Eat Shrink And Be Merry

Ziggy, zaggy, ziggy, zaggy! Hoi, hoi, hoi! The famous Oktoberfest chant pretty well sums up the excitement felt by Greta and I as we finally began filming season two of our TV series, “Eat, Shrink and Be Merry” last week. The scene of the food crime was Kitchener’s Oktoberfest celebration, the largest Oktoberfest outside of Munich itself. Schnitzel. Strudel. Spatzle. Steins of beer. Hardly a healthy eater’s buffet of choice. Moderation and Oktoberfest don’t really seem to go together, do they? How can a couple of Polish sisters with a penchant for low-fat pierogies please a hoard of beer-swigging, sausage-wielding partiers?

For this extreme recipe makeover, we took on a trained chef from Germany with his mega-crowd-pleasing warm potato salad. Chef Andreas Christopherson was his name, and besides the fact that he had a charming accent reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger (I know, I know. Arnold’s Austrian. No biggee–same continent!), he was quite handsome (and married—drat!). Apparently, in a previous life, he was a member of the German Secret Service. Talk about intimidating! Poor Greta had to constantly shield her secret recipe from his spying, prying eyes, and every time we caught glimpses of him, he seemed to be talking out of his shoe.

With such tough competition, my sister and I had to pull out all the stops. So…we donned dirndls! Yes, those darned dirndls that German woman fold themselves into, hoisting their breasts to high heaven, making themselves look like Heidi. You know the ones. Anyway, I was a bit apprehensive to don my dirndl because the week before our shoot, my sister went to the Bavarian apparel shop to try on the darned things. She excitedly called me to say that after painstakingly trying on dozens and dozens of darned dirndls, she had found THE CUTEST ones for both of us to wear on the show. We would be cute as buttons, she insisted. Cute, Bavarian-looking buttons. That all sounds great and fine, but the fact of the matter is that my sister Greta was endowed with much bigger buttons than I was! (I got brains of the family!) So my big fear was that I’d try on my darned dirndl, and the darned thing would sink to my knees with little to hold it up! Oh well, maybe that would win our potato salad some votes in the taste test! To solidify our chances of winning, we also had hair extensions put in (a first for both of us!), which were then braided, so we really did look like Heidi and Gretel. It was loads of fun to film!

Did our revamped, calorie-conscious warm Polish potato salad defeat the German’s hefty one, or did taste testers give in to beer pressure? Did Janet avert dirndl disaster? Or bust? To find out, you’ll have to tune in to season two of Eat, Shrink and Be Merry, which begins airing in April on Food Network Canada.

See ya Lederhosen!

By the way, in case you’ve been searching for our show and can’t find it, it’s been in re-run mode for a while (our first season only has 13 episodes), so the Food Network has simply taken it off the air for right now. Not to worry! We’ll be back!