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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
When you can't eat another bite this holiday, tune in for the perky perfection of "Giada at Home," the leisure-class delights of "Barefoot Contessa," or the down-home grub of "Big Daddy's House."
By Heather Havrilesky
Read more: TV, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, I Like to Watch, Food and Travel
Dec. 21, 2008 | The holidays are all about eating too much. When we're not stuffing our gullets with breads and pies and roast beasts, we're nibbling on gingerbread houses and sifting through cookie tins and scarfing down eggnog festooned with enormous whipped cream peaks, ideally while shuffling around the kitchen in socks and sweat pants, moving only as much as is necessary to secure the next crunchy, sugary snack.
Personally, I aim to gain 5-8 pounds over each holiday break. Without setting such ambitious goals for myself, I don't fully wallow in a piggishly festive state, which means I'll return to work in early January feeling slightly cheated. Besides, how can anyone sit down to write their New Year's resolutions without feeling disgustingly fat and unshowered and slightly queasy after a full two weeks of overindulging in greasy foods and boozy drinks and bad holiday TV?
Even when you're eating around the clock, though, there's going to be that stray hour or so where you can't shove another sugar cookie in your mouth. That's when you'll need to turn your attention to the Food Network, where cheerful, good-looking people who would never pad around the house in dirty socks fix ambitious dishes like stuffed Cornish hens and anchovy and arugula pizzas and hazelnut chocolate pies while chatting amiably with the camera. Not only do cooking shows provide just enough distraction from the pesky, prattling family members around you, but all of that delicious food (that you'd never have the patience to cook for yourself) will warm you up for your next enormous meal. And besides, watching all of those clean, detail-oriented, energetic humans working so hard and talking so fast will make you feel absolutely sluggish and overheated and filthy and wormlike and revolting by comparison.
Which is the goal, after all.
Golly, Giada!
Of course, when it comes to making mortal humans feel ugly, sullen and incompetent, Giada De Laurentiis is the reigning queen.
Apparently, instead of learning to cook from big, hairy men, there's a hefty segment of the population that would prefer to take culinary instructions from one of the hot girls from "90210." In addition to her Food Network shows, "Everyday Italian," "Behind the Bash," "Giada's Weekend Getaways," "Giada in Paradise" and her appearances on the "Today" show, Giada has a new show, "Giada at Home" (1 p.m. Saturdays on the Food Network), which seems to consist mostly of close-ups of Giada's flawless face, her shiny brunet mane, her glossed lips and her shimmering white teeth, interspersed with close-ups of Giada's perfect hands, cutting up onions or shredding cheese. Why do those onions look so much better than onions have ever looked before? How do they shoot this show, and why does it make everything look so sexy?
No wonder Giada seems so incredibly happy all of the time -- she lives in some gorgeous alternate universe with her pretty baby and an alarmingly regular-looking husband named Todd. Giada must've inherited some serious cash from her grandfather, producer Dino De Laurentiis, too, because she appears to have one of those backyards that they feature in Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware catalogs: miles and miles of perfect green lawn and rolling hills in the background, an immaculate, sparkling blue swimming pool in the foreground. The opening credits show us Todd and Giada, holding their adorable baby and strolling along the Pacific Ocean in what looks like the Big Sur area but could also be Malibu -- either way it's a place where only beautiful, wealthy people live. But how did average, everyday Todd manage to marry such a stunning Italian babe, one who just la-la-loves to make him Gruyere and sausage omelets whenever his urge for eggs strikes? ("Todd loves eggs sooo much!" Giada confides to the camera, like she and the camera are dishing on their husbands while getting their perfect nails done.)
Don't hate Giada because she's so beautiful, though. Hate her because she says annoyingly perky things as she's making her gourmet "breakfast for dinner," like, "That's the fun of cooking, is that you get to taste as you go along!" and (on grating cheese) "Good for your muscles, too, gives you a nice workout!" and "This is really good cheese!" and "Give it a quick little stir!" Basically, Giada is so abnormally thrilled about every step of the cooking process that it's tough not to dislike her and the photogenic red peppers and parsley bunches and eggy mixtures that she rode in on.
Next, throw in a few quick shots of Giada arranging the throw pillows on her pristine outdoor furniture from Pottery Barn or Restoration Hardware, then walking past a surfboard on her way inside and smiling warmly to her bestest friend, the camera, and saying, "It smells sooo good in here! Mmm, it's that Gruyere cheese!" and not only don't you want to get any more hints of Giada's unbearably perfect life, but you also don't want to cook pancetta and cinnamon waffles with her, either. You'd prefer to cook bacon waffles, which will make you fat, with a big, hairy fat guy who spends too much of his time shoving pasta into his big mouth to screw around with outdoor furniture. Christ, but that's not the end of it. Once Giada's done cooking, Todd arrives home and asks if there's time to surf before dinner, but there isn't time, Giada cheerfully informs him. Then she serves up the bacon waffles and the omelet and Todd slurps it up by his sparkling swimming pool like a pig in shit. (With so much shiny loveliness in the mix, I can't resist mentioning that Todd looks about 50 to Giada's 25. Unbelievably, though, he's just 45 and she's 38. See, a positive mental attitude does make you look prettier, just like that bitchy, wrinkled home economics teacher once told you.) Now Giada is lying and saying that she got sooo lucky because their baby, Jade, took a nap early, so she was able to cook all day "and even relax a little" -- at this point Giada flashes the camera a kooky "Can you believe that? Me, a busy working mom, relaxing a little?!" face, as if her baby wasn't screaming in the arms of some poorly paid production assistant all afternoon while she made chirpy but impeccable love to her best friend, the camera. Todd has nothing to say to this, really. He's just psyched that his wife has such a fine-looking rack and she made him an espresso topped with vanilla whipped cream to polish off their tasty breakfast-for-dinner meal.
Now that we all feel dirty inside from witnessing so much sugary perfection in such extreme close-up for 30 minutes, it's probably high time to escape Giada's purgatorial grasp. It's going to take a "Molto Mario" marathon to cleanse our palates of this one!
Next page: Big Daddy's near-lethal booze bomb
Food TV gets real
Finale wrap-up: "Top Chef"
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