����The moment I loved most last night in the two hour Iron Chef Battle New York TV special was the bit that true Iron Chef afficionados such as Squibnocket hated--and I can understand why.

����But watching the Monty Pythonesque segment where a glib tuxedo clad cooking show host convinces a somewhat dazed upper middle class woman to let him, a camera crew, translator and two oddly clad Japanese men into her kitchen to cook supper for her ... well, I simply loved it.

����Now part of me knows that asking Cooking Gods like the Iron Chefs to walk into someone's home and cook a meal out of what ever they have in that kitchen is like grabbing Leonardo daVinci, taking him down into someone's rec room and saying, "Leo, baby, how about you paint something on that blank wall over there. But Leo, you can only use whatever old leftover paint the family has lying around. 'Kay?"

����I KNOW that, and that's why Squib got ticked off. It's a waste of amazing talent. And yet ...

����The two Iron Chefs managed the culinary equivalent of "The Last Supper". It was an eye opener for me, let me tell you.

����The funniest moments as far as your correspondent is concerned were when the two Iron Chefs were pawing through the woman's fridge, freezer and cupboards looking for things they recognized.

����One of them only had a smattering English, the other didn't understand a word. There was a moment when one of them was staring at a jar of peanut butter and you could almost see the thought balloon over his head with the words, "W.T.F. is this shite?" Oh man ...

����I mean, imagine yourself in some Japanese housewife's kitchen, without knowing any Japanese, and see what you manage to cook from what she has around. Me, I can't tell hoisin sauce from miso, so I would be reduced to a quivering, sobbing mass in oh, say 20 minutes.

����Not the Iron Chefs. Nuh UH. These guys are so good that they see food as an artist sees colour on a palette.

����I've often thought that genius (that sadly overworked word) is the ability to see through the clutter. I mean you and I have all seen starry nights, but Van Gogh saw THE Starry Night and somehow managed to get it all on canvas, you know what I mean?

����I'm rambling, I know it. Anyhow, there was this moment when one of the Iron Chefs was holding a peeled potato in his hand, just looking at it, thinking about the possibilities.

����Now me, I'm about 40 per cent Irish so I'm thinking that I am Ms. Spuds 'R' Us and I could show this guy a thing or two about a potato--you've got your boiled, your mashed, your fried, your hash browns, your french fries, your baked, your baked and restuffed, your scalloped potatoes, your latkes, your samosas, your perogies ... hey, I can do a thing or two with a potato, eh.

����But the Iron Chef sees it in a whole other way and the only way I can explain what he did is this: imagine you're holding an apple, one hand on the stem, the other on the bottom. You take a potato peeler and you start running it around the middle of the apple, but you don't move from the middle, you make this long roll of apple, kind of like a roll of paper towel, really, really thin.

����Well, he did that to the potato, but this guy has such amazing skill with a knife that he uses a knife to do this and ends up with a roll of paper thin potato. He sets that on the counter and begins to cut sliver thin slices off the end and suddenly there are little curly raw potato noodles on the cutting board.

����After he's cut the whole potato into the equivalent of spaghettini, he kind of tangles it up a bit with his fingers and then tosses the whole thing into hot oil where it cooks into a pretty little nest that he fills with a beautiful stir fry mix.

����Helllllllloooooooo. That's the difference between a Kitchen God and the rest of us. He saw through the clutter, used extraordinary skills, and made something beautiful. Can food be art? I like to think so, but then what do I know?

����Now don't get me wrong, I loved the Battle Rock Crab, even if the American producers forgot that you need your tongue planted firmly in cheek when you stage Iron Chef.

����But the part that will stay with me is that goofy little potato bird's nest.

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