#try to find a place that's NOT on a bonkers steep hill

[an-aura-about-you]

I am having feelings, and those feelings are frustration.

[easyfoodnetwork]

For All Its Whimsy, ‘Crazy Delicious’ Can’t Escape Reality

Channel 4/Netflix

A fantastical setting and famous “Food Gods” Carla Hall and Heston Blumenthal only underline how conventional this Netflix effort is

Strawberry cheesecake chicken wings. Prosecco waterfalls and cheese growing on trees. Chef Heston Blumenthal descending in a thunderclap, wearing a tight white suit. It’s not a lucid dream diary: it’s the newest cooking show on Netflix, Crazy Delicious, wherein three contestants compete in three rounds, taking ingredients and inspiration from a Willy Wonka-like garden where nearly everything is edible. The first round is based on a hero ingredient like a strawberry or tomato, the second is a reinvention of a classic, and the third is a showstopper, with inspiration ranging from brunch to barbecue.

No mere panel of mortals will judge such a show. Enter the “Food Gods” — made up of Blumenthal, Top Chef legend Carla Hall, and “Michelin-starred chef” Niklas Ekstedt. Dressed in their pristine white costumes and accompanied by ominous music, the trio might be set up as transcendent, but their actual job is that of the classic food show judge: offer some opinions, throw some concerned looks, and dish out zingy one-liners. (When a contestant tells Hall, that their dish is made with love, Hall replies, “Well, [love] doesn’t have salt, unless you’re crying, honey.”) Host Jayde Adams, meanwhile, adds a decidedly dry British slant to the show’s proceedings, despite the show trying to turn her into a Lewis Carroll character.

While Crazy Delicious aims to break the food show mold — creating something more zany than Chopped and Masterchef, more bonkers than Nailed It, and cuter than The Great British Baking Off — it falls short on everything but the set. What unfolds in the short season is six episodes torn between total culinary fantasia and convention, the result of which is a basic cooking competition, but with more crafting supplies for sets and costumes. Its best efforts to bring something new to food TV only reveal just how conventional Crazy Delicious actually is.

Food TV shows, crazy or delicious, pivot on power dynamics: the relationship between the judges and the judged, mediated and molded by the hosts. While in recent years, shows like Great British Baking Off and Australian hit The Chefs’ Line have extricated themselves from boorish villain/hero tropes, Crazy Delicious wants to go as far as to extricate its judges from earth itself. They are Food Gods: remember this and do not forget it — but in case you do, production is here to remind you with thunder, lightning, and, well, that’s all.

The Food Gods, though, are also actual people with restaurant chops. While their duties rarely go beyond encouraging praise or gentle criticism, the show asks them to show off their conventional culinary credentials, rather than representing anything transcendent or wacky. Ekstedt references Michelin stars as a point of comparison when praising dishes; Hall harks back to her time as a contestant on Top Chef. When Heston Blumenthal becomes a Food God in his Edenic realm, he’s still being leaned on as a famous chef — the famous chef subject to widely reported accusations of wage theft and restaurant mismanagement, and a late-career pivot to casual sexism. The choice of name also unfortunately recalls Time Magazine’s infamous “Gods of Food” feature, whose anointing chefs as figures of worship excluded women entirely. There is no need for them to be culinary gods other than to be culinary Gods — deified shibboleths, set apart from the mortal contestants who try to please them by walking up a slightly steep hill godly mountain with their possibly crazy, possibly delicious food.

The contestants don’t quite get to realize the fantasy either. The diversity in every episode is a welcome development, and it’s interesting that contestants are neither the rank amateurs of Masterchef nor the trained chefs of Chopped. These are keen, often technically proficient cooks, and there is quality technique and great skill on display, so it’s a shame that they’re dealt kind of a raw deal. The stakes too often feel too low, and with each 45 minute episode being a self-contained story, there’s little time to develop intrigue or connections to the people on screen. The prize for winning is a golden apple, which means when crackers break and parfaits don’t set, it’s pride and self-worth that are at stake, not money or prestige. While this makes for more genuine emotion, it also puts limits on the show’s range. With neither financial reward nor — as with Great British Bake Off — the promise of access into the world of culinary celebrity, Crazy Delicious has to stand or fall between the start of each episode and its end. It falls more than it stands..

The prize golden apple is picked from the phantasmagoria of the Willy Wonka set — the most striking departure from the “faintly cool, faintly dangerous kitchen” template of its competitors; exceptions made for the GBBO tent. It could have been the ace in the hole: Everything is edible, and the contestants are instructed not just to find cheese in nooks and eggs in nests, but to “go forth and forage,” plucking tomatoes from vines and digging carrots from the earth, engaging with the agricultural systems that produce food.

Well, not quite. This bounty is artificial, because of course it is, and other ingredients like chopped meat and packets of pasta are not delved from grottos, but removed from fridges and pantries. This happens in any show with an ingredients tray, which is almost all cooking shows, but they don’t try to pretend otherwise. The creation of a fake, bountiful food system that is not entirely fictional but is entirely alienated from labor feels incongruous to the admirable, if unfulfilled ambition of other food TV in 2020 to reflect on the fact that everybody eats. Asking something as fanciful as Crazy Delicious to bear the weight of expectation around Taste the Nation or near-namesake Ugly Delicious might appear unkind, but the show wants it two ways — a magical respite from typical food TV, but with all the same prestige trappings — and ends up in some confused middle ground.

The genuinely fun elements of Crazy Delicious, like candles that burst smilingly with mango pulp or edible cherry blossoms that are sweets, unfortunately become little more than gags; the contestants never engage with them or use them in their cooking. Even Chopped, set in a kitchen and not an edible eden, does more with its introduction of comparatively conventional curveball ingredients. The Crazy Delicious set’s unchanging nature also means that the show runs out of secrets early on. A prosecco waterfall might bubble with whimsy in episode one, but it’ll go flat by episode three. There are some interstitial incursions which are funny albeit a little outdated, like a momentary send-up of the errant coffee cup in Game of Thrones, but as with the rest of the show’s elements, these jokes only further confuse the tone. Indeed, the omnipresent Big Green Egg — the favorite barbecue of chefs, sponconned across the industry — is significantly more disconcerting.

Overall, the place that Crazy Delicious is asking viewers to escape from — the world of food TV — looms so large that the show ends up reiterating familiar tropes rather than subverting them as intended. A set with ovens and blenders and barbecues surrounded by foliage is still a set with ovens and blenders and barbecues. Eurocentric restaurant discourse, standards, and techniques are so present that any fantasy never gets to genuinely establish itself; the final four-hour challenge of the series is “takeaway,” and of course, it pigeonholes Indian cuisine. Ultimately Crazy Delicious is frustrating: it could have been deeply weird, deeply fantastical; it could have been a jolly romp, contestants competing to grab the fruit candles and chocolate tree branches, the chaos of Supermarket Sweep unmanacled from the supermarket. Instead, even with its sweet burgers and activated charcoal pizza volcanoes, it feels like a waste.

It would be seemingly easy to write all these annoyances off because Crazy Delicious is, quite clearly, trying to be a bit of harmless fun. Viewers seeking a six-episode bliss-out with a few laughs and some Willy Wonka flourishes are just in it for the escapism, not the optics, right? But the titular crazy is leaning too much on the delicious, and the delicious is just normie interpretations of “good” food. Despite the ongoing insistence on the show’s wackiness, the results are a less fun, less weird, less intelligent, less crazy, and less delicious follow up to Chopped, GBBO, The Chef’s Line, and Nailed It. Try as it might, Crazy Delicious cannot unmoor itself from the fact that unlike its edible punchlines, food, and restaurants don’t just grow on trees.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AiHpLL https://ift.tt/2AlE3ru

Channel 4/Netflix

A fantastical setting and famous “Food Gods” Carla Hall and Heston Blumenthal only underline how conventional this Netflix effort is

Strawberry cheesecake chicken wings. Prosecco waterfalls and cheese growing on trees. Chef Heston Blumenthal descending in a thunderclap, wearing a tight white suit. It’s not a lucid dream diary: it’s the newest cooking show on Netflix, Crazy Delicious, wherein three contestants compete in three rounds, taking ingredients and inspiration from a Willy Wonka-like garden where nearly everything is edible. The first round is based on a hero ingredient like a strawberry or tomato, the second is a reinvention of a classic, and the third is a showstopper, with inspiration ranging from brunch to barbecue.

No mere panel of mortals will judge such a show. Enter the “Food Gods” — made up of Blumenthal, Top Chef legend Carla Hall, and “Michelin-starred chef” Niklas Ekstedt. Dressed in their pristine white costumes and accompanied by ominous music, the trio might be set up as transcendent, but their actual job is that of the classic food show judge: offer some opinions, throw some concerned looks, and dish out zingy one-liners. (When a contestant tells Hall, that their dish is made with love, Hall replies, “Well, [love] doesn’t have salt, unless you’re crying, honey.”) Host Jayde Adams, meanwhile, adds a decidedly dry British slant to the show’s proceedings, despite the show trying to turn her into a Lewis Carroll character.

While Crazy Delicious aims to break the food show mold — creating something more zany than Chopped and Masterchef, more bonkers than Nailed It, and cuter than The Great British Baking Off — it falls short on everything but the set. What unfolds in the short season is six episodes torn between total culinary fantasia and convention, the result of which is a basic cooking competition, but with more crafting supplies for sets and costumes. Its best efforts to bring something new to food TV only reveal just how conventional Crazy Delicious actually is.

Food TV shows, crazy or delicious, pivot on power dynamics: the relationship between the judges and the judged, mediated and molded by the hosts. While in recent years, shows like Great British Baking Off and Australian hit The Chefs’ Line have extricated themselves from boorish villain/hero tropes, Crazy Delicious wants to go as far as to extricate its judges from earth itself. They are Food Gods: remember this and do not forget it — but in case you do, production is here to remind you with thunder, lightning, and, well, that’s all.

The Food Gods, though, are also actual people with restaurant chops. While their duties rarely go beyond encouraging praise or gentle criticism, the show asks them to show off their conventional culinary credentials, rather than representing anything transcendent or wacky. Ekstedt references Michelin stars as a point of comparison when praising dishes; Hall harks back to her time as a contestant on Top Chef. When Heston Blumenthal becomes a Food God in his Edenic realm, he’s still being leaned on as a famous chef — the famous chef subject to widely reported accusations of wage theft and restaurant mismanagement, and a late-career pivot to casual sexism. The choice of name also unfortunately recalls Time Magazine’s infamous “Gods of Food” feature, whose anointing chefs as figures of worship excluded women entirely. There is no need for them to be culinary gods other than to be culinary Gods — deified shibboleths, set apart from the mortal contestants who try to please them by walking up a slightly steep hill godly mountain with their possibly crazy, possibly delicious food.

The contestants don’t quite get to realize the fantasy either. The diversity in every episode is a welcome development, and it’s interesting that contestants are neither the rank amateurs of Masterchef nor the trained chefs of Chopped. These are keen, often technically proficient cooks, and there is quality technique and great skill on display, so it’s a shame that they’re dealt kind of a raw deal. The stakes too often feel too low, and with each 45 minute episode being a self-contained story, there’s little time to develop intrigue or connections to the people on screen. The prize for winning is a golden apple, which means when crackers break and parfaits don’t set, it’s pride and self-worth that are at stake, not money or prestige. While this makes for more genuine emotion, it also puts limits on the show’s range. With neither financial reward nor — as with Great British Bake Off — the promise of access into the world of culinary celebrity, Crazy Delicious has to stand or fall between the start of each episode and its end. It falls more than it stands..

The prize golden apple is picked from the phantasmagoria of the Willy Wonka set — the most striking departure from the “faintly cool, faintly dangerous kitchen” template of its competitors; exceptions made for the GBBO tent. It could have been the ace in the hole: Everything is edible, and the contestants are instructed not just to find cheese in nooks and eggs in nests, but to “go forth and forage,” plucking tomatoes from vines and digging carrots from the earth, engaging with the agricultural systems that produce food.

Well, not quite. This bounty is artificial, because of course it is, and other ingredients like chopped meat and packets of pasta are not delved from grottos, but removed from fridges and pantries. This happens in any show with an ingredients tray, which is almost all cooking shows, but they don’t try to pretend otherwise. The creation of a fake, bountiful food system that is not entirely fictional but is entirely alienated from labor feels incongruous to the admirable, if unfulfilled ambition of other food TV in 2020 to reflect on the fact that everybody eats. Asking something as fanciful as Crazy Delicious to bear the weight of expectation around Taste the Nation or near-namesake Ugly Delicious might appear unkind, but the show wants it two ways — a magical respite from typical food TV, but with all the same prestige trappings — and ends up in some confused middle ground.

The genuinely fun elements of Crazy Delicious, like candles that burst smilingly with mango pulp or edible cherry blossoms that are sweets, unfortunately become little more than gags; the contestants never engage with them or use them in their cooking. Even Chopped, set in a kitchen and not an edible eden, does more with its introduction of comparatively conventional curveball ingredients. The Crazy Delicious set’s unchanging nature also means that the show runs out of secrets early on. A prosecco waterfall might bubble with whimsy in episode one, but it’ll go flat by episode three. There are some interstitial incursions which are funny albeit a little outdated, like a momentary send-up of the errant coffee cup in Game of Thrones, but as with the rest of the show’s elements, these jokes only further confuse the tone. Indeed, the omnipresent Big Green Egg — the favorite barbecue of chefs, sponconned across the industry — is significantly more disconcerting.

Overall, the place that Crazy Delicious is asking viewers to escape from — the world of food TV — looms so large that the show ends up reiterating familiar tropes rather than subverting them as intended. A set with ovens and blenders and barbecues surrounded by foliage is still a set with ovens and blenders and barbecues. Eurocentric restaurant discourse, standards, and techniques are so present that any fantasy never gets to genuinely establish itself; the final four-hour challenge of the series is “takeaway,” and of course, it pigeonholes Indian cuisine. Ultimately Crazy Delicious is frustrating: it could have been deeply weird, deeply fantastical; it could have been a jolly romp, contestants competing to grab the fruit candles and chocolate tree branches, the chaos of Supermarket Sweep unmanacled from the supermarket. Instead, even with its sweet burgers and activated charcoal pizza volcanoes, it feels like a waste.

It would be seemingly easy to write all these annoyances off because Crazy Delicious is, quite clearly, trying to be a bit of harmless fun. Viewers seeking a six-episode bliss-out with a few laughs and some Willy Wonka flourishes are just in it for the escapism, not the optics, right? But the titular crazy is leaning too much on the delicious, and the delicious is just normie interpretations of “good” food. Despite the ongoing insistence on the show’s wackiness, the results are a less fun, less weird, less intelligent, less crazy, and less delicious follow up to Chopped, GBBO, The Chef’s Line, and Nailed It. Try as it might, Crazy Delicious cannot unmoor itself from the fact that unlike its edible punchlines, food, and restaurants don’t just grow on trees.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AiHpLL via Blogger https://ift.tt/38h1T4j

[bimblingcat]

It’s a day off day. The sun is out and there is not a chance that I’ll be staying in today. Andy said that I shouldn’t be riding around with the clutch the way it is but I’m happy to take the chance.  Where to today? Okehampton? Ashburton? Brixham? Anywhere would suit me so long as there’s a camera, a working bike and some sunshine.

Gardening Lesley and off to Lyme Regis

My friend Lesley came over just before 9 am to sort out Andy’s garden. We had a cup of tea and shared mutual frustrations and admired the springiness of the Spring. I missed her when she was in India. I’m half surprised she’s come back. I can imagine her running a sewing course out there and having some place on the sea to cook and meditate.

I wasn’t sure where I was heading to until Lesley asked me, then the name Lyme Regis tripped off my tongue and that’s my day sorted out. I managed to follow the right roads this time without going on some bizarre loop of Exeter and picked up a nice spot behind an Audi from Exeter all the way to town. He was happy to burble along at just under the speed limit and I was in the mood for happily trailing along in his wake. No horrible surprises on the road just masses of flowers and that chilly Spring air that is just not cold enough to be uncomfortable…or…fresh would be a better way to describe it.

I pass a carpark at the top of the town and head down a steep hill in the hope that I can find a spot to hide Horatio in whilst I busy myself about with the camera: there wasn’t anywhere, at least not one I found. I flipped back through the town and up the hill. It’s going to be good for me getting up that hill later on…yes…that’s the way to think about it…good for me…hum…

The weather is again holding out to be blissful and I head down the hill and start finding things to take pictures of. There’s a pathway to a park half way down so I take the diversion and discover a nice view of the harbour and a motley looking cat near a spiky bush. A couple of snaps of the camera and the fluffy beast is curling around my feet. I give it a gentle stroke and it attaches all four sets of claws and teeth into my hand; thankfully it decides to be a gentle wee beasty.

Further down the hill (there is a lot of hill) I find a lane of cottages bearing off to my left. I trundle on down but find the cottages are a bit too chocolate box to make much of a photo. Plus I don’t feel good about taking photos of houses if I can’t get a reflection in the window. I don’t want to be taking photos ‘in’ to people’s homes; I might see things in the editing process that I don’t want to see.

Back up the lane and onto the high street, I find the ubiquitous Costa coffee with its internet access and a surprising little garden at the back where I scribble and sit in the sun. Note: I do not work for Costa. I’m noticing that I’m starting to sound like an advertisement campaign on behalf of Costa…other coffee houses are available.

It’s only just come up to midday so plenty of time to get myself into some nooks and crannies and who knows where. There are a few clouds around that could help to diffuse the light. I’ve noticed that some of my photos are not as sharp as I’d like. It would be useful to have a tripod with me but it’s a balance between having the stability to get a good shot and the faffing about required to carry it around. I may give it some extra thought…and possibly a trip to Jessops.

Much meandering in Lyme Regis I’m glad I didn’t stay in Costa for long as I’ve spent the last two hours wandering about the town and it still feels like there is a lot to see. Plus, now that I’ve stopped for lunch, the weather has decided to change to a dull grey and the colour is oozing out of all the buildings and landscape. So where have I been?

I walked down the centre of town; there was an old building that’s been left to go to ruin and it so wanted me to take its photo but I just couldn’t find the angle. Going further down the right-hand side of the street I took a couple of shots of people via the reflection in the shop windows…sneaky Kat, very sneaky.

Turned right and along the seafront I go. I see a middle-aged couple with a seagull waiting patiently between them and the symmetry of the lines are too good an opportunity to miss. Further up I spot some digging equipment working at the cob which is a type of dock…I think. I look at them and they’re so out of place that there must be a shot in there somewhere. Going further up I get to a set of shops at a roundabout and see odd bits here and there. Then I’m through the car park and onto a pebble beach. I like the way the horizon divides into stone, sea and sky but I don’t think I got a good shot. The camera was too wobbly being handheld and I couldn’t find anything to purchase it on. Damn.

I went off to the sea wall and walked on the top bit past a sign that told me not to if it’s windy. I know…what a rebel. It felt a bit lonely walking on that wall; something about the space and the sounds of the sea and…well…the general moodiness of it all. Then it struck me that if there was someone here then we’d probably start talking and I wouldn’t see anything to photograph…so… swings and roundabouts and clickety click we go.

I turn around and go back up the sea front. I spot a wedding party by one of the huts which looks as odd and out of place as the diggers. I really hope I got a shot with the bridge, the seafront and the machinery in. It’s all so wonderfully bonkers.

Further up the beach, I start shooting at the dogs; I ask some owners and others I just sneak a peak. Past the end of the high street, I head straight up toward some odd looking stone tower that looks like it will make an interesting shot but turns out to be more dull with each angle that I try. Further up I find myself turning toward the sea. The tide has gone out unusually far leaving more barren rock to shoot at. There are dogs playing and people meandering and maybe, just maybe I’ve got something out of all the shots I’ve taken. There was an odd shift in the light from behind a cloud creating a layer effect of light on the sea.

I’ve come up a narrow alley for lunch, the Terra kitchen, the soup was very tasty as was the bread although it was served in a dish similar to that thing you put underneath plant pots to hold the water. I don’t know…I don’t do cuisine.

To home and wine and bits There was a bit of hill to climb to get back to Horatio. I could do with losing a few pounds or stones…oh dear. I get changed into my bike trousers and casually knock the camera off the top of my helmet…oh dear. And then home via another lazy journey where I find myself happy to pootle along at the speed limit. I must be getting old.

I stop off in Chudleigh for wine and head back home. I get on with editing photos, we have dinner, Andy realises I have wine and he has no beer (such tragedies cannot be born) so off we go to the shops for cider. Yet more photo editing whilst Andy plays some computer game then we sit and drink and laugh like drains.

It’s easy to forget with the day-to-day rubbing up against one another (purely in the social sense) that we do get on. We share a similar sense of humour and odd background which makes hanging out together a lot of fun.

I get to bed around 1 am and dream of meeting up with Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey and that big guy off Mock the Week…Dara O’Brien. Not sure what was going on in my head.

  To Lyme Regis… It’s a day off day. The sun is out and there is not a chance that I’ll be staying in today.

[easyfoodnetwork]

Channel 4/Netflix A fantastical setting and famous “Food Gods” Carla Hall and Heston Blumenthal only underline how conventional this Netflix effort is Strawberry cheesecake chicken wings. Prosecco waterfalls and cheese growing on trees. Chef Heston Blumenthal descending in a thunderclap, wearing a tight white suit. It’s not a lucid dream diary: it’s the newest cooking show on Netflix, Crazy Delicious, wherein three contestants compete in three rounds, taking ingredients and inspiration from a Willy Wonka-like garden where nearly everything is edible. The first round is based on a hero ingredient like a strawberry or tomato, the second is a reinvention of a classic, and the third is a showstopper, with inspiration ranging from brunch to barbecue. No mere panel of mortals will judge such a show. Enter the “Food Gods” — made up of Blumenthal, Top Chef legend Carla Hall, and “Michelin-starred chef” Niklas Ekstedt. Dressed in their pristine white costumes and accompanied by ominous music, the trio might be set up as transcendent, but their actual job is that of the classic food show judge: offer some opinions, throw some concerned looks, and dish out zingy one-liners. (When a contestant tells Hall, that their dish is made with love, Hall replies, “Well, [love] doesn’t have salt, unless you’re crying, honey.”) Host Jayde Adams, meanwhile, adds a decidedly dry British slant to the show’s proceedings, despite the show trying to turn her into a Lewis Carroll character. While Crazy Delicious aims to break the food show mold — creating something more zany than Chopped and Masterchef, more bonkers than Nailed It, and cuter than The Great British Baking Off — it falls short on everything but the set. What unfolds in the short season is six episodes torn between total culinary fantasia and convention, the result of which is a basic cooking competition, but with more crafting supplies for sets and costumes. Its best efforts to bring something new to food TV only reveal just how conventional Crazy Delicious actually is. Food TV shows, crazy or delicious, pivot on power dynamics: the relationship between the judges and the judged, mediated and molded by the hosts. While in recent years, shows like Great British Baking Off and Australian hit The Chefs’ Line have extricated themselves from boorish villain/hero tropes, Crazy Delicious wants to go as far as to extricate its judges from earth itself. They are Food Gods: remember this and do not forget it — but in case you do, production is here to remind you with thunder, lightning, and, well, that’s all. The Food Gods, though, are also actual people with restaurant chops. While their duties rarely go beyond encouraging praise or gentle criticism, the show asks them to show off their conventional culinary credentials, rather than representing anything transcendent or wacky. Ekstedt references Michelin stars as a point of comparison when praising dishes; Hall harks back to her time as a contestant on Top Chef. When Heston Blumenthal becomes a Food God in his Edenic realm, he’s still being leaned on as a famous chef — the famous chef subject to widely reported accusations of wage theft and restaurant mismanagement, and a late-career pivot to casual sexism. The choice of name also unfortunately recalls Time Magazine’s infamous “Gods of Food” feature, whose anointing chefs as figures of worship excluded women entirely. There is no need for them to be culinary gods other than to be culinary Gods — deified shibboleths, set apart from the mortal contestants who try to please them by walking up a slightly steep hill godly mountain with their possibly crazy, possibly delicious food. The contestants don’t quite get to realize the fantasy either. The diversity in every episode is a welcome development, and it’s interesting that contestants are neither the rank amateurs of Masterchef nor the trained chefs of Chopped. These are keen, often technically proficient cooks, and there is quality technique and great skill on display, so it’s a shame that they’re dealt kind of a raw deal. The stakes too often feel too low, and with each 45 minute episode being a self-contained story, there’s little time to develop intrigue or connections to the people on screen. The prize for winning is a golden apple, which means when crackers break and parfaits don’t set, it’s pride and self-worth that are at stake, not money or prestige. While this makes for more genuine emotion, it also puts limits on the show’s range. With neither financial reward nor — as with Great British Bake Off — the promise of access into the world of culinary celebrity, Crazy Delicious has to stand or fall between the start of each episode and its end. It falls more than it stands.. The prize golden apple is picked from the phantasmagoria of the Willy Wonka set — the most striking departure from the “faintly cool, faintly dangerous kitchen” template of its competitors; exceptions made for the GBBO tent. It could have been the ace in the hole: Everything is edible, and the contestants are instructed not just to find cheese in nooks and eggs in nests, but to “go forth and forage,” plucking tomatoes from vines and digging carrots from the earth, engaging with the agricultural systems that produce food. Well, not quite. This bounty is artificial, because of course it is, and other ingredients like chopped meat and packets of pasta are not delved from grottos, but removed from fridges and pantries. This happens in any show with an ingredients tray, which is almost all cooking shows, but they don’t try to pretend otherwise. The creation of a fake, bountiful food system that is not entirely fictional but is entirely alienated from labor feels incongruous to the admirable, if unfulfilled ambition of other food TV in 2020 to reflect on the fact that everybody eats. Asking something as fanciful as Crazy Delicious to bear the weight of expectation around Taste the Nation or near-namesake Ugly Delicious might appear unkind, but the show wants it two ways — a magical respite from typical food TV, but with all the same prestige trappings — and ends up in some confused middle ground. The genuinely fun elements of Crazy Delicious, like candles that burst smilingly with mango pulp or edible cherry blossoms that are sweets, unfortunately become little more than gags; the contestants never engage with them or use them in their cooking. Even Chopped, set in a kitchen and not an edible eden, does more with its introduction of comparatively conventional curveball ingredients. The Crazy Delicious set’s unchanging nature also means that the show runs out of secrets early on. A prosecco waterfall might bubble with whimsy in episode one, but it’ll go flat by episode three. There are some interstitial incursions which are funny albeit a little outdated, like a momentary send-up of the errant coffee cup in Game of Thrones, but as with the rest of the show’s elements, these jokes only further confuse the tone. Indeed, the omnipresent Big Green Egg — the favorite barbecue of chefs, sponconned across the industry — is significantly more disconcerting. Overall, the place that Crazy Delicious is asking viewers to escape from — the world of food TV — looms so large that the show ends up reiterating familiar tropes rather than subverting them as intended. A set with ovens and blenders and barbecues surrounded by foliage is still a set with ovens and blenders and barbecues. Eurocentric restaurant discourse, standards, and techniques are so present that any fantasy never gets to genuinely establish itself; the final four-hour challenge of the series is “takeaway,” and of course, it pigeonholes Indian cuisine. Ultimately Crazy Delicious is frustrating: it could have been deeply weird, deeply fantastical; it could have been a jolly romp, contestants competing to grab the fruit candles and chocolate tree branches, the chaos of Supermarket Sweep unmanacled from the supermarket. Instead, even with its sweet burgers and activated charcoal pizza volcanoes, it feels like a waste. It would be seemingly easy to write all these annoyances off because Crazy Delicious is, quite clearly, trying to be a bit of harmless fun. Viewers seeking a six-episode bliss-out with a few laughs and some Willy Wonka flourishes are just in it for the escapism, not the optics, right? But the titular crazy is leaning too much on the delicious, and the delicious is just normie interpretations of “good” food. Despite the ongoing insistence on the show’s wackiness, the results are a less fun, less weird, less intelligent, less crazy, and less delicious follow up to Chopped, GBBO, The Chef’s Line, and Nailed It. Try as it might, Crazy Delicious cannot unmoor itself from the fact that unlike its edible punchlines, food, and restaurants don’t just grow on trees. from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2AiHpLL

http://easyfoodnetwork.blogspot.com/2020/07/for-all-its-whimsy-crazy-delicious-cant.html