Oh yum, delish Jo is coming back
Just when TV is bulging with shows that render cooking a competitive cauldron of pan-rattling stress, teary dramas, stony judgments, politicised scoring, tense smackdowns, screamed countdowns, with the most miserable of margins between being a success or sent home – here comes Jo Seager.
She’s not big on that malarky. Her approach is easy-peasy, even in these . . . erm . . . intensey-wensy times.
Once again she is headed to Invercargill for an October 14 fundraiser for Hospice Southland, combined with the launch of her latest book, Better than a Bought One, which seeks to take the stress out of something the cooking drama shows would delight in making nerve-racking – catering for large groups of people.
The intention is to help make hosting a party a matter of minimum effort and maximum effect.
She’s had her time as a TV celebrity cook, albeit in the days before there was such public inquiry into whose kitchen rules, who was the master of whom, and exactly how hellish things could get.
Remember back in the late 1990s, her show Real Food for Real People?
At the time it pleased The Southland Times TV reviewer to make fun of that notion of needing to distinguish itself from fake food for fake people.
(Yes, well I was younger then and the sense that fakery was in any way an option for a TV cooking show was rather less acute than it seems now.)
She’d use phrases that seemed
‘‘More flair, less fuss, that’s her motto. Moderation, not deprivation. That’s her motto too. She’s multimottoed.’’