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I'm driving the streets of Hollywood looking for Bob Blumer's toaster. These were my instructions when we arranged to meet for dinner earlier today. South on Las Palmas, check. Cross Melrose Avenue, got it. Look for a toaster. Uh-huh.

Text: TIMOTHY TAYLOR

Of course, since Blumer is also known as The Surreal Gourmet, I'm not looking for a small household appliance. In fact, I'm looking for his mobile kitchen: an Airstream trailer refitted with two giant sheet-metal pieces of toast popping out the top. Last year, Blumer logged 27,000 kilometres in this contraption, filming his new cooking show for Canada's Food Network. The mildly off-the-wall party dishes presented included salmon cooked in the dishwasher and chicken grilled on a beer can. But last night, Blumer was down in this part of Hollywood, just north of the Wilshire Country Club, cooking for a group of American TV decision makers. Based on his performance, Blumer might be a step closer to taking the Toastermobile continent-wide, and he's excited by the prospect.

"It was a big show," Blumer says, shaking his head, trademark vertical hair swaying in the breeze. "But then, they're all big shows."

Blumer and I have dinner at his place high in the hills above Los Angeles. For the past 10 years, since moving from Montreal, he has lived up here in a cul-de-sac, directly under the gaze of the Hollywood sign. Tonight's menu is grilled corn-brie-pesto pizzas for appetizers and Muscovy duck breast with cassis sauce for mains. It's typical Blumer fare - simple dishes with purposefully bright colouring and enthusiastic combinations of savoury and sweet. "I try to stay with a few really bold flavours," he tells me, flipping the half-cooked pizza crust on the grill and layering on the toppings. "Then let the ingredients do the hard work."

This style fits well with Blumer's practised hosting skills. Since assembly of the meal is straightforward, he moves casually between range and cutting block and grill while we talk about food television and how it is that The Surreal Gourmet came to be a part of the entertainment phenomenon that started with Julia Child.

Blumer certainly didn't plan his career to this point. He's actually a business school graduate and worked as the business agent for folk-rocker Jane Siberry. But Blumer also had a lifelong interest in illustration and in food. In 1991, after eight years of managing Siberry, he decided to fuse these interests in a book "I think some of them thought I was crazy," he says, referring to his music industry friends. But he did succeed. In 1992, Blumer published a collection of his drawings and recipes called The Surreal Gourmet. "Essentially, how to cook for girls," he explains, cutting up the pizza into crisp squares and sprinkling on fleur de sel. "My entire bachelor's repertoire. And I did my own illustrations because we didn't have money to hire anyone."

The book was "an instant classic," according to the San Francisco Chronicle, and received year-end recommendations from both the L.A. and N.Y. Times. Charming, yes - Blumer explains nineties basics like guacamole and roasted garlic. Surreal only if you consider Blumer's illustrations - eggplants spilling out of a bird's nest, chefs with heads made of broccoli. "People would always ask me: but what's surreal about the food?"

With this in mind, Blumer began to ramp up the surreal quotient of his dishes and TV appearances. He did 250 TV guest spots after the second Surreal Gourmet book came out in 1995, flambéing things in a fireman's outfit and making shrimp on the barbie by stacking grilled shellfish around a Barbie doll. But, in an equally important evolution from his first book, Blumer also began to focus on entertaining. Recipes making two servings gave way to recipes for six to eight, and sections appeared on everything from party provisioning to music recommendations.

"I wanted to show people they could take the money they'd spend on a dinner at McDonald's and cook a complete chicken dinner for four. I wanted to turn people into heroes in their own kitchens."

By this point we've finished the delicious appetizer pizza - I admit to having wondered about the brie-pesto combination, but I was won over - and Blumer has now begun making sauce for the duck breasts: shallots, black pepper and balsamic vinegar combined with crème de cassis and boysenberry jam.

In 2000, Blumer produced his third cookbook, Off the Eaten Path. Armed with some of its new ideas - including an unlikely technique for scrambling eggs on the surface of a clothes iron - Blumer finally landed a coveted spot as a regular on Canada's Food Network. In his show, Blumer pulls together his ideas about surreality and cooking for the gang by touring around in his Toastermobile and pitstopping at friends' houses to cater dinner parties.

Those episodes are now on-air in Canada, but Blumer still has a full-time job keeping up with the culinary persona he has created. He travels more than 160,000 kilometres a year doing everything from celebrity cook-offs to judging BBQ competitions to advising food companies such as Weber and Mrs. Dash. "This is an amalgamation of all the things I did sort of well, but not well enough to make careers out of," he says, summing up his career.

If you leaf through a Blumer cookbook and find yourself doubting that Julia Child would ever carve pieces of melon and cantaloupe into desserts that look like fried eggs, you probably wouldn't be alone. If you arrive at the conclusion that Blumer's monochrome dinner suggestions - the "black" menu calls for caviar, black bean soup, pumpernickel bread and squid ink pasta with blackened chicken - are more about visual punning than about flavour, few would argue. But, in both these cases, you might also be overlooking how much food entertainment has changed in just the past few years.

From the on-camera waiter sacking in Gordon Ramsay's Boiling Point to the highly sexualized finger licking that is the most memorable thing about any given Nigella Lawson episode, the whole TV food universe seems to be spinning slightly off its traditional, instructional axis.

Anthony Bourdain, executive chef at New York's Brasserie Les Halles and author of the acerbic exposé Kitchen Confidential, puts this down to the rising phenomenon of "food porn": "Nowadays I think a lot of food television is voyeurism. I doubt people are cooking much of this stuff. It's sex without penetration."

Bourdain happily acknowledges that his own cooking and travel show, A Cook's Tour, is part of the very same phenomenon. "I do no cooking on the show. It's just me eating and drinking, completely unscripted, half-drunk, lurching around the world. And I'm not exactly exploring the culture of the places I visit either. It's more like: this is cool, what the hell is it?"

But even if we accept that food TV is about titillation, about watching not doing, how does this explain the ascendancy of The Surreal Gourmet, whose coleslaw may be "psychedelic" but whose dinner parties, purely in terms of voyeur-worthiness, must be said to fall a couple rungs short of Lawson massaging a meatball or Bourdain choking down a vegan potluck in Berkeley?

Nick Stellino may have inadvertently helped me answer this question. Stellino, whose show is neither surreal nor voyeuristic, has been cooking his popular Italian family food on PBS and other stations since 1994. His food message is overtly about sharing with friends and family. "Food is an expression of love," Stellino tells me. "Through my show I am able to give to my audience a little piece of my own family - my uncle, my father, my mother. And this is my ultimate reward."

Since the tragic events of September 2001, he goes on to suggest, there has been an increased appetite among viewers for the comfort offered by just this kind of culinary message. "It's not that people don't have the money to go out. Pots and pans are selling like crazy. But I think people are rediscovering the meaning of family, of tribal ground. And the kitchen is a core part of this."

Blumer, whose personal influences include such canny entertainers as Magritte and Dali, is nevertheless not distant from Italian family cookery on this one point. The communal kitchen, the hungry crowd - these are always his first ingredients. Seen as a combination of these two qualities - culinary eye candy and at-home entertaining - The Surreal Gourmet sits comfortably at the heart of what is contemporary in food entertainment.

Blumer's bold sweet/savoury combinations are not always towering, out-of-the-park culinary home runs. Sure, his pizza was brilliant and the Muscovy duck breast was nicely prepared, but the cassis sauce was too sweet and thick for my palate - almost like jam. But then, I've been badgering the guy with questions. And a few weeks later, I see Blumer cook under real pressure and pull it off very nicely.

At the Cornucopia food and wine festival in Whistler, B.C., The Surreal Gourmet has been lined up in a celebrity cookoff against Gordon Martin, chef/owner of Vancouver's Bin 941 and Bin 942 restaurants. (Still no word on U.S. broadcasters, by the way, though the American E! Entertainment Network is on hand to see Blumer in action.) It was an early morning, discernibly hungover affair. But confronted with a bag of ingredients, including a large slab of salmon, chorizo, pears, jalapenos, potatoes, parsnips and eggs, both men did produce a meal in the 30 allotted minutes.

Martin's was the prettier of the two dishes. Portioning the salmon down to a single serving, he came up with seared salmon on a potato/parsnip/chorizo latke topped with salmon tartare and apple/jalapeno sauce. He made the pears into dessert. A plausible dinner for one.

Blumer, by contrast, cooked a single dish for eight. He put the whole salmon filet in an olive oil-soaked paper bag with some lime slices, soy and ginger, then cooked the fish en papillote. The pears he worked into a salsa with jalapenos and cilantro.

This left potatoes, chorizo, eggs and a fair amount of time on the clock. So The Surreal Gourmet made himself breakfast.