I was getting ready to watch “Christmas At Belmont,” a terrific annual Christmas concert featuring music students from Belmont University in Nashville (including my “It’s A Wonderful Life” co-star Keith Wortham, who said he’s in one of the choirs but doesn’t know if he’ll be visible on TV). The show is aired nationwide on public TV stations from one of my favorite places on the planet, the Schermerhorn Symphony Center. (I was there, in a tuxedo, the night it opened.)

Anyway, I turned over to WNPT a few minutes earlier and caught the last 10 minutes or so of “Volunteer Gardener,” a locally-produced show I don’t think I’ve ever watched before. It had the air of local TV programming, but a couple of things caught my eye.

It was a rerun; there were all sorts of references to spring and planting. I’m not a cold-weather person and this made me a little melancholy. I wish it were warm enough that gardeners were concerned about getting their seeds in the ground.

But the thing that really struck me was the cooking segment at the end of the show, featuring a woman from the University of Tennessee Extension in Nashville. As you well know, I love to cook and I love to watch Cooking Channel. So I guess I’m used to cooking shows and segments on TV that make certain minimal assumptions about the audience’s food and cooking knowledge.

This was not one of those segments. The woman was making an Asian-inspired broccoli slaw, with dry ramen noodles as an ingredient (they soak up moisture and soften as the salad sits before serving). The woman apparently felt she had to had to explain what ramen noodles were and how they were packaged, and she treated soy sauce and rice vinegar as if they were strange exotic substances that had just been flown in by space probe from the planet Neptune.

The recipe wasn’t necessarily a bad one (I’m not a big broccoli fan, but that’s just me). Food snobs notwithstanding, there are plenty of cases where it’s a great idea to use a processed food like ramen noodles as an ingredient in a homemade dish. And I don’t guess there was anything wrong with how the segment was presented; it just sounded really strange to me that she would make such low assumptions of the public TV viewer, especially considering some of the great cooking shows that air on Saturdays on public TV.

I’m not sure whose decision it was made to treat things this way. The woman at our local extension office who does food presentations has some great, sophisticated recipes, which I read with great interest when we publish them in the Times-Gazette. So maybe it’s the producers of the TV show who told this woman to assume that her viewers only cook with Bisquick and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup.

Or maybe I’m just being a condescending jerk, which on reflection is the more likely possibility.