Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 12, 1993 TAG: 9404210004
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ALMENA HUGHES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The event, billed as a "dazzling display of holiday cooking," will feature elegant dishes prepared by top-notch area chefs and randomly sampled by people in the audience. The Homestead in Hot Springs will present a roast loin of pork stuffed with apricot; Mountain Lake Hotel's entry will be a London broil with two sauces. The Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon will do a seafood dish in filo dough, and Roanoke's Radisson Patrick Henry Hotel will offer a roast goose with cranberry/walnut stuffing and poached pears.
Johnson and Bly won't do any stove work, but will serve up plenty of the blend of banter that has so popularized them on their syndicated TV show, "Cookin' Cheap." The show, which is produced by Blue Ridge Public Television and seen in 95 markets nationwide, will begin its 14th consecutive season on the air in November.
"By the end of this season we will have done 310 half-hour programs and been on longer than any other cooking show in continuous production," Johnson stated matter-of-factly. "If you started at midnight and watched one program every half-hour, it would take six and a half straight days to watch them all. We tried to once, but after a while we just glazed over."
Bly and Johnson were at their publicist's office at the WBRA-TV studios in Roanoke for an interview on a day not usually delegated to ``Cookin' Cheap'' production. Although technically they allot 27 minutes weekly from their busy schedules in which to tape the show, the two said that many more hours go into its preparation. Back in the days when they weren't even sure if the show would run from week to week and, in fact, during its first five or six years, the recipes were all original. But now, they mostly rely on the up to 700 recipes a year sent in by viewers as far away as Alaska, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Canada and Mexico. A companion booklet containing the recipes used during each 13-week season is available.
Johnson said he and Bly read each submission and find some astounding differences in the ways the recipes are presented. "And we've got these really bizarre demographics," he added. "Unlike any other show we know of, we're really, really big with kids - I mean ones who write and draw us pictures in crayon. And we get a lot of mail from elderly people."
There's also a fair-sized following among college students, many of whom never learned how to cook and now need some basic recipes for survival; and a few people on the West Coast, who seem to think the show, which airs there at midnight, is some artsy, underground offering.
Bly said the mail tells them a lot about what their viewers want and need. "One lady wrote that she'd appreciate it if we could find recipes that require fewer utensils. It was signed so and so from a women's prison," he said.
Laban and Johnson said they've received several letters from prisons, where inmates are actually cooking in their cells with products like soups in a cup. While most of the recipes used on Cookin' Cheap aren't quite that basic, simple, inexpensive, easy-to-find fare was the premise when the show started, and it's still a large part of what makes it popular.
Another draw is its sense of immediacy. The shows are taped live, with no stops, no edits and no back-up ingredients. Most of the time, Bly and Johnson don't pretest the recipes, so they're usually as surprised as anyone at the outcome.
"People love it when we have disasters on the air," Bly said. Like the cake that came out looking like a giant cow pie, or the gorgeous cookies that were hard as rocks and prone to burn on the bottom. Of course, if they see a wrong ingredient or measurement coming, Johnson and Bly warn the viewers and tell how to correct it. They've done whole shows on correcting recipes' mistakes.
The two make no pretense of having formal training in cooking. In their "real jobs" Johnson is special events coordinator for the city of Roanoke and Bly runs an advertising agency. They also have co-hosted a monthly radio talk show on WROV for 10 years and are involved with numerous civic and community causes.
When they do don their cooks' caps, though, they blithely work side by side - almost but never quite colliding. They throw things around, imprecisely measure ingredients, substitute what's at hand for fancy utensils, and toss out wisecracks and comments along with the vegetable scraps, meat-fat trimmings and emptied soup cans.
"We've even been known to burst into the same song simultaneously for no reason on the air," Bly said.
It's not promised, but attendees might witness such a spontaneous eruption of song during "Puttin' On the Ritz!"
It is promised that for a contribution of $20 for station members or $25 for nonmembers, the audience will watch the chefs prepare their dishes; be eligible for drawings to sample the dishes and receive door prizes; and receive a cookbook that includes the chefs' recipes and submissions from area cooks. Proceeds will be used to buy programming for Blue Ridge Public Television.
\ Puttin' on the Ritz! Hollins College Theatre, 9 a.m. - noon, Oct. 23. For reservations or information, call 344-0991 or (800) 221-0991.
by CNB