by Kevin Burton
My recipe for relaxation on the road has changed, just a bit, in the last couple of years.
Time was, on the road with my wife, I would put a ball game on the hotel TV before the suitcase got unpacked.
Or even opened.
Football, baseball, basketball. I even remember watching Oklahoma softball to see if they could repeat as NCAA champions.
Now? Can’t remember the last time I watched a ball game in a hotel room, or even looked for one. So what happened?
Well before, in my ESPN days, I would always get to the point of feeling sorry for my long-suffering bride and I would click around seeking something, anything else on TV I could stand to watch.
Well I pretty much hate TV. Most of it is mindless, profane or both. So I was gripping the clicker, and invariably I landing on the Food Network.
Food. We both like food. Good compromise.
Spin things forward a few years and now we watch nothing but the Food Network on the road. And this was mainly my doing!
That might not be such a shock to you but you have to understand just who it is lapping up this foody fare on TV.
Back in 2019 I started this Page 7 blog, without much of a plan. I had the whole world of topics at my disposal. Achievements of the blind, glory of the Big Red Machine, current cats, former cats, cats from Saturn, The Beatles, The Buggles, the Bomb.
I had nobody telling me where to go or what to write. I paid my WordPress fee, and I had a blog.
It took me exactly six posts to get around to skewering the Food Network, ridiculing them under the headline “My New Dish, Pretention On A Bed Of Cabbage.”
I offered up my version of one of their exotic meals. I called it “Chicken Fuzi,” Fuzi being the dog one of one of my classmates at the blind school when we were growing up (as in, my friend’s dog can cook better than this).
This, in part, is what I wrote:
“This is a chicken-based dish. How to describe it? I’m thinking out loud and my wife is helping. “It’s a chicken….”
“A chicken plank….” my wife interjects.
“Plank? Plank! Dear one this is not vittles,” I say. “This is no mere chow. It’s not grub. This is high art. This is BBC. We do not have planks. It’s a chicken, mmmm, a chicken….uh…”
I don’t have a word so I make one up because my wife is waiting.
“It’s a chicken guantine, smothered in queso cambulet, with shaved almonds and orange peppers, topped with mushrooms, served on a bed of cabbage….”
“Queso is cheese, right? What is cambulet?” my wife wants to know.
“Well cambulet is Campbell’s, you know, cream of something or other, but you can’t say Campbell’s it’s got to sound French or something.”
“You’ve got a Spanish word and a French un-word together there.” she says. “That’s ridiculous.”
Exactly! Now she’s getting it.
“So this is where my dish ends,” I wrote “Scroll up and read the ingredients again. It’s something you might eat or serve to someone you like, right? But on the cable show they’ve got to push well past this. They’ve got to create!”
“So they will add paprika and chives, leeks, steamed asparagus, cubed calamari and the legs off some South American insect. If they’ve sold enough commercials they’ll go beyond that even. And at the end of the show they will eat this stuff on camera.”
“That’s not dinner, that’s CSI Kitchen.”
And can’t you just hear the laugh track here?
Well, that was my middle-class bias showing. And this is me not doing anything to cover it up!
If I could perhaps audit some classes at culinary school, I’m guessing I could gain some perspective that would be useful to us even in meat-and-taters Kansas.
But if so, Jeannette and I are still not reaching for the meals they make on these cable shows, and we’re not reaching for their first, second, third or fourth cousins. We’re not taking notes, looking for something to serve to Jeannette’s bunco group when its her turn to be the hostess.
So with hundreds of channels to choose from on the road, and with the fact that Jeannette now says she wasn’t bothered so much about all the sports on the hotel TV all the time anyway, what keeps us locked on the Food Network?
Maybe tomorrow if you’re still hungry, you can come back and read about it.
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