table talk / By Bob Doran

Chefs on the Tube

KEET’s North Coast Cuisine shows off local restaurants and food producers

(March 12, 2009)  Celebrity chefs are not new to television. Back in the day you had Julia Child, Jacques Pépin and Jeffrey Smith, aka The Frugal Gourmet. BBQ king Bobby Flay and the ragin’ Cajun Emeril Lagasse (from Massachusetts) have been around for a while. Same with the globetrotting New Yorker Anthony Bourdain with No Reservations (a favorite at our house).

Or maybe you prefer Rachael Ray, or the Brit cutie Jamie Oliver, or Ferndale homeboy Guy Fieri, the spiky-haired winner of The Next Food Network Star, who has become ubiquitous on that network. Of course you pretty much have to get cable and watch The Food Network and/or The Travel Channel to be familiar with today’s cooking shows.

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That changes this week as Humboldt County’s PBS affiliate KEET-TV gets into the cooking show game with North Coast Cuisine, a six-part series aiming to“entertain and inspire viewers.” The series, along with the one-shot program North Coast Visionaries, also helps celebrate KEET’s 40th year of public television on the North Coast.

“With North Coast Cuisine the idea was to have different chefs on cooking with local produce,” said KEET outreach director, Clare Reynolds, who put the series together with KEET production director Sam Greene.

“We wanted to try to highlight local restaurants, focus on what they’re doing,” said Greene. “We had them come into our studios and also went out into the field to look at a couple of different farms and the Farmers’ Market.”

“Sam is a cooking show fanatic,” Reynolds noted. “He watches them all. He and his wife make these fantastic dishes. So he had a lot of inspiration to draw from.”

This week’s series kick-off features Peter Jones and Marsha Lenz, owner-operators of Folie Douce in Arcata. Peter talks us through preparation of poke (pronounced poe-kay), a Hawaiian-style raw ahi tuna dish garnished with fried nori chips. He follows that with a savory version of crepes served with smoked salmon.

Jones says he was a bit nervous at first, but it doesn’t really show on screen. There was a limit on what he could do in the KEET studio kitchen, which is in fact something of a faux food facility. There’s a working stovetop but no oven and the sinks are not exactly functional. So poke seemed to be a good choice since there’s no cooking required. “And crepes are something I’ve made a thousand times so I figured that would work out OK,” said Jones.

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