Cooking on Television

Cooking on Television

No surprise to those who know me but I have had a long standing relationship with the television and of course Tivo.  Gotta love the technology that allows you to watch what you want, when you want and skip over all the other junk.

I have a penchant for cooking shows.  Why?  I think it's watching the creativity of the chefs.  Most of the time the chefs fix food that ultimately isn't very appealing to me; but, the process of how they get to the finished plate is interesting.

One of my favorite shows is Chopped where there are mandatory mystery ingredients in the basket that each chef must use.  The ingredients are sometimes beyond strange and on more than one occasion fall into a category of foods that I've never even heard of.  The chefs use no recipes, just their memories and go with their gut.

MasterChef is another fun show to watch. These are home cook wanna be's.  Still cooking with mystery ingredients and limited time frames.  I never cease to be amazed at what these guys can come up with.

Maybe it's their creativity that I most admire and enjoy watching.  I know that I wouldn't know how to make an entree using octopus, prickly pear and wasabi peas.  Likewise, I wouldn't know how to make a dessert using pork rinds.  While I generally don't cook from a recipe much anymore - I'm not exactly stretching my brains looking for new ideas either.

I cook most of the same food that I started out cooking 37 years ago.  Old family standards.  The fellas in my family like it that way.  Spaghetti was, and is, supposed to taste like it did every other time I cooked it.  In other words, don't futz with the recipe Mom.

I have some special dishes that do require recipes because they are dragged out only on holidays.  7up salad and my hash brown casserole are family favorites as is Aunt Ruby's pound cake.  The "boys" look forward to those once or twice a year occasions when these dishes are prepared.  And, leftovers are never a problem.

A few years ago I prepared for my daughters-in-law a cookbook with all the family favorites and the history of each recipe if I knew it.  I don't know how much the cookbooks are getting used; but, at least I know that I passed these family favorites on to the next generation.