Mary Berg Reveals Her Pet Peeve – and It’s a ‘Shaky’ One! – as Season 2 of Her Culinary Series MARY MAKES IT EASY Begins

By BILL HARRIS Special to The Lede   Mary Berg is being very genuine with the title of her show, MARY MAKES IT EASY. She wants to help. But some home cooks just won’t listen, no matter how easy Mary makes it! With Season 2 of MARY MAKES IT EASY debuting Tuesday, Sept. 13 at 8 p.m. ET on CTV Life Channel, CTV.ca, and the CTV app, Berg was asked to identify a pet peeve. She must have one, right? After all, she has been providing valuable cooking tips and recipes to the public for a long time, not only on MARY MAKES IT EASY, but also in her previous show, MARY’S KITCHEN CRUSH, and through her cookbooks. So is there something simple that the former MASTERCHEF CANADA winner keeps telling people that just doesn’t seem to sink in? “Honestly and slightly embarrassingly for me, any time in a recipe when I write ‘ground parmesan cheese,’ I am referring to the stuff in the can – you know, the stuff that people admonish as being wood pulp, or fake, or whatever you want to call it,” Berg said. “But to me it is such a useful ingredient, because it’s kind of dry, and it has that funky parmi flavour. It works so well as a coating on things, because it doesn’t burn as quickly.” But people resist? “I keep sending that message home – don’t use grated, don’t get a block of delicious, perfect parmesan or reggiano cheese, and grate it finely, because that’s going to burn, and turn kind of bitter and almost acrid tasting. You want to use the cheap stuff. Not all the time, but in certain instances, it’s better. And people hate that! Some people think that is just blasphemy, and I’ll never convince them otherwise.” Despite that setback, Berg is not one to give up trying to make life better for everyone in the kitchen. Season 2 of MARY MAKES IT EASY begins with an episode that examines the countless ways to utilize her “all-time fave ingredient,” lemons. But not every episode in Season 2 is an ingredient episode, so to speak. “With this season, we felt like we’d gotten our sea legs a little, in terms of how the show was going to roll out,” Berg said. “We actually have a little bit of everything. We have some episodes that are ingredient-focused, like the lemon episode, but we also have a whole episode dedicated to cast iron pans, what you can cook in a cast iron pan, and how to care for your cast iron pan, because I think that’s the main thing that keeps people from using them. We cover how to make things to stock the freezer, either for yourself, or maybe for a family friend who has had a baby or something. So we’ve taken a little bit more … I guess I’ll call it artistic licence, in terms of what each theme is.” But of course, there is an overriding theme to all of this. “How do we get someone in the kitchen and trick them into knowing that it’s easy?” Berg said with a laugh. And for Berg herself, she insisted that whenever she makes anything on MARY MAKES IT EASY, no matter how well she knows how to do it, there’s the potential for her to learn something. “Every single time I make a recipe, I find a new little shortcut, or I find something that, oh, maybe initially I thought I had to do something this way, or I had to cut something this way, and then maybe I was lazy one day and tried it another simpler way, and it works just the same,” she said. “Sometimes that doesn’t work. But that’s the thing about food and cooking: there’s really no end to learning, and no end to new discoveries in the kitchen.” Mary Berg’s sunny attitude is infectious. Now, if only people would listen to her about parmesan cheese. “Hey, if I can’t convince someone to use shaky cheese, that’s fine,” she said, with comic resignation in her voice. “But I’m trying.”   billharristv@gmail.com @billharris_tv