Cooking and Cooking Shows

With the new year I put myself back on the "no wheat, no sugar" regimen with a nod to the strategic impurity school of thought.  The holidays always sends me reeling for a month or two and this time I just rolled with it and waited out the January birthdays and picked up where I left off.  So it's back to cooking dinners at home as much as possible and planning lunches more carefully and looking around for ideas and recipes to add to the menu.

One thing I've discovered is that cooking and food shows are ego-driven, elitist diatribes and do way more harm than good to aspiring cooks and diet conscious people.

That sounds harsh but after a couple of months of monitoring the various shows offered across a wide range of satellite TV and working over the regimen to spot any weaknesses or potential improvements, I discovered that the last thing I needed to watch was a cooking show for ideas.

Now, all cooking shows are not the same so I hate to lump them all together since I have learned quite a bit over the years from a select few.  Well, only one actually.  And that's because Alton Brown works hard to demystify cooking and distill it down to its most basic elements without sacrificing flavor or creativity. The rest need to stop. They need to be taken off the air and sent to soup kitchens on the bad side of town where they can do some good.

(I'll exclude Gordon Ramsey as well since Hell's Kitchen is a great source of entertainment.  He screams at pretentious chef-wanna-be's and calls them "fat cows".  It makes me giggle.)

But cooking shows are evil. They make cooking to be more than cooking which, I believe, intimidates a segment of the viewing audience into never cooking again. Or they use ridiculous ingredients that the average person could never find.  Having some round faced diabetic tell me that my dish requires some delicate fruit harvested by constipated virgins three days short of new moon or it just won't come out right irritates me to the point of throwing the remote at the TV. Pretentious doesn't even cover it.  And even when they dumb it down and tell you it can be done in thirty minutes with locally sourced ingredients, then the pressure is really on.  Not only do you have a time limit, you have to embrace the guilt of shopping in the big box because you can't afford anything else. Thank you asshole cooking person on TV. Thank you for making me never want to cook again. I'll just live on fast food and beef jerky, swell up, get sick and tell other people how they can't cook.  Maybe Food Network will even give me a cooking show.

I don't like to cook but I love food if I don't cook then I can't eat the way I want. Simplicity is a requirement and access to basic ingredients a must.  I will not be intimidated by a bunch of fascist foodies that don't live in the real world where we have to cook and eat to live, and do it within a fixed amount of time, and do it within the confines of a budget.

That being said, if you don't cook, I would encourage you to try it again.  Step in the kitchen and make something simple and enjoy eating it.

And remember, cooking shows are not on the diet.