Mixing It Up

photo Chatter food writer, Beth Kirby.

Chatter's food writer and photographer extraordinaire Beth Kirby finished 13th on this year's Masterchef competition (and we know she would have won if Gordon Ramsay judged food writing along with cooking). Here she shares the special ingredients that go into making Fox's reality show that viewers love to chew on each year.

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I was a rather unlikely candidate to be cast on Masterchef. For one, I can barely say "Masterchef" without laughing. It sounds so very serious. Also, I've never wanted to be a chef on the line; I don't watch reality television; I'm not competitive; I'd never even seen Masterchef before auditioning, and at no point did I want to win. So how, exactly, did I end up on the show?

It really all started with my blog, "Local Milk."

The creation of the site was inspired by a longstanding love affair with the kitchen and a rekindled love of Tennessee and the local food scene I discovered here in Chattanooga after moving back from the West Coast. I wanted to find a way to both preserve the culinary traditions I'd grown up with-the cornmeal and black walnuts of my grandmother's kitchen-and at the same time reinvent them for a new generation of cooks looking to discover the Southern kitchen for themselves. I wanted to create a space that embraced crumbs and imperfection and focused on the relational aspects of gathering around the table and living well as opposed to formal, high maintenance entertaining. And so "Local Milk" was born, a space where I share from scratch, seasonal recipes, photography and stories about my life, about being a real person, with foibles and eccentricities, bad days, doubts and all. Real reality, if you will. A far cry from the simulacrum of an L.A. soundstage, but my love of all those things is what ended me up there.

When a reader told me about the Nashville auditions on Twitter, it sounded to me like a great way to share my recipes, photography, writing and general love of life lived around the table with a wider audience, which was all I ever wanted. But honestly, I never thought for a moment that a few short months later I'd be sitting in an airport hotel in Culver City, California with 99 others awaiting the audition in front of Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich. But that's exactly what happened.

"How real is it?" This is one of the first questions people ask me about being on Masterchef, and I always tell them that the experience could best be described as a "farcical culinary thunderdome." That description alone may seem to indicate that it isn't particularly real.

photo Gordon Ramsay

The truth is a lot of it isn't: the judges are largely acting, it's a contrived situation designed to elicit drama with a vague pretense of being about cooking; and it's all, of course, heavily edited and overlaid with the most hilariously bombastic soundtrack I've ever heard. But from the moment I drove up to that first Nashville audition, black-eyed pea and pork confit cassoulet tucked in my little cooler wrapped in a towel to keep it warm, it was very real for me.

As it turned out I saw fit to fall very ill during the top 100 auditions and ended up in front of the judges shivering with laryngitis. I was literally speechless. Well, mostly. I could croak. You don't think terribly clearly when you're in that audition chamber, especially not with a fever. So what did I do in those five minutes? I managed to cook some sweet potato and ricotta gnocchi with a buttermilk béchamel sauce and then proceeded to tell Gordon, in a cracked whisper, about a dream I had in which I made him fall in love with me by mocking the contents of his iPod. Joe asked, with his peculiar sneer if I listened to Kings of Leon or something? I, eyebrow raised, replied that I was more of a Costello, Cohen and Bowie kind of girl, and that I didn't know who the Kings of Leon were. I think they approved.

I don't know if it was my record collection or my gnocchi or my eyebrow or my pitiful wheezing voice, but I got three yeses. Joe said my gnocchi was as good as his mother's, the famed Lidia Bastianich. It felt good to hear, but I've come to realize a lot of what the judges say, the good and the bad, has to be taken with a grain of salt.

A lot of it is television. That said, I'm going to go right ahead and believe my gnocchi is basically legendary, thanks.

I never could understand why everyone made such a big deal about "getting an apron," but I didn't realize how stressful it all was, how long the days were. I'd decided that I just wanted to get into the top 19 and after that, I didn't care if I went home or not. As far as I was concerned, I was halfway there. Only the top 40 to brave after that. So, sick and shivering after having already been confined to a hotel and away from my other half and home for two weeks, the relief I felt after those three yeses was immense. I shuffled out of the room, cried and hugged my now fiancé. A big, long pick-me-up-off-the-ground made-for-TV embrace.

It was the best hug ever. And then we had to say good-bye.

photo Recipe by Beth Kirby

From the beginning the cameras didn't bother me. I never thought about them, and they didn't make me nervous unless I was hitting my head on one as it hovered over me peeking in the oven. In that regard they made me nervous. No, it wasn't the cameras or even the challenges that were hard, but rather everything behind the scenes that made Masterchef one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was, as I like to say, a character building experience. It made my faith stronger, and some of the cooking classes we were given made me a better cook, and for those two things alone it was absolutely worth it. But I don't think the audience gets to really see what happens to us when we're there.

What ends up on television is a creative collage of a thousand tiny moments taken out of context of real people under real stress like exhaustion from long, long days of back-to-back filming in a cold sound stage, the emotional limbo of not knowing what's going to happen on any given day, isolation from friends and family (we had no access to phones and were only allowed to call home, if we were lucky, for a grand total of 10 minutes each week), and living out of a hotel with company designed for conflict, unable to leave unsupervised without the group. The cooking isn't the hard part, of course it isn't. The life you live (or more accurately don't live) while you're there is. It isn't exactly glamorous.

I think we live in a culture where being on TV somehow means you did something. But I don't believe that. I believe that a father cooking his family dinner, baking a loaf of bread for the sake of bread, a woman making her first meal for her lover: that's doing something. And it's those things that I do that make me proud, not being on television. The real accomplishment is in life lived on the ground, feet firmly planted on the earth.

For me cooking is about relationships, a sense of place, about Silver Queen corn and furious late summer thunderstorms. It's about seeing Suzanna and Anne and Milton at the market on Main Street, cooking a pork shoulder from Creek Ridge Farms all day long, and blackberry stains on white napkins. I will always be grateful for the experience of Masterchef and for the opportunities it's given me, but I will always prefer reality over reality TV.

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