Confessions of a Cooking Show Addict

Hi, my name is Tina, and I'm a cooking show addict. I watch more cooking than anything else, I get twitchy if I miss an episode of a favorite show, and you better not steal my bandwidth when I'm using the Food Network interface. It's total crap, but when you have to have your fix of Next Food Network Star, and you don't want to deal with the whining of kicking you 13 year old and all his friends off the XBOX, you put up with some annoyances.

The Food Network interface has several great features. If you pause too long, it takes you back to the beginning. It has only a few commercials, but they will play the same one three times in a row. As in back-to-back. As if we didn't JUST see it. I will never buy your pasta now, nor will I mention your name. The most annoying? It won't go full screen. It will go MOSTLY full screen, but leave the time-elapsed bar along the bottom. I hate visual distractions.

Hulu has it's issues as well, but that's where Gordon and I meet. I have a serious crush on Gordon Ramsey. Yes, he's the guy who yells at the chefs in Hell's Kitchen, but he's also the guy who goes around the country fixing restaurants, and that usually means fixing the PEOPLE who run the restaurants. The man has compassion and some serious people skills, when he chooses to use them. The bluster and cussing in HK has it's place, because it does produce top-notch quality and immediate obedience, but he also knows when to give a compliment, and the chefs know that he really means it when it happens.

Netflix and I aren't speaking right now, because they can't seem to coordinate their audio and video. Yes, pausing does make it catch up. But why should I have to pause every two minutes, for two minutes, just to get watch another two minutes? Get some more servers people. Not that Netflix has many cooking shows, so I'm surviving that annoyance.

The absolute best shows, though, are cooking COMPETITIONS. Chopped. Iron Chef. Next Iron Chef. Masterchef. Love them all. Give them weird stuff to do, an impossible time limit, and let them at it. I love watching someone make five interesting courses with a potato, or making a cohesive dish out of fish-heads, gummy worms, an exotic vegetable no one knows anything about, and graham crackers.

Here are some invaluable cooking tips I've learned from Chopped. No, peaches and cream with eel essence will not make a good soup. No, you can't skin an eel with a corkscrew. (They really had trouble in the eel episode...) Yes, durian does stink, but inside is a really delicious fruit. You can't reduce fruit leather with vinegar in ten minutes. Goldfish crusted halibut is not something yummy. In addition, one cannot make a cheese sauce out of goldfish, and even if you could, cheese doesn't go well with seafood. Bacon CAN be a dessert item, but you do need chocolate. Just because you know how to make ice-cream, doesn't mean that beet ice-cream is a good idea.

You might think that my time should be spent elsewhere, but when you've got a baby blanket to finish by June 30, you get a free pass to watch as much TV as you want. And look at all the cooking fiascoes I will now avoid ;-)