Michael Symon, Courtesy Scripps Networks
COOK LIKE AN IRON CHEF
Friendly Rating: Teens, maybe elementary age.
Safety Rating: Very safe.
Quality Rating: Mostly fun, more informative.
Series premieres on The Cooking Channel tonight at 10 p.m.
Finally, a cooking show that has some application to real life. Don’t get me wrong. I love Good Eats – the science and other information provided by Alton Brown has really elevated my cooking skills. But if Brown can find a hard way to do something, he does it that way. Feh. I don’t have time to play that game.
In this show, Chef Michael Symon, who is one of the Iron Chefs on the U.S. version of the show, currently on The Cooking Channel’s mother Food Network, shows us how he pulls it together on Iron Chef by taking a secret ingredient – in the episode I saw, lamb – and pulling together some dishes using that ingredient.
The cool thing is that you can learn some useful tips on how to prepare a meal quickly, which most of us do. Let’s face it, when you’ve got kids whining, a spouse/partner grumbling and everyone is pooped from a long day at school or the salt mines, it’s pretty tempting to chuck it all and head for the fallen arches. It’s not good for you and your family, so you don’t. Or maybe you do. But maybe if you know it’s only going to take half an hour to get dinner on the table, then maybe that’s more bearable than hauling everyone out to the car.
I will say the show isn’t perfect. Symon encourages folks to download the recipes at cookingchanneltv.com and doesn’t really talk about substitutions. And depending on recipes only slows you down in the kitchen, especially when the recipe calls for fresh lemon and the one in your fruit basket looks like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day.
But then, no cooking show deals with that kind of real life scenario. And until we get one where the host is forced to figure out how to do chicken parmigiana in an hour when the freaking chicken is still frozen solid, this show will have to do.
