​Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Stuffed: Food Hoarders, a one-hour special that sours as you watch it, Feb. 11 and 12 on the Cooking Channel.

Kudos to the Cooking Channel for showing food in as disgusting a light as possible, and for profiling people who should be physically barred from buying so much as a peach without supervision. Fuck all food, you know? It also deserves praise for ripping off an existing show so thoroughly you could fall asleep during one and wake up during the other without realizing your roommate came in, changed the channel, wrote on your face, and left.

But by focusing solely on food, can Stuffed: Food Hoarders offer the same rubbernecking TV as its whole-home crazy neighbor Hoarders?

Food Hoarders CAN! Sort of.

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Naked chefs can be Top Chefs too.

​Calling all food truck, nudist, and mini-pastry chefs, it's time to serve a slice of San Francisco to "reality" television.
Top Chef is casting for its 10th season of babelicious host Padma Lakshmi entertaining 2 million viewers by cutting her small sample servings into miniscule ones. Then chewing ... and chewing.

 What will be different on the show this season? Maybe your debut. Open calls for Top Chef contestants in San Francisco are Monday, Feb. 27, in SOMA's Kitchit at 848 Folsom from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

 For the Top Chef application, additional casting dates and more information, visit Bravo's website. Millionaire bachelors for Patti Stanger's matchmaking show are also in high demand. Although her horrible dating advice is not.

Millionaires shouldn't be lonely on Valentine's Day.

After the backlash from her last gay candidate, we're not sure why her application still encourages candidates of every sexuality. Maybe Stanger will advise another gay man to "put his pickle back in his pants."

If you are a single, millionaire chef who is miraculously eligible for both casting calls, forget Bravo and let us hook you up with someone more appealing -- you must be a very spectacular catch.

There truly is a show called Fat Chef.

​Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Fat Chef, a one-hour show about steamed vegetables, Thursdays at 10 p.m. on the Food Network.

In another effort to put even more distance between itself and food preparation so skilled it demands to be put on television, the Food Network rolls out Fat Chef, which is not about, as I had hoped, a shirtless and oiled Mario Batali storming across France with a Henckels, murdering geese for their livers and throwing virgin cheflings into pits of simmering madeira. Nor is it a show about the greatness of fat chefs. It's a show about the fatness of regular chefs, and how they jog to get rid of the fatness. A fucking weight-loss show. Called Fat Chef

Of course, having a weight-loss show ready to go in the pipe is a stroke of luck for the Food Network, because Paula Deen finally told the everyone she has diabetes, or the diabeetus, and the network can point triumphantly to this new weight-loss thing and say, "See? Fucking RIGHT. We got this HANDLED." And as much as I can slow clap this late-January crisis-management miracle, a fact remains: It's a weight-loss show. Weight-loss shows make me want to kill myself.

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She has ways of making him talk.

​Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off, a one-hour show about the debt ceiling, Sundays at 9 p.m. on the Food Network.

There used to be only A and B-list celebrities, divided by movies and television. Then television got worse, and Calista Flockhart (B) or someone sought inoculation from Richard Hatch (below B). Then television got horrendous, just flat-out murderous, and everybody called the new people "shitheads" until a script editor from Frasier remembered they were in the business of grading people and suggested "D-list."

Then there are the worst of the Ds, your competitors on Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off.

Well, not entirely. Cheech Marin is M-list, for marijuana, specifically the kind that can be rolled into a van (Up in Smoke). Actually, he's Beyond-list, since upon his death he'll get an obit in the Times, print edition, for his body of work 35 years ago, with pot.

But Alyssa Campanella, Summer Sanders, Aaron Carter, Joey Fatone, Taylor Dayne, Coolio, and Lou Diamond Phillips? Who the hell are two-thirds of these celebrities!

Coolio: "Cooking is therapy for me."
Taylor: "I can't believe I'm still here."
Summer: "I want to chef it up."
Lou: "The one weak point in my culinary arsenal is desserts."

Wrong, Lou! Your weak point is Rachael vs. Guy Celebrity Cook-Off.

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Here is a guy with a saw.

​ Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Ice Brigade, Fridays at 4 a.m. (fuck!) on the Food Network.

Ice Brigade is a show about ice carving, and if I didn't like ice carving so much all of a sudden I might have some pretty terrible things to say about it, because it's a show about ice carving and not, for example, food, on the Food Network.

I might have some other things to say, too, like about how the Food Network has clearly crossed the event horizon and is now just twiddling knobs and minding the ship, unaware that it is already dead, unaware that it is no longer a food network, unaware that it will soon relaunch as a reality-show garbage chute with an acronym for the title, much like the Learning Channel did when it realized it was no longer in the business of nurturing and educating, but of murder.

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They all want to kill each other.

​Check, Please! Bay Area, the KQED television show that takes three S.F. Bay Area residents and has them dine at each other's favorite restaurants and then report back on air, is looking for  people to go on TV and talk about food. More >>

Something she made turned out all right!

​Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Not My Mama's Meals, a half-hour psych pop quiz, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on the Cooking Channel.

In Not My Mama's Meals, the Cooking Channel convinces Paula Deen's son Bobby to remake her death-food in a manner that would kill fewer people in the near term. I should confess to having never watched an entire Paula Deen show, because, well, Paula Deen. But I know what people say about her. They say, "Butter." They say, "You're talking about Paula Deen? Butter." It's like a meme for people who don't know that memes should be funny.

I also know what Anthony Bourdain said about Paula Deen, via TV Guide:

"The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it's OK to eat food that is killing us."

One more time:

"The worst, most dangerous person to America is clearly Paula Deen. If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it's OK to eat food that is killing us."

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Misha Tsukerman, via Rice Paper Scissors

​Anthony Bourdain loves to come to San Francisco on a travel show budget, make fun of its citizens for being snobby, weirdo hippies, and then declare he loves it here and eat all our food. It's his pattern. He was in fine form when he visited with The Layover, his new Travel Channel show where he spends one or two days in a city to "unleash an unpredictable story about a place, a people and their food."

His episode focusing on San Francisco airs tonight, and we talked all about the big man with featured guests Valerie Luu and Katie Kwan of Vietnamese pop-up Rice Paper Scissors.

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Bama Glama: One part cupcakes, one part "Break Stuff"

​Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking. This week: Bama Glama, a half-hour show not about food, Fridays at 4 a.m. (yes!) on the Food Network.

With Bama Glama, the Food Network pivots from food-centric shows and embraces the broad-audience lifestyle-guide reality-show premise, with a six-show run about a wedding party planner in Alabama who helps young brides fabricate and then solve small conflicts that could ruin the big day.

You see what I did there? I tried to make Bama Glama not sound like a hat of crap that doesn't belong anywhere near the Food Network or perhaps not even near the TV at all. I think I did a pretty good job. Someone once wrote something like that explaining the show to the FN president, I'm quite sure of it.

Here's some more:

In host Scot Wedgeworth, the Food Network has a fun Southern dethgoth in spiked sunglasses and black clothes wandering around 1997 looking for rap-metal. Imagine what might splatter across Alabama if Criss Angel and Mystery were shat out of a pack mule after Tom Colicchio threw it down a hillside.

Rearrange those words and you get, well, the same thing.

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Each week we take a quick, cautious look at what's going on with televised cooking.

Have you seen Guy Fieri's kitchen-fort on Guy's Big Bite? I love this guy. Here are some photos from the set.

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Le grand kitchen-fort. Go ahead, whisper "Awesome sauce." See how that feels. More >>