…the horrible reality of the liberal agenda…
Like many of you, I eat things. Things like soap, sunglasses, harmonicas and plumber’s putty (yum!). But in addition to these items, I also eat food.
Where food is concerned there’s obviously an entire spectrum of quality. It runs from classic dishes prepared by gifted professionals to anything cooked by the Irish, or by any French person not living in France (Acadians and Québécois, I’m looking at you…). Assuming that you don’t want to be a turnip and depend on others for all of your sustenance, you’ve probably learned to cook a few things for yourself.
This is not to say that you’re any good at it, of course. I have known at least six people whose definition of ‘cooking’ precisely matched my definition of ‘unwrapping’. Generally, they went no further than opening cans or finding the end of the freezer bag that had the zipper-lock on it. I could even relate the tale of an adventurous friend of mine who decided that she’d perfected her method for cooking chicken only when she didn’t vomiting explosively after eating it - it should also be noted that this woman now owns a restaurant and if she doesn’t pay up, I’ll tell you where it is.
The problem with cooking for the self-taught is that there is no reliable, external measure by which to measure your skill. Your friends are all idiots and will either lie to you or simply call anything crap if it’s not filled with aerosol “Cheez”. You can try comparing it to the culinary work of your dear mother but let’s face it, the old girl could have been feeding you guitar picks in rotten mustard for 18 years and you would have eventually grown to like it. Where food is concerned, the number of people who will lie to you again and again is truly staggering. I once tried my hand at Thai noodles to impress a girl I was dating and the result resembled a wok full of ear wax with a handful of elastics tossed in. Like a trooper (and something of a hog, honestly) she consumed the mess and then lied heroically about the quality of the dish as we rushed her to the ER.
PBS helped me out a little, but I could never make any sense of whatever the hell Julia Child was saying and The Frugal Gourmet was accused of being a pederast, so I felt uncomfortable having his cookbooks in the house. CBC tried to educate me as well, but being the CBC the best they could do was a show with an off-balance, British guy who substituted every ingredient other than salt for Spam and peach preserves. Inexplicably, they called this show The Urban Peasant rather than The Cook Who Won’t Go Shopping.
So I was adrift in a sea of some metaphor or another until I finally got a decent signal provider and started watching the Food Network – pardon me, Food Network Canada.
If you’re from a country that is not Canada, you may not be aware of the technology we have to mostly copy American cable channels. We’ve not perfected the process and as a result the gaps are filled with government-mandated Canadian shows and a lot of public service announcements. This may sound like a good thing until you realize that the absence of commercials is made easier since a slice of all the Canadian programming is (you guessed it) paid for by the government.
Before I go any further, let it be known unequivocally that Food Network Canada is a terrific source of entertainment and information. To be honest, next to my 24-hour news addiction Food is the channel I watch the most.
It’s especially good once you can stop flinching every time Emeril Lagasse screams at his food…delicious, chef – and now my daughter is crying!
If I weren’t so hideously under qualified, I’d like to have a show on Food Network Canada – I am Canadian after all and I can’t be worse than some of the single season runs that have come and gone over the years. It also goes without saying that it is even conceptually impossible that any show I might make would be worse than The Manic Organic.
It rhymes…get it? Not only do I get it, but I own a tiny piece of it. I don’t know what the parent network shows while our organics are being manic, but I’d like to be able to see the menu.
So while I learned to cook a lot better while watching Food Network Canada, I was both enthralled and unnerved that I was paying for a very small piece of Christine Cushing. I sure hope that it’s one of the good bits.
I am such an awful person – but I can cook.
