Burger and fries. Photo: onlinehero, Flickr.

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• A list of cookbooks for frugal cooks starts off with former Slashfoodie Alanna Kaufman.
• A chat with chef Eric Ripert about his new PBS show, "Avec Eric."
• An Internet search might give you the idea that reheating spinach is dangerous, but a food toxicologist says the concern is baseless.
• Produce Picks goes nuts for Bartletts and suggests pear quesadillas.
• Recipes: Molten Chocolate Cake, Microwave Risotto, Baked Apples with Dates and Pecans.
  
• San Diego's food calendar.

PETA has offered a million dollar prize to the first people to develop artifical chicken meat. To find out how this would go over, a new PBS web TV series, Your Week, hits the streets, farms, and markets asking if people would be willing to eat meat grown in a lab.

The response, not surprsingly, was mixed.

Have a look at the video and let us know if would you eat Frankenmeat. Answer in the poll and leave a comment letting us know why or why not.

Wow, now here's a blast from the past.

I remember watching Chef Tell (Paul Erhardt) on television in the 70s, 80s and 90s, on such shows as Evening Magazine, Live with Regis & Kathie Lee, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, and his own PBS cooking show, In The Kitchen With Chef Tell. This was after Julia but before Emeril, one of the very first celebrity chefs (and he really was a chef, becoming a Master Chef before age 30) that everyone knew.

Erhardt died of heart failure in Upper Black Addy, PA. He was 63 and had just completed his last book, about diabetic cooking.

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• PBS will profile 27 chefs in a new show.
• A lawyer quits her job and now makes gluten-free desserts.
• Harvard is going to Pete & Gerry's Organic Eggs.
• This week's recipes: Individual Pizzas, Granola, Chicken Adobo, Pink and Brown Parfait, and Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Scientists around the world are working to develop a reliable process that will grow meat in a lab from a few cells. So far, they have successfully grown meat tissue that, while it smells like meat, neither looks nor tastes very much like the real thing. The process has only been done on a small scale and the results resemble jelly. Flesh colored jelly. To get an idea of what this product currently looks like, take a look at PBS's virtual taste test, which compares the properties of lab meat to animal meat.

Scientists hope to see this jelly develop into something that looks and tastes like the cuts of meat that can be achieved from butchering a cow - without having to kill the cow and with the added benefit of being able to grow the meat at home in an incubator. Achieving this goal would nearly eliminate the need for animals in meat production and reduce the total energy and expense required to feed, raise, slaughter and transport those animals.

Meat from a non-sentient source presents an interesting problem for vegetarians, as many become vegetarians for ethical reasons alone, objecting to the practice of raising animals for slaughter. Because the initial culture cells can be taken without harming the donor animal, no animals would be harmed in this type of meat production. In-home meat growth might also limit access to truly natural meat, which may raise concerns of those who are against artificial and otherwise modified food products.

There is a short video segment available on the PBS website about cultured meat and a poll which reveals that 45% of respondents would eat the artificially grown meat. I can't honestly count myself among them.