The World is My Kitchen

“Bonjourno, y'all!” Striving to be the next Emeril (“just more cute”), thick-accented Master Chef Suzi Massetti consistently provides excellent instruction on this soon to be aired on PBS cooking series of 12 half-hour episodes, presented here on a double-disc set with an optional cookbook. Each episode--with creative titles such as “A Very Crabby Day,” “The World is My Oyster,” “I Feel a Little Clammy,” and “Extremely Wild Game"--offers a brief outline of the day's recipes followed by comprehensive instruction in the kitchen (with occasional special featurettes shot outside in locales as diverse as a local grocery store and a gun club). Although the series' focus is southern Georgia, low Florida Keys, and New Orleans-style seafood cuisine, the diverse entrée, appetizer, bread, sauce, soup, and dessert recipes include crab-stuffed avocado, Italian herb focaccia, crab soufflé, spinach salad with oysters brochette, mango and key lime Bavarian parfait, conch fritters, coconut-fried stone crab claws, venison osso buco, fried green tomatoes, and English scones with strawberries. The cookbook, which suffers from spelling errors and wordy descriptions, pales in comparison to the program's main dish, the amiable, knowledgeable, and meticulously detailed Massetti, a Milan-born epicure who always closes with a buoyant “Ciao, Ciao!” The DVD set sans cookbook is highly recommended. Aud: P. (J. Williams)