I'd really like some cake.

Julia

Mrs Child to you.

Great expectations?

So many of our students come to us from having watched Top Chef or Kitchen Nightmares thinking that bad behavior, screaming and cutthroat skulduggery are the norm for getting ahead,  I wonder if any of them actual worked, or hope to work, in a quiet efficient well run  productive restaurant kitchen. Full story here.

Chef Sang Yoon prepares a dish at the Top Chef Masters Season 5 Premiere Tasting Event. The rise of competition cooking shows has quickly overtaken the traditional, how-to style of cooking television.

"If you're one of the many addicts to the current crop of food shows, watching a clip of Julia Child — the original French Chef of television — is like visiting a different planet.

You might wonder how long she would last in the gladiator's arena that modern cooking shows have become. Since the original Japanese Iron Chef first appeared on the Food Network here in the U.S. 15 years ago, how-to cooking shows have gradually been displaced by food combat: reality shows that pit chefs against each other.

According to journalist Allen Salkin, Emeril Lagasse initially opposed bringing Rachael Ray, pictured here in 2007, onto the Food Network – and, at first, Ray agreed with him. "You have this all wrong," she told executives, "I'm beer in a bottle; you guys are champagne."

Krishnendu Ray, a professor of food studies at NYU's Steinhardt School, tells NPR's Arun Rath that networks love these shows because they're cheap to produce. They also reflect a changing audience that includes more men; cooking shows used to target a mostly female audience.

More broadly, food has entered "a kind of a public discourse," Ray says. "A lot of things are driving it."

Ray says one thing that's new is an aesthetic approach to food — one that's open to non-experts.

"There's now room for people to argue about good taste in a relatively much more democratic way than, say, high art or architecture," he says.

As for the impact of the changing nature of food TV, Ray says the popularity of these new shows, and the public discussion of food more broadly, is very good for celebrity chefs. It also helps out those at the upper end of the chef business. But for the millions of low-wage professional cooks, he says, those discussions haven't really touched their lives.

Ray says another effect these cooking shows have is the creation of a seasonal "fashion cycle" for food. This season, pork bellies or bacon might be the hot item, and then next season everyone will be eating something different.

"When you mediatize something and commercialize something so proximate and domestic and care-based, that's the price you pay for excessive discussion," he says.

And do the new food shows teach anything to home cooks? Ray says he agrees with Michael Pollan: "What food TV does is trains you how to order in restaurants."

Yes, people want to watch food shows and talk about food, Ray says, but socioeconomic factors are keeping them out of the kitchen. "People being very busy, long commutes, two jobs: those are the reasons why people are not cooking," he says."

So. Several Chickens gave their lives for no reason yesterday.

It seems a class of third term students failed a chicken practical(i.e. cook and plate chicken dishes to be graded on both taste and appearance) yesterday. For some reason I am finding it very annoying.  They had two hours to prepare and present, a roast chicken, a grilled chicken, lentils and greens.  A basic dinner that I could have pumped out in an hour:

Put water on to boil
Season & truss chicken. Roast
Quarter/butterfly & season chicken. Grill
Wash greens, prepare as salad or steam.
Watch T.V while sipping cocktails for the remaining hour and a quarter hour before dinner.

Let me emphasize that this was in professional level classroom kitchen focused solely on the assigned dishes at hand.  NOT the restaurant kitchen these students are attempting to gain employment in, where the meals would have to be pumped out in under 25 minutes while further orders came in and the waitstaff fought with the kitchen staff and vice versa.

SIGH!

The call came through!

Years of working as  an underpaid Librarian by day, and well paid caterer by night, have finally culminated in the merging of my two careers.  I've been offered a job as Librarian to a cooking school allowing me to share my expertise in both fields.

How I learned to cook

The French Chef

Always a classic, I could watch her for hours, and frequently have.