The same flagrantly decadent sensibility applies to the Fat Monk's pièce de résistance, the duck burger, which took McCue more than a year to perfect and turned into an alchemy project of sorts.
Yet it still has the feeling of magic, or alchemy – pig's trotter turned into juddering, shimmering gold.
Here is "Gold Leaves": Someone ought to write about (I thought and therefore do) stage three of alchemy: not inauspicious metal turned into a gilded page, but that same page turned back to basics when you step outside for air and feel a radiance that was not there the day before, your sidewalks lined with gold.
"Those initiatives — once applauded by the regulators as diligent and responsible management — have, through the alchemy of Washington, D.C., politics been turned into allegations of gross negligence," Mr. Killinger said in a statement.
Alchemy is primarily an art of transmutation: one metal is turned into another, one living creature erupts out of the substance of another.
From its conception the genre's stars seemed blissfully ignorant of the concept, convinced instead that by some mysterious form of alchemy, falsetto vocals, tight leather trousers and poodle perms could be turned into serious chest-beating machismo.
His central interest was transformation, the alchemy of one thing turning into another.
Developmental biologist Deepak Srivastava and cardiovascular researcher Masaki Ieda of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, California, and their colleagues wondered whether some cellular alchemy could prompt the fibroblasts to turn into cardiomyocytes.
Consider the toilet: a yawning ceramic distillery where you deposit your turds and wee, and they are turned alchemy-like into a sort of brown pissy slurry that runs beneath the city like blood runs through veins.
But then his second fundamental motive kicked in, and that was maximum TV exposure over the course of one summer leading to a certain level of sub-fame that can, once he leaves the Island, be turned alchemy-like into money.
