foodtvandme.com is the unofficial food network fansite with news, reviews, and my attempts at those great recipes you see on tv.

Fellow Rachael Ray fan, Madeline, has a new look for her Everything Rachael Ray blog.  It’s a beautiful new site.  If you get the chance, click over to it and check it out. 

Her latest posts include an interview with her for Food Candy and the Manifesto of a Grudging Rachael Ray Fan.  In the Manifesto, she bites her tongue as she summarizes a recent article where a writer criticizes Rachael Ray.  I agree with Madeline when she says:

“Rachael’s demystification of meal preparation is exactly what helped me try cooking that very first time.”

You’re not the only one, Madeline.  She helped me, too.  Without Rachael, there probably wouldn’t even be a FoodTv and Me blog, and how sad would that be?

Check out her newly remodeled site.  You might just learn something new about Rachael, and you’ll definitley be entertained.  Keep up the good work, Madeline!

This week’s recipe attempt wasn’t actually attempted by me.  My friend, Valerie, decided to take on a recipe from last weekend’s Nigella Feasts episode.  Her recipe was a more adventurous attempt than my usual attempt (she’s a bit more skilled than I am at cooking and I hate to admit it, but I have to give her credit.)  This is also a fish dish, which is nice for everyone who likes fish, unfortunatley, I’m not one of them.  So here is a treat for all of you out there.  The following is Valerie’s attempt at a salmon dish from Nigella.  The commentary on the dish is also hers.  Enjoy!

Weekly recipe attempt: Sake Salmon and Rice
Valerie writes:
I am completely new to Nigella Lawson, but I’m already hooked.  On Sunday, she made salmon look so delicious I was ready to try it.  Salmon isn’t even a favorite of mine.  Truthfully, I rarely eat fish.  I think her accent and semantics makes her recipes extra inviting.  Due to a power outage,  I was able to invite two coworkers over for lunch.  The main course was Sake Salmon and Rice.  I only changed one thing in the recipe.  I tried, but couldn’t find English Mustard and didn’t want to use wasabi paste, so I used ordinary spicy brown mustard.  The cardamom gave the rice a nice aromatic flavor.  I think I’ll always put cardamom in my rice now.  If you have a rice cooker, this is the simplest recipe ever.  It’s great to entertain with because you aren’t slaving over a hot stove.  I think the English mustard or wasabi would have really kicked the flavor up a notch, but I was quite satisfied the way I made it.

I give it an 8 on taste and a 9 on the easy factor.  I have a salmon recipe!

I was watching the Barefoot Contessa this evening and caught the episode where Ina makes a ton of different cocktails.  It was a nice little episode, but I caught something strange.  She rimmed one of the cocktails by dipping the glass into a beaten egg white.  She never explains why she does this.  I’m used to glasses being rimmed in lemon juice and then dipped into sugar.  Am I in the minority?  Does everyone do this?  I don’t think I can bring myself to crack a whole egg open to merely rim a glass.  Please find a moment of your time to maybe explain to me the reasoning behind this egg white thing.  I beg you.

If you want to see the recipes from this show, one of which is Linguini with Shrimp that looks delicious, feel free to click here.

I’ve caught a couple of glimpses of the Food Network Challenges every chanel surf or so, and I must say, how boring!  This week, the Food Network has devoted its “Food Netwok Challenge” show to breaking world records.  Among the shows, we have, Popcorn Giants, Fastest Foods, Sugar Skyscrapers, and Pizza Champions. 

I’ve never been a fan of the challenges in the first place, but this time they are taking things to a new boring low.  A popcorn sculpture?  I’d never even heard of such a thing, until now.  OK, the world’s largest pizza sounds cool, but pretty much all I need to see is the finished product for about ten seconds and I think the marvel is over.  I do have to admit, I paused a bit on the onion chopping in the “Fastest Foods” episode, mostly because they were using big knives and chopping at lightning quick speeds through the fast forming tears.  It was kind of like watching someone on a balance beam.  You watch in horror that something tragic just might happen.

I worry that these episodes will be played over and over and over again for the next couple of months.  That’s what Food Netowrk tends to do with these shows.  I’ve passed through the Gingerbread Mansion episode countless times in the past couple of weeks and I would just rather watch someone cook. 

Don’t take my word for this, folks.  If you love the challenges, let me know why.  Also, if you’ve caught any of the World Record breaker episodes, and think that a certain moment might change my mind about the challenges, let me know what moment.   I’m sure it will be on TV a hundred or so times next week and I’ll try to catch it. 

You can catch glimpses of these challenges on the Food Network Website.

And so did the food network addict.  I, unlike jrs, caught some of Nigella’s previous shows from the land across the pond.  I agree that the constant conversions could sort of make your head spin, and deter you from wanting to make the dish, but you can’t blame her for trying to make the amounts accessible to us yankees.  In “Nigella Bites,” her previous cooking show, she used the metric system, while a conversion scrolled along the bottom.  I think I liked that method better as opposed to the lovely Nigella breaking the flow and saying a second measurment.

Apart from the measuring weirdness, I thought the show was a nice little show.  There are a whole lot of close ups that take a bit for me to register what I’m looking at, but after I see what it is, the angle makes things more artistic.  I like the rustic feel, but doubt I’ll ever pluck up the courage to make any of the dishes.  So far, they’ve seemed complicated and heavy.  More artsy than practical.  She’s definitley no Sandra Lee or Rachael Ray.  It’s a lot like the Barefoot Contessa or Giada.  You feel like you’re in her kitchen chatting with her while she makes some dinner.  It’s nice.  I also appreciate how she has some curves.  I actually feel that she eats the food she makes.  It’s a nice change of pace from, say, Giada.  I love Giada and all, but I think that one bite she takes for the camera is the only actual bite she takes. 

I think Nigella’s a keeper.  For more from the Food Network Addict, click here.

Food Network thought so.  Adam from the Giada Fan site reports a new show in the works for the beautiful Giada. This new show called ”Giada’s Weekend Getaways” will premiere on Friday, January 12 at 9:30pm, according to Adam.

This new show seems to be a lot like another traveling cook’s show, Rachael Ray’s “Tasty Travels.”  Adam also comes to the same conclusion and also makes another interesting point, “I see this possibly going the way of Rachael Ray. Before her daytime talk show, she was in at least 4 shows on the food network, mostly about travelling and finding great deals and great food like in Tasty Travels or $40 a day Sound familiar?”

Yes, it does sound familiar, Adam.  I hope we don’t get bombarded with Giada now that Rachael has her own network talk show to worry about.  I still love her, but I might get sick of her, like I did with Rachael.  I’ll cross my fingers.

For more on this new show and more from Adam, please check out his blog, Giada Fan. 

I picked this week’s recipe for a variety of reasons.  I was going to pick one of Nigella’s recipies as a kick off to her new show, but they were both kind of heavy: chili with cornbread and a trifle with whipped cream and other bad-for-you yumminess.  For the next few weeks, due to an upcoming wedding where I have to squeeze myself into a tight fitting bride’s maid’s dress, I am going to try to eat a bit healthier.  Therefore, I will try to pick slimmer recipes or modify recipes to cut some calories.  That having been said, this week’s recipe came from the queen of quickness herself, Rachael Ray.

Weekly Recipe Attempt: Chicken in Tarragon Cream Sauce, White and Wild Rice with Walnuts

First off, I love chicken.  It is by far the thing that I cook the most and what attracted me the most to this recipe.  So I took that building block and followed the recipe pretty much to a tee.  After the pot roast disaster (click here to read about the pot roast that ate Orange County), I had to return to my tried and true roots of poultry. 

While the chicken cooked, instead of rice (to make things a bit lighter) I oven roasted some green beans.  I would like to thank Emeril for this idea.  I don’t really like his show, but this was one great idea.  It made the beans all crispy and yummy.  If you have a hard time choking down vegtables, or getting the little ones to eat their green beans, try the oven roasted trick and tell them the beans are actually green french fries.  Just stick the beans in a 400 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes with some olive oil, salt and pepper.

It then came to the cream part.  I used some fat free half and half (yes there is such as thing.)  I found mine at Trader Joe’s.  If you don’t have a Trader Joes, or if you can’t find it at your supermarket, try fat free sour cream.  I used what I had on hand.  If you don’t have a bride’s maid’s dress to fit into, by all means use the full fat stuff. 

It was good.  I’m not a huge fan of tomato-type sauces with my chicken, but the balsamic vinegar definitley helped take away some of the tomato flavor.  Go lighter on the vingear than you would think.  When this stuff concentrates, the aroma can hit you in the face like a sucker punch.  Just wanted to warn you.

All in all I give this recipe an 8 1/2.  It doesn’t get a 9, but I think with fat free sour cream instead of half and half, it would.  If anyone out there tries this with the rice, let me know how that turns out. 

The sultry domestic goddess, Nigella Lawson’s, first Food Network show premiered last Sunday to much anticipation.  I, unfortunately, was only able to catch a glimpse of this new show last weekend, and therefore, am relying on other reviewers opinions on this new show. 

• Mike at TV Food Fan writes - “This is a very good show, and one that is all about the food.”  (If you’re only going to read one review, I recommend this one.  It is comprehensive and really captures what the show is, not just his opinion.  Excellent re-cap, Mike!) For this review Click Here.
  
• Neal Justin of Ye Old Shoppe writes - “Hail to the chef” in his succinct review of Nigella.  For this review Click Here.
• Pascale Le Draoulec of the New York Daily News writes reports - ”Sexy chef Nigella Lawson heats up the Food Network.”  For this review Click Here.
  
• The Food Network Addict has a review by blogger Amanda and writes - “She always seems so stuck up and full of herself.” (Hey, they can’t all be good reviews.) For this review Click Here.

Please comment with your reviews.  Hopefully I will catch the full show this weekend.  Nigella Feasts airs on the Food Network Sundays at 1pm.

Thanks to an e-mail I received from Erica Cerulo this week, I caught an interesting glimpse into the mind of the modern day man.  Erica pointed me to an article in Details Magazine entitled, Sexpots in the Kitchen by Jeff Gordinier.  Fellow food Blogger, Adam Byrd also caught the article, and was quoted in the article, no doubt due to it’s detailed homage to Giada and her “reach.” 

According to the article,  “(The Giada Reach) happens whenever Giada De Laurentiis…spies a key ingredient—extra-virgin olive oil, juicy Italian sausage, whatever—that seems to have been placed ever-so-slightly too far away from the stove. She must therefore lurch forward for the ingredient, and into the camera, leaving the viewer with no choice but to zero in on the scooped neck of her shirt.”

This is the fascination - sexy women in the kitchen.  It’s so simple, yet, so effective.  The modern day woman has forgotten this alluring trick.  We go off to jobs, earn oodles of money, go to the gym, and run errands like pros, but somewhere amongst saving the world, something had to give.  So we dropped cooking off the schedule and made it an endangered species. 

I’m all for throwing guys for a loop and doing a throwback to the hoop skirt era, but I can’t help but be reminded of an old acquaintance of mine.  I dated someone a while back who was more turned on by me in an apron than me in a low cut shirt, and I have to admit I was a bit offended.  I work so hard to look attractive, and ended up getting more attention in a huge, unflattering apron with flour on my face and nutmeg in my hair.  This guy is no longer in my life for a lot of archaic reasons such as these and other pretty stupid things, but alas, this article brought some of the inter workings of man to life.

I ask you.  Where is the article about how sexy a man is in an apron?  I would love it if a guy came over to my apartment with bags full of ingredients, threw on my pink apron and started to whip up some risotto.  I think this allurement works both ways.

In the end of the article, Gordinier redeems himself a bit by quoting fellow blogger, Adam Byrd, explaining the attraction.  “In the end, what’s alluring and subversive about the image of a cheerful lass in an apron is not that she’s playing a housewife per se, but that she appears to be . . . enjoying it. “Because of feminism,” says Byrd, “it’s kind of taboo to want that.”

That makes sense.  I can get behind that.  It’s not ok to wait around like a sad puppy expecting the woman to wait on you hand and foot.  Enjoy me in an apron, but also drool when you see me in a little black dress.  Or better yet, a white tank top and jeans. 

All in all this was a fun article to read and comment on.  Please check it out.  There is also a fun little slide show of sexy TV food women to check out.  They call Sandra Lee the “Stepford Wife” of cooking, and Nigella Lawson the “food-sex” fusion goddess.

All comments are welcome on this.  For Adam’s take, check out his blog. 

I don’t shop on eBay.  I don’t buy kitchen stuff online.  I want to see the product in person before ordering from Foodnetwork.com. If I’m going to spend $100 on a knife, I want to see it close up.  (Honestly, I probably won’t spend that much on a knife, but if I had the means, I might consider it and I’d still like to see it close up.)  Lack of opportunity has prevented me from purchasing, or looking at, those highly profiled kitchen gadgets we see everyday from our favorite chefs. 

That is about to change, my friends.  According to chron.com, we will be able to peruse those fun kitchen items at Kohl’s department stores in the fall of 2007, just in time for the holidays.  Maybe I should start making next year’s Christmas list now. 

According to the article, “Food Network’s celebrity chefs will be involved in marketing the products, which also include kitchen electronics, table linens, cutlery and pantryware.”  Maybe they’ll even have W there to help us pick out the right crock pot or frying pan for whatever our culinary dillemma may be.  Thanks, Kohl’s!