Mary Roach - My Planet

I recently came across a TV show called The Naked Chef .You probably all knew this, but the Naked Chef wears clothes. He is no more naked than the Galloping Gourmet was galloping. He’s just a British guy cooking.

“They call it that because he uses simple, fresh ingredients—the food’s not all gussied up,” said my husband, Ed, settling in beside me on the couch.

“Aha.” I picked up the remote.

Ed grabbed my wrist. “What are you doing? Emeril’s coming up.”

Do you recall the look on Mia Farrow’s face when she peers into the cradle at the end of Rosemary’s Baby? Picture that on me. I was about to learn that my husband, watcher of sports and wearer of tool belt, has been checking out the Food Network—daily. Ed works at a newspaper, where they’re allowed to have TVs so that they can keep abreast of breaking news, such as Martha Stewart visiting an asparagus farm. Lately, his set has been tuned to the Food Network.

We sat in silence as the Naked Chef made monkfish kebabs. He pronounced the last syllable “babs” not “bobs,” and instead of skewers, he was using rosemary sprigs. Adding to the confusion, our chap insisted on giving ingredients in ounces and pints.

“They translate the amounts for you on the recipe you can print out,” Ed reassured me while at the same time alarming me deeply, for this meant that he had been visiting the Food Network website. He went and got a Naked Chef pizza dough recipe. “One pint” had been helpfully converted to “568 milliliters.” It would be simpler to just move to England.

It took the Naked Chef all of three minutes to ready his kebabs. Here is the seductive deceit of cooking shows. The ingredients have all been washed and diced and set aside in a dozen tiny glass bowls. No one is ever shown tidying up afterward and ruining her manicure washing tiny glass bowls. Ed made an amazing roasted chicken and dumpling soup over the holidays, but because Tyler Florence appeared to make it in 20 minutes, Ed miscalculated, and we ended up eating shortly before midnight. The cleanup brigade is still at it.

I explained this to Ed while the commercials were on. A woman was demonstrating a coffee mug with a built-in blender at the bottom to froth milk so you don’t have to buy a milk steamer, but you have to drink out of a blender.

Ed tried to make the point that the shows aren’t just educational, they’re entertaining. Unfortunately for him, the network was at that moment broadcasting a segment about whipped dessert-topping strategies. A woman was crowning a piece of pie with a “rippled dollop.”

“There is no dark side to this dollop,” said the woman, and you couldn’t argue with her there.

Emeril was on next. Emeril Live is one of the Food Network’s most popular shows. It’s based on the daytime talk-show format: a sound stage, an excitable studio audience—even a house band. But in place of witty, attractive celebrities and a funny monologue, you get a middle-aged man cooking.

Today Emeril had taken the camera backstage for a tour of his pantry: “Over here we got the snail dishes, the ramekins, the bread pudding cups.” Ed and I recently videotaped the contents of our home for insurance purposes. The tape features Ed narrating as the camera pans from one closet shelf to the next: “Extra pillows, place mats. This is a sewing machine…” I’m thinking we could use this tape to launch our own entertainment network: the Storage Channel.

Setting aside the issue of whether these shows are entertaining, I raised one final point. The irony, the dark side to this dollop, is that with people watching Emeril three times a day, no one’s got time to cook. To prove me wrong, Ed made Food Network crab cakes and broccoli rabe with anchovies. He made them fast, and he made them amazing. I am eating humble pie, only this time I know how to top it in an attractive and professional-looking manner.

My father-in-law turned 80 this year, and there was a big party in South Florida. A few months beforehand, I decided to use up some frequent flier miles and go. I called United, because they’ve filed for Chapter 11 and I wanted to get rid of my miles before they get to Chapter 12, which is the chapter where they cut out 70 percent of their routes and start serving Kool-Aid and salami ends.

I gave the frequent flier man the date. There was nothing into Fort Lauderdale, nothing into West Palm Beach. Perhaps it was a blackout date. Frequent Flier Plans, as you know, have more blackout dates than Anna Nicole Smith. It certainly wasn’t a holiday, unless you count Bunsen Burner Day. But this hardly merits a blackout.

Bunsen burners may well get the day off, may well wish to go and visit their relatives, but, tragically, FAA regulations prohibit Bunsen burners on airplanes.

There was a flight into Miami, which I said I’d take. I’ll rent a car, I said. I’ve got lots of those free rental car certificates that the frequent flier programs send you to make you feel better about having to fly into the wrong city on the wrong day. Then again, there’s a reason I have lots of these. I can’t find anyplace that’ll honor one. I’ll walk up to the counter and hand the woman my certificate, and she’ll start shaking her head. “Today is Wednesday,” she’ll say slowly and with fraying patience, as though talking to a small driver’s-license-bearing child. “This coupon is for the third Friday of a month ending in E . It says right here it must be used before National Foot Health Day yet after the start of the Tule Elk rut season. Besides, we have nothing left but locomotives, and this coupon isn’t good for those.”

“Oh, one thing,” said the United Man. “The Miami flight is on the day before you want to leave. Is that okay? And I see it leaves out of San Jose, not San Francisco. Does that work for you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Oh, one thing. My credit card is expired, so I was going to pay you in Betty Crocker coupons. Does that work for you? And I’ll be traveling with a family of Bunsen burners. Is that okay?”

The man from United had an idea. He said that if I cashed in 40,000 miles instead of 25,000 miles, there would be more seats available. This would put me in the No Restrictions Category. Unfortunately, it would also put me in the Gave Up a Free Trip to Hawaii Category.

He found me a flight into Fort Lauderdale, and then he said, “There is one stopover. In Chicago.” Unless you are trying to draw Anna Nicole Smith with your flight pattern, you don’t fly up to Chicago and back down to get to Florida. Clearly we had moved on to Chapter 12. We were right on the brink of Chapter 13, where the CEO sells the company to Air Burundi and you’re out of luck unless you happen to be traveling to Bujumbura, and even then you’re going to have a plane change in Chicago.

“Okay,” I said to the United Man. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that I decide to do this. Let’s say I trade in my free trip to Hawaii for the opportunity to spend 12 hours with my knees inside a stranger’s kidneys, eating embalmed chicken and breathing last year’s air. What does the return look like?”

The return looked like an ad for prescription-strength pain reliever. It was one of the busiest days of the year, the man said. All the flights were overbooked. For the Sunday I planned to return was the last day of Spring Break. Spring Break, as you probably know, is a week-long gathering of American college students, similar in many ways to the Tule Elk rut season.

There were no flights at all out of South Florida. I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my frequent flier miles, except possibly to my therapist, where there would at least be more legroom.