Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Let's "kick it up a notch"...

Man, there sure are a lot of cooking shows on television. They run the gamut from complicated gourmet cuisine to simple meals anyone could make in thirty minutes. However, the one thing they all have in common is that they lack "edginess", there’s no one "pushing the envelope", not even on "cable TV"(alright, I’ll stop with the quotation marks).

Not surprisingly, I have some ideas for what could be called "alternative cooking shows" (sorry, those were the last quotation marks, I promise) that ought to spice things up a little…

BUSHMEAT FOR BEGINNERS: Chimps, gorillas, leopards and many other exotic animals not normally considered food by most people are on the menu for this show. You will never be caught without a good recipe for spider monkey again.

THE LAST CHANCE DINER: Travel each week to a different state penitentiary and watch as the nation’s top prison chefs prepare the last meals of death row inmates on budgets tighter than a hangman’s noose.

FRYIN’ WITH THE PLAYMATES: Taped at the Playboy mansion this show will feature topless playmates frying everything from bacon to zucchini, all the while jumping and jiggling to avoid the splattering grease. The show will be hosted by Hugh Hefner who, ironically no longer eats actual food, but is kept alive with oxygen and large doses of vitamin enriched Viagra.

EXTREME CUSINE: This show would be the ultimate in adventurous cooking. You will see chefs with more courage than common sense attempting things like:
Roasting hot dogs over the rim of an active volcano, deep frying chicken in a canoe while riding the rapids and serving up elegant examples of Novelle cuisine while dressed up as a Union soldier in the middle of a trailer park somewhere in the deep south.

Hey, even if the Food Network isn’t interested in any of these, I’m sure the Fox Network will be.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

have you ever seen "iron chef" (not the stupid americanized version, mind ya, but the original)? cuz i'm pretty sure my husband and i saw an episode featuring bushmeat. in fact, in a bold move, iron chef sakai simmered a batch of spider monkeys in a lovely shark fin soup... he lost the battle that night, tho', when he garnished the dish with sauteed yak balls that were, and i quote "not as delicate as the seared goat balls we had last week". sigh, good times...

Raymond Betancourt said...

Now that you mention it I did see one episode of that show, but they weren't cooking anything that interesting or I surely would have watched again!

Anonymous said...

well, it's easy to be fooled by titles like "turnip battle" or "milk battle", or, my personal favorite... "salt battle"... but sometimes the show was pretty dang fun ("live octopus battle" was certainly memorable)

as you can see... my husband and i are easily amused on any given night, hence our willingness to watch such a show in the first place! which is why i'll root for you when you pitch your fine ideas to the appropriate network (food? discovery channel? national geographic? i think you have choices here) please keep us posted!