Over the past year or so, I have taken more of an interest in food.

It started when I went off to college and actually had to decide what to eat for myself, but it has grown since I’ve moved into a house with a real kitchen of my own since college.

It helped that I married a chef. Food is something that we both think about a lot, whether it’s a meal we are cooking for ourselves or figuring out which restaurant we will eat at for dinner.

Within the last few months, we have also started watching cooking competitions on television. I used to think cooking shows were boring ways to spend time learning about things I would never try myself.

Now I realize that cooking competitions can be intense and exciting shows. We have especially been watching Food Network’s Cutthroat Kitchen and Camp Cutthroat.

Both shows have a premise around three master chefs who must compete to make their best version of a prompted dish while undergoing “sabotages” that limit their time, take away ingredients or cause other significant inconveniences. The only difference is Camp Cutthroat takes place in a camp-like setting near a lake and Cutthroat Kitchen takes place in a typical culinary kitchen.

The lure of these shows is the craziness that they must endure while still managing to perform. Since most of these contestants are skilled chefs, they generally can come up with something delicious for the judges, which is quite a task.

I never thought I would be recording cooking shows, but here we are.

Joy Haynes is a staff writer for the Hartselle Enquirer.