Don’t trust skinny chefs

LITTLE ROCK — Since I’ve angered just about every overly sensitive special interest group lately, I might as well go hog-wild and provoke the most sensitive of them all: Crazed fans of skinny female celebrity chefs.

You know the kind of skinny chef I’m talking about. They wear size 00 designer clothes. They never get a speck of oil on them. Their hair is perfect. They never sweat on TV. Sure, their food looks fine, but the chefs themselves look like little pixie sprites who’ve never dared to dip a crust of bread in their own sauce.

Coincidentally, celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis is in town, promoting a new line of affordable cookware to her legion of adoring Giadanistas.

Here at the office, some people are excited about the pixie chef’s visit. They’re almost as wiggly as the time Barack Obama came by to say hello on his way to the White House.

Besides, she’s much too skinny to be a proper cook. Cooks require heft, to prove they eat their own creations. And I’m as suspicious as the next fat guy about this skinny chef trend.

But my wife and two sisters-in-law have made it clear they just love Giada.

“Leave Giada alone,” said my wife, frostily. “She’s perfect. She has great recipes, and she doesn’t tell you to use 300 fancy ingredients that you can’t find.”

Honey, everybody knows that you can’t trust a skinny chef.

“You don’t want to go there,” she warned.

But I’m compelled to charge forward, into the jaws of hell.

It’s not just the skinny women chefs. I don’t trust skinny male chefs either.

When I think of a chef I can trust, I think of cooks with gravitas, some weight on their bones, women who clearly are no strangers to the knife and fork.

Cooks like the late Julia Child, who was something of a counterspy during World War II, coaxing information from her dinner guests as easily as she extracted flavor from beef bones.

Or Ina Garten, who was an economist in the Carter White House but left to do something useful. She eventually became the “Barefoot Contessa” on TV and now uses even more butter than Julia.

Also, there’s Paula Deen, whose butter usage is all but felonious, and Paula wouldn’t be caught dead in skinny jeans.

So you won’t see me down there with the Giadanistas. (Do they make skinny jeans in XXL?) -

John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.