Weinr Loves Food!

So, tonight is finally the premier of Dinner: Impossible. Robert Irvine, the host of the show and head ass-kicker, does an absolutely entertaining job as far as propelling the show along. If you’re a guy. I have a feeling my wife won’t like the show, but I love it.

Robert, thrown into a mansion kitchen and tasked with preparing food for a wedding reception with at least 200 people, inherits a of about six 15-20 year old kitchen staff (who don’t quite have the skills he’s looking for), and is now in the middle of whipping them into shape. In addition to those challenges, he’s completely re-menu’d the entire event, throwing out most of 13 months worth of dinner planning by the wedding planner. And, he’s in the kitchen kicking these little kids’ asses all over the kitchen for messing food up. He’s got the guns to back it, too – this guy’s got some pythons that I wouldn’t want to be on the business end of Anyway, it’s not fake action like what you’d see on American Chopper – this guy has the knowedge and experience to back what he’s doing up – and he really cares about what he’s doing.

He order 50 center cut beef filets. Mmmmm… Filet Mignon

Yes, I am truly sad that Good Eats is not on tonight. AB, I miss you! But, this show looks very promising. It’s manly. As I said before, I don’t think this is quite a girl’s show

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Oh my god – This guy is an insult to geeks everywhere. Homaro Cantu, with his Scrolling LED name badge from thinkGeek, Laptop, Digital Cameras and headsets, this guy makes my brain hurt. And that’s generally a hard thing to do. I’m a huge geek, but this guy is just wayyy too much. It makes me think he’s probably a schwazz. I hope he gets his ass kicked by Morimoto. :-p The secret ingredient? Beets.

Alegedly, this guy is trained in “postmodern cuisine”, but you wouldn’t know it so far, 9 minutes into battle. Iron Chef is still trying to explain all of this guy’s gadgets.

Oh, now onto the judges – Melissa Clark, Naomi Moriyama and Jeffery Steingarten (The man who ate everything).

Oh man, this is an insult – he’s using edible packing peanuts, and edible rice paper that he’s printed stuff onto. How does this have anything to do with beets, the secret ingredient? I can’t imagine how that stuff can taste good, at all. Yuck :-\

Cantu just started using his class 4 laser to carmelize sugar on something fried. Oooh, now he’s using it to poke holes in that edible packing material. That’s so lame :-\

Uh, they just stopped to take a picture with their digital camera. They’re not taking Iron Chef seriously. Oh, he imported the photo into MICROSOFT WORD – Sacrelidge!

Cantu’s inspiration for his dishes are… USB cables and personal computers? That just makes me cringe :-\ He’s onto judging now. His dishes are: Beet Maki roll with synthetic champagne, hot and cold beet soup, surf and turf (prepared tableside with a “hyper-insulated box”), frozen sphere of beet, mascarpone with beets and “liquid delivery system”. His final dish is chocolate pudding with julienned beet and horchata paper.

Morimoto is now onto judging, wearing traditional Japanese clothing – he’s changed out of his normal outfit. His dishes are: 3 kinds of beet sushi, where Morimoto made faux salmon eggs out of beets. They look neat, and apparently taste really good. The second dish Morimoto presented was toro tartare with pureed beets. His third dish is gold beet soup with beet foam. Beet foam? Fourth: beets cooked in Miso. Fifth dish: Tempura, udon and rice. His final dish was beet souffleith yellow beet ice cream. The judges loved the yellow beet ice cream.

Oh no! Chef Cantu won!? Morimoto actually got the jump on him with Originality of dishes, too! How is this even possible?! :-\ Okay, in taste Morimoto lost out by one point, 25 to 26. In plating, he also lost by one point, 13 to 14. In originality, he won, 13 to 12. So in total, Cantu won by one point.

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Okay, so the guys over at TVFoodFan.com get their hands into things, and end up interviewing people. The last I saw, it was the guy from The Hungry Detective. Now, they’ve got part 1 of a 2 part interview with Marc Summers on their site. He’s currently the host of Food Network’s Unwrapped, and is the producer of the upcoming Dinner: Impossible.

Now, I know this is a small stray from food and tv shows, but Marc Summers is also a writer, on top of being a producer. A few years ago Summers wrote a book called Everything In It’s Place about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – which has always interested me because of his work on TV shows like Double Dare where children run around covered in slime. Anyway, I would think he would also have a lot of issues in general working in the food industry. Maybe that’s why he’s not a chef?

Anyway, Marc is entertaining – I end up watching Unwrapped quite a bit, but I didn’t know he was a producer. I was considering watching Dinner Impossible, but now that I know he’s the producer of the show, I will definitely have to check it out

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So, last night I got around to watching Iron Chef America, battle Frozen Pea. It was, as most other episodes, entertaining, but was just a little odd.

The first thing I noticed is that Iron Chef Bobby Flay was missing from the battle. I mean seriously, how can you have a Iron Chef America without Bobby Flay?! Mario Batali took up the slack though, so it was entertaining enough. I enjoy how Batali converses with Alton Brown though – he does a great job at competing and enriching the viewer’s minds by letting us in on all those crazy Italian words he has a tendency to use.

The battle was against a chef named Morou – and unfortunately I can’t remember his cuisine style. The good news is that this wasn’t a new battle – it’s been on the air before. Anyway, the challenger’s cuisine included pea filled fritters, and frozen pea and cream cheese pea-sicles. Apparently, they were tasty. I wouldn’t know because Iron Chef America hasn’t yet invited me to be a judge (just a note for when they do: I’m allergic to seafood, so it’ll have to be battle MEAT, no seafood allowed.)

I must say – this time the judges were all culinary critics or related to the food industry in some way. The unfortunate thing, though, is that one point in the battle, one of the female judges says something to the effect of “I can definitely taste the pea-ness in this dish”, which obviously completely and inadvertently sounded like penis. Well, what do you do, right?

Anyway, it was a good battle

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A post over at TV Food Fan titled Food Network — Too Profitable?!? caught my attention today. And yes, I agree with them. TVFF talks about the strong market Scripps (FN’s parent company) has seen in the cable network industry. I’ve posted about it before, in my entry titled I Want My Food Network?! – a businessweek article talks about how Scripps is seeing much more success with FN, which is saving the company. Their other cable network channels are also seeing success (who hasn’t heard the catchy “you should see what’s on H-G-TV!”) through their other cable network markets – HGTV and DIYNetwork. Wholy crap! They own Fine Living, GAC too!

This is just a side comment – but do you guys notice how much Scripps channels market their sister channels? They do it quite often.

One other strong point TVFF mentions is the move to online media – I agree that this will be a very strong market for FN, and I’m sure they know that, too. As far back as I can remember, when Alton Brown had a thick head of hair and before Rachel Ray even thought of the “yumm-o” catchphrase, they were pushing “log onto foodtv.com for more”. So, obviously, Foodnetwork has seen value in online media, and that’s great. It’s a much better market rather than their newspaper business. Who reads those old things, anyway?

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