Since I’ve angered just about every overly sensitive special interest group lately, I might as well go hog-wild and provoke the most sensitive of them all: Crazed fans of skinny female celebrity chefs.
You know the kind of chef I’m talking about. They wear size 0 designer clothes. They never get a speck of oil on them. Their hair is perfect. They never sweat on TV.
Sure, their food looks fine, but the chefs themselves look like little sprites who’ve never dared to dip a crust of bread in their own sauce.
Coincidentally, celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis is in town, promoting a new line of affordable cookware to her legion of adoring Giadanistas.
Here at the office, some people are excited about the pixie chef’s visit. They’re almost as wiggly as the time Barack Obama came by to say hello on his way to the White House.
“Are you going to see Giada?” asked one eager co-worker. “She’s so petite! Isn’t she just adorable?” “Giada’s coming! Giada’s coming!” said her fellow Giadaphile. “You’re going to see her, aren’t you?” No.
“But isn’t she adorable?” they said, teasing me.
To you she may be adorable, but for me, there’s only my wife and sons.
Besides, she’s much too skinny to be a proper cook. Cooks require heft, to prove they eat their own creations. And I’m as suspicious as the next fat guy about this skinny-chef trend.
But my wife and two sisters-in- law have made it clear they just love Giada.
“Leave Giada alone,” chided my wife. “She’s perfect. She has great recipes, and she doesn’t tell you to use 300 fancy ingredients that you can’t find.”
Honey, everybody knows that you can’t trust a skinny chef. “You don’t want to go there,” she warned.
But I’m compelled to charge forward. I just can’t seem to stop angering people. The other day, I compared a Chicago politician to a wolf, and a wolf-loving reader chewed my ear off for an hour for demeaning the noble, yet cunning, predators. (The wolves, not the politicians.) Then, I foolishly poked a stick at the bloggers. Now they’re fiercely snapping at my ankles like a pack of bloodthirsty, feral Chihuahuas, just because I said they tend to blog from their mommy’s basement.
For days, they’ve been tweeting and viciously “smacking me down” and whatever other tortures they visit upon their sworn enemies in the magical universe called the blogosphere.
Egad! Imagine if I’d left in the part about how they pick lint from their navels while waiting for Mommy to fix them a nice lunch of cream of tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches? Which offers this fat guy a rather smooth and subtle segue back to food and the skinny-chef thing.
It’s not just the skinny female chefs. I don’t trust skinny male chefs either, especially if they’re dressed like teenage vampires in “Twilight” with skinny black jeans and tight T-shirts and ample hair product.
When I think of a chef I can trust, I think of cooks with gravitas, some weight on their bones, women who clearly are no strangers to the knife and fork.
Cooks such as the late Julia Child, who was something of a counterspy during World War II, coaxing information from her dinner guests as easily as she extracted flavor from beef bones.
Or Ina Garten, who was an economist in the Carter White House but left to do something useful. She eventually became the “Barefoot Contessa” on TV and now uses even more butter than Julia.
And what about Lidia Bastianich, host of “Lidia’s Italy”? She’s obviously no size 0. She grew up in a refugee camp in Trieste after World War II, when skinny was not stylish.
Lidia’s hair may not be perfect like Giada’s, she doesn’t wear skinny teenage vampire jeans like that egomaniacal Bobby Flay, and her waist is no longer as thin as a wasp’s.
But she’s a poet when discussing Italian artisanal foods, breads, olives, various cheeses. And who can forget the time she rolled up her trouser legs to wade stumpily into the chilly Adriatic, and filled a basket with fresh clams? All Lidia has to do is put some oil in a pan, toss in red pepper flakes, those clams of hers and a little wine, and men of all ages line up to propose marriage.
Same with Ina Garten. When the Contessa works her magic with scallops and cream and more butter, you feel like driving to the Hamptons to camp out in her driveway.
What’s more, Ina always says incredibly sensuous things like, “Jeffrey just loves cheese.” Or, she’ll taste her sauce, get that smoky glint in her eye, and purr, “I can’t wait till Frank gets here,” and you just know it’s true.
So you won’t see me down there with the Giadanistas.
Do they make skinny jeans in XXL?
Denver Post columnist Tina Griego is on special assignment.
