"foodtv" news and stories

As much as I love the Food Network, sometimes they just don't quite hit right the mark. Holidays are guaranteed to turn out many interesting recipes, as all the chefs work on recipes designed to fit a particular theme. Recipes like Sarah Moulton's Chocolate Stuffed Heart Shaped French Toast and Michael Chiarello's Butternut Squash Ravioli with Sage Brown Butter and Bittersweet Chocolate are truly excellent recipes and fit the delicious, romantic standards of the holiday wonderfully. The recipes below, however, you might want to avoid serving on Valentine's Day, assuming that you want to keep your Valentine around until next year.

Agnostic of your preference for men or women, the hot chefs on the Food Network, well, they know they're hot. They're entirely crush-worthy and would make ideal fantasy Valentine's dates - they're personable, they have great taste in wine, and best of all, they can cook. If marital status weren't an issue, my top Valentine's Day picks would be:

• Bobby Flay: I've had a crush on Bobby ever since I first wished I was his giggly sidekick on Hot Off the Grill. I saw him, in person, at Bolo five or six years ago and my face got all warm, I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. He's the ultimate in hunky Food Network chefs. On my dream date, he'd grill shrimp and portabello mushrooms with some sort of green garlic sauce and we'd wash it all down with a gigantic pitcher of sangria.
• Giada de Laurentiis: She's so obvious it almost feels wrong picking her. Giada just drips sex appeal from the camera angles to the cleavage. Boys, she is one hot cookin' mama. We'd eat lobster fra diavolo and warm chocolate cakes with berries and drink cocktails of Prosecco with raspberry puree.

Just in time for the Golden Globes, the Food Network aired a special on their work behind the scenes of Queen Latifah's movie, Last Holiday. The special, creatively entitled Food Network Goes to Hollywood, was a fun behind-the-scenes expose of how food is styled for the silver screen.

In Last Holiday (which, Cinematical tells us, receives raves from all the critics), Queen Latifah plays a housewares saleswoman with a heart of gold and a love for Emeril, whose dishes she cooks up for the kid next door. But the plot's not so important here: we care more about how many chickens they had to be purchased so the Queen could make Chicken Tchoupitoulas along with Emeril (on TV in her kitchen). They never actually said, but it was clearly dozens. We care that the actors usually don't get to eat the food in restaurants scenes, but in this movie? They did, and ate cassoulet and roasted quail with brioche and chorizo stuffing and spiced lamb shanks with blood orange relish. Oh my.

The funniest part of the whole show, though, was one of the chef consultants explaining that, because Queen Latifah's character ate Lean Cuisines for dinner, she was making a red wine sauce to go over the frozen entree: "so it will taste better for Queen Latifah." That's so sweet.

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It's that time of year, the time to look back on the stories that made 2005 great. Our countdown began with God and moves on to - what else? - TV.

It all began in 1998. My obsession with the Food Network. I was hanging out in New York awaiting the beginning of business school. I'd quit my job and, other than boning up on the calculus, I had absolutely nothing to do. I scheduled my life around Too Hot Tamales, Ready Set Cook! and Cooking Live with Sara Moulton. In those days, the Food Network was all about cooking, especially cooking at home. I mean, Cooking Live - Sara would list the ingredients the day before so you could be prepared to cook along with her. People called in and they were actually in front of their stoves, yes, cooking live.

It was gradual, but the channel has changed over the past seven years. A couple of major things happened this year that indicate a turn away from the original core audience - people who liked to cook - to a new and (for whatever it's worth) bigger audience. People who eat.

The Food Network, it seems, is divesting itself of the foodies and embracing food, of the edible and eye candy variety. And this is such a shame. Some of the big changes that spell doom for the home chef:

In an interview with Pop Candy this week, Paula revealed a few secrets about her life as a celebrity chef, now that she is the most watched personality on the Food Network. For example, with two restaurants to run in addition to her busy TV, book-writing, magazine-editing schedule, she and her family rarely eat at home, preferring to eat at one of her restaurants. She says she spends approximately $100,000 on food for both restaurants, one of which seats over 300 diners at a time. That is not stopping her from cooking Christmas dinner, though. Her table will be spread with a standing rib roast, green bean bundles, shrimp-stuffed twice-baked potatoes, salad and “everything that goes along with [those]”. The best meal she ate this year was not one of her own, but a romantic dinner with her husband in Paris’ George V at the Four Seasons.  Paula also has a new line of cookware in the works for 2006, along with a new biographical book.