Just when you thought the Food Network had sold its soul to the reality television devil (I'm talking to you, "The Next Food Network Star"), along comes the first bit of watchable original programming in quite awhile: "Healthy Appetite with Ellie Krieger".
Ellie who? Well, the Food Network has certainly saturated their commerical air time with her.... she's young, she's sexy (threatening to perhaps dethrone Giada "Food Babe" DeLaurentiis?), and she loves chocolate.... and entreats you to call the food police as she unwraps the foil of her chocolate bar.
The pitch? Looks like she's found the holy grail of cooking healthy.... yeah, yeah, she's a nutritionist, but she knows how to cook things that are good for you without removing the tasty stuff that is usually not so good for you. She's not cutting corners, and she tells us so: Hence, we have episodes where she's making triple chocolate cookies (without the usually nasty "good for you" fillers in chocolate baked goods like bananas) and scrambled eggs with avocado and buffalo chicken fingers with blue cheese dressing. She uses butter and mayonnaise. Bottom line: I salivate.
She's got a sexy coolness that is a refreshing reprieve from the high-on-diet-pills energy of Rachael Ray or the hedonistic butter psychosis of Paula Deen. She talks lovingly about her husband and daughter, sometimes parading the husband onscreen as she fills him with tasty meals. Her show is easy-going, thanks in part to her calm-yet-bubbly voice, and is instructional, thanks to the little tidbits we learn about correct portion sizes and the composition of vitamins in the food we eat. Bookending commerical breaks are atmospheric shots of her walking around New York City, for instance the Starbucks right at the gateway of St. Marks in the East Village, and I imagine myself running into her and following her home where she will make me delicious food. Maybe I'd just say hi instead. Or take covert pictures with my cell phone camera.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
more reasons for a Healthy Appetite
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4 comments:
You're obviously a food whore in the making.
When you move back here, I think we need to go to (1) cooking school and (2) bartending school. And then have lots of parties.
The anti-Paula Deen, eh? At least Food Network now has everybody covered.
Hey, Paula is comfort from way back in the day. It's nice to see some of those dishes for nostalgia's sake, but there's good reason why nobody cooks like that anymore and you can actually feel your arteries clogging up when you watch her.
But did you see the pictures of her drinking the melted butter? Not only will she one day die on camera, the woman is kind of a Grade A nutjob. Despite the giggly charm of her show (I must admit I do enjoy the woman sometimes), I knew she'd gone too far when she once deep fried biscuits, only to pull them hot from the oil and inject them with a nozzled bottle of melted butter.
Does she actually eat more than one bite of the fattier things that she plates? Seriously.
The butter drinking *had* to be a put on ; ) Just like that Giada episode and several of Rachel Ray's dishes that you know couldn't possibly taste decent, I doubt she consumes it all once the cameras are off.
There's no way, she would've had a dozen heart attacks by now. Like many radio talk show hosts, I think she does one thing and lives entirely another.
Thank you very much for the link, by the way. I linked you back.
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