I just discovered that Hulu has some Iron Chef America episodes up and so I’ve been working my way through the current season on and off. I’m a fan of competitive cooking shows in general, and they’re in my binge rotation. (Watch a whole season! Watch nothing cooking related for a month!)<\/p>\n
Today is the day I cook for the week, and this week I made it up as I went along rather than using a recipe. I’d used a vague “guide” recipe for this dish in the past, but I couldn’t find it this time. The impulse to grade myself on the Iron Chef metric was thus impossible to ignore. I think I would have gotten ejected from Kitchen Stadium with the Old West collar and belt grab bouncer toss.<\/p>\n
It’s not that I failed in my dish, it’s just that my style as a cook is perhaps best described as Extreme Pragmatism. I have specifically cultivated a high capacity for repetition, so if I can make a huge batch and then not cook for days thereafter, w00t! I also want things to be as healthy as possible, so for example if a recipe calls for sour cream, I’ll automatically substitute the non-fat version. (Similarly, I’m also frugal (cheap) and am unlikely to buy fresh this or that when the price is an order of magnitude different. I maintain you can’t argue with a monthly grocery budget of $100-$120 for one person.) My philosophy is that while full-fat, full-salt, super-fresh cooking does taste better, if you only ever allow yourself it in restaurants, you won’t get frustrated at home at its lack, and restaurants will be a treat.<\/p>\n
So in Kitchen Stadium I’d already fail on that head, I’m sure. This week’s dish also fails on the fact that it doesn’t look particularly prepossessing. There’s not really much you can do to increase your plating score on a casserole. It’s a casserole. Maybe I need a kind of squarey bowl with high sides. But it’s new and innovative! I made scalloped potatoes, but I added (turkey) ham and mushrooms, swapped half the potatoes for sweet potatoes, and subtracted the cheese. I call it… Scalloped Ham Potato Thingy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just discovered that Hulu has some Iron Chef America episodes up and so I’ve been working my way through the current season on and off. I’m a fan of competitive cooking shows in general, and they’re in my binge rotation. (Watch a whole season! Watch nothing cooking related for a month!) Today is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anecdotes","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n