Cooking with the Saints

You wonder if there was a moment when someone shouted "Divine inspiration!" as the production staff sat around in the scrubbed little studios of Salt+Light Television watching the playback of the pilot segment of Cooking with Saints.

The set: a kitchen -- with stained-glass windows.

The culinary celebrant: Roberto Martella of Toronto's Grano restaurant -- a made-for-television natural, effusively lecturing on the risks posed by globalization to traditional food while preparing tagliatelle Frassati with Piemontese mushroom sauce from a recipe divined by the Blessed Giorgio Frassati himself.

The homilist and creator of the show (and just about everything else on Salt+Light): station CEO Father Thomas Rosica, whose vocation in the priesthood denied God knows how many other professions of a luminary (what he could have done with mutual funds can only be imagined), patting the corners of his mouth with a starched white napkin before reading from the Blessed Frassati's writings.

Toronto-based Salt+Light went national this week, bouncing brassily into the digital universe as the reincarnation of the Inner Peace Television Network.

Think of the Roman Catholic Church with nose-studs, and you more or less get the programming rhythm: pop music, news, documentaries, talk shows, meditations, moral and theological instruction, films with a religious message and saint-food. All with a beat. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. All Catholic. [Source]

Maybe after Cooking with the saints they can do some biography's called "Cooking the saints." St. Lawrence who was tied to a grill over a slow fire to be roasted famously said "turn me over." Don't tell me the church doesn't have a sense of humor since St. Lawrence is also the patron saint of cooks.