Misanthropaea

Not Necessarily The Next Food Network Star

Although I’m not specifically a fan of tattoos and curious piercings, I’ve decided that I would make an exception for Avery Pursell. It’s rather unfortunate that in order to watch her compete against the other chefs, I had to sit through the newest version of The Next Food Network Star. Well, ‘sit through’ is a bit of a stretch, really. More like ‘strolled in and out of the room and be annoyed that it wasn’t 11pm yet.’

I would be remiss in my blogging duties (not that I have been terribly thorough of late) not to mention here that my rather lengthy love/hate relationship with the Food Network is rapidly becoming more of a hate/hate relationship. The last series of The Next Food Network Star counted as one of the worst, heavy-handed, manipulative,   ill-conceived and scripted excuses for ‘reality’ television I’ve seen in ages, and it succeeded only in driving me away from almost anything on the network since.

After seeing the advertisements for the new eighth series of The Next Food Network Star, now no longer called The Next Food Network Star, and seeing that the network have decided to ‘revitalise’ the programme by giving it something of a face-lift and a new format, my immediate reaction was one of enormous joy that it would be over in time for me to catch the re-broadcast of the Around The World in 80 Plates premiere on Bravo.

Seeing the fabulously uninteresting group of Paul Stanley, Big Chris, Vic ‘Vegas’ Moea and Justin the Second, Fishmonger compete on Chopped All Stars only just reignited my antipathy for last year’s programme and fuelled my utter indifference to the New & Improved version. And the melodramatic adverts for it, which had been slathered over every millisecond of available air time on the Food Network for the preceding month did, if only by their sheer pervasiveness and seemingly desperate grappling for potential viewers, almost  nothing but repel me.

My only real interest – vague and half-hearted though it was – in subjecting myself to this programme again after last year’s misery was to see just how the promise of a new format and new rules would be handled. But even that did little to intrigue me, and I found my already waning attention frequently drifting during the 2-hour debut.

For whatever pointless reason, Dark Lord of the Sith Bobby Flay, Darth Giada, and Sith Master Alton Brown divided the 15 – yes, again – new Sith hopefuls into three groups of five for whom they would each act as mentor, making the competition just as much about themselves and their abilities as it is about their apprentices.

Team Flay was a Malcolm Jamal Warner circa the Jeremiah period look-alike called Malcolm , Michele (or Anne Burrell 2.0), Eric, Nikki, and Kara, who has my vote for the win. And it’s not because she’s attractive (which she is, of course) but because she seems to have strong presence ‘on camera,’ which astute readers will no doubt recall is industry-speak for ‘on the camera.’

Team Giada was a children’s programming-inspired group with names like Ippy, Linkie, Martita, Yvan, and Josh ‘The Rock n’ Roll Chef’ (because he has a band), and Team Alton was Cristie, Justin, Judson, Martie With the Partie, and Emily, also my pick for the win because I have a weakness for certain nerdy women in glasses.

I think I got their names right. Does it matter? No. Not really.

Once all the introductory nonsense was out of the way, the newly-formed teams of Sith Apprentices were thrown immediately into the…

…are you ready?

Wait for it…

The Star Challenge!

Of course it wasn’t the old Star Challenge we’ve seen carted out splashily for the last few years in which a celebrity chef or ‘star’ provides the contestants with some form of challenge which would lead to an inevitable elimination of one or more of them – this was the New & Improved Star Challenge! 

In this version, celebrity chef or ‘star’ Robert Irvine marched out wearing the same black t-shirt he’s worn for a year and explained that on his programme, Restaurant: Impossible, he has 48 hours and $10,000 to rebuild and redesign a failing restaurant. The Sith Apprentices, he said, would have just half that time and half that money to design and open their very own restaurants from the ground up. But despite what you may immediately be thinking, this wasn’t anything at all like 24 Restaurant Battle, because on that programme two teams are required to create an entire restaurant in just 24 hours from the ground up. This is clearly very different to that concept simply because there are three teams, not two, competing in the challenge and at the end of it, one of the new Sith Apprentices would be eliminated.

The other major shift in narrative was that, once the Sith Apprentices had figured out their restaurant menus, themes and names – Do South for Team Alton (Do South, get it? Do? Due?), the not-at-all-pretentious-sounding Blu for Team Giada, and the dull Tasting Space for Team Flay – each team would have a limited time frame in which to purchase their own goods. This entirely New & Improved concept required that the teams would further divide themselves into even smaller groups: one portion would go to a place called ‘Fresh Market’ and the other portion would go to a warehouse-like location called ‘Restaurant Depot.’ Once at their respective destinations, the teams would communicate via space age consumer-grade electronic devices held in their hands and shout instructions at each other very loudly whilst running about.

To further complicate an already complicated scenario, the Sith Apprentices would be given Discover cards and be required to hold them at curious and cumbersome angles during use so the cameras could languish on them to ensure paid sponsorship.

Once this so-called ‘shopping’ task was completed, the Sith Apprentices would then have a mere six hours to prepare their various foodstuffs for a staggering 150 people! 150! That’s like tons of people! One can only imagine the pressure. And a big hats off to the producers of Not Necessarily The Next Food Network Star for throwing in such an unexpectedly New & Improved twist to such an otherwise tattered and threadbare concept. 

This new ‘cooking’ segment included lots of exciting camera angles and spirited music so that we at home could really feel the intensity of what it would be like to work along side total strangers in big professional kitchen for six hours. Very often the action was intercut with, for lack of a better term, ‘interview’ segments filmed in what appeared to be some sort of clinically stark cookware showroom wherein the Sith Apprentices spoke ‘on camera’ about topics relevant to the particular situations seen along the way – a type of narrative or informal dialogue, if you will, which provided colourful commentary and keen insights. Overall it was quite a radical departure from all that has gone before.

In this New & Improved bit we saw, for example, that Eric wanted to make pasta from scratch – and he was see making enough dough to create almost 20 noodles; Yvan didn’t buy eggs no matter how often Rock n’ Roll Josh told him to buy eggs; Martie With the Partie felt it was ‘over ambitious’ of her to make three different devilled eggs all at the same time, but at least she had eggs; black-eyed pea and cabbage purée is not, in fact, a proper soup, no matter how much Cristie wanted it to be and does not have flavours that ‘pop’ and, as Judson said, it ‘doesn’t look pretty to look at,’ and, finally, Nikki wants to see the ‘dynamic personalities’ of her companions ‘on a plate’ – a concept I never would have thought possible.

Amidst this profusion of terrifying new ideas, Dark Lord Flay, Darth Giada, and Sith Master Brown interrupted their apprentices to explain that ‘There’s one more thing we have to do’ or, as Alton suggested, add ‘a twist of new flavour’ to the proceedings. Like me, I’m sure the reader will be echoing the sentiment of all the Sith Apprentices who stared in abject horror and astonishment at their mentors. How could anyone be expected – in a fierce competition such as this – to shop and cook – all in one day! –only to have matters complicated all the more by having another theoretical spanner thrown in the works? It’s unimaginable!

Truly the producers have shown their mastery of The Dark Side with these New & Improved ideas.

Gathering together once again, the Sith Apprentices were told by Chef Robert Irvine that the group of 120 diners (with no indication as to why the number had dropped so dramatically) would be able to choose where they want to eat ‘at.’ This stunning and unexpected turn is completely unlike 24 Hour Restaurant Battle where 150 guests pick which of the two just-opened restaurants they want to experience based on the menu options and concepts presented to them.

In this New & Improved twist, each of the three teams would be required to do a live two minute presentation of their respective menus and concepts upon which, then, the prospective diners would decide where they wish to ‘eat at,’ and everyone looked shocked because this was no new and nothing like it had ever been done before on Food Network. Josh said he would ‘rock it out,’ though, because he has a band. And by ‘rock it out’ he meant struggling to memorise the complex Shakespearean-style soliloquy of ‘Welcome to Blu where we are serving California cuisine.’

And the final shocking twist, however, was to introduce the new Sith Apprentices to ‘The Network’ for whom the winner will be working: strangely only comprised of Bob Tuschman, the senior vice president and general manager of Food Network, and Susie Fogelson, senior vice president of marketing and brand strategy, who was wearing a black skirt with a giant Santa Claus buckle on it pulled up above her navel. One would think more than two people were involved in programming and operations. Do they act as janitorial staff as well? Unless… it is possible that the sweeping changes in this new iteration included a dismantling of the previous power structure into which void stepped Bob T and Susie to re-establish the Dark Jedi under the Rule of Two and, in all probability, usher in a new Supreme Order unified under a Grand Lord…

Over the next hour, the Sith hopefuls performed their much-rehearsed two minute presentations before the assembly of 120-150 eager diners – which included Rock n’ Roll Josh doing a cartwheel described by some guests as simply ‘too much’ but which got a wide-eyed Susie Fogelson all sticky in her girl parts – and then they individually served each of their own contributions to the overall meal rather laboriously to ‘The Network’ and their mentors.

The end result of this hour was the revelation that black-eyed pea dip should be more ‘liquidy’ in order to be called a proper soup, Darth Giada believes ‘you want to be with Yvan,’ Emily brought a smile to the brain of Bob T in a creepy sort of way I didn’t care to explore further, and Cristie would be the first Sith Apprentice to be eliminated. Not because her pea and cabbage purée wasn’t really a proper soup – because it wasn’t – but because the careful editing strategy telegraphed her departure large enough to be seen from orbit and cunningly depicted her as a bumbling fool. For example, when it comes to the critical issue of childhood obesity and the general lack of healthy eating in this country, Cristie, portrayed as defensive and joyless, said she wanted to use the word ‘fed up.’ Which is two words.

Although Not Necessarily The Next Food Network Star appears to be so radically different to The Original Series in design and structure and, as such, is almost wholly unrecognisable, there were subtle elements included in it which fondly recalled the early days. For example, after the overlong ‘food service’ segment the young Sith Apprentices and their mentors assembled in the familiar Council Chambers of Food Network’s Los Angeles Bureau to listen to the emphatic music appropriated from SyFy Channel’s tiresome Face Off series and to glance awkwardly at each other.

Suddenly, whilst the music thundered to a crescendo, all eyes were on an enormous section of brick wall on the other side of the room which, in an electrifying twist I would never have predicted, actually slid apart revealing that it was, in fact, not a brick wall with ‘Food Network Star’ painted on it at all – but a giant cartoon door!  And before you hastily jump to conclusions, this was clearly unlike the giant cartoon doors used on Who Wants To Be The Next I-ron Chef or Sweet Genius because they obviously didn’t have the Food Network Star logo painted on them. So it was very different. And they were made to look like brick.

Rather than sit at a cloth-lined dais in pompous judgement of competitors as in years past, Bob T and Susie Fogelson strode out from the giant cartoon doors and stood before the Sith Apprentices and explained to them what they’d done in the previous hour and twenty-seven minutes in case they hadn’t been paying close attention. It was also noted that Susie enjoyed Judson’s ‘total package,’ and Bob T wanted more Ippy. And really, who could blame him?

The team headed by Dark Lord Flay had the favourite restaurant with the stupidest name and were safe from elimination, whereupon they filed slowly out of the Council Chambers in gloating fashion to the chagrin of their adversaries.

Some other things happened too. They weren’t very important. I’d filled my glass with more malt whiskey, though. That was important. And then Cristie and young Rock n’ Roll Josh (he has a band) were up for elimination. Mostly because Josh was told he couldn’t just rely on tricks to mask his culinary inabilities and he was wearing a scarf. Cristie, on the other hand, had been touched by the Stark Fist of Removal from the very beginning and was undaunted by the fact that ‘fed up’ was two words.

In what was perhaps the most surprising declaration of the evening, however, and a bewildering spin which blind-sided me by its sheer innovation, Bob T explained that the two Sith Apprentices would have ‘one last chance’ to save themselves by being set against each other in a culinary combat he called a ‘Producer Challenge.’  This would be something very like a ‘sudden death cook-off’ of sorts in which the Sith Apprentices would have just 30 minutes to prepare one dish. Whomever created the superior dish would overcome their competitor, seal their fate and their advancement towards The Dark Side would be complete.

But this New & Improved segment, I soon realised, would be absolutely nothing like other cook-off bits we’ve ever seen on Food Network, for example in Who Wants To Be The Next I-ron Chef or the more recent Rachael v Guy: Celebrity Shaka Zulu. In those programmes, two I-ron Chef hopefuls or two nominal celebrities, each of whom had been considered the least effective at their various tasks, were given one half of an hour to compete in a one-on-one trial, often beneath the intense scrutiny of their companions, in which the victory of one competitor would be based entirely on the judgement of their final offerings.

And this was called the Producer Challenge. So it was very different.

But wait! There’s more! After the Sith Apprentices have cooked their potentially last meal under the duress of the ever-watchful gaze of their teammates, they would have to videotape a one-minute presentation ‘to camera’ in which they would introduce their dish through a personal story – in this case a tale and dish suited to a Mother’s Day brunch. The unmitigated newness of this idea – the massive brazenness of it – has no analogue to anything viewers have ever seen on the Food Network before.

And the final New & Improved twist was that these brief, personalised introductory segments, forged with fifteen minutes of aid from the mentors, would be ‘screened’ – industry-speak for ‘viewed’ – in The Pitch Room where, we are ominously told, ‘the fate of shows and talent’ is decided. Oddly, the ominous nature is quickly dispelled when you realise it’s just a painfully sparse room reminiscent of an embarrassing downmarket attempt at the conference room in the overbridge on The Death Star, with a few chairs positioned round a plain rectangular table whose centre has been carved out so a white light shaped much like the Eye of Sauron can shine through an opaque Perspex insert.

Rock n’ Roll Josh made a frittata and, in The Pitch Room, noted that, amongst other things, he used herbs, goat cheese, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and onion. Bob T was duly impressed and noted that, amongst other things, there were herbs, goat cheese, garlic and onions in the frittata and that he kept getting ‘happy surprises’ from it. You and I would call that ‘gas.’

Cristie made a Scotch Egg and her assessment that ‘you can’t go wrong with an egg’ was immediately disproved by the confused ending to her personal story which, to the studied eye of Bob T, lacked the joy and excitement to excite a nation and thus the Stark Fist of Removal came down as was prophesied.

Her exit was made in an understated, completely realistic and absolutely not staged in any fashion tracking shot which began as she entered alone into the dimly lighted Council Chambers from an unseen anteroom and crossed towards a large proscenium at the back of the room in a wide arc. As she passed through the proscenium, the large cartoon doors cunningly disguised as a brick wall closed behind her and a spotlight shone brightly on the Food Network Star logo. This was completely unlike the dark and lonely perp walk often seen on HGTV’s Design Star where an ousted competitor would be forced to exit down a darkened hall and out through an obviously artificial iron door made of cheap plywood and grey paint. This was something totally New & Improved.

According to teasers in the opening montage, we get to see Sith Master Alton cry at some point this year. Probably not before I do, though…

All-Star Snoredown

I’d really hoped to avoid doing this, mostly because I was so completely annoyed by the very thought of it. It sat on my DVR, taunting me, provoking me, until I finally let the inevitable happen. So let me just begin by saying that in one of my favourite Neil Simon comedies, Murder By Death, an incensed Lionel Twain demands that ‘I’m the greatest! I’m number one!”

‘To me, you look like number two,’ replies Sam Diamond.  ‘Know what I mean?’

Also looking very much like number two was the second series of Chopped All-Stars, which just aired its final episode last Sunday, 6 May. The entire series wasn’t shit. Not as such. Mostly it was just the third episode which was so intolerable because it was devoted to the now seemingly mandatory group of non-winners of The Next Food Network Star – politely referred to as ‘fan favourites’ – in an episode aptly called ‘All Stars: Food Network Star Contestants.’ 

Precisely like its predecessor (and exactly like the other version of it called Chopped Champions) the second series pitted 16 contenders against each other in groups of four throughout four episodes. The finale, the fifth episode, had the winners of each of the four earlier episodes facing off for a $50,000 grand prize to be given to a charity of their choice.

As I noted in the post below, Iron Chef Michael Symon and the irritatingly loquacious and gesticulative Jeffrey Saad were the winners of the first two episodes. Round three, this time, was a Not-So-Fantastic-Four (as I also noted previously) of Padawans from the wretched and abortive seventh season, and a thoughtless bitch-slap to viewers of Chopped. The ridiculous and standards-lowering collective was comprised of our old friends Justin the Second, Fishmonger, Big Chris,Vic Moea – who has, for whatever reason, resurrected the absurd‘Vegas’ moniker even though he’d presumably laid it to rest on The Next Food Network Star when he discovered who he really was in a major heart-tugging breakthrough moment of self-realisation that clearly didn’t last – and the grating, noxious Paul Stanley.

The Sammich Thing, obviously, was far too busy to participate and the remaining ten Padawans surely recognised the futility and stupidity of accepting an invitation to be paraded out for the sake of ratings.

Each of the contestants had their obligatory introduction, of course, and it felt very much like sitting through some bad parody of Iron Chef as they each stalked towards the camera beneath dramatic lighting and posed and postured in threatening sorts of ways to prove how serious the were: 

‘I’m here to show people who I really am,’ Big Chris proclaimed, looking precious in his tight pink trousers and cheap brown shoes.

‘His big personality and extreme ambition kept fans cheering him on,’ Ted said rather enthusiastically of Big Chris, a statement making it clear he’d never actually watched any of The Next Food Network Star last year and was probably just reading provided  promotional material off a card.

Big Chris explained that we at home saw the ‘crazy funness’ of him on The Next Food Network Star and that he was likely seen as a bit ‘goofy’ in very much the same way as Hitler was likely seen as just a bit cross. But with a year behind him, he had grown up and things were now ‘very serious,’ clearly evident in his composed and thoughtful clothing style.

‘Vic Vegas is going to make this happen,’ Vic assured us, nodding like a bobble head doll the entire time, smiling in an uncomfortable sort of way which suggested he’d just scanned John Conner’s face at a remote desert fuelling station, and standing in a rigid attack stance as if he would take out the camera operator at any second.

The repugnant Paul Stanley wisely ditched the notion of the ‘Mediterranean Mama’ she’d pushed all through The Next Food Network Star in favour of calling herself a ‘Persian Princess,’ because it falls as easily off the tongue as do the contents of my stomach.

‘She likes to look – and cook – like a million bucks!’  Ted read happily off a card. In the insert shot, Paul Stanley was seen puffy-eyed and haggard from a rough night of sleep as she toyed and teased her curler-laden hair into submission and the words of Sam Diamond echoed once more in my head.

‘I’m super talented and super feisty…’ she demanded.  ‘Stand back,’ she awkwardly pointed at the camera and tossed her head back in what was supposed to an alluring fashion, ‘and watch me win.’

And finally Justin the Second, Fishmonger, knowing that his woodenness before the camera had eclipsed his culinary skills on The Next Food Network Star vowed in a wooden sort of way that, ‘When I get into the Chopped kitchen, I’m gonna kill it!’

In the starters round, with ingredients of razor clams, breakfast radishes, green grape tomatoes and shrimp paste, Vic claimed that because he had been the most successful of the four failures from the last series of The Next Food Network Star he would be ‘the guy to beat.’ He made a ‘nice’ pub-style clam with a ‘nice’ briny broth out of wine, garlic and shallots or, more simply put, clams in broth. Big Chris, thinking inside the box, made a white wine-poached herbed razor clam and roasted green tomatoes which also was essentially a dish of clams in broth. Based solely on his culinary skills, Justin the Second, Fishmonger, made razor clams in a spicy Thai broth. What made his dish stand out, however, was the inclusion of a chilled radish ‘salad’ – what you and I would call ‘garnish’ – placed carefully on top of the clams in broth.

Paul Stanley, insisting that Food Network need her ‘feistiness,’ claimed to have been ‘traumatised’ by not having won series seven and wholly disregards the fact that she lost primarily because she’s an arrogant, egomaniacal, backstabbing hostile nag who, in the words of Peter Griffin ‘looks like a foot.’ Her choice for a starter was to forgo clams in broth and add some Mediterranean flair with a clam-stuffed green grape tomato in a shrimp sauce, and the careful editing and shrill music made it seem as if she would never finish such a complicated dish on time.

Judge Aarón Sanchez mentioned to his fellow judges, Amanda Freitag and Scott Conant, that no-one had properly cleaned or even pretended to clean the clams, except for Paul Stanley who, by virtue of the style of preparation she’d chosen, was rather forced into doing so. Scott Conant pointed out that for the first three episodes of The Next Food Network Star Vic hadn’t got anything on the plates for the Jedi Council to taste (for which he ought to have been eliminated) and he believed the same would happen here.

Despite how often throughout the lengthy run of Chopped someone has endlessly harped about a chef not taking the time to ‘transform’  or to ‘elevate’ an ingredient, and often chopping them for it, no-one said diddly squat about Paul Stanley merely gutting a tiny grape tomato and cramming it with razor clam.  They did, however, roundly criticise Big Chris for the heavy-handed use of costly and pungent truffle oil splashed on at the last minute as it overpowered his dish. He was chopped, but felt that he ‘exemplified maturity’ for the judges. Later he probably ran crying from the building, twisting angry fists into his tear-streaked eyes.

And on it went for another gruelling and banal 36 minutes…

In the mains round, featuring ingredients of culottes steak, Okinawa sweet potatoes, turnips, and ‘strawberry leather’ which, when you aren’t paying for sponsorship, are best known as Fruit Rollups, Vic made a blackened culottes steak over sweet potato hash and his own ‘custom-made steak sauce.’ He also continued with his somewhat disingenuous-feeling Momma’s Boy act and his carefully practised facial expressions as he went on about how his mother was influencing him from ‘up there’ and how she would tell him, if she could, that  he was ‘takin mountains and movin the hell out of em.’

Justin the Second, Fishmonger, opted for a grilled culottes steak over sweet potato purée whilst Paul Stanley chose to go a completely different route and bring a more Mediterranean flair to her dish by making a Moroccan-style culottes steak and a sweet potato mash, promising that it would be as gorgeous as she isn’t.

Unfortunately, not having a proper meat tenderiser, Paul Stanley jabbed viciously at the steak with her clenched fingers, smiling a dark Sweeney Todd smile and adding yet another item to the growing list of reasons why she is single. Scott Conant seemed to enjoy this exhibition, however, especially when Amanda Freitag pointed out that she was ‘beating the meat.’

To the culinarily-skilled eye of Justin the Second, Fishmonger, she was ‘pounding the ever-living shit out of the steak’ and he knew it would be over cooked, predicting that, in the end, there would be ‘a dead grey steak on a plate.’

And there was indeed a dead grey steak on Paul Stanley’s final plate, much to the displeasure of the judges, but it was still Justin the Second, Fishmonger, who was chopped for having flaccid bacon and a slightly underdone steak. This, then, left Paul Stanley and Vic in the final round, competing with mango chutney, white apricots, blue cornmeal and bacon bits.

Judge Sanchez felt the blue cornmeal ought to have been the star of whatever dishes were about to be made and he told his fellow judges that he expected the contestants to use it as a flour for making pancakes or perhaps some crêpes.

Of course neither of them did so.

Vic chose to create a bread pudding, using the cornmeal as a thickening agent, and Paul Stanley, feeling that some sort of a Mediterranean flair was in order, opted for stuffing large phyllo dough cups with white apricots coated in cornmeal and adding a mascarpone and heavy cream sauce to it. She also threw down a challenge to the producers of Iron Chef America to include her in that programme. Because, gosh, wouldn’t that be entertaining: two of the most noxious things ever on the planet put together for your viewing displeasure?

Perhaps the most welcome bit of the entire programme was Scott Conant telling Paul Stanley that her phyllo dough cup tasted ‘like nothing.’ As she attempted to defend her untenable position by arguing that she didn’t want to add ‘another layer of fat, another layer of sugar’ and that it was all ‘a matter of taste,’ Scott bristled.

‘It’s not necessarily a matter of taste,’ he rolled his eyes and adjusted himself in his chair. ‘Alright, let’s be clear, okay? Because you’re going to try to talk your way around it and this is not to be talked your way around.’ He crumbled the bone dry phyllo dough into a rain of flakes. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is what I get on my palate. It’s not fun.’

‘Understood,’ she nodded her obvious disagreement and he offered a tense stare in response.

Eventually, though, after the judges deliberated on the relative merits of each dish, the two Padawans were called back and, as something very like Carl Orff’s O Fortuna blasted away shrilly, everyone glared at each other. The camera hove dramatically about until Ted at last lifted the cloche to reveal that Paul Stanley had, unfortunately, beaten Vic and would move on to the finale where she continued to be her unpleasant and egocentric self.

The overly theatrical introductions to each of the final chefs and Paul Stanley were an embarrassment to watch and really drove the ordinarily far classier Chopped down to the sad level of Iron Chef America-style lunacy. 

‘I am gonna win,’ Paul Stanley announced whilst clawing laughably at the camera, and added that ‘Victory’s gonna be ooey-gooey, lick your fingers sweet!’

And victory was ooey-gooey, lick your fingers sweet. For Chef Marcus Samuelsson.

Paul Stanley, feeling that by taking a different approach and utilising a Mediterranean flair in her dish, managed to survive the starters round, shockingly, only by virtue of the fact that Iron Chef Michael Symon failed to get his fried Chinese okra on his plate – an often unforgivable act on Chopped and an omission all the more heinous in an All Star battle.

However, in the mains round, with ingredients of rainbow chard, bonito, hard cider, and couscous, she decided to challenge herself by pushing the culinary envelope and develop a more Mediterranean flair in her food, which apparently meant leaving the thick, inedible skin on the bonito and by using so much saffron in her couscous that it was, to Judge Amanda Freitag’s way of thinking, ‘incredibly overwhelming.’ She also used the typically very pricey saffron with sheer impunity as a garnish on her plate, an act Judge Amanda felt was ‘excessive.’

Despite her argument to the contrary – that she only used ‘a pinch’ of saffron – she was, thankfully, chopped, leaving Chef Marcus to roundly trounce the oft-blabbering Jeffrey Saad.

What made her appearance on the programmes so offensive, apart from the fact that she’s just so unbelievably smarmy and smug, was her incessant trash talking of the other competitors. It’s perfectly fine to be confident in your own abilities and to be proud of your achievements, but having a sense of humility goes a long way to being more likeable and accepted.

Each of the 15 others in the competition were generally gracious of their wins as well as their defeats, and on the infrequent occasions when they took personal shots at their opponents they did so in fairly good-natured and professional fashion.

Paul Stanley was, in sharp contrast, harsh, abusive, and thoughtless, and her insolent gloating (for example about the ‘bragging rights’ over ‘beating’ an Iron Chef) was some of the most obnoxious self-congratulatory behaviour I’ve ever seen on television. She is not a celebrity chef for many of the same reasons Commander Lisa isn’t: she hasn’t the personality or the admirable – or even welcoming – qualities anyone would want in a host.

And she looks like a horse. So there’s that.

With the New & Improved Next Food Network Star now begun, one can only imagine what the next permutation of Chopped All Stars has in store…

United Tastes of Shut the Fuck Up

My apologies to the three of you, but it’s been a rough school term the last few weeks which has been keeping me from my posting duties, and as I hurtle towards the end the work is piling up: multiple research papers due at nearly the same time, an entire ethnography on the Azande of the South Sudan to struggle through, and various other readings for final exams…

In the meantime, Chopped All-Stars has returned to Food Network and I have sat and stared at it with great trepidation – almost as much trepidation as I have had for the upcoming series of the New & Improved Next Food Network Star now not called The Next Food Network Star, a series I have now come to dread with each passing year because it has morphed into an insufferable parody of what it once was and makes me want to drink.

A lot.

The current episode of Chopped All-Stars – called Prime Time v Day Time – which ran on Sunday, 15 April, as the second of the newest series and host to a face-off between Food Network Challenge Judge Keegan Gerhard,  Marcela Valladolid of Cooking Channel’s Mexican Made Easy, Winner of Series Six of The Next Food Network Star and now host of her own Aarti Party, Aarti Sequeira, and Jeffrey Saad, Not the Winner of Series Five of The Next Food Network Star and host of United Tastes of America  on The Cooking Channel.

I was always fundamentally annoyed by Jeffrey during the run of The Next Food Network Star in 2009, and after he made his lengthy, impassioned, cringe-worthy, painfully artificial and blatantly over-rehearsed ‘Choose Me Because’ speech on the finale, I’d pretty much had my fill of his grandiose gesticulations and ego-centric ramblings. I hate his programme on Cooking Channel and find it intolerable to sit through. His descriptions of food are often ridiculous, unappealing, and frequently border on the embarrassing.

And so it came as no surprise that when Amanda Freitag, in her capacity as a Judge, made the fatal error of asking Jeffrey to ‘Please tell us about your charity,’ that he went on a circuitous and emotive dissertation which soon had the polite smiles of everyone beginning to fail as their eyes glazed over with boredom.

What did surprise me was that the immaculate Ted Allen didn’t graciously intervene and explain to Jeffrey that Chopped only runs an hour and could he please just wrap it up because there was quite a bit of important cooking left to do.

It’s one thing to be confident about your abilities and proud of what you do. It is another thing entirely to be a pompous twat and crashing boor. Endlessly reminding the viewer of a now almost three-year-old failed Next Food Network Star concept of ‘Cooking Without Borders’ as if it was somehow still relevant to anyone but yourself and claiming that evidently every human on the planet still considers you to be ‘The Spice Guy’ whilst droning effusively on about the relative merits of the charity being played for and how you are deeply connected to it because you once cooked for them does nothing to endear yourself to an audience.

Smug is not the new cool. And anyway, shut the fuck up.

Gratingly, he won the top honours of the programme and will be in the final episode, competing (so far) against Iron Chef Michael Symon, winner of the first round.

Programme three, a flagrant bid for ratings and a desperate pandering to the lowest common demographic denominator, will air on Sunday and – like its train wreck of a predecessor on last year’s All-Star series – will pit an exasperating group of former Next Food Network Star losing contestants, this time all from series seven, against each other: Big Chris, Justin The Second, Fishmonger, the artist formerly known as Vic Vegas, and (need I say it?) Paul Stanley.

Hold on to your cornette, Sister Sixto…

Unorthodox Easter

I don’t know why I find this funny. I just do.

Fat Tax

As you both may recall, I’d finally reached a point a couple of years ago where I was determined to shed the excess weight I’d packed on over a period of time grappling with all the stress, anxiety, and depression resulting from matters of business, and my indelibly-linked personal life, spinning wildly out of my control.

Around the same time, I posted about my irritation with what I felt were some very misleading NutriSystem adverts being run which centred round Amy of Fayetteville, Georgia. For example…

Shortly after that post went up, I received quite a number of snippy comments and unpleasant emails from the wife of a doctor who was utterly outraged over what she perceived to be my complete lack of compassion for Amy and her deeply touching personal journey to lose 28 pounds. I subsequently deleted all the comments and emails after seeing it was an uphill battle of trying to talk logic and sense to someone who appeared to be belligerently, if not defiantly, choosing to disregard or even comprehend my point of view. That is not to say I expected this person to agree with me in any way, only that she try to understand my argument so that we could work from even just a smallish patch of common ground.

Unfortunately my intolerance for people who deliberately want to remain obtuse and unreasonable for no discernable reason other than ‘just because’ had reached its limit when I was told that I lacked credibility because the picture I posted was not actually of Amy.

And, to be fair, no. No, it wasn’t.

And it wasn’t for two reasons: one, I felt that my version, though quite clearly meant to be taken as humour, did, in fact, perfectly depict the sort of thing NutriSystem were trying  to market, i.e. magic fatlessness; and two, I was unable, at that time, to find an adequate image – or any image – of young Amy from Fayetteville, Georgia which better illustrated my point. Or illustrated any point at all.

That particular matter, as can be seen above, has now been rectified. I think it’s also fair to say that my illustration wasn’t too terribly far off the mark.

It’s unfortunate, however, that humour and sarcasm are simply lost on some people.

*Sigh*

Later, after I’d responded to this reader, pointing out that it was not my intention to seek or assert credibility in the matter, only to state an opinion, and, after assuring her that I felt the basic idea behind NutriSystem was, as a means to an end, perfectly legitimate and that, yes, I completely understood that some people really do need the support of such a plan – whether it’s Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig or whatever – to assist in attaining their weight loss goals, but that what I hated was their misleading advertising, her doctor husband then joined the fray and launched into me with the same myopic fervour: you have no credibility, you’re not a doctor, you don’t know anything, you suffocate puppies – you get the idea.

What I failed utterly to communicate to this couple, or what they simply chose not to recognise, was that, in my opinion, it seemed the image of Amy used by NutriSystem to depict the ‘before and after’ comparison was just ever-so-slightly deceptive.

In the ‘before’ image, Amy is clearly seated. However, the chair or sofa or whatever it was she was sitting on has been eliminated to accentuate her former girth all the more and, so, makes it seem – and read very that closely, MAKES… IT… SEEM – as though her weight loss was far more dramatic. That is not to diminish her achievement in any way. Rather it is to point out that, without a legitimate side-by-side comparison, the differences between ‘before’ and ‘after’ cannot accurately be judged. In fact, it would appear from the photograph that Amy lost considerably more than 30 pounds. And if so, good on her. Or maybe her 30 pounds were larger and puffier than the 30 pounds other people may be hoping to shed.

And it’s not to say losing nearly 30 pounds can’t make a difference in some people: it most certainly can. If they have a smaller build, indeed, such a loss can be dramatic. But… one simply does not immediately go from being Gardulla the Hutt to amazingly ripped, tanned, and well defined just by eating less food.

It doesn’t happen.

And if it does, it certainly doesn’t happen quickly and it most assuredly doesn’t happen without exercise.  Not unless you’ve spent time languishing in Dachau. Your arms don’t go from flabby ‘Lunch Lady’ arms to beautifully sculpted just by following the Glycemic Index Chart unless the food packaging is considerably heavier than most and therefor opening it constitutes an extreme upper-body work-out.

And though Nutrisystem don’t hide it, they certainly don’t go out of their way to clarify that these sorts of results are not typical for most of their users. They also don’t  provide a relative time frame in which this very astonishing transformation took place for our Amy. Or at least not in any of the advertising I’ve seen. Maybe it’s on a late-night infommercial. I don’t know. I don’t watch them.

So what I had objected to was the fact that people were being enticed by the illusion – read that carefully, the ILLUSION – that unwanted pounds will magically fly away just by eating NutriSystem food when, in fact, if you have a look at the fine print or simply analyse the claims, the weight loss breaks down to about  1 pound, maybe more, per week – which is actually normal for any diet claim. If you lose 20 pounds in 16 weeks or 200 pounds in 305 weeks, it still breaks down to about 1 pound, maybe more, per week.

Thankfully, in their more recent advertising spots featuring Dan Marino – an apparently well-known sport person of whom I’ve barely any knowledge beyond the confines of the adverts – NutriSystem have pulled back from their previously dramatic and misleading images.

Dan is shown to have returned to his so-called ‘playing weight’ (a figure which is left undefined) by losing nearly the same amount as our young Amy. Yet the transformation for him, whilst still a substantial loss – as you will not seen on the right – is nowhere near as visibly pronounced as Amy’s.

And why oh why must I bring all this up again? Well, it fills space, doesn’t it? Gives me something to whinge about, gives you something to look at other than the last post you’ve read just stuck there for days and days…

And because, despite periodic backsliding and occasional set-backs, most of which I have documented here at one time or another, I’ve managed to lose 62 pounds – or roughly half of my projected goal – over the past 20-odd months and, just like Dan, no-one can tell.

After analysing and radically altering my admittedly poor eating habits, adopting a primarily vegetarian lifestyle and cutting out as many processed foods as I possibly could, cutting my caloric intake down to far more sensible levels, growing my own veggies and herbs, biking, walking… the weight loss appears insignificant.

I haven’t gone from, as fellow blogger Rachel at Lessons Learned calls it, ‘Fatty McFatterson’ to being just a mere shadow of my former self in any sort of readily discernable way.

Do I notice a change? Of course I do. I can walk up stairs without wanting to fall over, breathless and red-faced; I can pick things up from the ground without straining and sweating; I can button shirts I could not previously button; my pants, once straining at the seams, now require a belt to stay up; I no longer have the symptoms of sleep apnoea; I can get up from a kneeling position without a system of pulleys and wires; but more people seem to notice when I’ve had my hair cut. And I still try to hide the waist size sticker on clothing from the store clerks (because that way they don’t know you’re fat).

So yes, I call shenanigans on some of the NutriSystem adverts, and on the tedious and annoying Fat Burning Furnace and it’s stupid ‘one weird old trick’ nonsense seemingly ubiquitous on the internet, and on Montel Williams and his saffron oil supplements and his green smoothies and his prohibitively expensive Living Well Pressure Cooker which accomplishes the same sort of thing a $20 slow cooker will, or supermegapoop colon purges, or acai berry miracles because they are all trying to sell people a magic antidote to adiposity.

And the real answer to the problem is simply eat less, eat healthfully, and exercise more. And, of course, don’t expect a radical or immediate change. There are very few things more demoralising and irritating than switching on the television and seeing trim, tanned, and toned models who have only seen stretch marks in photographs telling you how miraculous their weight loss has been by drinking some sort of cat sick-looking load of bile from a container they won’t recycle because it’s too much work or by taking pills to melt away the inches.

It doesn’t work that way. It works through hard work and perseverance.

Back in late December, at the height of the post-holiday sales events offered by many retailers, I decided to purchase a ‘home gym’ to help get past the plateau I’d been stuck on rather maddeningly for several months. I briefly toyed with the idea of just joining a gym, though I realised a friend of mine was correct when he told me, ‘Fat people don’t go to the gym.’

Skinny people go to the gym so they can stay skinny. Fat people buy gym memberships and then never use them, effectively paying a ‘fat tax’ to help keep the gym open because fat men don’t want to work out next to hot skinny women in purple spandex and look like a fat loser.

So I opted to take what amounted to a 4 or 5 month gym membership and buy a less costly version of one of those As-Seen-On-TV! contraptions hawked by out of work actors from the 80s. I had previously purchased an inexpensive treadmill so that I could go for walks or have a nice heart-attack inducing jog during the winter months, but it wasn’t going to do much for muscle tone.  Hence the TorturCiser300 found a home in my living room. 

I used it regularly throughout January and lost another 5 pounds – or about 1 pound, maybe more, per week – and could feel the difference. However, the unusually warm February got me motivated to paint the living room and start a few projects which, unfortunately, put me off my strict regimen. Now those things are nearly complete, I can go back to using it for more than an expensive coat rack.

I’ve got 60-ish more pounds to go and then I, too, can walk along the beach or past a pool in slow motion to the hard crunch of heavy metal guitars. Or not. Pink was never really my colour anyway…

Paula Deen’s Cunning Plan Redux

Note: I was out with a couple of friends recently and, as it sometimes does, one of them mentioned my blog. She then brought up this post, submitted to Food Network Humor, on her mobile and began reading it aloud. In doing so, I thought she skipped something in the text simply for the sake of brevity. Turns out she hadn’t. So, because I feel the minor FNH cuts made things a bit awkward – and because I later noticed an irritatingly misplaced modifier (yes, I missed something in the editing) – I’ve decided to re-blog the post here in it’s corrected form… 

During a recent shopping excursion to Walmart – and by excursion I mean a series of brilliant tactical manoeuvres to avoid the wall of eight Mexicans meandering listlessly abreast and pushing one cart with a case of Tecate in it, or steering far afield of the giant woolly mammoth in the ill-fitting, food stained Hello Kitty t-shirt and worn out slippers who insisted on texting whilst rolling along with blind impunity in one of those grey mechanised death carts – I happened to make a break for safety through their newly re-modelled and irritatingly relocated housewares section where, to my chagrin, I noticed a series of Paula Deen signature products.

I’m not typically enamoured with such pricey novelties and ‘Celebrity Chef’ style gear no matter how smooth and round Giada’s hefty stockpots are, but it is nice to know even the small people with Walmart-centric subsistence level income lifestyles, such as myself, can enjoy a lesser quality representation of the opulent post-prison Martha Stewart empire by getting doily cutters for $14.88 after price rollbacks. So, despite the fact that Miss Paula was smiling her best chemically enhanced 3D White Strips smile at me from the glossy wrapper of a French Rolling Pin and offering up a friendly ‘Hey Y’all!’, I was perfectly inclined to continue on my way, undeterred, when part of the fine print caught my attention:

‘Manufactured in Thailand.’

And it occurred to me what an absolutely brilliant and cunning plan this was. My admittedly limited exposure to Paula Deen is, of course, entirely self-inflicted. I’ve heard Y’all more times in 9 minutes of Paula’s Home Cooking With Heaping Great Wads of Butter than I ever did in 9 years of The Beverly Hillbillies, and the department store Santa guy she’s married to creeps me out more than Ina Garten’s subservient houseboy Jeffrey, so I tend to avoid her at all costs.  But I never would have thought that our jovial and portly Miss Paula could be so ruthless.

Granted she could have provided limited manufacturing jobs for a small fraction of the 14 million people in this country desperate for work, but clearly Paula’s vision is far more global in its scope and much more devious in its design. The fact is, anyone can make a stick. Stick-making technology has existed for some 22 million years, in all likelihood starting with the Proconsulids during the Miocene, and remained a robust and flourishing technology down through the period of Homo Erectus and into the era of Archaic Homo Sapiens. Even as recently as twenty-thousand years ago, regardless of their ability to more efficiently bang stuff with a rock, the various anatomical moderns toughing it out in the cold caves of France still found the basic stick a practical and effective tool (as evidenced in the artwork of Lascaux, for example). So it stands to reason that the small band of resident Parisii Celtic tribes huddled along the Seine would one day further hone the essential stick into a world-renown and classic tool for rolling and shaping fluffy bits of sugary dough and eventually open a series of nice pâtisseries when they weren’t  busily hacking away at the invading Roman army.

But Paula Deen’s cunning plan obviously isn’t just about creating a properly tapered 18-inch stick.

This sarcous Savannahan… Savannite… Sav – Georgian understands that Thailand is a rapidly-emerging, newly industrialised country with approximately two-thirds of its more than $600 billion GDP coming from exports and the remainder from tourism, prostitution, and the sex trade. They also make some cars. But mostly the rest is sex. This makes the country not only a major contender in the global marketplace but one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia. For the exports, not the sex. But Paula is also very clearly aware that the same total factor productivity to investment capital weakness that touched off the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s is still an exploitable reality.  

With very nearly nearly half of Thailand engaged in agriculture, Paula realises that through a simple matter of subterfuge, she can convince them to satiate the American need for a good stick at a bargain price and thereby incrementally lay waste to the lush forests of the Chao Phraya river valley one native Gaharu tree at a time. Through the cumulative effect of this methodical deforestation, the available biomass (which typically supplies, cleanses, and rejuvenates the earth through nutritional cycling processes of decomposition and decay) will slowly be depleted and eventually rob the topsoil of valuable nutrients. And without the trees to shield the earth from excess heat, absorb vital water stores, and to act as carbon sinks, the already oppressive tropical heat will go unchecked and soon the once arable and abundant lands will be completely desiccated. Erosion will then expose the anaerobic and nutritionally poor substrate and the country will rapidly become a heat island no longer able to support rice production – its primary export.

With millions of farmers out of work and the barren, uncultivable landmass unable to sustain essential crops, enormous pressure will come to bear on the financial sector and escalate an already unsustainable increase in domestic spending. As the baht is strained, encouraging even more need for exports and pushing the fragile economy further into a dangerous imbalance, nervous foreign investors will pull their support, interest rates will skyrocket and Thailand will collapse. As an anchor economy in the region, when Thailand goes, so too will much of Southeast Asia.

Obviously Paula is counting on the fact that the largely Buddhist population will not likely fight back – because these aren’t the Shaolin Mahayana Buddhists who would drop you like a pair of moistened panties at a Phuket brothel if they were given the chance – and she feels confident that she can crush them like a tiny bug beneath the heels of her Gabriella Rocha’s and laugh and eat butter the entire time.

It truly is a brilliant strategy. I still won’t buy the stick, of course, but the plan itself is really very cunning indeed.

Come And Get It!

A friend of mine discovered this and posted it to her Facebook wall in all appropriate shock and horror. Just how she discovered this, or what it was she’d been hoping to search for when it came up, so to speak, she did not say.  I found I was disturbed by the lack of a provided utensil in this image, initially, as it conjured up rather unpleasant ideas as to how one might be expected to consume this entrée once you’ve identified the primary ingredient. 

Interestingly, though, this is certainly a series of recipes I would like to see Sandra Lee try. It is, after all, semi-homemade…

Shaka Zulu: Celebrity Knock-Off 4

Have I ever mentioned anywhere here, at any time recently, or in the past, or ever, that I have a deep and enduring love of nerdy women?

I anxiously await this to debut on Cooking Channel…

Shaka Zulu, by the way, was a multi-part mini-series made around 1986 for South African television. It was also a phrase I heard shouted nearly ten thousand times by Coolio as Food Network’s ridiculous car crash of a programme Who Wants To Be the Next Worst 24-Hour Restaurant Celebrity Battle Cook Star droned endlessly along in the background as I read my anthropology textbook.

Coolio didn’t win, I guess.

Anyway, have I ever mentioned that I love nerdy women?

Moose Boosh: Celebrity Knock-Off 3

I was reading for an anthropology exam most of the evening and realised, at just a few minutes before 10pm, that Finding Bigfoot was about to start. Yes, that’s how I roll, if you haven’t figured that one out by now. Without thinking, I grabbed the remote and switched on the television just in time to witness Taylor Dayne expressing confusion over a little something she called ‘Moosh boosh.’

  ‘A little welcoming bite,’ Rachael Ray clarified.

‘A small, all-encompassing, one bite appetiser,’ Guy elaborated, as though ‘A little welcoming bite’ wasn’t clarification enough.

‘Huh,’ I said, punching in the numbers for Animal Planet.  ‘You learn something new every day. And yet I still hate this fucking programme.’

Discovering that amuse-bouche is another term for hors d’oeuvres or ‘a small, all-encompassing, one bite appetiser’ was fascinating in the same way I find it fascinating that Food Network haven’t shelved this Worst Celebrity Cook atrocity yet.  But I did find rather a strangely arousing  picture of Giada gently gripping and tugging a firm shaft of pasta…

Proofreadng 101-B

Attempted internet memes about the checking of spelling, grammar, or punctuation are often much more effective when someone actually checks the spelling, grammar, or punctuation of their meme before they send it out into the cold, harsh world…