Crock Pot with a Generous Serving of Pretension
Get a pencil, here’s the recipe for cooking-show success as dished up on MasterChef Australia. Channel Ten recommends the meals should be served six days a week; Monday to Friday at the dinner time of 7pm, and a double portion at 7.30pm on Sunday night. The ingredients should be fresh but familiar, and served al dente. The setting must be pretentious and serious, with a light base that won’t discourage those who think a meal is just for eating. The kitchen should be shiny and pointy, and the dining room filled with ostentation.
For an entrée, serve a good-looking host; in this instance, we use a Sarah. Make sure your Sarah has long, tanned legs, a perfect nose and a generous helping of breast. The Sarah is just a garnish, so it won’t add to your meal but will make it presentable to the diners. The entrée should also contain a hardened chef, a ‘been there, done that’ rough diamond, Gary, who will make being a chef seem a choice of profession that just pipped earth moving. Make sure that the Gary you concoct has the kind of passion for food normally reserved for a die-hard football fan on a twenty-year losing streak.
The main course should contain plenty of fresh meat; preferably, virgin cuts fed on television-chef fame and arrogance with large gonads. Put all the ingredients in a house together, mix generously and let the natural spices bounce off each other to create a drama hot pot, then serve with a viewer loyalty to their favourite cook. When you’re ready, divide the fresh meat into teams and set them off against each other. Cook at high heat for twenty-five minutes, stirring occasionally, and bring them to the boil for fifteen minutes of fame. Let the bitterness and pretensions rise to the top and skim them at the end of the meal.
Finish up with a dessert of tongue-licking, lip-pursing, affected food critics. Three Judges Dessert consists of scowling, ingesting middle-aged men called Gary, Matt and George, placed at a long covered table, with clasped hands and an over-abundant consideration of all things gastronomical. Make sure one of the judges looks like Doctor Octopus from the Spider-Man movie, wrapped in a cravat on a bed of blubber. The Doctor Octopus judge will give the show its flavour, so let him sit for a while, and then give him plenty of air time so that his jowly procrastinations will enhance the weight of your final decision. The secret is, above all, to use food-colouring language with phrases like ‘Just a hint of....’, ‘underlying flavour’ and ‘let the food speak for itself’, so that your meal will appear to have more volume than is actually on the plate.
Garnish the meal with generous helpings of advertisements. Make sure there is a disproportionate amount of Channel Ten self-promotion, even for the very show you’re actually watching, so that the diner must consume refried program. Drizzle with saucy lifestyle advertisements about food and shopping, and irony-free weight-loss commercials.
This piece originally appeared in ‘The Big Issue’.
Matt Quartermaine is a Melbourne-based writer and comedian. With Matt Parkinson, Tim Smith and Andrew Goodone, he produces ‘The Chat’, a weekly podcast in which four grown men in comfortable chairs spill their guts. Click here to download it for free at iTunes.
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