Snooty Foodies

I'm watching Food Network and I honestly just heard Giada claim that she learned this mah-velous trick at cooking school in Paris. Sooner or later, you hear every chef subtly slip in phrase like this. "When I was in Paris last time" or "I'm 'classically trained'" or "When I was studying under Chef Georges in the south of France" which is code for "I spent a butt-load of money going to Paris to study under other snooty chefs who have inflated egos and it gave me an ego the size of Detroit."

You know, Giada, who makes pasta every other episode, who uses lemon zest in everything and who lives on the beach in California. Which viewers know because the intro footage features Giada walking on the beach with her oh-so-handsome husband and her so-cute daughter. (Except she has a pseudo-Italian pronunciation for everything Italian and she refers to it as "pa'-stuh" and not "pah-stuh'" like the rest of us.) . Giada, the one where the cameras are always focused on her cleavage.

She actually told viewers last week that allspice comes from the Med, and "exotic" spice. You mean allspice? That berry that grows on spice bushes all over the Ozarks and probably northern Arkansas??? What a snob!

So the trick that was shared by a top chef in Paris was: removing the tomato seeds from the meat of the tomato doesn't water down the dish as much.

Really? You mean that trick that I learned from my Detroit-raised mother at the tender age of four? You mean that trick that I thought everyone knew and we didn't have to go to Paris, France to learn it? That trick?

Honestly, as a wanna-be foodie, I watch a lot of cooking shows and I'm amazed at how truly stupid these great chefs think the rest of us are.

The latest episode of Food Network Star touts that during the last episode, America gets to vote for the winner. Wow! Like, we haven't tasted a single dish these contestants are offering and we have to take the Judges' word for it that their dish was the best they've ever had or tasted like dog food or whatever.

Judges on these competitions tend to have very elevated views of their own palates...as in, they alone have the trained taste buds to discern the grain of cinnamon the contestant used in her ice cream and of course, they alone know that cinnamon doesn't EVER, UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES belong in ice cream. Or that he doesn't think raw onions belong in ANY dish, EVER. Snooty, I must say.

At least Ina, the Barefoot Contessa, while she has a lot of very good reasons for being snooty, isn't the snootiest. She lives in the Hamptons, for Chrissake, and her husband has a very well-paying job in the City, so she can afford to serve lobster at a beach party or not one but two ducks for her little dinner party of 30. (I couldn't fit 10 people in my dining room, let alone 30) The reason she isn't as snooty is, she explains things, not in a knowing, "I learned this in Parie" attitude, but in a straightforward, educating tone of voice. And she explains that for years she did something one way and then she learned another way which is much easier. As in, it wasn't wrong, it is just a better way to do it.

These TV chefs have an unnamed butcher and fish monger and baker in their hip pocket that they frequent (I know this because, they frequently say things like "Have your fishmonger do thus and so" or "your butcher should be able to find you a side of Argentian bison" or "my deli carries a rare, soft cheese made only in the mountains of Peru from llama milk").

What they don't tell you is the cheese is $50/ounce and the fish is only available to select customers on alternating Wednesday which are even not odd. In large cities, where you don't have a job outside of TV Land, so you have a whole day to wander around the City, looking in shops and having the fishmonger fillet your fish and the butcher butterfly your chicken. I imagine me trying to find a butcher anywhere in Food Lion and demand that he butterfly my chicken. That would go over real well.

They also make gobs and gobs of whatever dish they are preparing. As a single person household, even if I prepared a dish as practice (because you should never try a new dish on company, a sad fact I learned the hard way), I would be eating it for 3 months. And then you don't need a whole bottle of wine to deglaze the pan, you just need 2 tablespoons and what are you going to do with the rest of the $60 bottle?

I do appreciate it when they say, "If you can't find xyz, you can substitute abc." At least, I think that's what they are saying. Maybe, just maybe, they are saying "If you are too poor to buy this wild cod caught off the shores of Borneo, then you can cheap out and serve white fish."

I well remember the first time I ever tasted caviar. It wasn't exactly a staple on my family's table, what with having 5 kids and my dad's professor's salary. So I was an adult before I ever tasted it. It seemed to me at the time that it was the ultimate in sophistication, the epitome of glamour and suave-i-tay. (see how I made up a French word) I took one very sophisticated small bite and then had to delicately spit it into my napkin, the way Mrs. Morehead taught us in Manners class. I don't think her example was for caviar, I think it had something to do with "what if you ever put a too-soft berry in your mouth" or something.

Anyway, I had to gulp some champagne to wash the rotten fish/salty taste out of my mouth. The taste was reminiscent of the docks down in Houston where we would go to buy shrimp. Not the shrimp, the actual dock water. And this is what goes for $100/pound, I thought to myself. Some things are obviously an acquired taste and some things are just downright inedible. Some fishmonger, with too much roe on his hands, saw them coming and made it out to be the latest and greatest in epicureanism.

Snooty, I'd say.

Food to Gag You, Part Deux

So, in my previous post by the same title, I opined that Mole, that supposedly luscious sauce used in Mexican cuisine, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

I decided that I really shouldn't judge the book by its cover (in this case, tomatoes and chocolate in the same dish) until I tried personally to make it and eat it. I'm trying to expand my horizons by cooking more gourmet. You have to understand that my baking and cooking skills have tended to draw heavily from crockpots, church basement suppers and hospital auxiliary cookbooks. Recipes that include a lot of Jello and catsup.

I've been embarked on an attempt to cook more things the Food Network might feature, or at least not turn its collective nose up at. So far, my successes have included pate and onion marmalade. The pate was so-so...the marmalade divine!

So how did the mole turn out? In a word, blechhhh! Okay, so now I've tried it and I have to say, I was right the first time. Tomatoes and chocolate don't belong together. I can't say I can really taste the chocolate, but I'm of the opinion that, if you can't taste it, why add it in the first place? Same applies to the whole almonds and whole cinnamon sticks...peppers tend to overpower EVERYTHING so if you're not a big fan of hot and spicy, what's the point?

(Plus, I also secretly believe that people who like spicy food have so burned out their taste buds that they can't appreciate the subtleties of almonds or chocolate or cinnamon or lemon.)

This dish took about 4 hours to make and dirtied every pot and pan and bowl I own (and I own quite a few). I had to run the dishwasher a couple of times and still had a half a dishwasher full left over of knives and whisks and spoons and saucepans.

But that's not the real judgement. If this dish had turned out like I've heard other people wax eloquent over, the four hours would be well worth my time. It didn't. It wasn't.

My mole tastes almost exactly like the sauce you get when you buy those El Paso frozen Mexican dinners...you know the sauce that's supposed to be over the chicken enchiladas but somehow ends up over the beans and rice?

I could've just bought a can of that El Paso enchilada sauce (I know, 'cause I buy it for my chicken enchilada casserole)! And if it didn't taste chocolate enough, I could always add some Hershey's syrup to the sauce!

I wasted some perfectly good chicken by pouring this sauce over it and braising it in the oven. Now the chicken is enfused/confused with that sauce and I can't say I like it.

For starters, I had to buy several different types of peppers, only one of which was readily available so I went to like three different stores and ended up substituting. Then I had to buy tomatoes because my vines have kinda petered out this late in the season and my late season stuff hasn't begun to produce. THEN I had to buy about a hundred different spices whch aren't in my very well-stocked spice cabinet. This whole sauce must've cost about $60, not counting the chicken. And NOW I have all these weird spices I'll have to figure out some use for.

I have whole fennel seed. I have whole cumin. I have whole anise. I have several ounces of dried peppers. This recipe called for whole everything on account of it wants you to toast all the seeds prior to grinding them. In fact, you toast or burn practically everything in the recipe.

I did at least reserve about a quart of the damn sauce so I could give it away. I've decided that my new culinary adventures will be confined to stuff I personally like. I hear a lot of TV chefs talk about blending of savory and sweet. Okay, I'll buy that in an onion marmalade but no more mole for me!