Originally published in the Lebanon Reporter on April 6, 2006
For a baseball fan, playing an inning with a favorite team might be the ultimate fantasy. If you are a Karaoke queen, maybe belting out a tune on the stage at Carnegie Hall is what you daydream about as you while away the day in your cubicle. For me, it has always, been, for as long as I can remember, doing a cooking show.
Julia Child and Graham Kerr (The Galloping Gourmet) were among my favorites. This was when all the cooking shows were on PBS, long before the days of the Food Network. At about 10 years old, when my parents would occasionally leave me home alone for a couple of hours at a time, I would pretend to host my own TV using a window between the kitchen and the living room as the pretend television screen.
My repertoire included such classics as cereal, peanut better and jelly, and bologna sandwiches - all prepared with meticulous detail and a verbal explanation, to my pretend audience, of each ingredient and preparation step. Fortunately, this was a relatively short-lived pastime and sports and girls soon occupied my thoughts.
My interest in TV chefs reemerged about 20 years ago when I started to cook for myself and others. There still were no superstar chefs like we have today and many of the same TV personalities from my childhood were still on TV. Early in our marriage, my wife got me a very thoughtful gift for my birthday. She wrote to Jeff Smith (The Frugal Gourmet) to tell him I was a big fan of his show and books and to ask him for an autographed photo. He sent one which now hangs framed in my kitchen along with autographed photos of Julia Child, Jacques Pepin, David Rosengarten, and The Two Fat Ladies (photo here).
Even though I’ve been writing about food for over a year now, it had never occurred to me that I might someday get an opportunity to do a real cooking show until the other day. The phone rang and on the other line was a producer from PBS in South Bend. She had read The Hungry Hoosier, been on my website, and wanted to know if I could come on a show called Open Studio to cook something.
It only took me a fraction of a second to say yes. We discussed details and I learned that I would only have ten minutes and I suggested featuring a recipe that uses an Indiana ingredient and we also decided to pair the food with an Indiana wine.
A couple of days later I had assembled all my ingredients and cookware and made the trip up north to tape the show. The segment came and went in a blur. Ten minutes seemed more like ten seconds. The co-host was asking me questions as I was trying to cook and I found myself jumping back and forth between explaining what I was doing and answering the co-host’s questions about who in Indiana had the best tenderloins. All the while, the off-camera director is giving us hand signals worthy of a third-base coach - stretch, smile, wrap it up. The segment ended just as I plated my dish and the host took a bite. That was it. My 15 minutes of fame had only been ten. The recipe I prepared was a Crostini with Indiana Chevre (Goat Cheese), Fig Marmalade, and Caramelized Onions (recipe here). I paired it with a wine called Ba-Da Bing from Madison Vineyards.
So far, no talent scouts have called, I’ve not been asked to sign a three-book deal with a publishing company, and the prime-time network shows opposite of the Open Studio episode did not seem to take much of a hit in the Neilson ratings. So, I’m not ready to quite my day job, but it sure was fun. If you wander by my house on a day when Lisa and the boys are gone and the kitchen window is open, you might hear me practicing my co-host banter while I prepare a Crepe Suzette. You never know when the phone might ring again. If it does, I’ll be ready.
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