Cooking Shows

Somehow I can’t resist them – the cooking shows on Food Network. My favorites, just now, are Barefoot Contessa and Everyday Italian, although ‘favorites’ can often change. Mark can’t stand Rachel Ray so I don’t watch that one any more but I’ve gotten some great recipes from her show… Don’t trust the one with the unnaturally thin woman (no good cook is a skinny cook?) doing Semi-Homemade and, although Paula Dean (who always starts cooking with a pound of butter) is my kind of gal I am finding her a little over-exposed and loud these days.

But I have some ‘pet peeves’ about cooking shows (“of course,” you say.) And they are these:

• Why don’t they ever scrape the bowl or the beaters or whatever container they are using? They waste half the recipe by simply not getting it out of the mixing bowl. “That’s 3 cookies you are washing down the sink!!!” I want to scream at the screen.

• They don’t wash or wipe off their hands in between actions – so they are tossing vegetables in olive oil with their hands and then picking up the baking dish and opening the oven door and sliding the dish in the oven… the dish will burn oil off the bottom and they will have oily fingerprints all over their kitchen! Were these women born in a barn?

• What’s with the spreading of salt from a dish by hand? (See above sanitation comment.)

• Either they don’t measure at all – “just add about a quarter cup” they say, while pouring in three times that – or they measure carefully and then just leave half of what they measured in the measuring cup. I know they are on a tight schedule, but really!

• And who decided that they always have to ‘taste’ the end product and roll their eyes in ecstasy or otherwise indicate, visually, that the food is good? News here: you can’t convey taste with anything but a taste.

Ok now. I feel better. Don't you?