I used to want to have my own cooking show. Imagine me an eight or nine year old little girl in my kitchen talking to the imaginary camera, while I was cooking. It was really cute and I wish it was really videotaped because I am sure it was hilarious. It was long before Food Network and most cooking shows. Those were mostly shown on Sunday mornings on channels like PBS. I knew a woman who had her own cooking show on a local station in North Carolina. I wanted to have my own show someday. When Food Network started I was in love and dreamed someday I would be on there too. Eventually, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t because I was not going to be discovered. It is not I am not an awesome cook, because anyone who has tasted my cooking knows otherwise. The real reason is because I am not an exotic chef. I don’t want to make half the food those chefs make. I would never touch lamb anything. I don’t like baby arugula or curry or anything like that. I would be a very simple chef that makes food that real people like. There isn’t really a market for that.
I would love to be on a cupcake show or a challenge show but, really I wouldn’t use any of those weird fancy ingredients that make me gag at the thought of not only putting them in a cupcake let alone in my mouth period. I wouldn’t win because they judge on eccentric ingredients. I can hear Kerry Vincent saying in her British accent, your cupcakes are a bit plain and unordinary, I expected a bit more of you. My philosophy is that food doesn’t have to be full of weird and expensive ingredients to taste good. Have you ever tried to make some of those recipes? Most of the ones I would eat have really expensive ingredients. Especially spices, who wants to spend sixteen dollars to buy a jar of organic Bolivian green sweet pepper flakes for one teaspoon? I don’t really.
One thing I fell in love with when I was visiting my aunt and uncle was that the grocery store they shop at sells spices in bulk so, in that instance you could get just as much as you need, but not many places do that. That is how I ended up flying home with 2 pounds of Cumin. I made sure I labeled it a bunch because my uncle told me that it looked like gun powder. This is the same uncle who told me they were going to think I was the Unabomber because I had his old Montana license plates in my suitcase from another trip out there. He likes to pick on me as I am the baby of the family. Anyways, I would have things like fried potatoes, meatloaf, taco bake things that are easy to make and not something you have to spend a week in Morocco to eat. It would be all classic things that wouldn’t make you poor by making them. When I watch cooking shows I think well you didn’t have to actually pay for your ingredients and you got them from a giant warehouse where you can have access to the finest everything. I just once want to see one of the products not be perfect, like a bruised fruit or something a little moldy. Not that they would have to cook with it, they could get a new one, but make it like real life. I am sure we have all had a bruised fruit or something that went a little bad at least once.
I have also noticed those thirty minute meals never take thirty minutes. Most people are not really fast choppers or have little distractions otherwise known as our children who constantly need something or throw paper airplanes in the kitchen doing something to distract us. Normal people do not have Rachael Ray’s super power of being able to carry twelve things at once. She must practice because she never drops anything. I think she is part octopus, really I do. If they really took thirty minutes, you spend at least twice as long cleaning up and doing the dishes. I don’t really get the idea of a garbage bowl, its just one more thing that has to be washed. Pull up the trashcan next to you. Everyone owns a trash can right? It’s cheaper and it eliminates the two extra steps. So, don’t expect to see my bright and shiny face on a cooking show anytime soon. I don’t have a broad enough palate for it.
