TV cooking contest shows

[Blarg]

Well, the producers kept telling her to not get fancy, and she tended to do so anyway. Remember when she had to serve meatloaf, and made sneering remarks about how inedible the very concept was? Then charged with just dealing with it, she made a lousy meatloaf, and delivered it with a sneer at what "you Americans" eat? (I guess she was in France long enough to forget that she was an American too.)

She seems very wed to doing things her way, which is not really simple at all. She has great difficulty with and even resentment toward the task of doing what the show wants or what people want rather than what SHE wants. Her essential concept is to broaden people's food horizons in the directions SHE is most interested in. As far as eating, not preparing. Few people are going to want to go to cooking school to learn complex techniques so they can duplicate her flavors. And she doesn't seem to respect that. She's a good ways off on a cloud.

I don't think that makes her a bad cook, maybe quite the contrary. But it's at odds with teaching people on t.v. how to do simple recipes, which the Food Network guys repeatedly told her was her emphasis and which she only later in the game adopted as her new emphasis. She's going to have to change her basic outlook on what she wants to do with food to something that's not really in her.

You know that 50-ish southern lady who has a show where she does southern homey cooking? She can't stop herself from sticking EVERYTHING in her constantly going deepfryer after battering it up in her ever-ready bowl of all-purpose glop. As much as her food often looks like it completely stinks, she LOVES easy, crappy, trashy food. She doesn't have to pretend or lower her sights and talk down to her audience. She's easy-to-make-garbage incarnate.

Amy doesn't incarnate the "gourmet next door" that anyone could be. She's more like the person who would want to make an "easy" recipe the way JAG did -- with 25 ingredients just on the first page, and a five-minute dish that takes plenty of expertise and 3 hours and unusual ingredients to make.

P.S.: Yeah, Rory's video was so good I thought it would be impossible for Amy to win after that.