Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Kitchen Skulduggery


Sometimes on a lazy weekend afternoon, especially if it is raining and we can't do yard work, we watch cooking shows on the Food Channel. This requires little brainpower, and is amusing, and now and then, we are inspired to try a new dish we've seen presented.

One of the shows we like is called Dinner: Impossible. In it a chef, a big, bodybuilder Brit named Robert Irvine, is brought somewhere and told of this week's challenge, which involves cooking a meal from anywhere from a few to a few hundred people, given a theme he must follow, and time limit. In the past, Chef has been taken to Pixar and told he has to feed six hundred animators, and the theme is to use the Pixar movies, like Finding Nemo, Cars, and Ratatoullie. Or in Williamsburg, making a meal using only 17th century tools. Or at Hershey, PA, making a five-course meal for a hundred and fifty, each course of which had to feature chocolate ...

Silly stuff, but the chef seems a good-natured fellow, and he and his crew, mostly taken from the group he has to feed, run around like chickens with their heads cut off while trying to come up with dishes whilst missing half the ingredients they need.

Imagine my horror when -- only today! -- I found out that Irvine has been canned for lying about his resume. A month ago, he was outed, and today, his replacement announced. Hidden and murky depths in the chef ...

Oh, the humanity! Is there nothing sacred ... ?

3 comments:

Dean Pennington II said...

What do money, alcohol and ego have in common?

Cause for stretching the truth- or sometimes outright lying.

We have seen it before.

Who knew that even the gustatory would have no taste.

Bobbe Edmonds said...

Well, the thing is, he's really a good cook. Lying on his resume'?

Fuck-A-Doodle-Doo.

So he's not a knight. So he doesn't own a castle. So he didn't make the decorations on the cake for Diana and Charles (considering his age, he would still be in his early teens when that one happened...seems like a no-brainer to me).

From what I've seen and read, everyone who has tasted his cooking thinks it's truly a cut above. He's innovative and resourceful in his approach, and can produce on command.

Sometimes I have to think; what more do you want?

A meal cooked by James Bond doesn't really appeal to me. I have had, to put it mildly, an interesting life. I can cook a handful of dishes with a high degree of skill, and even won an award for my Creme Brulee'. They didn't know jack shit about me being an orphan, a thief, a photolab manager, a martial arts teacher, a husband, a Pagan sex God, or a Systems Analyst. My custard was good, that's all that mattered.

Steve Perry said...

Hey, I liked watching the guy, but if you dig a little deeper into the story, it doesn't sound so good. It's one thing to buff up and spin your credits to show them to their best advantage; it's another to make a whole lot of shit up out of whole cloth. That kind of stuff always comes out if you get even a tad famous, and if you are supposed to have street cred and you turn out to be Vanilla Ice? it don't matter if you can dance. Part of what you were selling was the sizzle, and if it isn't there, people get pissed off that you gulled them.

We all know how the celebrity game is played, players and watchers, and part of it is that if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. That's why it's better to admit all the stuff up front. Running for office? Hey, I'm from the Sixties -- drugs, sex, and rock 'n' roll, inhaled? you betcha! Put that that in your hash pipe and smoke it.

We got a guy running for Senate here, Steve Novick. He's about four feet tall, has a hook where his left hand used to be, and has the best political ads you have ever seen. In one of them the VO drones on about whether or not he's the kind of guy you'd like to sit down and have a beer with. Novick is at a table with a guy who has a capped bottle, and is trying to figure out how to open it. Novick reaches over, takes the beer, and pops the cap using his hook. I practically peed myself first time I saw that.

Ten bucks to his campaign gets you a bottle of his Left Hook Ale ...

There's a man who deserves the vote for his balls alone, whatever his politics.