Food Network Folks Around Town

We had a quick visit with Ingrid Hoffman on CBS this morning. Who even watches that show? My excuse was that I was waiting for the painters.

The good news is that not only did she not cross contaminate anything...THIS TIME, but she didn’t even TOUCH the long strip of pork ribs that she was cooking.

She talked about the tamarind sauce in her recipe, which she said is "nice and tarty". Immoral or not, I happen to LOVE tamarind sauce. She gave a less than adequate explanation of Aji Panca. At first I thought she was talking about garlic flavored Japanese bread crumbs.

Next she was using "wooshie" sauce, her overly cutesy pronunciation for Worcestershire sauce, telling us that it was made from tamarind, which I cannot believe I didn’t know. Then she gives a few “chica tips” (isn’t that kind of sexist?) for her cole slaw with mango. She says not to use an overly ripe mango. They can be stringy and you don’t get the beautiful clean cut pieces that you do from one that is slightly less ripe. And she says to salt and then press the cabbage to extract as much liquid as possible.

The host (no clue who it is) turns on the blender, without holding the top down. That’s a recipe for a big dry cleaning bill. Ingrid didn't seem to notice.

At the end of the segment they show her unique table setting, which is newspaper (but only the "happy" news) on the table sitting under baking pans, which she’s using as plates. Yup, that’s right…baking pans, baking sheets, baking trays whatever you call them…in place of plates. This is a slightly irritating and useless idea. She also had little brown paper bags on the table, which are actually for the rib bones, but they look alarmingly like those bags you find on airplanes. And THAT doesn’t inspire confidence among your guests.

Quick Tyler note:

He was truly adorable on the Kids Losing Weight Show tonight that Shaq hosts. Tyler's assignment was to prepare a healthy and delicious lunch for over a thousand kids in a school cafeteria that could be replicated by the hardened and wizened lunch ladies, who were definitely not believers. Poor Tyler, it turned out they weren't completely wrong. He went way over the time he had to prepare the lunch and not all the kids had enough time to eat. But he was awfully dishy, even in a hairnet.