Cooking on the Radio

Don’t know where or how you learned to cook, but there are lots of variables to fire and steel and dead animals or plucked vegetables.

There are books that tell you step-by-step what to do. There are television shows that talk you through with interesting camera shots until the lenses fogs up from the steam.

The best, from what I’ve heard, is straight from the home kitchen. Personal direction from grandma for the secret family recipe ingredients can never be duplicated.

To smell and taste the results of your classes will no only sustain your existence but can be passed down for generations to come. A cooking lesson in your own kitchen is a tattoo.

Yet there are these cooking shows on radio?

I enjoy radio to listen to congressional inquiries or interviews without being distracted by camera shots of mouths moving and lots of bored people. Music is certainly good on the radio; sports not so much. Listening to a fashion show or a painting instruction just doesn’t work.

So why do we have radio cooking shows?

I’ve watched enough Rachael Ray talking about ‘Smell-O’-Vision’ on her show but as close as I get to the screen, I can’t get a whiff. Besides watching other people eating leaves one hungry. Look through the window of a restaurant.

Sure the radio has the sound effects of flame and steam and the clink of plates and the announcer expressing how wonderful it taste but a radio cooking show is somewhat lacking. If you can imagine the process, you might get a watery mouth, but it only makes you want to go into the kitchen, rummage through your cupboards and find whatever you have on hand to mix up trying to duplicate the joy you are hearing on the radio.

Open box. Remove plastic. Place on a microwave safe plate. Close the door. Press high for 6 minutes. Beware! Plate will be hot. Consume. Throw recycled materials in the proper bin.

Or call take-out.