ACPT: Stuck in the Middle With You

Two weeks ago this morning I was sitting in the ballroom of the Brooklyn Bridge Marriot Hotel anxiously awaiting Puzzle #1 of the 36th Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.  To prepare for this, my 4th ACPT effort, I did 10-12 extra Wednesday/Thursday level New York Times crosswords for the prior 8 weeks in addition to my regular daily NYT puzzle, even writing down any new words I encountered that I hadn't known (if you do crosswords regularly and you're not a genius, there's ALWAYS a new word that comes along).  I felt like Rocky training for the bout.  I was going to crack the top 200 this year after my best finish of #222 out of 652 last year.   Did any of the puzzles this year have the words I learned? No.......  Did I crack the top 200?  No.....

It takes a couple of weeks to digest the whole experience of the ACPT and come down from the excitement of it all, the highs (getting four puzzles "clean", the cool crossword insider term for "correct", and actually getting the theme of the brain-slog that is Puzzle #5 this year!), and the lows (not getting the theme of Puzzle #3, not having enough time to finish Puzzle #5 once I figured out the theme, and stupidly filling in one...yes one...wrong letter on Puzzle #6, which I am blaming on fatigue as well as not getting my new prescription eyeglasses BEFORE the tournament).  

If you love crosswords, attending the ACPT is like going to Mecca.  You are among your people.  The vibe is a combination of camaraderie, fun, and the grueling experience of taking a final exam in law school where your whole grade depends on the one test.  We all want to acquit ourselves well, do better than last year, even though the majority of us know we don't have a chance in hell of being in the top ten, let alone winning a trophy.  But we dream of it just a little....sitting there with our six or eight sharpened or fully loaded mechanical pencils, waiting for the "proctors" to pass out the puzzles face down, waiting for the person who still doesn't have a puzzle, looking up at Will Shortz in the front of the room with the clock stopped at 15:00 or 30:00 minutes or whatever (depending on the puzzle) and waiting for him to say "on your mark, get set....begin", then hearing 570 or so pieces of paper rustle over at the same time with pencils madly scratching away!

My place is all set with 8 mechanical pencils, water, diet coke, and 2 Tylenol

After four years of attending the ACPT, I am herewith offering some dopey things I've done (so you won't have to experience them) or suggestions to allay any fears if you've been afraid to try your hand at the tournament: 

First of all, after looking at the official photos from this year's tournament, I realized you are not required to raise your hand when you finish a puzzle (IF you finish before the clock) like you're still in Catholic school waiving "ooh, ooh, I know the answer!"  A regular raising of the arm without almost wrenching it out of its socket will suffice for a referee to see you and pick up your puzzle.

Don't memorize the spelling of the volcano in Iceland from a few years ago.  "Eyjafjallajokull" has yet to show up in a puzzle I've encountered....anywhere.  Not even from Patrick Blindauer.  You'll have wasted a good memorization.

Don't worry about coming in last as I did my first year.  Last place will go to the people who decide to quit before doing all the puzzles....if you try all seven you're probably safe.

When you are deeply engrossed in a hard puzzle and Will Shortz (who, I might add, is such a nice guy and always willing to take his picture with you if you ask) says the dreaded words "one minute left",  I can almost guarantee your brain will freeze for that final minute.

Will Shortz

Don't chew a piece of gum and wrap it in its wrapper and place it in your back pocket.  Especially not before the dreaded Puzzle #5.  When you are on your way into the ballroom for the start of the puzzle and try to retrieve the gum to throw away, you will discover it is stuck to your ass (in the pocket of your jeans, that is) as well as now on your fingers with no time to wash them.  It is distracting to have sticky residue on your fingers when you're trying to solve the hardest puzzle.

Sit in the first or second row so you can't see everyone raising their hands way ahead of you.  Horse blinders would also be nice (if they sell them to humans) because it's so unnerving to peripherally see the person next to you furiously pencilling in answers while you are trying to find a starting point in the puzzle.

Don't be late for Puzzle #7 on Sunday morning, especially if you are sitting in the first or second row!  After you place your supplies in your seat, don't go out to the lobby to send an email because you misread the program and thought the puzzle started at 9:30 despite being an anal-retentive person about time.  You will then have to saunter into the room at 9:25 to a hushed crowd of 650 people (except for the people you passed outside the ballroom BECAUSE THEY WERE ALREADY DONE) hunched over their puzzles and see that 13 of the allotted 45 minutes have already transpired!  Despite being all flustered and embarrassed, just pull yourself together, save your pity party for later, and try to finish.  You may even by some miracle finish in 20 minutes, even though it will be marked as finishing in 32 or 33 minutes (I've never quite figured out the clock thing after 4 years....maybe this is why I don't win trophies).  

Finally, don't check your standings right after the Sunday morning talent show and send out a mass email to friends and family that you finished #244/573.  If you were #308 the night before, you are not going to move 64 places up in the standings just by finishing Puzzle #7 in 20 minutes.  If you were a genius you would know this.  Especially when the guy next to you that morning tells you that they had not scored one of his puzzles and were working to correct that.  He was not an outlier for this.  It is then quite deflating to have to send out a mass retraction that you regret the error of saying you finished #244, but rather #288, which then jumped down to #299 while you slept Sunday night.  Perhaps one trick is not to go to sleep.  

So, alas, ACPT 2013, despite a valiant effort, I slipped from my best showing of last year back to the middle of you, #299/573, middle of the sixties age group which I just joined this year (along with Ellen Ripstein, only #10 overall!), middle of the Midwest contingent (which features Anne Erdmann and Amy Reynaldo...I have no chance there!), middle of the "C" group, even middle of the Illinois group.  At least I'm consistent.  The only way I could contort my way into a trophy in my head is that I am #1 from La Grange.  No one else from La Grange was in attendance.

I'm back in the middle just as I was in 2010 (370/639), and 2011 (329/655).  I think I am forever stuck there, but I decided I'm happy with the middle, with the solvers who cannot fill in a crossword grid in 2-3 minutes, other than with wrong letters....the ones who cannot think or write that fast if their life depended on it!  For one thing, I couldn't take the pressure of solving a puzzle on a whiteboard in front of 500 or so people. I am in awe of the geniuses at the ACPT, the ones who finish in the top 100 consistently, the people who can unscramble the letters "enigmaaz" during the  Saturday night Fun and Games and shout out the word "magazine" before I've digested the idea of adding the letters "a" and "z" to the word "enigma".  These people can actually reset the clock radio in their hotel room for the time change Saturday night to daylight savings time (or "DST" a favorite NYT answer....you're welcome), and not have to give up in frustration and then Google how to set the alarm on their iPhone instead. 

But this is precisely what makes the ACPT so great even if you're a middling solver like me:  you can compete with the geniuses on the same set of puzzles....it's equivalent to the Olympics letting regular swimmers compete with Michael Phelps.  We're still pushing off the starting board (or in my case drowning) as he is finishing the first two or four lengths of the pool, but we can say we were there and had fun doing so!  Because all of the competitors, at all levels, are such a welcoming group of people that you feel at home, even a middling solver like me.  I'd recommend the experience to anyone who loves the NYT daily crossword.  And knows at least 2 sports stars:  Mel Ott (baseball) and Bobby Orr (hockey).

The closest I will probably ever get to a trophy.....

  

My DInner With Alinea

(You know, like the boring 1981 movie "My Dinner with Andre" that depicted a conversation between two guys in a fancy New York Restaurant for the WHOLE MOVIE....at least "My Dinner With Alinea" starred me and my sister Maryann and had unboring conversation, some giggles and the most amazing food!) 

I need to write this synopsis...okay, maybe not a synopsis; I'm not good with a synopsis....to make this awesome dinner real. It started as Maryann's (aka Mare, my always nickname for her) idea for a great 60th Birthday present to be a 60th Birthday experience and I was all down with that. We decided on Alinea mainly because it's only 7th best restaurant in the world according to Restaurant Magazine in 2012, 2nd in the U.S., AND it's right here in Chicago! It also has 3 Michelin stars. Which is supposedly a really big deal to get. Plus we both like "Top Chef" and I consider myself the Padma Lakshmi of LaGrange....well if I were 10 inches taller and had a cool scar on my arm and ate adventurously. But that's not important right now. What's important is that we got tickets for last night, February 28th! 

I thought the flash was going off....you can take pics but no flash!

You see, you can't just make a reservation like at regular restaurants that aren't 7th in the world. You have to watch for when tickets are released on-line, usually about a month in advance, by checking their website or Facebook page---every day---like a stalker. Then once you can snag a date and time, you quickly sign-up for it and pre-pay for your expensive meal, and you don't even have time to check with a clairvoyant to make sure you won't be sick or worse (like die or something) before that day since you already paid for the meal! But neither of those things happened, thank goodness, between the time we bought our meals on January 10th and ate them yesterday. (Although I did have stomach cramps most of yesterday mainly from nerves, I think....we're talking about a person who eats the SAME foods almost every day yet loves food and especially fine dining---okay she gets the anomaly in that--- AND got way too excited on February 27th about the upcoming dinner...then worried on February 28th that she built her expectations too high.  Also, someone who can always find a reason to worry, but that's a whole other blog for a therapist. She  (me) took an Immodium and wore a Thermacare heat pack on her stomach (UNDER her clothes) to the restaurant and all was fine.) 

 See how nice the bathroom was!

Random picture that turned up when searching for Alinea photos!

Mare picked me up at 4:00. Part of the greatness of the gift, besides her accompanying me (Bob would have done so, but he has some nebulous seafood allergies and I didn't want to dine while holding an EpiPen in one hand), was that she drove us downtown. Driving downtown is too stressful once you reach the age of 60.  Well, for me it was about age 30.  We took Ogden Ave. because it was rush hour and the expressways would have been awful, and even though we had to drive through Lawndale, there were no shootings to worry about because of it still being rush hour and also too cold out for gang warfare.  Ogden took us almost directly to Halsted which is where Alinea is located, just right up the street from the Steppenwolf Theater in Lincoln Park. Also a neighborhood where there is almost no place to park. But we did find a parking garage about 2 blocks away for only $19 total after 3 hours, not bad for Chicago. We did try to pay before we left the garage at an ATM machine instead of the parking machine but realized our error when one of the options was "Withdrawal or Deposit".  THIS is why I avoid driving to and parking in Chicago.

Mare said I walked so fast to the restaurant from the garage she had to pretend she was on "The Amazing Race" with me.  But our confirmation ticket for our 5:30 seating said we had to be there within 15 minutes of our reservation and it was already 5:20.  I didn't know if "within 15 minutes" meant exactly 5:15 or whether you had a little leeway.  People are always getting penalized on "The Amazing Race" from misreading their clues. Turns out they don't even open the doors---or put out the sign saying "Alinea"--- until 5:30, although the doors magically opened as we stepped up to them at 5:25.  Thank goodness Mare had Googled a picture of Alinea so she knew we were entering the right building. Well, and we did have the address....so there's that. You enter through this magical blue lit forest and the person admitting us told us to go first, but I said "I can't see where I'm going" so I pretended I was Helen Keller until we came to the light. And then we saw the kitchen to our left when we emerged.

  

I found out yesterday that "Alinea" is pronounced "a-LIN-e-a", not "a-lin-AY-a" as I had been calling it in my head. I'm glad Mare Googled that. I only remembered to Google that Alinea's head chef's name, Greg Achatz, is pronounced  "ACK-its" not "a-SHOTS" which I had also been mispronouncing in my head since about 2005 when he opened the restaurant.

Finally, on to our experience: We were the first ones to be seated in our little room of five tables.  We had four or five waiters milling around and hovering and pouring water and pulling out our chairs (not to make us fall like a prank but to seat us) and putting our napkins in our lap. They asked if we wanted to do the wine pairing with our food.  Mare overheard the next couple to arrive who DID do the wine pairing and it comes to an extra $150 PER PERSON and neither of us really like wine anyway so we said we were in AA (not really).  We just did the free bottled water pairing with our courses. So we had 17 courses (and my birthday course made it 18, one of my lucky numbers!). I know it sounds like a lot but it's a TASTING menu so everything is small and manageable which is how I knew I could handle that much food. AND....it was delectable. Our first course was the little cup of hot chocolate with little marshmallows that was handed to us as we were being seated...so cute and yummy!

There were two big vases of water on our table filled with flowers BUT they were not decorations we soon found out. There were also two ice sculptures sitting in a bowl of rocks and there was a hole hollowed in the middle.

One of our waiters then presented us with a kind of fat glass straw filled with butternut, and muscovado, finger lime, and West Indies according to our menu.  Not sure what those are or how they got the West Indies into that straw.  But you but it in the middle of the ice sculpture and then take a big noisy slurp. You're supposed to slurp.  It was very good. The waiters kept telling us what the dishes were as the courses came out but after awhile, or even since the start, it was like listening to Charlie Brown's teacher describing the ingredients "wah, wah, wah, filled with wah, wah, wah", and we'd catch a word here or there but just shrugged and ate and thought everything tasted scrumptious.  Even the dish that Mare heard the words "bone marrow" as part of it, and she said she freaked a little inside thinking of Mandy (our old Dalmatian) chewing on bones to slurp up the marrow.   But no worries, it was great.  And I couldn't even tell you which course it was part of. You're just overwhelmed with looking at everything, and tasting everything, and pretending you know what you're eating, and pretending you're a judge on "Top Chef".   It was just FUN!

After the slurpy straw, our vase of flowers was topped with a floating glass bowl filled with some fish seviche dish, and we got this little sliced scallop and a hot rock to sear the scallop on before we ate it.   Very interactive!  And I never cook!  Also some little squares of swordfish on a skewer that you put in a big glass jar of broth to poach, and a shrimp head with eyeballs and everything sitting on the top of a big glass with some orange sauce dolloped on the side....the shrimp was crunchy and delightfully delicious. Actually nothing at Alinea wasn't delicious so I will try to stop using that word. After the fish we were told to eat a couple tablespoons of pineapple slushy ice with a long tall spoon at the bottom of big glass to cleanse our palate.  By the way, they also have the best silverware and utensils for every course, and someone wipes the table after every course.

As more people were seated in our room, we tried to overhear the waiters describing the dishes we'd already eaten to try to understand what we'd missed so that was kind of fun but a little pointless....I still didn't comprehend.  It didn't matter, though.  As an aside, a family with two kids aged about 10 and 13 was in my line of vision and the kids were so fun to watch; it wasn't even their first time at Alinea I don't think. The younger one, a boy, seemed to have quite the sophisticated palate! Mare said she overheard that the Dad texted the kids that very day that he was able to get them into Alinea somehow (connections I'm guessing) and they said "yay"! At that age I would have said "yay" to an outing to White Castle.  

We had some kind of buttery halibut dish with a mole sauce and avocado dollop, then a hot rock topped with mushrooms and the blue flame appeared in the middle of the table (see picture below) heated up a kettle of consommé that was poured over the mushrooms and rock for a kind of soup course. Yummy....

THEN...one of their signature dishes: Hot Potato, Cold Potato. It's just this little cup about the size of your cupped hand with cold potato soup and on a silver stick above it is a mini hot potato covered with a black truffle.  In one movement you are to slide the skewer out to plop the hot potato and truffle into the soup and drink it in one mouthful. As I read from one blogger on Alinea this morning: "Please sir, can I have some more?"

One of our main courses came next called "Duck....?????" You get a plate with duck five ways: a duck foie gras (never had before; never knew what my taste buds were missing), a little sliced duck, and three other ways of duck preparation that I was too dim-witted or overwhelmed to understand, but all good.   Served with the duck is a big platter filled with all these tiny little condiments and jellys and pomegranite seeds and blueberries and a smidgen of chocolate and loads of things you can't identify and they won't tell you what they are, because you're supposed to experiment with trying different things with each bite of duck. Very fun. And this from a person (me) who brings home a new flavor of Chobani and asks Bob to taste it first to see if it's good before she'll eat it! I guess I just trusted that a 3 star Michelin restaurant would only have things that taste good.  I trusted right.

The other piece de resistance came next: The Black Truffle Explosion. It's a ravioli on a spoon with black truffle inside and the waiter tells you you MUST put the whole thing in your mouth in one bite and close your lips while the tastes explode in your mouth! As another blogger wrote: "Holy mother of the best thing I ever put in my mouth!"

Next was a wooden plank of 3 different kinds of pork with some pureed turnip I think...melt-in-your-mouth goodness yet again.

Before the four dessert courses--the extra one was for me for my birthday but I shared--we got this little silver holder of five thin skewers with a bitsy piece of ginger on each one and we were told to start at 12:00 o'clock and eat them counter clockwise since they get progressively spicier or hotter.  We were told these were required to get our mouths ready for dessert.   Mare had to show me which way to go; I even get lost eating in restaurants.  

                             .

The first dessert course was some carrot, caramelized honey, sesame coated brown butter ice cream cube and something coconut on a glass plate above a glass jar filled with herbs. The waiter poured hot water into the middle to go down into the glass jar and gave us another glass straw to sip the delectable herbal tea which resulted.

My birthday "cake" might have come next. How do people who drink wine have the whole experience NOT become a haze more than those of us who just do water pairings? It was a little chocolate ball and for "ice cream" the waiter poured hot cream over the ball to melt it....yum, yum, yum.

The signature helium balloons came next...a helium balloon made of green apple taffy with an edible taffy rope. You have to take off your glasses (in my case) so they do not get stuck to the balloon while you "kiss" it to inhale the helium (and talk funny for a few seconds) and taste the green apple. Well, that was just plain childlike fun!

Finally, the MAIN dessert: a waiter puts a clean silicone liner over the entire table, and then one of the kitchen sous chefs comes out and paints syrups and dots of flavorings--Mare said one was pear and I distinctly heard and tasted orange for one--like a Jackson Pollock painting. Then a big ball of dark chocolate is placed in the middle and the waiter pours liquid nitrogen into the top and then drops it to break all over the table. Inside was some cotton candy and nitrogen-ized ice cream chunks (like really really good dippin' dots) and some crumbled brownie like things I think, and some mini waffles.  The mini waffles were the only things we didn't much like; we thought they might be the one mistake to make someone on "Top Chef" have to "please pack up your knives and go."  Otherwise you eat with spoons and your hands and dip pieces of chocolate into sauces and have a blast. But we did get too full to finish it all. All accompanied by a black tea we ordered and it was almost as good as my Twinings Black Currant tea for not being Twinings black currant tea.  

So that was our experience at Alinea and molecular gastronomy, which I learned doing my research for this paper---for which I hope I get an "A" or else my doctorate degree---which is the application of scientific techniques and tools to cooking. But it's also about what the diners see and how they interact with the food, making surprise presentations or trompe l'oeil of food so it looks like another food, or employing interesting savory/sweet combinations. Neither of us will ever forget it unless I get Altzeimer's in which case I'll make Mare read me this blog every day in the nursing home.

My stomach hurt somewhat during the night.   Not from being overly full but from my stomach being all "whoa, I never get this kind of cuisine; you only give me peanut butter and rice cakes and yogurt and Zone bars and little cheeses and now you throw this all fancy tasty stuff inside....WTF? I don't know how to process this."

The next morning I woke up and took a walk in the light snow and thought of a line that Maria Von Trapp says to the Captain in "The Sound of Music" but extrapolated it to me (it's all about me in the end isn't it?).  When the Captain comes home with the Baroness, and Maria and the children fall into the lake, he hollers at her about their play clothes and says "Do you mean to tell me that my children have been running around Salzburg dressed up in nothing but some old drapes?" So, my dear reader, you may think "Do you mean to tell me that you, Cathy, who is afraid to try anything adventuresome in food especially over the last few years and eats almost the same stuff every day, sat in Alinea trying all kinds of unknown foods without fear?" 

And my reply will be the same as Maria Von Trapp's (well, Julie Andrews as Maria): "Mmm...hmmm...And having a marvelous time!" Oh, and here's a picture of our souvenir menu: