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Channeling Your Inner 'Top Chef'
Unless you’ve been dead, locked in a closet--or letting your brain turn to mush watching episodes of The Hills the last few years--you may have noticed that slapping together our daily bread has been elevated from the ordinary to almost super-star status.

There will be no more reheated leftovers or delivery pizza. Not if the executives of the latest addition to our cable and satellite line-ups have anything to say about it. It is time to rise above the hum-drum and into the stratosphere of do-it-yourself haute cuisine. That’s fancy-schmancy chef parlance for those of us McDonald’s-eating heathen-types.

The new channel, called Cooking Channel, fired up at the end of May. Targeted at a younger, more hip crowd, Cooking Channel aims to bring out the inner Top Chef in all of us. Kicking and screaming, if necessary.

Moms, dads or anyone whose idea of an elegant meal involves paper plates, frozen dinners and an unhealthy fascination with the family microwave need not apply.

Over the last decade (if not longer) cooking has come of age. No longer the playground of the rich and famous, what we once would have called “fancy” restaurants are popping up everywhere. Some within easy reach of the average Joe’s pocketbook, some not.
               
How provincial
Thanks to the likes of popular cooking personality Guy Fieri and his equally popular Food Network showcase Diner’s, Drive-ins and Dives down-home, regional cooking has been elevated to haute cuisine status as well. In a very provincial, affordable way, of course.

BBQ ribs, as a food group, have attained superstar status and it seems everyone has a favorite restaurant that serves them “just right”. Peasant food is all the rage. Pasties are next.

Want good bread, make your own. There’s a show for that.

Even I’m joining the fray by posting an easy cinnamon swirl bread recipe on this site. (To be up soon!) And trust me, baking bread is not my forte. For that reason alone, Julia is probably spinning in her grave.

The movement to reinvent cooking and give it back to the masses, is a good thing. Seeing it prepared on tv in easy to do steps makes it comfortable to accomplish at home for family and friends. Even if it’s only once a week. Gathering in the kitchen and sitting down together at the dinner table can only strengthen a family.

Proof is in the (family) pudding
It worked for my family. Even when the girls and I became older, moving from grade school to junior high, and junior high to high school (even spending summers home during our college years). Sure, we may have cultivated and hung out with a new “crew” outside our family dynamic but dinner at home was the focal point of our day.

In essence, we were forced to interact with one another. As Martha would say, “That’s a good thing!” The Schutte clan is a boisterous family. With the parents trading off as co-ring masters, my sisters and I unwittingly revealed the good, the bad and the scholastic while wolfing down homemade meatloaf or mom’s still secret spaghetti sauce over noodles.

Sharing food together has an uncanny way of making that happen.

Not every day is going to be a Food TV or a Cooking Channel day. Most days are going to be a challenge just getting out the door and on the way to work or school. Without freaking. Learning a new recipe from a tv show on a cooking network and presenting it to family and friends isn’t necessarily going to change that. But it might make it a little easier!

We could all use a break. Allez cuisine!