical chef on how to turn a few cases of a recipe here into a dinner for four, instead of one tasting course out of eighteen. Yeah, maybe "Bacon, butterscotch" isn't going to be a meal, but some of the flesh and fish dishes certainly could, if you scaled them up a bit and cut back on a couple sauces and garnishes. There are few times when I'm going to spend 3-12 hours work to produce a three-bite course, when my family will be expecting several more such courses to make a meal.

This level of effort does help me understand the cost of such meals -- the labor costs are exhausting, to the point where the expensive ingredients probably come out to the same percentage of the gross as McDonalds does. Still doesn't help me understand a $68 steak a la carte, though.

For all they swear kids can do it, I basically look at this book as insight into a high-level creative process, and something I'm not really any more likely to do on my own than I am to make a headbending space movie after reading this.

The savory bubbletea recipe needs tweaking.