Do you watch Iron Chef? Have you seen some of the fru-fru things they are doing with food lately? I saw one just now, using basil. The stacked little bites on the plates were so precious no one should lay utensils so crude as knives and forks near them. I don’t think people are actually supposed to eat those little orbs and squares. They are art. Imagine strolling through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with a spoon and scooping out a chunk of a masterpiece here and there. That is how I felt about the food on Iron Chef tonight.
The concept of food is simple: find it, prep it, cook and eat it. Tonight’s Iron Chef, like every episode, added yards to the process. One chef was painting with balsamic vinegar. One chef made little veggie sculptures with goop from a food processor. An engineering contraption was churning out dough or perhaps it was something else, I’m not sure. I lost track while Alton Brown tongue-wrestled sentences pontificating about kosher salt.
How do all of those chefs in Kitchen Stadium just rip into the secret ingredient so perfectly? How do they know what they’re about to be making instantly if it was, indeed, a secret just 18 seconds ago? The Bruce Lee fellow passionately unveils the star ingredient as if he is about to attack Jackie Chan and immediately, every person wearing a white uniform is playing their part like the same symphony went off in their heads simultaneously. I’m sorry but I think they’re not showing us the part where the head chef sits down with a pencil and paper and scratches his head and looks out the window and tries to figure out what the hell he’s going to whip up with that big, smoking table filled with supposedly secret whatever. It is just too damned perfect.
Tonight’s secret ingredient was basil. Basil. Are you kidding me? You can put basil in anything. One chef made ice cream out of the stuff. Are the producers of the Food Network running out of ingredients? Basil? How about salt? Perhaps pepper or water will be next. No matter, I’m a sucker. I watched it like it was North Carolina and Duke tied with a minute to play and the Tar Heels are about to nail the winning tre.
I didn’t even recognize the guy playing the Iron Chef. No Bobby Flay, no Cat Cora, no Mario B. Who was this guy? Maybe I have missed too many episodes lately. I’m loosing my Iron Chefishness. I feel like the first time I watched Deadliest Catch and said, “So?” I mean every week they are out on that boat in rough water, right? Crabs maybe? Maybe not? Some guy gets his fingers smashed. Another guy gets pissed off. There is bad weather. Forgive me but that’s not unlike making a show about some Nebraska farm guys plowing every week.
“Hey, Hubert, watch your hand or that combine will –“ Squish. “Oh damn. That’s gonna leave a mark. Grab that thing. Dust it off. If we get to the ER fast enough they can probably sew it back on.”
Next week, Hubert is up on the combine again, hand all bandaged up, couple of fingers lost to the gears. A storm is whipping the plains like Hulk Hogan after two pots of coffee. There is yelling and grimacing. Deep voiced announcer: “Next on Combine.” Cut to a big old boy standing on the combine. “Watch your foot, Hank!” Crunch. Damn, another one.
These shows have a pattern. Every week on “How It’s Made” they make something. You see what I mean? Every week on MTV, some beautiful twentysomethings pile up in a house together and we watch them bitch and moan and smite each other with insults, and after a few episodes, someone wins something and ends up in People magazine or on a website, wearing no underwear. That’s the pattern.
I want to see Iron Chef pit two guys from Assback, Alabama in Bryant-Denny Stadium with 92,000 people and a Weber Grill. The ingredient will be a greased pig. One of them has to catch it. What happens next is not scripted.
Before you get upset about the cruelty of this heinous premise, there is a twist. If you have ever tried to catch a greased pig, you already know that the advantage goes to the pig, big time. So sans the escaped porker, the two contestants must square off in a best two-out-of-three wrestling match. The loser must grill and eat a football.
The frilly, little dishes served tonight on Iron Chef were no less preposterous. A dab of this, a sprig of that, a dollop of some green, syrupy plant matter squeezed from a Glad bag with a tiny hole in the corner.
Where’s the hubcap-sized slab of chicken fried steak as crusty as a scab on an elephant’s knee? Where’s a chunk of country-cured ham, salty enough to kill all three judges and Alton Brown just for looking at it? Where’s a mess of turnips and yams both hot and sweet enough to get you elected governor in Mississippi?
I’m waiting for the day when they uncover that table on Iron Chef and there sits nothing but a deep fryer. Who cares what they fry up in it? Pass the Lisinopril.
