Peruse your satellite TV guide and you will no doubt find a plethora of cooking shows which featuring everything from home made treats from the South to exotic platters from the Maghreb or Southeast Asia. Many of these dishes, showcased in exquisite HD clarity will tempt you to try to cook up a little culinary storm yourself. The cooking show genre has become a television staple. Celebrity chefs have become stars in their own right, with their signature flavors and sometimes diva like attitudes.
With satellite TV, you’re bound to find dozens if not hundreds of these cooking shows which will most definitely make you drool. Foodies are often addicted to these shows and they even program their HD DVRs to record them so that they can watch later on and try to perfect the recipes in their own kitchens. Food is actually akin to sports to many people-they are avidly passionate about what they eat; it often shows too. However, there are a variety of cooking shows dedicated to healthy eating. These shows stress the benefits of certain ingredients and often dedicate entire segments to different ways of preparing beets or using goji berries for instance.
Although fad diets are often all the rage one moment and then gone the next; many of these food shows maintain a balance of fad foods and actually healthful and nutritious dishes. They do showcase, in almost painfully delicious HD detail (it can be hard to watch on an empty stomach as you will be wishing that the food were on your table and not being broadcast on satellite TV), exotic ingredients that you can often find in your local organic grocers alongside more common foods cooked in unusual ways.
Shows such as The Naked Chef with the adorable British cook Jamie Oliver and The F Word with Gordon Ramsay have provocative names, but of course, there is nothing really that risqué about what they cook. Oliver does not really cook in the buff, and Gordon Ramsay’s F-word is food of course. These chefs are successful not only because of their mouth watering dishes, but also because of their personalities. They aren’t all business and no fun. They inject a little playfulness and wit into their shows.
Still other cooking shows take a look at food from all around the world. They examine local cuisine from such out of the way places as desert towns in Tunisia and villages in Laos. What you get is a lesson in food and culture too. You get to see how other people live and eat. Andrew Zimmern, whom you can catch via satellite TV on the Travel Channel, travels around the world and eats oddities such as bull’s testicles and blood sausages. While this might not be appealing to some, it is certainly quite a sight to see. Similarly, infamous bad boy chef Anthony Bourdain globe trots across continents and oceans to get some good eats.
And then there are shows like Iron Chef which dazzle you with the skill of the chefs in the competition. You probably won’t be able to follow the recipes, but this show is pure food entertainment at its best.
