A Mild Rant on Cooking Shows

This is supposed to be humorous, so don't think I am REALLY down on cooking shows.

But.

For fun, we looked on the web for other "lasagna videos", and they were all short.  I understand that as most TV shows can't spend 35 minutes showing how to make lasagna.

But I had to chuckle because AS USUAL, all those professional videos show a chef in a spotless kitchen, with the ingredients for the dish measured carefully into charming, clean bowls.

Let me say that cooking shows don't reflect the reality of our lives.

If I had some nice (or paid) person to measure ingredients, chop up veggies and meat, and put them in beautiful bowls, I could do some M...E...A...N  cooking around here.  Yes, I could possibly be a gourmet cook if I had somebody doing the hard work of cleaning, chopping, and measuring.

Cooking in our house is SO not like that.  There is a constant struggle against entropy as mail, dishes, and various sundry foodstuffs creep up onto the counters. 

There are dirty dishes everywhere, or at least it seems that way.  Sometimes clean dishes are not as clean as they should be, and need to be rewashed.

The ingredients are scattered about and need to be retrieved.  We try hard to have what we need on hand, but occasionally we mess up and discover we desperately need some tomato paste and the store is 10 minutes. away.  (For the record, when that kind of catastrophe happens, we improvise.  I don't run to the store for one item.  That is just too stressful and annoying.)

While cooking, there are between 0 and 8 children underfoot.  2 or 3 is probably the average.

Yes, cooking in our household is way more challenging than in any cooking show.

And that's fine.  It's real.  It's life.  We are teaching our older children how cooking actually works.

For a little light entertainment, I might watch a cooking show.  But it is more like watching Fantasy Island than really teaching me anything useful :-).