The Chopping Block Gets Chopped

So after only 3 episodes NBC’s The Chopping Block is getting the axe.  For any poor soul who actually sat through a full 45 minute episode of this complete tragedy of a TV show, this comes as no surprise.  Because I love TV shows that involve food (or anything that involves food, really), I actually watched all three in the hopes that perhaps this would improve over time and hit its stride.  But no, it just continued to be pretty much some of the worst reality TV I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

So how exactly did a reality cooking show fail?  First of all, there was the set-up.  Pairs of 2 friends or family members formed two larger teams that each had a restaurant.  Across the street from one another, these restaurants would compete every week in a challenge, be judged by a secret critic who would dine at each, and then one of the pairs on the losing team would get the axe by Marco Pierre White.  Not only could I have cooked anything better than a lot of the “chefs” on the show, but no one was even interesting to watch.  Usually a few people emerge in a reality TV show who just add entertainment value.  But no Stephen or Marcel (both of Top Chef fame) existed; the contestants were untalented and uninteresting.  Furthermore, most of them were complete wimps.  They would complain that cooking with fresh produce picked out of Central Park was too hard, and a lame excuse for a “harsh judging” would have people leaving in tears.  I honestly wanted to smack them.

But the worst part of this show was the host, Marco Pierre White.  Hailed as a world-renowned chef who once made Gordon Ramsay cry, I was expecting him to be mean, loud and massively entertaining.  Instead he was conceited and annoying, and by the end of each episode I wanted to take an axe to the screen just to make him go away. 

Food-isms of the Day

• Oatmeal for a dollar!  Print out your coupon and go get some delicious oatmeal at Jamba Juice right now!
• The James Beard Awards are announced!  Check out the full list.  Anyone else a little disappointed by the food blogger nominees?  They’re One Block Diet, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook and BA Foodist.  There are so many more innovative and more entertaining blogs out there by highly qualified people!
• The Bread Art Project wants you to make your own bread art!  The best part?  For every piece you create, $1 gets donated to Feeding America.
• Just when you thought people might start eating healthier, America proves us wrong once again.  Although if you want one meal for two days this will do the trick.  And if you can finish this monstrosity, you get a free t-shirt.  That is, if you can still fit into it…
• There are a lot of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint, but when did using “eco-friendly ice cubes” become one of them?!  Useful overseas where water isn’t clean, but in America?  How far are people going to go with this stuff?
• I love coffee.  I love ice cream.  This is heaven!  Starbucks has teamed up with Unilever instead of the massively inferior Dreyer’s.  Unilever is the maker of both Ben & Jerry’s and Breyers.  B&J’s will always be number one on my list, and Breyer’s still destroys Dreyer’s in any match-up.  I’m already searching for where I can find these cartons of delight, not to mention ice cream bars!
• In Chicago, the cops are called when a special at El Pollo Loco caused a complete mob of people looking for some low-priced chicken.  I guess people were taking the name El Pollo Loco (The Crazy Chicken) a little too literally!

News: Bad Economy Brings 3 Buck Bites

When it comes to spending money I’ve never been one to turn down an incredible dinner at one of my favorite restaurants because it’s too expensive.  I’d rather splurge on a perfectly cooked steak or a delicious new dish than on a dress or electronics.  But as I get ready to leave college and face the grim prospect of finding a job in the seriously railroaded architecture industry, I am faced an unavoidable fact: I will very soon be flat broke.  Needless to say this has completely demolished my tendency toward fine dining.

Enter 3 Buck Bites, Citysearch’s remedy for the monetarily-challenged.  Foodies who have searched their local area for the best and cheapest food they can find can submit pictures and reviews of restaurants and dishes, and the best part is that everything is $3.99 or less!  Essentially this is the Dollar Menu for people who like good food (except not even Subway’s $5 footlong could make it onto this list).

News: Jacques Torres To Make Ice Cream

For anyone who’s ever had Jacques Torres super-thick, super-incredible Hot Chocolate or his highly addictive chocolate chip cookies, something may be on the books for you: Jacques Torres ice cream! The Huffington Post revealed that he is now considering opening an ice cream shop complete with seating next door to his first chocolate store in Brooklyn.   Furthermore, we might have an ice cream truck on the books! I don’t even want to think how long the line would be for that truck if it started trolling the streets of Manhattan.  If it does, though, expect to see me there. I have in fact been known to wait almost two hours in line for Garrett’s Popcorn in Chicago when the irresistible urge hits me.   Currently he sells ice cream sandwiches during the summer (which I’ve never had, but I’ve heard amazing things), but the new store would be selling “ice cream with chocolate and passion fruit, raspberry, peanut butter, banana”.   Sounds delicious!  There’s nothing like going out for good homemade ice cream.

Daily Food-isms

• Bissinger’s Confections merges a hard-boiled egg with a Cadbury Cream Egg just in time for the Easter season.  Would you actually pay alomst $10 per egg for what is essentially a hunk of chocolate housed in an eggshell?

• Woman’s Day highlights 10 unusual flavor combinations that I fully intend on trying as soon as possible.  Just not the pickle jellybeans!

• Burpee develops a Seedless Tomato!  This may be something that I will be attempting to grow this summer in my backyard!

• The New York Times wants you to find out what your cooking personality is.  I actually fell under every single category, so I guess I’m a cooking mutant 🙂

• Now that spring break’s almost over, some of us suddenly realize all the procrastination we’ve been doing was not a good idea. Yahoo helps in avoiding hyperventilation with 7 anxiety-fighting foods. Now I have an excuse to try and review Vosges’ Chocolate Bacon bar!

• Smoothies aren’t always good for you!  ABC News teams up with Mat Bean of Men’s Health to highlight 4 of the worst mall foods you can eat. I don’t know about you, but I’d take the 13 chocolate frosted Dunkin’ Donuts over the grape monstrosity any day!

• Fast food meets sustainability?  Enter Burgerville, the restaurant chain in the Pacific Northwest that offers seasonal cooking with local and sustainable ingredients.  Anyone been?  I want to know if the food’s good, because to be honest, the name of the place is horrendous.

News: The Wikipedia of Recipe Websites

I don’t know about you, but I’m always frustrated when I’m looking for a recipe for something specific and come across literally dozens of variations that all seem pretty decent.  So along comes Foodista.com, the first collaborative cooking website of its kind.  Essentially this is a fully editable Wikipedia for recipes, tips and techniques.  The duo behind the site gathered some 2 million recipes from around the web and then edited and combined them down to an initial compendium of about 1,500.  In their words, “Foodista is a collaborative project to build the world’s largest, highest quality cooking encyclopedia.  With your contributions, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people learn how to cook everything and anything”.

Sounds pretty good, right?  Searching terms like “chicken” or “stir-fry” produced a plethora of recipes with nice pictures and easy-to-follow directions.  Furthermore, there  were links to information on techniques and equipment involved.  All together, it was a pretty sweet package for someone who hasn’t been to culinary school but wants to try completely new things and cook delicious food.

Food-isms of the Day

• Meat Madness! Vote for your favorite meat here, although I wish steaks had a category of their own.  And I’m thinking Ostrich is going down hard.

• Not just nuked: in Italy, a Pizza vending machine that actually prepares and cooks your pizza!  Forget delivery, even forget DiGiorno; these babies are freshhhh.

• And you thought the Wendy’s Baconator was unique!  Check out McDonald’s menu items from around the world.  Most unique invention goes to the McRice, although I’m digging the Prosperity Burger and the McAloo Tikki Burger.  And why do they not sell the Volcán de Chocolate in the US!?

• George Clooney tofu?  PETA’s newest harebrained scheme in their attempt to convert the populus to a vegan lifestyle.  At least they chose someone attractive.  Seriously, could you imagine Michael Jackson tofu?  Jack-ofu!

Top Chef Masters to Air

If looks equal success, Kelly Choi will be a hit as host of Top Chef: Masters

Although not exactly news, I found out today that Bravo is launching Top Chef: Masters, where the contestants are 24 world-renowned celebrity chefs instead of unknown chefs looking to make it big. While it will have the same basic format (with Quickfires and Eliminations), both the hosts and judges are different. Kelly Choi, a New York food journalist with her own show Eat Out New York will serve as the host, and the judges will be New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Green, British food critic Jay Rayner and culinary expert and Saveur editor-in-chief James Oseland.   The Feedbag has some interesting speculations about possible contestants, including past guest judges on the original Top Chef.

I have to admit, I’m a little concerned that this won’t be the same Top Chef without Padma and Tom. We all know how much a host can make or break a show (just watch Katie Lee Joel in Season 1; the switch to Padma made Top Chef what it is today), so I hope Kelly Choi will live up to expectations. I’m hoping that because she already has her own show she will be relatively charismatic on camera. The other thing I’m worried about is the entertainment aspect. Gail and Tom are by no means shy of tearing apart the Top Chef contestants when they screw up, a fact that adds massively to the entertainment value of the show. Celebrity chefs can prove to be a little trickier. I hope their fame won’t make the judges wary of telling them when their food tastes terrible, or (even worse), I hope they aren’t so good that the entire series consists of the judges essentially salivating over and praising expertly-cooked food.

Let’s be honest, though.  This is another dose of Top Chef.   How can we be disappointed?

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