Food Network to feature meal on Maine island

CRANBERRY ISLES – Residents and others familiar with Little Cranberry Island will get the chance to perhaps see themselves or someone they know on a national cable network at the end of the month.

That’s when the episode of “Dinner: Impossible” that was filmed at the island’s annual fall supper last October will air on the Food Network, according to show executives.

The broadcast time for the episode, in which chef Robert Irvine and his two sous chefs cooked dinner for 200 people at the island’s Neighborhood House, will be 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 31. The show will premiere the week before, at 10 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 24, with an hour-long special.

For each episode of “Dinner: Impossible,” Irvine and his two assistants have to plan and cook meals with few prepared resources and little to no advance warning.

In one challenge on the Jan. 24 premiere, Irvine and sous chefs George Krelle and George Gatali will be shown cooking dinner for a 200-person wedding party with only a staff of inexperienced boys to help and eight hours of lead time, according to the network’s Web site, www.foodnetwork.com. In the other premiere challenge, the chefs will have 10 hours to scrounge up food and equipment from tailgaters at a professional football game and fix a gourmet lunch for 40 executives from the Philadelphia Eagles organization.

In an episode scheduled to air Feb. 7, Irvine and his assistants have to use 18th century methods to prepare a meal for food historians at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.

For the Little Cranberry Island challenge, the chefs were told 11 hours in advance that they would have to cook dinner that night for 200 people on the small island, which is accessible only by a 45-minute ferry ride from Mount Desert Island. With just their knives, $3,500 cash and the help of a few island residents, the chefs had to find food, track down cooking utensils such as pots and pans, and figure out how to have it all finished by the time the island’s annual harvest supper began at 6 p.m.

The island supper also served as a fundraiser for the community’s volunteer fire department, which raised $3,000 that it hopes to spend on a badly needed $150,000 saltwater tanker truck.