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7

Jan

The Sad Decline of Food Network

Posted by moo  Published in Food Network, rant, TV

Author’s Note: This is the first post in a four-post series wherein I rant heavily about the Food Network and BBC America. I’ve recently come to discover that both of my favorite channels have just gone completely down the shitter, and it’s high time I had my way with it on teh intarweb. Enjoy!

You’re already confused by the title of this post. I can tell. Your head is cocked to the side and you’ve emitted a couple of low, guttural “hmm?” sounds and you’re about two seconds away from clicking the Comment link so you can lambast me for such a broad and allegedly incorrect statement.

Do me a favor. Hear me out. I need to rant in the worst way. And brace yourselves, this is going to be a LONG entry…

I’ve been watching Food Network for quite a number of years now (almost 14 to be precise), so I’ve seen a fair number of shows, hosts, fads, and concepts come and go (still lamenting the loss of Too Hot Tamales…), enough that I’m painfully aware of what is damn good and what is just plain fucking ridiculous. And unfortunately, the fucking ridiculous outweighs the damn good these days.

Fucking ridiculous: Rachael Ray. OK, I’m just going to tackle this one right out of the gate, and I will try to ignore the fact that her ass has quadrupled in size in the last two years from all the goddamned scenery she’s been chewing. I was fine with her back in her $40-a-Day era. She did nothing else but drag us around to various eateries in random cities worldwide and that was perfect. You weren’t subjected to her inane lingo or the exaggerated hand gestures. Just that circus freak smile that threatened to split her head every time her lips stretched back. And then someone got the bright idea to give her another show. And another one. And another one. And…why is it not stopping? Why does she keep getting shows? The woman is fucking everywhere. She’s even on my goddamned box of low-sodium Triscuits, grinning like a fiend. How am I supposed to keep my food down with that staring me in the face? I think the one place I can tolerate her the least is 30-Minute Meals. Which bums me out because how cool of an idea is that…quick meals that rock! But no. You’ve got Miss “OMG I’M SOOOO ITALIAN!” over there gesticulating madly, as though we would be completely unable to know what the hell she’s talking about if her hands weren’t miming Every. Fucking. Word. It’s not sign-language, folks. It’s spasms. And please. PLEASE. Stop with the cutesy vernacular. E-V-O-O, sammies, Yum-O, and my personal fave, stoup. You fucking bitch, quit two-fisting the English language in the ass. I predict an overdosing of Rachael in the next few years and a steady decline of her presence on the Network. It happened to Emeril, it will happen to her. Eventually someone will get a clue. Until then…ugh.

Fucking ridiculous: Paula Deen. STOP WITH THE FAT, WOMAN! And do us all a favor and quit chewing the rest of the scenery that Rachael left behind. Butter and lard and mayonnaise are not acceptable additions to EVERY MEAL. Speak with Ellie Krieger about healthy eating and a bit of decorum, please. I’m not even sure why she was given multiple shows. The world does not need more Paula Deen. The fact that her uterine dumplings have their own show is bad enough. The Deens don’t need more facetime with the public. I really wanted to like Paula when she first came about. She was charming and all Southern sassy and made some relatively interesting dishes. Then someone whispered in her ear “People will love you more if you roll everything in cheese and breadcrumbs. Oh, and speak louder.” And there she went. I never thought I would find someone who irritated me more than Emeril during his Emeril Live years. Then I saw an episode of Emeril Live where Paula guest-starred. She even grated on Emeril’s nerves. Most likely due to the fact that there was a bigger attention whore in the room than himself, but that’s beside the point. Thankfully, Food Network has never been keen on showing reruns in any particular order, so we get to see these older, wonderful episodes of Paula’s show. Those are fun to watch because she’s so chill, and you get a chance to overlook some of the grotesque food concoctions she brings to your attention because awwww…pretty southern lady with a cute accent!

Damn good, threatening to be fucking ridiculous: My girl…Giada de Laurentiis. While I will agree that yes, she’s no Italian gourmet and what she demonstrates on her main show is definitely simplified, non-traditional Italian cooking, let’s face it…she’s always been up front and honest about this fact. She’s never sold herself as the end-all be-all in traditional Italian cooking and frequently states that she’s reworked a recipe or devised a new one to take advantage of a time crunch and enhance the ease-of-use factor. Let’s call her cooking “intermediate Italian for the masses.” It’s many steps beyond your basic pasta and pizza combinations, but it’s not mind-blowingly involved. Accessible. That’s the word. Thank you for sticking around while I fumbled for that one. Anyway. Giada is another one of those Food Network personalities being handed multiple shows, and it’s starting to threaten her credibility AND her likability. It’s hard to really care what she has to say about traveling and eating when you also have Rachael Ray prattling on in her own traveling-and-eating shows, and those fucking Deen boys Homering on in their own traveling-and-eating show. (I could go on, but this needs to become its own bullet topic) Giada is great in her one main format. We don’t need to go behind anyone’s bash, nor do we need to take weekend getaways. Just stay in the kitchen with your tiny fingers and your massive…erm…head (seriously, how does she keep that thing up with that dinky toothpick neck of hers? She resembles a lot of my relatives in Italy; I will never understand it) and continue to make accessible, delicious sorta-Italian foods. I think my only true beef with Giada, however, is her irritating inconsistensies with Italian pronunciations. As anyone who has sat through her shows with me knows, hearing her say “spa-git-tee” and “mare-ih-nare-uh” makes me angry and violent. She gets almost every other pronunciation right, yet these two basic fucking words…oh dear god. I could forgive the marinara blunder if she wasn’t so hardcore with all her other Italian words. You can’t go all exotic accent on 99% of your words and then be all like “but I will show you how I’ve been completely bastardized by the Americans” with marinara. It’s just not right. But that aside…how does one frequently fuck up saying spaghetti? The Italian side of my family would really like to know. Because we all find this completely ridiculous. But Giada? We still love her. She’s got birthing hips and her own Parmesan wheel. She is one of us.

Stay tuned for part II: What the Food Network Continues to Do Wrong and What They Need to Do to Make Shit Right.

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28

Jan

Speaking of predictable…

Posted by moo  Published in family, rant, wine

I’m appropriately disgusted with how the wine tasting turned out, as I said I would be in my Friday post.

For the amount of time, money, and effort I put into the tasting, I got very little in return. No, I don’t expect heaps of praise. That’s not what I’m talking about. What I DO expect is things to go relatively close to how I planned them. And that’s just definitely not how it ended up.

_______________________________________

I had to run to Nugget Friday afternoon to pick out an additional Cab Franc and Riesling since previous selections had fallen off the list. I had seen this Bonny Doon CF the previous weekend when I’d picked up the rest of the lot, and I’d since read some fantastic reviews on it, so I was very interested in making it my fourth CF selection. I beelined it, only to find the shelf filled with some other wine that I couldn’t have cared less about. In a panic, I grabbed the nearest stock boy, who scurried off and soon brought me the wine steward to deliver the bad news.

They were out. For the season. Mother. Fucker.

I left with another wine that I knew nothing about and had very little enthusiasm for.

I then spent half an hour on Friday night trying to upload my Publisher file to the FedEx online ordering form, only to finally give up in disgust and accept that I’d have to add “Trip to Kinko’s” to my already bulging task list for Saturday morning.

Had I been truly attentive, Friday should have been a sign of things to come. Really. Because it was pretty much a messy shit-covered slide downhill after that.

_______________________________________

I had to run to Kinko’s yesterday morning to get my packets printed up for the tasting, where I proceeded to have the following exchanges with the incredibly batty lady who turned out to be the ONLY EMPLOYEE ON THE PREMISES.

Grumpy Manda: Hi, I needed to get some copies made. (holds up CD)
Batty Lady: *blink…blinkblink* OH. You have a file on that disc?
Grumpy Manda: (pause) Yyyyyyes?
Batty Lady: Oh! Well I can figure that out.
Grumpy Manda: ……
________

Batty Lady: It says that we don’t have one of your fonts.
Grumpy Manda: Oh crap, I forgot about that.
Batty Lady: Do you want me to hit “Substitute fonts” and we can just print that out instead?
Grumpy Manda: (thinking of the hours she spent picking out just the right fonts and aligning all the margins and pictures and page borders) Um. Do we get to choose which fonts it substitutes?
Batty Lady: Yeah, I think so.
Grumpy Manda: Oh! Oh good. Here, go ahead and select–
Batty Lady: Here, come back here and you can do it. I don’t know anything about these computers.
Grumpy Manda: ……
________

Batty Lady: (as 23 copies are finally being printed) You do know that these copies are eighty-nine cents apiece, right?
Grumpy Manda: (doing mental math…89 cents times 23 copies…oh so cheap!) Yup. It’s all good.

(a few minutes pass, copies are still coming, Batty Lady rings up the purchase on the register)

Batty Lady: Okay, that will be $163.52
Grumpy Manda: (makes a noise akin to a cat vomiting up a hairball while being fed through a wood chipper)
Batty Lady: (confused by the reaction) It’s 89 cents per page. Remember?
Grumpy Manda: (pulls paper bag out of pocket to control hyperventilation)
_________

*twenty minutes later*
Batty Lady: Huh. It’s still making copies. I’m pretty sure it’s made twenty-three copies by now. Maybe I typed 230 instead of 23?
Grumpy Manda: Um. OK?
Batty Lady: Oh well! I guess you’ll have extra copies you can hand out on the street.
Grumpy Manda: (eyeing machine) I don’t have to pay for this little error, do I?
Batty Lady: Oh…um. I don’t know…
Grumpy Manda: (pulls paper bag back out)

No, I did not end up having to pay for all those extra copies. But she DID send them home with me. What the fuck I’m supposed to do with what I now estimate to be about 100 extra copies of the tasting packet is beyond me. She was in a better position to recycle them than I am. Now I have to haul that shit to work and dump it in our shredder bins. Fan-fucking-tastic.

_______________________________________

I think I’m done with wine tastings for a while. They’ve become less of a fun, educational event and more of a social gathering. I’m not there to get drunk and blather on about how great my life is. I’m there to taste wines and learn something and THEN have a bit of a social time. I’m just so tired of the way the other group members treat these tastings and it’s entirely clear to me now that I’m on a whole ‘nother wavelength than they are. This is their chance to get wasted, eat a lot, and talk themselves up to the rafters. Oh, and show off how much they think they know about wine. It’s one step removed from a college kegger, minus the “so what’s your major?” smalltalk.

Ever have one of those weeks where you just want to move into some remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness and forget about people for a while? Yeah. Me too.

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