Foodstuffs, literal and metaphorical

My in-laws came to visit yesterday and for dinner we placed a take-out order for Afghan-style kabobs. There was an Afghani place near the old homestead that was profoundly loved by all of us (my wife and I as well as her folks) so the move to the new house involved some separation anxiety in that regard. There is a local kabob joint near the new neighborhood, but after sampling their offerings once or twice we pronounced the fare adequate but certainly not transcendent. But last night, on a local’s recommendation, we tried a restaurant which is technically in the next town over, a good twenty-minute car trip away.

Totally worth it.

The menu was a little pricey and that, combined with the forty-five minute round trip retrieval of foodstuffs, means we won’t be eating there on a weekly basis or anything. But dang did we enjoy the heck out of it last night. Everyone at the table stuffed themselves silly. Even the little guy enjoyed some tzatziki cucumbers, chick peas, and spicy rice.

If I had indulged in a brown ale or other alcoholic companion beverage with the meal I probably would have passed out as soon as my in-laws hit the road for home. (Two beers and I almost certainly would have passed out right there at the table.) But I abstained and thus had only a run-of-the-mill food coma to contend with.

Nevertheless, that still makes it fairly surprising that I ended up staying up late to watch the entire supersized premier of this season of The Next Food Network Star.
TNFNS is one of those shows I probably would never have watched if I hadn’t married my wife (owing to the fact that I doubt I would ever watch The Food Network at all if not for her) but don’t misread that as a complaint. The show amuses the heck out of me, at least when it’s not making me want to crawl out of my own skin with awkward discomfort. It all comes down to schadenfreude, and whether I enjoy that or not depends on whether its currently happening to a contestant I’m rooting for or wishing doom upon.

The show is just a perfect, genius blend of multiple opportunities for trainwreckery. On the one hand, anything involving cooking has the inherent possibility of spectacular failure, from Top Chef to Food Network’s various Cake Challenges (another pair of shows I owe my mere awareness of entirely to my better half). TNFNS certainly promises that, and by the time the second (!!!) cook ended up with raw chicken in their dish at the end of a timed challenge, my wife and I were wondering to each other if the producers had custom-built kitchen equipment which is actually booby-trapped to not properly achieve cooking temperatures a random 10% of the time or something.

TNFNS simply ices the kitchen-disaster cake with performance anxiety frosting. The sight of amateurs cutting promos or doing live on-camera presentations is hilariously or hideously cringe-worthy, again depending entirely on how much sympathy you have for the person whose soul is being devoured by the unblinking lens. I admit I did ample amounts of howling from positions both delighted and distressed, and by the end of the show I knew unerringly who was getting sent home, because it was the contestant who had crashed and burned in both arenas of the competition and for whom I had no sympathy whatsoever.


That may be the strongest appeal for TNFNS for me, because on a show like Top Chef the really loathsome competitors can hang around forever as long as they keep delivering solid dishes to the judges table. But when half the evaluation is based on personality appeal and likability, the jerks get weeded out pretty quickly.

While I’m on the subject of reality show competitions that have “Next” in the title and which my wife brought into my sphere of consciousness (and aren’t dating shows on MTV) … we haven’t watched America’s Next Top Model in a while, but there was a period where it was practically appointment television. This in turn led to the oft-repeated mantra, “Tyra’s crazy,” which would be spoken in a kind of understated horror that one might use while backing away from someone with a blood-smeared machete. In fact the trainwreck of Tyra’s craziness on display every cycle of ANTM eventually got to be too much to process, and there came a certain point where the show was unwatchable because the crazy never, ever let up. But every once in a while I am reminded that it still exists, and in a weird, Stockholm Syndrome way I kind of miss it.

Thus you can imagine how pumped I was to hear that Tyra has somehow inked a deal to write a series of books. Novels, in fact. Fantasy novels about models with super powers, to be ultra-precise. Abrupt needle-scratching-across-vinyl noise! Super-powered super-model fantasy novels written by Tyra Banks. There is nothing in that phrase I do not want to inject directly into my brain. I’m sure these “novels” will end up mostly ghost-written, and on the cheap to boot, which means they will be the literary sustenance equivalent of off-brand pork rinds. Do not think for one second that will stop me from buying at least the first one, and then obsessing over how far is too far in completing the collection/keeping up the joke. Chances are I’ll come down on the side of eating them all up, glutton that I am.