Rookie Blue and Apple Pie

[janedavitt]

Watched the second episode of Rookie Blue last night and again, fun was had. It actually makes me laugh in places and it's just undemandingly entertaining. A little young for me, but eh, it's nice having something I can watch with E. Not sure why it rates a 9.00 PM airing. I like that the five rookies are three women, two men, and the women get most of the focus for a change (the two men are frankly forgettable for the most part). It also seems to be intended to be Toronto, not just filmed there; the money flashed around last night was Canadian. Cool, if so.

Top Chef DC again had me ranting and raving.

The quickfire was to cook a pie for dessert.

You'd have thought they'd been asked to go Christmas dinner for 100 in fifteen minutes.

'This sucks. I've never made a pie in my life!' they whined.

You're a chef! How is this possible? Surely they get taught how to make shortcrust pastry at school? You make it, roll it, throw in some fruit and sugar, top it off and bake it. That's a basic, (and okay, boring) pie but it's better than some of the inedible messes those geniuses came up with. I love curry and mourn the loss of a balti restaurant on every corner (Stoke has some amazing Indian restaurants) but curry powder in a dessert? No. Stop trying to be clever. It's a sweet course, dammit. Think sugar.

The scorn and contempt for my favourite course drives me mad.

I can't wait for the new Top Chef show that's all about desserts. Bring it on!

Comments

[raine]

The odd fact of chef school is that you can apparently go through it without ever making baked goods, especially if you went through the hard-knocks-method of chef training (i.e. worked your way up and had no formal training.) I'm not entirely surprised, given the pedigrees of some of the chefs, that they don't know -- especially if it's been a few years since formal school and/or they have dessert chefs in their restaurants.

Then again, the other night my husband turned to me and revealed he'd never in his life boiled eggs and didn't know how, so it just shows you never can tell what people know and what they don't.

[janedavitt]

I am the most basic of chefs but in a program like this, I kind of expect them to know the rudiments and when it comes to desserts their fear amuses me ;-)

[raine]

Yeah, it is amusing. It's also probably part of the point of the show. I've only seen a few minutes here and there, but the impression of it that I've gotten is that if you're the chef, you need to know certain things in case that person in your kitchen drops dead and you have a full house to serve.

[janedavitt]

That wouldn't matter too much on the show, but yes, in general I think some basic knowledge would help for sure!