While in France, I discovered Ready Steady Cook, the BBC answer to the Japanese Iron Chef TV program. Iron Chef is a show that appears here on satellite once/week. There's a group who gets together to watch it. It's one part cooking, one part Japanese samauri. The titles are things like "Mango Confront" or "Spinach Confront" They pick a mystery ingredient & give 2 chefs 30 minutes to make several dishes with the mystery ingredient. During that time, the camera walks around & sees what they are doing & the commentators try to speculate on what the chefs will do with whatever the ingredient of the day turns out to be. It's kinda interesting for about 2 episodes. Then I start to lose interest & it's more interesting to watch the people watching the show.

The BBC has Ready Steady Cook where they send 2 housewives to the grocery store & let them spend about $5 on random food. Then they give the shopping bag to 2 professional chefs who get to make something with it in 20 minutes. This isn't exactly Julia Child.