"CurtisStone" news and stories

Last year Slashfood launched the The 10 Hottest Men in the Food Industry and boy, did we hear about it! From commenters all over, everyone had an opinion. This year, we opened up the polls to our readers and let you decide who would make our final top 10 list.

Narrowing down 30 names to 10, after the jump, see who made the list again, and find out who, surprisingly, is our (possibly not-so-hot) hottest man of 2011.

Good news: Top Chef Masters is up for a third season, says Eater. Even better news? Celebrity chef and KitchenDaily contributer Curtis Stone will be hosting. (Sorry, Kelly Choi.) And he's also on the roster to judge contestants on NBC's upcoming America's Next Great Restaurant, which is set to premier in March. Non-food-obessed folks might recognize Curtis for his long run on Celebrity Apprentice 3, but longtime fans will remember his early days on TLC's Take Home Chef, where he found wandering home-cooks in grocery aisles to go home with in order to revamp thier special meals (along with an engagement or two).

But here at AOL, we know him as the guy who teaches us simple, down-to-earth cooking in a KitchenDaily video series aptly called Cooking with Curtis Stone. His Austrailian upbringing and classic London training (under legend Marco Pierre White) have lent us many a satisfying dish. Find demos for making homemade waffles, white chocolate Macademia nut cookies, and plenty of meat -- braised short ribs with honey-roasted carrots, turkey bolognese, and a standing rib roast all sound great for anyone else braving a snowdrift right now.

Watch Curtis Stone's videos from KitchenDaily after the jump ...

They're not knee high, and it's not the Fourth of July, but fresh corn on the cob, and the summer parties that surround it, are on our minds. File this under "Must Make As Soon As Possible," and start salivating. Blogger Dayna McIssac put a little Latin-American flavor in her grilled corn with a sweet chile-lime glaze. With leftovers, she continued the Latin theme in a recipe for corn-and-quinoa salad.

Grilling corn doesn't mean simply throwing the cobs on the flames. You need to first pull back the husks, remove the silk, and soak the corn for around ten minutes, then drain it. I'll let Curtis Stone explain it all for you: See his recipe for grilled corn with parsley and garlic.

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool for a shot at having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

Curtis Stone isn't easily ruffled. On a rainy morning in Los Angeles, the celebrity chef and author of last spring's, "Relaxed Cooking" cookbook is a picture of calm as a swarm of prep cooks scurry around steaming pots in Wolfgang Puck's enormous catering kitchen. The staff is frantically preparing dinner for 800 guests attending a gala for G'Day USA: Australia Week, honoring well-known Australians in the U.S., but Stone casually grabs a bottle of water in the middle of the chaos and shrugs with zen-like calm. "Cooking for this many people equates to a headache, but I guess you've got to do it at some point," he says, taking a swig from the bottle and settling on a chair.

If he seems unconcerned that entertainment bigwigs like Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Olivia Newton-John will soon be sampling his roasted rack of Australian lamb served with a ragu of braised lamb shoulder, well, that's Stone. His mind is already leagues away, puzzling over why Americans tend to favor beef. "Aussies eat nearly as much lamb as we do beef," he says, "which is entirely different from the U.S., where the ratio is probably 95 to five."

Who doesn't enjoy having dinner prepared for them by someone else? Even better if that someone is celebrity chef Curtis Stone.

Enter the GMC Trade Secrets Sweepstakes and you could win a dinner party at your humble abode prepared by the Australian 'Take Home Chef.'

Even if you don't win the grand prize, you could win a $50 Williams-Sonoma gift card instantly. Our only question is: what are you waiting for?