#cookslikeagirl

While watching this past Superbowl, I noticed the subject of the Always commercial. It was their “Like a Girl” campaign, which champions female strength and a thought hit me.

First, some backstory about me. I do not like many competition cooking shows. Mostly, I dislike watching other people’s conflicts and I get extremely uncomfortable, even when it is on tv but there is another giant reason I have issues with many cooking shows.

“Always” and “Never” are words that tend to get one into trouble and Lord knows I get myself into enough of that without help. However, there is a certain type of contestant that appears on these reality cooking shows that drives me up the wall.

It is the female cook or chef whose first line is, “and I’m going to show them that a girl can cook as well if not better than the boys.”

Oh sweet cheeks – I have known enough bad ass chefs in my life to realize that, if you have to tell someone you’re gonna cook them under a table, you may want to make room for yourself down there. Kinda like the Margaret Thatcher quote, “Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”

Most chefs do not care what equipment you have under your chef coats and aprons. Most chefs care about that offal you have in your noggin. We want to know how well you can actually cook. We want to know if you understand the science behind the food; if you respect the food. We want to know if you actually care about your carefully applied makeup that’s now streaming down your face over a steam table or if you can just wipe it off with your sleeve and move along. The question is, can you hang on a line?

My main concern with this type of person is that they are spending their time and energy in the wrong place. A chef’s food will always speak the most about them. I can talk about food with the best of them but my super quiet husband’s cooking blows mine out of the water.

The little girls in the commercial showed what “throwing like a girl” meant to them… using all of their energy, aiming, and launching a ball as far as possible; nothing like the seemingly “sissified” version the parodying adults in the beginning of the ad were portraying. Same thing goes for the culinary world.

Now, if I take what the Always campaign is working towards and apply it to the world of food, we might get a slogan that reads: #cookslikeagirl

What this means is that one part has not a thing to do with the other but if you care to test out my food, you may realize I have a long line of female chefs I look up to, constantly learn from, and aspire to honor with my cooking. But I’m not gonna tell you that. You’re going to taste it.

And to those young girls cooking brownies over light bulbs in their Easy Bake Ovens, reading Julia Child’s cookbooks, standing at their parent’s apron strings, or watching April Bloomfield on Mind of a Chef, I want them to know, we’ve got your back. Show me what you’ve got… not just what you are.