Top Chef idea

You know what I want to see? A spin-off of Top Chefs called "Home Cooks" or something.

You know how people who are really good home cooks sometimes are told they should open a restaurant? The purpose of the show would be to help someone do just that.

I'd want it structured more like TC Masters, with qualifying rounds and then "playoffs" and finals, and with a rating system like theirs as well. I'd also like to see some more generous time limits, or the addition of sous chefs or something else to acknowledge that home cooks aren't always the fastest preppers, and take the focus off of speed a bit in favor of letting them see what they could do. And the prize would presumably be both money to go towards opening a restaurant (or catering business, maybe) and the aid of someone who knows the ins and outs of opening restaurants to help them set up their place and hire the right people and such.

The challenges could be similar to what they do now, so long as they got the extra time or extra prep help I mentioned above. Plus I'd probably want to give them basic reference guides—not recipe books, exactly, but things like "this is what goes in basic sauces at these ratios" and "here's a basic white cake mix", and "here's a list of basic substitutions". A bit of a cheat sheet seems reasonable for people who don't spend as much time with cooking as professionals do.

Anyhow, I think that'd be interesting to see.

Not a Top Chef

I'm not watching Top Chef this season. I freely admit I got bored of it, which seems weird because I really do love cooking shows. Maybe I just like them better when there's less manufactured drama. I find Iron Chef (the real one, not the American version) and Alton Brown pretty entertaining, for instance.

That doesn't mean I'm totally disinterested, though. I'm reading the recaps over at Television without Pity, which I do for shows I've seen as well because they're frequently really funny and point out things I missed. Right now, because I'm bored, I'm noodling through some of the old recaps, and I just got up to season 3's "reinvent a classic home dish as an updated, healthier dish" challenge, which I really liked.

Now, I'm not a professional chef and never will be, but I do like to cook, and I'm fairly good at it. I'm actually a lot more familiar with the classic home dishes than upscale food, in fact, and cooking healthily is usually a goal of mine (nothing wrong with occasional unhealthy food, mind you). So when they did this I thought about what I would make, and I'm thinking about it again now that I'm reading the recap. I don't know if I'd be able to come up with this stuff on the fly, but then, I'm not aiming to be a contestant. I haven't tried any of these (though some use elements I've used before). I actually am planning to try some of them since typing it up made me hungry. :D I think, though, they'd work reasonably well.