My Kitchen Rules: A Waste of Time!

 Last night, Monday, we were watching My Kitchen Rules and after a long ad break there was a very short piece of MKR and then back we went to ads. Rather amazed at both the length of the ad breaks and of the short piece of show we began to time the ads and the show itself. We came up in 45 minutes with the startling, though not surprising, total of 28 minutes of show to 17 minutes of advertisements.

Here is a breakdown of the times:

            MKR               5 mins 47 secs

            Ads                 4 mins 27 secs (11 ads)

            MKR               10 mins

            Ads                 4 mins 25 secs (13 ads)

            MKR               6 mins 30 secs

            Ads                 3 mins 57 secs (10 ads)

            MKR               6 mins

            Ads                 4 mins 7 secs (12 ads)

           

This is really not acceptable for either viewers or the advertisers. It’s hardly worthwhile wasting your time sitting through this.

And to compound things the show has so much repetition in it that you can cut more time out of it still because after every ad break you have to put up with a repeat of what happened before in case you were stupid enough to have forgotten it.

The show time now seems also to have been lengthened (no doubt to accommodate more advertisements). So it would seem to watch the show you now have to sit for longer and endure more ads. I can cope with the normal length of advertisement time but not what we now are presented with.

The show is not worth watching under these conditions. If you must watch it then there is no alternative but to record it and then watch it skipping through the advertisements. But don’t stop there. Skip through the beginning until the titles are over because before them you are given snippets of the show to follow that not only spoil the show itself but are falsely edited to give you the wrong impression. So skip all of this, skip all of the ads and also skip the start of the following sections of MKR so you don’t have to suffer endless repeats of information.

If you really want to watch the show on the night it is shown then record it and start to watch your recording when it is about half way through. That way you will find that you catch up at about the same time as the show ends. You don’t go crazy watching the same ads over and over; you don’t watch the show repetitions and you save yourself such a lot of time.

I feel sorry for the advertisers but they are getting bad deals from the television channel anyway. They are no doubt being crushed in with heaps more ads and charged at exorbitant rates to boot for this. And people are tuning out because of the length of time the breaks go on, or recording to watch later and skip the ads. 

Spiced Carrot and Feta Gnocchi

Spiced Carrot and Feta Gnocchi

from Gourmet Vegetarian, Jane Price, Murdoch, 2007

I’ve never been able to understand why vegetarian food has a bad rap. Lately I tuned in to Master Chef and was stunned to hear one of the presenters say that if the contestants didn’t catch a fish they’d have to cook a vegetarian meal. It was all expressed as though this was a punishment.  At another time when watching My Kitchen Rules the presenter expressed amazement that a contestant was able to present a vegetarian meal which was tasty. These presenters are supposedly tops chefs. I can’t understand why they choose to present a whole vibrant cuisine in such a negative way.

Gourmet Vegetarian expresses the opposite view from these particular chefs and includes a range of recipes from cuisines all over the world.

The Spiced Carrot and Feta Gnocchi was easy enough to make: cook the carrots, puree them with feta and form them into gnocchi shapes. It was all a little fiddly though with the mixture softer than the usual gnocchi and tending to stick to the hands that had to be constantly floured. Consequently my efforts tended to be larger than I would normally expect gnocchi to be. 

And was it worth the effort? The gnocchi itself was pleasant to eat. The sauce was a failure for me. I just couldn’t get it to thicken. In fact, the longer I cooked it, the thinner it seemed to become. Should I make it again, I would make a different sauce.

Taste: ✔✔✔

Ease of cooking: ✔✔✔