sevenswells | Food obsession: it's not getting any better (Reply)

Fuck. I KNEW it was a stupid idea for me to start watching Iron Chef America. But. But the episodes were there! Available! On my computer! Saying: "click me! Click that link bitch!" And I was there too, and, and I clicked, and...

I'm addicted now. I can't stop. It's like watching a wrestling match, BUT WITH FOOD. Here we go, random thoughts:

-Shit, Mark Dacascos, I wasn't sure it was really you at first. Do you intend to NEVER get old? O____O Good God man, it's been ten years since The Brotherhood of Wolves and you were 37 at that time. THIRTY-SEVEN, DO YOU HEAR ME!? YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE A MIDDLE-AGED MAN NOW YOU FREAK, WHY DOESN'T IT SHOW ON YOUR FACE???? Also, do they keep calling you "The Chairman" because your name is so horrible to pronounce?

-Speaking of pronouncing, I love the way he says "sikrit ingridient". Cracks me up every time. Which, after watching about twenty episodes or so, should start to make me a bit worried about my sense of humour.

-Still on the pronouncing chapter, dear Kevin Brauch, it's pronounced kon-ban-WA. I keep hearing kon-ban-WAN. Do you do this to irritate me in particular or...?

-For some reason, I really like Michael Symon. Something to do with his face, or his booming gravelly voice, I dunno, he makes me think of some sort of Frankenstein creature, a monstrous humanoid from a B horror movie or a sidekick villain in a Disney movie, one with a cap on his head and clothes in dark tones and who kidnaps kittens or dogs and puts them in big bags. Something like that.

-I had a soft spot for Mario Batali too, except for the time when he wrapped cooked lamp chops in pizza dough and then deep-fried them. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU CHEFS ON COOKING TV SHOWS??? Why oh why do you INSIST on deep-frying delicate quality meat that must never, under no circumstance, be traumatized and desecrated like this? Jesus Christ.

-The challenger that has impressed me the most so far is Michelle Bernstein. As much as I found her annoying and snobbish as a guest judge on Top Chef, now I see that she actually had every right to be snobbish: the way she talks about how she constructs her dishes and what she does to achieve this or that effect, god, it's extremely smart. I feel like her style is subtle and very precise, and her dishes seem well thought-out and planned. She had a tough "sikrit ingridient" to work with (sweet onions), and she dealt with it beautifully and, again, in a very clever way. I love people who seem to have this kind of deep understanding of food and how ingredients can play each other out, instead of just following recipes and merely tweak them a little one way or another. Michelle Bernstein kind of looks like an artist to me.

-And speaking of badass chefs, oh my god, Chef Morimoto is THE SHIT. That guy is extremely impressive; he seems to compete in less episodes than the other iron chefs, and I can understand why: I think he can kick anyone's ass with his mad n1nj4 cooking skillz. In just one challenge he can use so many cooking techniques it's almost impossible to keep up; his knowledge of cooking seems infinite. Japanese cuisine never ceases to amaze me. I mean French cuisine is almost too easy: we've always had good produce to start with, so you can actually just toss it all in a pot and there are good chances that the end result will be good anyway. But in Japan, though, they never had many resources to begin with and never the variety of produce that they have in France; maybe that's what forced them to develop incredibly complicated and subtle cooking techniques and use ingredients no other people would normally use, I dunno. But god it makes me really admirative (and hungry)

Coming up: a Sherlock rec post, a big master post with everything Sherlock I ever did in it, and a special post on books about food.