Chef de Garage : Millionaire and Sidekick Serve Disasters With Humor on O.C. Cable TV

Things catch fire. The chef blows his nose on camera. Sometimes the recipes come off a Bisquick box. Sometimes they go right into the trash. On one notorious show, the chef and his co-host cooked dog food and fed it to bibbed bowsers eating off fine china.

This is “At Home on the Range,” a cooking show that in the past year has become an Orange County cable TV sensation, watched by college kids and society folk alike.

Unlike burghs such as Manhattan--where local cable access has brought a revolution of weirdness and sleaze to the tube--few people in Orange County watch or produce programs for community viewing. But even amid a glut of programming, “At Home on the Range” would likely stand out with its garage-level professionalism, lovably curmudgeonly chef and its dry, often thoroughly unintentional humor. The show is indeed shot in a garage, though it’s a garage in which you could practically hanger a jet. It is a swimming pool or two removed from the main house, which, except for the Yankee flag flying out front, is a striking replica of Tara from “Gone with the Wind.” It all is a part of Village Crean, an estate roughly the size of Kuwait located above the Back Bay.

And for all the down-home, Everyman-with-a-spatula appeal of chef John Crean, this is his place. His frothingly bubbly co-host and show producer Barbara Venezia met the wealthy businessman while interviewing him for her local business video magazine, and the two hit it off as friends. On camera, though, Crean seems--and says he sometimes genuinely is --irked to have her cluttering up the kitchen when he’s seriously trying to cook.

Venezia says they’re the Odd Couple of cooking. The two can’t even agree on what the show’s greatest disasters were.

“It was when we set the paper towels on fire,” Venezia said.

“No, it was the spider,” Crean rebutted, referring to a salad he’d accidentally made with eight legs more than the recipe called for.

After some niggling over a fritatta they’d once attempted, the pair were able to agree on the worst food they’d ever cooked.

“It had to be the onion rings,” Venezia said. “We had a sponsor--we don’t have him anymore--who had this terrible cookbook. One of the recipes was for breading onion rings and putting them in the oven instead of frying them. When we got them out the top was done, the bottom was burnt and they were stuck together, looking like a pancake with onions. They were so bad that as I was saying, ‘If you’d like a copy of this recipe. . .’ John goes over and slides them into the trash.”

They tape the show at 8 p.m. four nights a month before a live audience of about 40 people, and it goes out over all 10 county cable systems. Reservations for a place among the folding chairs are booked up weeks in advance. When the show debuted last June, they began by having celebrity guests such as Stan Freberg, Mr. Blackwell and Joey Bishop, who gave the show its present name.

“We were originally titled ‘The Village Cooks’ and Joey Bishop said we were more like the village idiots. Then he said we needed a snappy name and came up with ‘At Home on the Range,’ ” Venezia recalled.

Crean can barely abide having Venezia in the kitchen, so the celebrity guests didn’t last long. The show initially didn’t have a studio audience, but so many friends started hanging out that they decided to open it to the public. “Also, we’d been getting calls from people who just didn’t get it,” Venezia said. “They didn’t know they were supposed to laugh until we had an audience in here.”

One person who still doesn’t get it is Crean.

“I watch the tapes from time to time and I really think the show is dumb. I cannot figure out what the hell people are laughing about, because I take the top off the ketchup bottle and they laugh. I don’t know what could possibly be funny about that,” he said.

Maybe it’s because most other TV chefs don’t employ ketchup and a plenitude of canned goods in their cuisine. Crean does indeed get his recipes off Bisquick boxes and similarly unassuming sources, and one of his secret ingredients is big heaps of sugar. Most often, though, he modifies dishes by omitting ingredients. “I just flat-ass forget to put them in,” he admits.

He’s capable of great one-liners and put-downs, but there also seems to be a fine comedic timing to his mistakes. When he pours a cup of water into a recipe, there’s a precious second that passes as realization dims his nearly deadpan face and he says, “You know, that was supposed to be milk .” Then he goes right on cooking.

Born in North Dakota and raised in Compton, Crean said he was a latchkey kid who had to do much of his own cooking.

“I was great at making angel food cakes when I was 7 or 8 years old, because in my neighborhood there were a lot of chickens, and we had all the eggs we could eat, and angel food cake is nothing but eggs, sugar and a bit of flour. Of course, during the Depression years there wasn’t a hell of a lot to cook,” he said.

Instead of a French cooking school, he refined his talents during 18 months in the Merchant Marine in World War II. Officially a dishwasher, he wound up helping to cook three meals a day for 60 men. Later, he cooked on a boat of his own on trips to Mexico.

At some point in between, he went through the bother of becoming rich. His Fleetwood Enterprises is the top motor home manufacturer in the nation, nearly reaching $2 billion in sales last year. In 1955, he and Donna, his wife of 45 years, began giving 10% of their income to charity. Now it’s up to 50%.

Crean started his company in 1950, he says, “mostly because I was just unemployable. I’ve always got to do things my way. So I went into business for myself. I think the things that made it possible for me were just inherent in my system. As a little kid, the idea of getting out and making a few bucks was just there. I always did that.”

He also always cooked. The dog food recipe he once prepared on the show was one he first made when he and his wife were on a liquid diet.

“I didn’t really miss eating food nearly as much as I missed cooking it,” Crean said. “So I decided I was going to cook for my dog and went down and bought a bunch of stuff and made some dog food. The recipe included vegetables, rice, beans, a bit of lean hamburger, and some wheat germ ‘for the people in Irvine.’ My dog was crazy about it. So one night I made it on the show and had my dog and a friend’s dog there with napkins on eating the dog food.”

Crean said a cooking program was the last thing he would have thought of doing. But after Venezia interviewed him the first time they met, “we just got to chatting about this and that. And she’s a sneaky little broad. She just is. The first thing you know, she had a date scheduled where she came with her cameraman and we were doing a show in my kitchen over in the house.”

Though large by most standards, that kitchen proved too small for shooting the show. “We were tripping over the cords, and the camera was in the soup. It was a mess,” Crean said. A few weeks later, he had the kitchen stage built in the Gargantuan garage, in which he also slaps together motor home prototypes.

On this particular Tuesday, the pair made chili in the garage, in preparation for a chili cook-off they are entering. “We schmooze with all the judges, so we hope we got it wired,” Crean said. Usually, he doesn’t pick a recipe until the afternoon of the show, and Venezia often doesn’t know what it is until after the cameras are rolling--not that the knowledge helps her much.

Part of the play between the two comes from her not knowing how to cook. Venezia said: “I think the funniest thing about John and I is there is a very big generation gap between us. I’m 37; he’s 68. People from his generation were very into cooking and taking care of themselves. Women in my generation went out to college and work and weren’t concerned with that kind of thing. He says all the time that the only thing I make well is reservations.

“I once asked him why he didn’t cut the fat off the bacon. On the last show I asked him, ‘How come these eggs are brown?’ and he said they came from brown chickens. I usually don’t know if he’s lying to me or not.”

Aside from tolerating her questions, Crean relegates Venezia to performing only the simplest of kitchen functions. This has led to something of a dubious fame for her. “I call on prospective advertisers now and it’s, ‘Oh, aren’t you the one that stirs?’ ” she said.

Crean says he’d have a far more comfortable time cooking without her. “It’s a fight because I’m trying to get the stuff cooked and I’m serious, and she is forever trying to screw me up. At least I feel that way. She’s in the way. Even when she stirs she gets it all over the stove.”

But Crean also says, “She’s really the spark plug of the show. She brings things out of me, where without her I’d just be cooking.”

When he’s in front of the camera, Crean is no different than he is the rest of the time, except for the highly starched chef’s hat covering his military-cropped hair.

Except for a permanently mounted camera over one stove-top burner--which Crean routinely forgets to position his pans under--the show is a one-camera shoot. It is taped live without a script in about 40 minutes and cut to 21 minutes by Venezia. She edits out the dull spots, but whatever else happens stays in.

As they prepared the chili this particular evening, Crean forgot the onions, blew his nose, got a squirt of Clora-Septic from Venezia, commented on the bugs in the Newport Beach water system and offered a few words that are sure to boost their advertising revenues: “You know, we only get two kinds of sponsors, the ones that drop us and then the kind that don’t pay.”

The garage audience seemed predisposed to howl at the least little aside from Crean or Venezia, and a lot of it was pretty choice, reminding of nothing so much as the wobbly early days of television, where anything could happen.

Crean says his wife is such a fan of the show that she can’t sit in the studio audience for laughing so hard. And he doesn’t bother worrying about what others who move in his sometimes-rarefied social circle might think of his cutting up on low-rent local TV.

“I couldn’t care less. I’ve slummed worse places than this. I do what’s fun and what I enjoy and if it bothers other people, that’s tough,” he said.