Whose Wii Remote Reigns Supreme?

The Sherbs and I picked up the Iron Chef video game for the Wii at Best Buy, and found it a lot of fun, although also a lot like cooking.

The game, in essence, is going through all the tasks of cooking the necessary dishes. Each particular type of food based on the secret ingredient (eggplant in pita! Carrot gyoza!) has a number of steps required to complete it, such as chopping, grating, running a stand mixer, or boiling a pot. Each step is turned into a 90-second mini-game where one tries to accomplish the task. Chopping and slicing are easy; boiling and grilling are tough.

So, should one pick four dishes, each with six tasks, one then must complete twenty-four cooking tasks, many of them chopping, slicing, or grating. The music, sadly, is a tad repetitive, as are the Chairman's repeated exhortations of the tasks' name (even with two different enunciations) and Alton Brown's Madden-like inanities (e.g., "John Madden’s inane and often insane ramblings are extremely tedious, and it seems as though he and his fellow commentator have a vocabulary of around 30 phrases which they just spout out sporadically and sometimes inappropriately") . Despite all this, The Sherbs and I had fun as a team of chefs against the computer, where we could switch off between grating and boiling tasks.

Is Iron Chef worth what we paid? We'll see how much fun we get out of it. Since the controls are easier than Cooking Mama (I still can't crack an egg in that game), I'm saying yes for now.

Chick-a-pea-pea-pea-pea...

Spring is slowly coming, and I recall my youth in Massachusetts, when the merry chickadee would make its appearance.

Also, because the Sherbs and I made a chickpea dish out of Vegetarian Times. It was a "chickpea and butternut squash stew," or more accurately, chickpeas in prefab butternut squash soup, over couscous. It wasn't quite as flavor-riffic as I was hoping, but it was tasty, which is more than could be said for the tahini soup fiasco of last week.

I'm having my tuna casserole from last Saturday for lunches this week; it's Campbell's recipe, but with Teet brand condensed soup, baby lima beans instead of peas, canned green and wax beans instead of pimientos (who eats those, anyway?), and extra mushrooms for greater shroominess (we do this with the slow cooker hot & sour soup, too - we add Teet brand canned straw mushrooms, my favorite mushroom of all time).

Finally, this is an accurate assessment of the Wii game Cooking Mama, which I found frustrating.