The Best Cooking Shows Of All Time?

This list is put together by Thrillist so probably not the most authoritative source in the world, but it did get me thinking about the evolution of food-based television shows.

yahoo.com/food/the-24-best-cooking-shows-of-all-time-ranked

This list is pretty stacked towards shows created in the past 5-10 years, and contains a show that represents pretty much everything I dislike about what the Food Network has become.

The Food Network is no longer about food and cooking, but about the "food experience", as brought to us through the likes of Guy Fieri and his Grocery Games, or competitions like Hell's Kitchen were the show is really more about watching Gordon Ramsey act like a right swine and make people cry on TV than about cooking.

Or shows like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives or Man Eats World, where hosts drive around and eat outrageous meals or specialties of certain local favourites.  Now, I don`t have any issues with these particular shows - at least they generally feature real chefs cooking real food, and someone experiencing it - but we don`t need a network fully stocked with only these shows or food-based game shows.

I do like Chopped and Top Chef tho - at least it is full of real chefs cooking real food and I learn something.

And once you hit their Top 10 Shows....I start to agree...and they get it right for the most part.  Naked Chef was fantastic, and I still adore Jamie Oliver. I loved Alton Brown's Good Eats. Iron Chef was a riot...the real Iron Chef from Japan, but Bobby Flay and Mario Batali did continually blow my mind in the American version.  The Two Fat Ladies is a classic.

However, the best modern cooking show I have ever seen is hands down Molto Mario.  #4?  The man is brilliant and knowledgeable beyond belief and so much fun to listen to.  I always wished I could get an invite to sit at his counter for this show.

And they missed Essence of Emeril which despite its low production value will always be better than Emeril Live in my mind. I learned so much about this style of cooking from him because it was about food and not about the Emeril franchise.  I did like the first few seasons of Emeril Live but then Emeril almost became a caricature of himself, where everything was `bam`this and `bam`that but it got people excited about food and cooking so I guess I can`t really fault him.

The one show they did forget for me at least was David Rosengarten`s Taste - if you like Alton Brown David would have been for you....this was intelligent cooking with a campy sense of humour.

And although he doesn't belong on the a list of the "best" cooking shows of all times, The Galloping Gourmet staring Graham Kerr still has so many memories of cooking for me and was probably the first actual cooking show I ever watched back in the 1970s.  Sorry Julia.

Then there was Yan Can Cook, staring Martin Yan, who despite the silly chopping antics and bad puns, brought the concept of Chinese cooking to North America.  I still have my Dad's old copy of his Yan Can Cook book.

In the end, the #1 show of all time is The French Chef. As it should be.

Julia truly defined this genre and every show on the air today owes its dues to Julia Child and The French Chef.  Julia really introduced the French way of cooking to a North American audience and made this style of cooking accessible to a whole generation that was starting to become obsessed with eating frozen dinners in foil pans on TV tables in front of the tube!

This is my favourite episode and one of my favourite recipes of her`s which I still make today.

Mustikkapiirakka

Heading to a friend's for lunch today to celebrate the day my friend Jeff first landed on this planet. Since it is his birthday, he gets to dictate the menu, which I am told is nachos :-) . Such a man!  And he wants blueberry pie from me for dessert. Ah geez.  I hate making pastry crusts. So I start googling...and I find this variation..... Mustikkapiirakka or Finnish Blueberry Pie.  

I must admit I have no idea how to say this (moose-tikka-pee-rah-ka I read) but the picture on Great British Chefs looks incredible and, the recipe is gluten-free, which is a bonus as Jeff's lovely wife Lisa has Celiac.

Unfortunately blueberries are not in season right now in Canada.  What is actually?....its still bloody winter here and its almost April!  So I have gone with frozen wild blueberries.The only thing I find with baking with frozen fruit is you have to be careful to drain the fruit well, otherwise the colour of the fruit will bleed into your filling. .

I will mention that this recipe is scaled, meaning the ingredients are weighed and not measured. While it may seem like a bit of fuss, from my baking courses at George Brown I have learned all too well that a recipe that is scaled is much more accurate and much less likely to fail than one that is measured in cups.  If you don't have a kitchen scale, all is not lost...this is a great conversion calculator you can use to get you through...until you get a scale! Trust me...it makes a difference.

Mustikkapiirakka or Finnish Blueberry Pie

Crust:

150g butter, softened

150g sugar (divided into 150 g and 75g)

1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract

100g rice flour
100g almond flour

1 tsp baking powder

Filling:

400g blueberries

300ml full fat greek vanilla yogurt
2 eggs
50g rice flour
zest of half a lemon

1 tsp. vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 375°F and grease a 10-inch loose-bottomed tart pan with cooking spray. 

In a medium sized container or bowl, sift together the flour and the baking powder. This not only mixes the two thoroughly, but removes any lumps or other miscellaneous things you don`t want to appear in your finished product.
Bake in oven for 10 min. then remove and allow to cool slightly while you prepare the filling.  Reduce heat in the oven to 350 degrees.Then pour the mixture in dollops over the blueberries, covering the entire surface of the cake. Using the back of a spoon, spread out filling to cover any bare spots.  When I went back to check on the totally cooled cake, it split and looked like someone had dragged a spoon across the filing in two spots (and yes I did ask the family if they sampled and they didn`t).  So I went back to filing recipe, made some adjustments and it worked just fine and tasted great!

Using a paddle attachment on your mixer, cream together the butter and 150g of the sugar until pale and fluffy. Beat in one of the eggs and 1 tsp vanilla extract. Fold in the combined flour and baking powder.

The batter will be fairly thick but not dry. Spread the batter over the bottom and up the sides of the tart pan.  Place tart pan on a cookie sheet to make it easier to get in and out of the oven.

Whisk together the yogurt remaining ingredients: greek yogurt, 50g sugar, 50 g flour, lemon zest, 2 eggs, and the vanilla.  Sprinkle blueberries over the cooling crust. 

Bake for 45-50 minutes in 350 degree oven then turn the oven off and allow the cake to sit in the oven for a further 10 minutes. Place the tart pan on a wire rack to cool completely before taking the pie out of its pan to serve.

Note: While the cake on Great British Chefs looks great, the recipe didn't work for me. Everything worked well - or so it seemed - right up until I had the cake out of the oven cooling on the rack.  

Spice Shelf Life

A great rule of thumb for those of us thinking of a bit of spring cleaning for our kitchen pantry.

Why aren't Italians fat?

Great question!!!  I am always jealous of anyone who can eat copious amounts of carbohydrates and not have to be concerned about it!

Read this article to find out more.


Why aren't Italians fat???

Coming soon....