Watch Them Cook

My new favorite reality show is Food Network’s Chopped. Four chefs prepare an appetizer, entrée, and dessert, each course within 30 minutes and each using a bizarro combination of bizarro ingredients found inside a picnic basket. At first, I thought what I enjoyed about this show was that it’s a complete series in a nutshell and an hour of nonstop action. At the end, three competitors are eliminated and the $10,000 winner revealed. No tune-in-tomorrow strung out hour-long results show. Sometimes I think the judges are too hard on contestants working under difficult restrictions, but now I realize that’s where the reality comes in. You don’t always have much time or the desired ingredients available to cook a meal. And whatever you prepare, you set it down on the table in front of picky eaters. (I do anyway.) Most intriguing to me is the invention, the creative ways these chefs use the strange ingredients to produce something edible.