Aug062007

More on Top Chef

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So I’m up-to-date on Top Chef now. All two and a half seasons. I even kind of vaguely remember that All Star special that was on TV months ago.

Watching all this cooking TV has certainly had an effect on me.

Chopping Board

My chopping board

What is so much fun for me is watching the creative process that these chefs go through. You watch some of the shit on the Food Channel and it’s yet another friendly face promising home-style cooking straight out of their own cookbook which is at a bookstore near you. There’s no thinking going on, it’s all an elaborate, well-rehearsed show.

On Top Chef, these guys are really really stretched. Given very tough (and sometimes farcical) challenges, they are asked to invent things on the fly. The improvisation is so much fun to watch. It’s like watching atoms fuse together to form something new and somehow spectacular in 30 minutes even though it takes me 2 hours to produce a lump of beige that tastes kind of like starch mixed with salt.

That’s kind of my dream of what cooking should be. Just grabbing whatever ingredients you have, make something delicious on the fly.

Top Chef has left a bit of an impression on me. I was planning to just fry up some chicken wings and eat them with some store-bought coleslaw. But the wings had been in my fridge for a week now and smelled kind of weird so I threw them out and went downstairs to pick up some chicken breast, mint and lime. I had an idea to use the coleslaw to re-create the Vietnamese salad that my grandma made once.

Chicken, coleslaw and some noodles

It wouldn’t kill me to get some tips on food photography

The proper, authentic salad is a whole bunch of julienned vegetables with fish sauce and some sort of cirtrus. But I don’t fancy fish sauce and I had a large tub of coleslaw sitting around. And frankly, mint and lime make anything taste Vietnamese. So after slowly frying up the chicken, chopping everything up and mixing it together and throwing some noodles in there to make everything feel extra Asian, I managed to make a delicious mockery of Vietnamese food.

PS. I loved Ratatouille

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4 comments »

Dennis

I agree totally! .. Cooking is not just about recipes.

That’s why I’m a big fan of guys like Jamie Oliver… it seems like he’s just throwing in what he thinks would be good.. with no particular recipe. I like that! Often the stuff he makes is simple enough to cook at home too.

I haven’t watched Top Chef before.. I might have to check it out.

Salad looks great btw. :-)
Jack

I’m not sure if Top Chef is airing in Australia… I doubt it. They’ve probably written it off as another Iron Chef spin-off.

Yeah Jamie is great. Very energetic and captures that sort of frenetic fun about cooking.
Carolyn

The cooking looks great. err.. but… um… there’s a nail clipper resting beside the plate at the top of the picture. What were the ingredients again?
Jack

lol you noticed -_-

Obviously that was an accident and I need to be more careful about taking photos. :(

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