I like to cook. I enjoy cooking. I’m actually pretty good. The only thing I’ve never mastered is the art of Cooking for One. I usually end up with enough leftovers for three or four meals, which is too much of any one dish. Anyway, I’ve got a buddy who I regularly invite over for dinner. Said friend doesn’t/won’t cook. If it weren’t for me and the occasional visit to his parent’s house, he’d live on McDonald’s Hamburgers and The meat and dessert portions of T.V. dinners. I figure I’m helping to keep him alive and he’s willing to chip in on the cost and do the dishes. Plus he’s an enthuiastic eater. Anyway, I’m grilling some wild-rice and dried apple stuffed lamb-chops and he’s channel surfing. He calls me into the other room. “Hey Fenris! Look at that.” he says, and gestures to the T.V. wherein Emril, Food Network’s alleged 'cook" and the aforementioned Mush-Mouthed, Shrill Portuguese Asshole is doing his little “flabby fanny” dance on the Cooking Channel (he wiggles his butt at the camera while poking his index fingers in the air). My appetite goes. If only he could bottle that dance and sell it to slim-fast.
“BAM!” Emril shrieks. “Pawhk Fat RULEZ!!” His audience shrieks in near-orgasmic delight. Emril moans in a disturbingly sexual way “OOooOOOohh yuh! Bay-bee! Uhhhnh! I LUV Gahlik! Let’s aahd abowt 500 cloves!” he tosses about 15 garlic cloves into a pan of smouldering green beans and rendered bacon grease. He’s got the pan too hot. The garlic immediatly turns black. The food will not be good.
“How come you don’t cook like that?” my friend says, apparently in all innocense.
I am puzzled. “What? Make green beans soaked in bacon grease with pecans and burned garlic? Because I’m trying to lose some weight and it looks disgusting. What do you care? You don’t eat vegetables anyway.”
“No” he says. “Why don’t you cook like that.” he gestures to the T.V. I stare, agahst. Emril now is doing a little mock ballet dance. He’s standing en pointe and tossing in his “Essence” from his fingertips towards the pan from about 10 feet away; a fat, ugly sugarplum fairy sprinkling, not pixie dust, but rather an unpleasantly pungent mixture of spices onto the floor. Some small fraction is getting into the pork-fat fried green beans. “LET’S KICK IT UP TO NOTCHES UNKNOWN!” he howls for the 10th time in 8 minutes, preparing overspice yet another dish.
EVERY goddamned friend I’ve got who ISN’T a cook thinks that Emril is how cooking “should” be done. Not as a mixture of creativity and skill but as professional wrestling mixed with slapstick comedy.
And to make matters worse, Emril’s a phoney. He has a fake “Bahaston” accent that he constantly drops when he’s not paying attention (“I wanna ‘awhsk’ youse sumthin’.”), his recipes don’t work (I’ve tried several…in each one that I’ve tried he drastically overestimated the amount of spice needed and underestimated the liquid.), his diction’s terrible and he keeps burning his food.
The two or three catch-phrases he has are just barely amusing the first ten thousand time you hear them (“Pawhk Faht RULEZ!”, “Dis ain’t like dem utter late night tawhk shows!”, “Dis ain’t rahket science”, “Let’s kick it up annudder notch!”). The Food Network could save money by hireing a parrot to repeat the catch-phrases and get a chimp to burn the ingredients. They’d certainly be as compentent as Emril. And far less annoying.
Emeril can’t even cook properly, given the percentage of food that he accidentally blackens. A few weeks ago he made some sort of fritters. He was busy playing with the audience and smoke started to come out of the fryer. He pulled out some fritter briquettes. This is typical. There’s also something disturbingly Oedipal about the way he talks to his mother “Hilder” even when ‘Hilder’ ain’t dere. (“Hey! Hilder! How’d’yuh like da way I do dis chiffonade dis basil? I’m doin’ it fah youse, Hilder! Fah YOUSE!”)
And his mother (Hilder) is scary. She’s shaved her eyebrows and pencilled new, fake ones on about three inches too high, giving her a perpetually surprised/Snow White’s evil queen (but less regal and more toad-like) look.
Why do people watch this moron? They obviously are, because the Food Network has him on every two hours (“ALL EMRIL ALL THE TIME!”).
AAARGH! Bring back Julia Child, David Rosengarten, The Two Fat Ladies, The Two Hot Tamales! Give us more Iron Chef (“ALLEZ CUSINE!”). Anyone but Emril (and that smarmy punk Bobby Flay…but that’s another rant).
Bam this, Emril you asshole.
Fenris
Or cook.