kitchenmage

In Which Ina Garten Doesn't Make a Wish

There are other, more thoughtful posts floating around on my computer half-written but I am annoyed in a more than 140 character kind of way about today's twitter outrage. In a nutshell, Ina Garten declined to cook with a terminally ill child who requested it through Make a Wish foundation.

We will now pause for the two-minute hate.

Done? Good. Moving on...

Sandra Lee's Kwaanza Cake - the Rest of the Story

If you hate love love to hate Aunt Sandy, you know this cake.

An abomination made with all sorts of semi-edible crap, with bonus cornnuts, this cake is the epitome of all that is wrong with celebrity food media today. Tone-deaf, ugly, disgusting and just a bit of cultural offensiveness thrown in for good measure...that's the Kwanzaa Cake.

Here's what you don't know...

Paula Deen's Paper Towels

Happy Saturday from the confluence of two of my favorite things, food and comedy.

Seattle Cooks Rock Master Chef Auditions!

Master Chef is coming to the US and Seattle is ready!

Yes, Fox is bringing Gordon Ramsay's UK show, Master Chef, to the states and that means one thing: casting call! Auditions were held yesterday at Sur La Table in Kirkland and lots of people showed up. I am happy to say several Seattle cooks I follow on twitter got callbacks. Here's the list I compiled with a bit of quick sleuthing. Names link to twitter pages:

• Leslie Kelly made the transition "from critic to cook" just under a year ago when the Seattle P-I folded. She writes now at  Whining & Dining where she has tackled geoducks and gone on a moveable feast in New Orleans.
• Scott Heimendinger who celebrates the convergence of geekery and food at Seattle Food Geek  Check out this Gingerbread Eiffel Tower or a video showing how to make homemade olive oil mayonnaise.
• Linda Nicholson, whose blog Salty Seattle was a happy discovery while writing this. Look at this tempting Minted Dungeness Crab Cakes with Lemongrass Kaffir Sake Beurre Blanc or the scarily true-to-era Mad Men Birthday Draper-Style she threw just a few days before Christmas.Evvn more impressive, she does this while wrangling a baby, which is one of those "backwards and in high heels" sort of complicating factors.
• MarcSeattle who pulled off getting a callback even though his dog ate his homework.If you know Marc, you know he would be a colorful addition to the show. He doesn't blog, but if you can take seriously adult language you might check out his twitterstream . (Seriously, you have been warned.)

Round two of auditions for these folks (and others, perhaps) is today and I wish them all the best of luck. (Well, I wish Marc a smidge extra because we once had cubicles close to each other and I have a soft spot in my head heart for him.)

With another dozen or so auditions coming up, you still have time to enter the fray.Here us the complete list of Master Chef audition dates and a casting director discussing what they are looking for. If you just want to keep up with all the Master Chef news, one way to do so is by following the #masterchef tag on twitter.

Good luck to everyone who has yet to try out.

How about it: Have you or someone you know tried out for Master Chef or another reality cooking show? Would you ever? (Not me!)

Food Network Kitchen Training Show casting call

Food shows on TV are not my usual beat but I am feeling benevolent towards the media at the moment because the Hell's Kitchen art department, where my good friend J works, was nominated for an Emmy! (And J says if I can get myself to LA, maybe she can get me dinner on the show next season! How much fun would that be?) But that's not whay I am here, otherwise that title up there would be about HK, now wouldn't it?

I am here because of another friend, who sent me a link for a new Food Network show that is casting and I wanted to share it with you. Just in case you are on the other end of the spectrum from HK, you know, just learning to cook.

Food Network is looking for the most disastrous cooks in the country to participate in a very different culinary competition show!

This is the opportunity of a lifetime—to work with the best chefs in the country and learn to cook like a professional. Seeking outgoing people with a genuine inability to cook, but a need and desire to improve!

For more info, check out the site - which seems to just be getting started learning to be a web site since it is still lacking some details and an application form. (No word on whether or not you will be verbally abused by the host.)

Food Network's Kitchen Training Show

What the Hell's Kitchen?

When one examines the pantheon of cooking video games, from BurgerTime to Cooking Mama and the almost inevitable sequel Cooking Mama: Cook Off, to Happy Cooking...well, one discovers it's a very small pantheon indeed.

The next thing one discovers is that there is much fun to made. (disclosure: I have not played any of these games...mostly because I have a real kitchen if I want to play with food. Also, no dragons to slay or tame so what kind of game is it?) Anyway, on to the digression: Happy Cooking, which is described thusly:

Lisa, a little girl, is having a hard time trying to cook dinner before her father comes back home. Hopefully, an unexpected angel from the Moon will make her meet a famous chef who will help her.

There are so many things wrong with this. Like: Do they have angels on the moon? Really?

But let's start at the beginning with Lisa, the little girl whose adventure we share. There's a picture of Lisa on the box and I kind of like her look. Attractive, but not overly so (if you know what I mean), kind of spunky looking, she's cradling that mixing bowl like she knows what to do with it (although the grip on the whisk is iffy),

Have you looked at that box cover yet? No? And you are waiting for what? Geez! Go look already, I'll wait.

TV, training wheels, teaching and trashing...

I think I figured out what's up with those two food tv shows that many of us don't understand. It's all a matter of framing. This is cooking for beginners. Just maybe not the beginners you are thinking of.

What do you think of when you think "beginning cook"? For me at least, I think of children (and adults too, but always children) who are not only unskilled in the kitchen but too young to do many basic things on their own. No sharp things. Limited use of appliances: microwave instead of range, toaster oven instead of standard oven, etc. There is often a focus on assembly of ingredients rather than actual cooking.

You can see this clearly in old cookbooks. I learned to cook as a young child, and while I didn't use many children's cookbooks, I did have a few. Having not done too much shopping for such books in the last decade, I'm not sure if they have changed all that much since then. (other than having TV personalities on the covers) While there have been some notable additions since I was a kid, I bet that the books that have been in print for decades (and many of the newer ones) still use their tried-and-true approach. Duh. Tried and true sells.

If I ran the Food Network...

Let's talk. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, perhaps you'd like a slice of cake?

I was over at eGullet, snickering at the (twitter) oh-so-awesome (flutter) project's ideas for some new Food Network shows
and it triggered this thought that has been floating around in my head ever since the last round of eating competitions hit my radar and left me ranting. Now, I realize that when it comes to thoughts on the Food Network I am a rank amateur compared to some people, but I do have a few ideas I'd like to put forward.

Not the targeted demographic

I've been trying to watch more Food TV lately, including some shows that I normally avoid like avian flu (do we really "avoid the plague" anymore?) and I have some thoughts. One advantage to having a blog is that I can come here and rant instead of just snarking at the television. Add that to my recent dearth of posts and this is what happens.

First, I am clearly not the targeted demographic for the network. I find this really odd because I am a serious cook who works at home and has time to do all sorts of cooking. I don't live near a grocery store where I can buy individually wrapped vegetables, nor would I buy them if I did. I care more about the taste of my food than the 'scape of my table. I think that good food is worth taking a little time to create and never buy something I could make in less time than it takes to drive to the store. (45 min). I have a freezer and am not afraid to use it...for homemade food and bulk purchases, not commercially prepared things.

I have to wonder about editorial staff. Have they nobody to explain to their on-air folk that if you say an acronym followed by the meaning every time you can just skip the acronym. (meaning it's silly to say "EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil)" instead of one or the other). Better yet, how about just "olive oil" and let people get their single bottle of olive oil off the shelf without inquiring as to its virginity, because, really, how many of the people watching that show — you know which one I mean — have more than one kind of olive oil on the shelf? Heck, how many of you have more than one kind of OO (say it with me, "oooooo!") on your shelf? I am a food-nut and I have only two...and both of them are extra-virgin. (I want a bottle of "bit of a hussy olive oil," which doesn't exist but should.)

Can we call off the stereotypes? Alton says grills are about Y chromosomes**, RR giggles and says something about her inner girliness as she talks about tea sandwiches, and there are a few on-air folks that every online discussion about them devolves to "I'd do her" and an accompanying accusation that people (read women) who don't like ____'s show are jealous of her looks. Uh huh. Either that or we don't consider mixing a can of frosting with sugar and rolling it into balls to be candy-making, let alone "sensuous."

Oh my. Ms. Ray just put saffron in something instead of annatto seeds and then called it inexpensive. Uh huh. This from the woman who buys individually shrink-wrapped vegetables.

I think they should change the network name to "I like to watch other people putter in the kitchen making things I'd never actually eat TV" — at least it'd be truth in advertising. (Having written this, I am guaranteeing that my chance at Food TV stardom is ruined, but I just don't think it was happening anyway, what with me being over 30 in both age and weight in kilograms.)

**those being the ones that make people look at things attributed to it and say, "why?"

pizza acrobats...who knew?

Had I been named in one of those cultures that named people based on qualities they possessed, rather than choices made from a book length list, i think dances with food would have been a good choice. I often call the interweaving motion of multiple cooks working together kitchen dancing and I prefer cooking with live music--well, really doesn't everyone want a house band?