A Food Network Rant

Here's a post I left on food writer Michael Ruhlman's site www.ruhlman.com . He's been known to hang out with Anthony Bourdain. The topic: why the Food Network is disappointing.


"Let's face it, The Machine is broken.

What is the Food Network now if not one big promotional mechanism that oscillates from cleverly disguised travel show to cleverly disquised gadget and food infomercial and back?
We the public aren't privy to what goes on at FN's offices to know the fates of those who built the network with the Hannovers, Rosengartens, and Biggers. Let alone those who actually discovered and developed the bona fide stars like Lagasse, Batali, Moulton, and Garten et al. So we don't know when the ad men took over and started telling us and their stars what we should like.

Why dumb it down ALL the time? I don't always want a Velveeta nacho casserole. How dare the FN have a problem with French terms and the food. Any culinary student (attended, graduated, or otherwise) or anyone remotely involved with food, or anyone with a pulse at least knows of the significance of French cuisine in Western food. Nowadays the ad men call Spain "the new France" and cite Ferran Adria's culinary laboratory as the locus for innovation in that country, but the fact is that whatever's being "discovered" in regards to Spain's cuisine doesn't really involve any recent innovations in Spain, but rather that our lazy xenophobic American asses are finally looking past the fast food chihuaua and the chain of margarita nacho bars to actually bother to learn about and include these centuries-old culinary traditions among the American culinary mosaic.

Or perhaps the American culinary mosaic only has space for one tile right now, and French cuisine has to go to make room for Spain. Just what triggered the anti-French sentiment may never come out, but Alton Brown clearly subscribes to it by the way he sneeringly pronounces French terms and chefs' names on that pathetic trainwreck of a product-placement show of his that jumped the shark two seasons ago. (The only uni-tasker in his kitchen is his product pimp. I hear fire extinguishers make good paperweights.)And clearly he seems to be following orders on his own show, because he's all "Johnny Encyclopedia" again when he's on US Iron Chef. Say it isn't so, AB. Say it isn't so.

So here come the Spanish. Or should I say Latino? Either way, Jag-off and Ingrid were more than likely concurrent contingency plans for a show that Das FN was looking for. Hence the return of the "Sofrito!" battle cry from that Latina contestant from a previous season of TNFNS through Jag-off. All of a sudden "Fusione" started popping up in the discussions. And good for Latino cuisine. We should have more. Latinos are the majority minority here in the States, so why not have a showcase for it on FN? But are you really telling me that ALL Latino cuisine from all those countries hinges on ONE blend of spices? You sure it isn't Goya Adobo?
When I think of the names of all the Latin cooks out there who've appeared on various food programs, the natural choice is "Ingrid Hoffman". It simply oozes Latin like the ink on a German passport when it first relocates to a humid rainforest. Judas Priest, what's her lead-off dish, Arroz-con-Poland?!

I have to thank the previous poster who commented on how he did not like being snapped at. I thought I was weird for wanting to smack my TV after FN started airing the "Simply Delicioso" commercials that included that extra millisecond of footage. And I think they know at FN, too. Hence that quick mid-finger-snap cut to a side view by the shows' editors. I thank the FN for that, because if I'd sat through her show and experienced that, I probably would've broken my TV and needed to get a new one. Or maybe that was the plan to begin with."

JAG "resigns" from The Next Food Network Star

So the liar and faker finally "left". Yay and good riddance.

I added this comment to the Food Network Addict blog. See its link at the right.

"Glad to see Josh gone, but my inner cynic can't help but think that the whole scandal was a bona fide ratings pot of gold for an otherwise fading rainbow that the show was turning out to be. The bitter after taste being, of course, that the next FN star and their show is going to pretty sucky unless FN hires a crack team to pull an Eliza Dolittle and save the network's credibility.

As said by other posters, if this scandal's done anything it should have opened FN to the fact that they need to fire whoever's on the search committee and in charge of casting and hire people who can spot actual cooks and or food experts and do the necessary background checks BEFORE seeing if they're TV show material.

Seriously, this show was cast for a TV reality show. Not a cooking and food show. "

I could care less who wins.

Mexican Mac'N'Chee

Mexican Mac'n'Chee

So, I have a great idea for a book that I came up with while working on my book proposal and hustling resumes out to recruiters and firms:

The Prolonged Unemployment Weight Loss Plan: 60 Days to A Poorer, Leaner You

Just let accreditation restrictions from your school's degree program force you to quit your out-of-state and lucrative job and return to the town your school is to finish up a graduate degree as a full-time student in 6 months, remain unemplyed for another 6 months after that, and watch the pounds fall off!

Bitter? Kind of. But today I present a tasty recipe I developed from my love of pasta, Mexican-style queso dip, and good ol' mac'n'chee. Not "Mac'n'cheese". Mac'n'chee. It's a Tenacious D thing. (Get the first album and watch the DVD live concert. You'll love it.)

It's cheap, good, and adjustable to your tastes. What you need:

1 lb. of rotini pasta (cooked, and you may want to leave out the salt if you cook pasta with it)
1 can of cooked chopped mushrooms (7 oz. w/ liquid or 4 oz. dry, go fancy or cheap, it's all good)
1 can Ro-Tel brand diced tomatoes and green chiles ( Original or Mexican variety)
1 lb. of Velveeta (nothing else will do)
Total cost: US$7 max. Makes 8 "servings" (translation: feeds 4 real people or 2 of ME).

So you cook the pasta. Done.

Cut up the block of Velveeta into 1/4" slices and microwave with the Ro-Tel. Stop and stir every 2 minutes to combine ingredients. Total microwaving time should be no more than 6-8 minutes.

Strain the canned chopped mushrooms.

Combine HALF of the pasta with the cheese blend and mushrooms and then add the rest of the pasta until you get the desired mix of cheese and pasta you like. Some like their mac'n'chee runny while others like it thick. Whatever mix you prefer, let the combined and mixed dish sit for 15 minutes. Then stir it up again until you hear that telltale "sticky" mac'n'chee mixing sound. That's how you know it's ready.

From this point you could put everything in a bake dish and add anything from cubed pre-cooked chicken breast, sliced jalpenos or red pepper flakes to it and or add a crust of pulverized Doritos and then bake it up. Me, I just eat it as is. With a Diet Coke.

Gotta go, the chee is ready.

I'm Just Tired

No pics today. Not even a true blog entry, really. As the title above says, I'm tired.

I'm unemployed, overweight, have a knee injury that I can't afford to fix and don't have the time to fix because I live alone and need to look for work, and I'm unmarried.

I'm not whining. Just the facts.

I'm also the only son of a mother who calls me twice a day EVERY DAY. She calls me when she knows I'm asleep to "log the call" and in doing so inform me that she wants me to call her. If I don't answer when she calls, she performs an audit of my whereabouts when I do call. I'm 32 and pathetic, yes. But none of that is relevant when she starts crying.

We basically talk about the same things: my weight problem, my injury, whether any of our relatives called me, what my relatives and I talked about, whether I revealed any of her self-concocted "family secrets" to my relatives, and my weight problem again. She just nags me. Usually I can handle it. After about 19-21 days of 2 calls a day, though, I generally lose it and start screaming. She apologizes profusely and after a day of radio silence she calls me again and avoids the topics for about 2-3 days before the cycle repeats itself.

I'm unemployed and living on a tight budget. But I have a decent food budget because after she calls I get really depressed. And when I get sad and depressed, I eat lots of junk food. I eat to feel happier, relatively. Then she calls and depresses me with her nagging. So I go eat some more. And I'm a little happier.

But you know what makes me really happier? Seeing my double-chin recede and my pants feel a little more comfortable. And that happens when I cut down on the buffets and the drive-thru. And not eating a lot at night before sleep. Walking more and doing 30-45 minutes of simple exercises that don't stress my knees. And I don't want to jinx it. Why make a mountain of a proverbial ant-hill's worth of progress? One pizza here or there and I could be back at square one, and then I really wouldn't hear the end of it.

In spite of my less-than-zero circumstances right now, my mom is ever the match-maker and has been after me to call this girl who's a family friend. There is nothing wrong with the girl, for the record. But she is so way out of my league it's not funny. But I called her every other week or so for the past few months. Polite conversation. I elicit a laugh from her here or there. But it's blatantly obvious that she's not into me. And frankly, I have so many problems of my own right now that could not invest the time or money to pursue any further courtship let alone maintain a long distance relationship. I've seen people IN a relationship lose it all when one has to move far away. What chance do 2 strangers who aren't even looking to get together have?

Wanna know how I know she's not into me? She never calls me back when I leave a message and she never returns my email, even when I ask her to. No problem at all.

But these aspects of modern communication and relationships escape my mom, who just nags me about calling her more and debriefing me on what we talked about. Call more often? I'm not a stalker and I'm not a fool. Then she nags me about losing weight and begins her rundown of the latest weight-loss tips she's heard. Then she nags me about how I should call my relatives more and email them more and wants a transcript of any and all communications. That's about when I lose it.

Fortunately, she never nags me about my job search. She is more than aware that I am a very good design engineer. She's seen my paychecks. She's seen where I work(ed). And she watches the news enough to know about how the war and the economy are really doing a number on the aerospace industry.

Right about now most you might be thinking that there's nothing wrong with a mom checking up on her son. But EVERY DAY and TWICE A DAY?!! It's been like this for the past YEAR! You've got to experience it before judging me.

I get so upset after the phone calls. I start breathing a little heavy and sometimes I get a lump in my throat. And then I go out and get some junk food. Or I eat vast quantities of what food I have at home. More so than what I intended to eat per meal. Then I just sit around and stare at nothing . I usually turn on the TV to take my mind off it, but it takes a while. All that time I could be looking for work or following up with recruiters. Or I could be exercising. Or getting coffee with a friend. Or go for a walk. But I can't. All I can do is sit there. At night after one of her calls, I used to order a big pizza or Chinese delivery comprising a large lo mein and a large General Tso's chicken. On a good night when she doesn't nag me (2-3 times a month) and we end the call amiably maybe not.

I don't even feel like typing anymore, but this blog is one of the things at night I'm trying to use to take my mind of of the phone calls. That and I've taken up reading at night more regularly. I need to break the cycle somehow in this way because she won't stop calling me. And any attempt I've made at making her NOT talk about the things she nags me about have been effective for 3-4 days at best. Theories of positive reinforcement and extinguishing bad behavior in a behavioral modification setting are worthless if the subject has a bad memory and has honed her nagging skills into instinctively natural behavior over the course of my lifetime.

I have to do something to break the cycle that's in my control, because I don't want to die young. I'm not that good.

Buffet TO-GO Tactics (Buffet Tactics 2)

It all comes down to how comfortable with your food touching. Are you a culinary segregationist who believes that the peas belong in one quadrant, the mashed potatoes in another, and the gravy be damned? Then a buffet to go may not be for you. But if you're on a budget and trying to curb your take-out tendencies, then a buffet to-go box may be something that could work for you.

A small digression: I oppose buffets that charge by the pound for to-go orders. Especially if they charge a flat rate for dining-in. It's simply criminal, and to me it's their way of saying, "We know you're pressed for time and would still like a variety of foods, and so we'll just exploit that." Forget that, I say.

So from my last Friday food post "Buffet Tactics" you'll recall why I prefer the to-go buffet: lower cost, lower quantities (or more optional quantities, really) than take-out, and, most importantly to me, greater variety than any "blue plates" offered by many restaurants for lunch. Oh, and there's also the avoidance of having to eat solo at a buffet which is a peeve of mine I expound on in my previous food post.

Maximizing the effectiveness of a buffet to-go requires an in-depth knowledge of the buffet layout and its contents. You want to plan your path around the buffet to avoid backpedaling. Unlike when dining in, you can't go back and get something you missed after your to-go box is full. There ain't no coming back. Unfortunately, this requires that you've eaten at said buffet enough times previously to acquire such intel. From the Buffet Tactics post you'll know that, sadly, I have such intimate knowledge. But for the uninitiated this advice should not go unheeded, or you could take home a big box of diasppointment whereas while dining in any corrections or omissions could have been made.

So after getting the "lay of the land" and planning the "retrieval route", the next element of buffet "to-go-ing" is "stacking". From the pictures of the Chinese and Mexican to-go boxes above, you'll see that I apply stacking principles to boxes that do and don't have dividers.

The first part of stacking involves deciding which "wet" dishes you'll be eating. The "wet" are usually the main food items one eats, such as General Tso's chicken, or a meatloaf in gravy. After picking your wets and assigning them locations in your to-go box, it's time to pick what "sponge" or accompanying starch you'll have with each wet and begin lining the bottom of the box with them. In the Chinese to-go box I did this in the large compartment. I lined the left half with pancit noodles and the right side with vegetable lo mein.

Now, I could go on a whole other tangent about avoiding "filler" foods like salads, rice, and bread when dining at a buffet either "in" or to-go, but I'll leave it to someone else to write the Unified Buffet Theory. I'm pretty sure it's in the works out there. Moving on.

After lining the bottom of that compartment, I added the wet layers mentioned earlier. In the Mexican to-go box pictured second, I divided the container into upper and lower halves. My "sponge" for both halves was a thin layer of nachos that they serve in thin layers covered in taco beef and cheese. To the top half I added more taco beef, red sauce, and white cheese sauce before topping it off with steak fajita meat and vegetables. In the lower half I added seasoned rice, a different red sauce, and topped it off with chicken fajita meat and vegetables. For the Mexican to-go it's evident that that there were a few kinds of sponges employed from base-layer nachos to intermediate beef and rice. FYI, the final swath of wet was a line of salsa along the upper-lower border.

The third and topmost layer of the to-go container stack is the "dry" portion. There's only so much of the wet you can layer on top of the sponge and carry around without spillage or a complete fallout. It can be hassle while transporting your food and downright embarrassing in the restaurant. You definitely don't want to draw any negative attention from the staff. Besides, they work hard enough as it is without any hit-and-run messes. So the dry tier of the stack fills that empty upper portion or "dry space" of the typical rectangular styrofoam to-go box (pictured above) above the sponge and wet layers. For to-go boxes or other containers lacking dry space on closure I guess one has to contend with full or partial submersion of the dry elements as the container is smushed closed.

For the Chinese to-go pictured at the top of the post I took a conservative approach with a row of spring rolls, but other times I've mixed it up with crab rangoon, fried shrimp, and on-stick beef and chicken teriyaki. Though you can't really see from the photo, there are actually seven of the quesadillas pictured in the Mexican to-go. I've also had taquitos, tamales, chicken tenders, and fried shrimp, too, coincidentally.

By refining my stacking skills I actually bring home more food than I can eat in one sitting. I usually save the dry portion of the stack for later at night since they microwave up pretty well. That usually tides me over without making/ordering a dinner and fits in with my revised eating habits, which include eating less towards the end of the day. As something I make into an all-day event, a to-go buffet run is something I'm so good a that I don't have to do as often, and that saves me money and take-out food calories.

Buffet Tactics

A major factor in my drastic weight gain over the past few years has been the lunch buffets available for all types of cuisines where I live. Please observe how I didn't use the terms "cause" or "reason" or "culprit". I realize that I am solely to blame for my weight gain and also for my failure to lose weight. I'm not looking for applause for making these distinctions either. I'm just setting the stage for this post which isn't going to be about maxing out the buffet the experience in as much as it'll be about preventing the buffet the experience from maxing you out on the scales. Let's move on.

Buffets were what you did for lunch where I worked. Pay your $7-9 and take trip after trip at your pace. Appetizer course. Main course. Dessert course. Substitute and or repeat as needed. It was great. But as others maintained a consistent regimen of work and exercise outside of work, I ate even more fast food and prepackaged food on beteen work, night school, and the time I spent plopped in fron t of the TV. Shame on me.

And that's how it went for years for almost every work day. Chinese buffet, Mexican buffet, Ryan's, Shoney's, and even a Pizza Hut buffet were part of my office's lunch clique's regular rotation. Looking back, it was all so sinister.

And as I mentioned at the start, the buffet was not the only factor involved with my weight gaine. If it were, I would have lost the weight for the two years I lived/worked in another state. But I didn't as I had plenty of other bad habits.

It was no surprise to me that when I moved back to town after two years that all my buddies wanted to meet up at a buffet during their lunch break. Just like the "good" old times. A new restaurant this time but a buffet nonetheless. And a Chinese buffet at that, which was my weakness.

And so I went, and then I knew I was fat. Even the mousiest waitress there took a half-step back and stared as I lumbered into the joint. The host hesitantly asked if I needed a table for one. Now, there's nothing sadder than a fat guy eating at a buffet by himself. Simply eating at a restaurant by yourself, excluding eating at a diner counter, is sad to me, but to be fat and to eat at a buffet, well, it's sad. And I had been mistaken for that guy by this host. So I guess I was that guy. It implies so many things. For instance it could mean that you have no friends at all, none that can tolerate eating the same things you do, or none that can tolerate being around you when you eat. It also means that you might have an eating disorder such as one where you eat large amounts very often. In short, solo buffet dining could be likened to solo alcohol consumption.

But I digress. The host look glad to hear me say that I was meeting some friends, and my friends waved me over almost instantaneously. I promptly placed my beverage order (Diet Coke, for the taste of it) and proceeded to confound my friends with just one visit to the buffet.

And that's my new buffet tactic: ONE VISIT. That's it.

It simply involves changing one's attitude towards the buffet meal. Contrary to what some restaurants say when they condescendingly post those insulting "All you CARE to eat" signs, I've never seen a buffet as an invitation to test my consumptive mettle. And I've never seen two people engaged in an eating contest like those with pies, buffalo wings, or hot dogs at the fair. What a buffet does for me is trigger my natural human foraging/gathering instinct that has propelled the species forward through time as we know it. It all goes back to the first time man thought to himself, "I better eat as much as I can while I can because who know what the future holds?" The one-visit tactic involves reminding oneself that in this day and age, if you can afford to go eat at a buffet, then there's probably a good chance that you have either the food or the resources to get said food later on in the day or in your life.

And so, I approached the buffet with the mindset that it was one pass and I'd better get a little bit of my all-star favorites. I should note that I used a soup bowl to hold about a cup od steamed white rice also. I loaded up my plate, which did look ridiculous, but the amount of food on my plate was far less than my usual 2-3 plate trips combined. I usually don't get dessert.

I threw my friends off their pattern. I think out of politeness they were waiting for me to finish my current plate and go back up together like the "good" old days. Finally, one friend just kind of announced that he was going up, and then I cheerfully said, "Oh yeah, sure, don't let me keep you, I'm good." And that cleared up any confusion. They cheerfully rallied their forces and attacked the General Tso's with extreme prejudice. I still had food to eat.

The new tactic has allowed me to not be completely anti-social and still get my Chinese food fix. But what can you do when you don't want to eat out at a Chinese buffet and don't want the expense and over-sized portions of delivery? Well, there's a "buffet-to-go", and that's another post. Coming up...