The Food Network, which I like to drop in on from time to time, yesterday concluded its fifth annual "The Next Food network Star" competition. They started out with 10 contestants and weeded one out every week, as with most reality shows, but viewers got to see interesting recipes along the way with the knowledge that the winner would be showing us cooking secrets regularly. And the winner was:
Melissa d'Arabian, the mother of four from Texas and the absolute underdog heading into Season 5 of "The Next Food Network Star," won the competition tonight, beating Los Angeles' Jeffrey Saad, the front-runner in this race literally from Day 1. Melissa now stars in her own cooking show, and it starts in just one week.
What made d'Arbian the underdog was that she was the only nonprofessional chef among the contestants -- she's a mere Mom Cook. But she managed to come up with pretty interesting dishes from very ordinary ingredients. Saad was the front-runner because he was the most personable of the professionals and the one most likely to cook with exotic ingredients. It was an interesting final because of the contrast of their offerings.
Melissa's approach was "kitchen rescue," things you can do to still make the meal when you don't have what you thought you had in the pantry. Jeffrey's was to take an exotic ingredient from somewhere in the world (cooking without borders!) and put it to use in American recipes. It was the practical vs. the adventurous. We need both approaches in the kitchen, but I confess that I might have watched a show by Jeffrey more often. I already practice my version of kitchen rescue, which is to engage in the kind of cooking that uses a variety of what one might find in the cupboard or refirgerator -- stir fry, pasta, one-pot meals, casseroles, slow-cooker stuff. I don't go out looking for exotic ingredients to spice up the meals that often.
That's often our choice in other aspects of life, isn't it, the practical and the adventurous? Too often we think we have to go one way or the other all the time instead of finding the right balance. That's the real magic trick.
