Congratulations to Class #58

Congratulations to Class #58 of the Second Helpings Culinary Job Training Program.

Class #58 graduated Friday, April 30, 2010, putting the total number of graduates since the program's inception to 401.

Pictured below (front row, left to right): Shane Everett, Deadrick Green, Kathleen Blackwell, Alwanna Bradley, Brett Davis, Michael Carruthers (back row, left to right): Chef Conway, Michael Bower, Derek Prezzy, Timothy Rosa, David Upshaw, Conrad Rollins, Robert Snowden, and Michael Hewitt.

Food for the Journey

For students in Wilma W. Stephenson’s culinary arts classes at Frankford High School in Philadelphia, cooking is more than a skill. “It is the key to their futures,” says Stephenson. She’s not exaggerating. In the 11 years her graduating seniors have participated in the Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP) Cooking Competition for Scholarships, Stephenson’s pupils have racked up more than $3 million to be put toward paying for college, earning $637,000 in 2009 alone.

“A lot of these kids in the beginning do not see themselves doing much of anything [as a career],” says the 64-year-old schoolteacher. Stephenson explains many don’t even consider education beyond high school. Some come from broken homes; others are accustomed to financial hardship. Yet when they leave her class, many go on to college and careers where they hold titles such as executive chef and pastry chef at restaurants all across the country.

“My students are successful because they have the motivation to succeed; they have that drive,” says Stephenson who has taught at Frankford her entire 41-year career. But their success is also due in part to the impact of the dynamic woman who runs her classroom like a boot camp. Yelling like a drill sergeant, she presents her classes with a laundry list of rules, including: “You have to be on time, you cannot chew gum, and you cannot wear big earrings.”

For some students, her tough demeanor is off-putting at first. “In the beginning I felt intimidated,” admits Lasheeda Perry, a former student. “She was tough, straight to the point, and didn’t take any mess.” As hard as it may have been under Stephenson’s direction, Perry earned an $80,000 scholarship to Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island, to study baking and pastry arts. The 24-year-old is now a pastry cook at the Four Seasons Resort and Club Dallas at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas.

But the students also see another side of Stephenson, whose take-no-prisoners teaching style is the subject of a documentary directed by Jennifer Grausman and Mark Becker called Pressure Cooker (www.takepart.com/pressurecooker [3]). They see the side that buys a student a winter coat, the side that gives out her cell phone number so students can call her when life gets complicated outside the classroom, the side that assigns personal essays to her seniors and returns the writings as many times as it takes for the students to acknowledge how past traumas have held them back.

The lessons Stephenson dishes out in Room 325 don’t just pertain to cooking. No topic is off-limits if putting it on the table can benefit students. “I think I learned more from her [than from anybody else] about becoming a woman,” says Perry. But inevitably the conversation always finds its way back to cooking. In competition, students have two hours to prepare a three-course meal and clean up. Stephenson wants her kids to be ready. While some students will walk away from it with enough cash to further their education in the field, all leave knowing the value of hard work, emotional honesty, and discipline. Stephenson is certain that cooking is a way they build pride.

This article originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Black Enterprise magazine.

Cajun Food Hides in Plain Sight in New Orleans

April 18, 2010 - New Orleans often seems to exist to be misunderstood by outsiders, and Cajun food — what it is, where to find it, what it tastes like — is a disorienting topic even to people who live here.

Not even K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and Cochon, the city’s two best known Cajun restaurants, are full-blooded Cajun. An early K-Paul’s menu included fettuccine, and Cochon self-identifies as both “Cajun” and “Southern.” The Bon Ton Café, the city’s oldest Cajun cooking stronghold, serves dishes you can find at Galatoire’s.

“It does strike me as a little odd when people say I’m going to New Orleans to eat some Cajun food,” said Frank Brigtsen, who has been cooking Cajun-style food professionally for 30-odd years, most of them at his restaurant Brigtsen’s. “That requires a long explanation.”

I’ll try to keep it short.

New Orleans is an old city, but its reputation as a stronghold of Cajun cooking is relatively new and roughly 136 miles off the mark.

Cajun food comes, of course, from Cajun country, the largely rural swath of marshes, swamps, bayous and plains whose unofficial capital is Lafayette. Cajuns are descendents of the French Acadians who fled eastern Canada in the 1700s. The food is born of the ingredients and challenges unique to rural people. It is porkier that the Creole food indigenous to New Orleans. It is also marked by fewer European cooking techniques, a characteristic that leads many to describe it as simple, which is not to say it isn’t labor intensive or deeply flavored.

That is history drawn in broad strokes, and anyone interested in the full story of Cajun cuisine should visit the library and/or the region itself.

Read a brief guide to Cajun cooking in New Orleans here.

For Former White House Pastry Chef, Life is Sweet

MARTINSBURG, W.VA. — With his chef’s-eye perspective of life inside the White House, Roland Mesnier served a platter of amusing anecdotes Saturday at a WV Book Faire event.

He recalled former President Bill Clinton’s penchant for big parties and hearty appetite for sweets, which presented a challenge: Clinton was allergic to chocolate, dairy products and flour.

Mesnier — who retired after more than 25 years as the White House executive pastry chef — said he made a low-calorie strawberry cake that Clinton appeared to enjoy; he once ate half of a cake by himself.

One day, Clinton wanted leftover cake and was upset when a butler couldn’t find it. Clinton’s voice rose and he pounded a table.

“We think that Al Gore is the one who took it,” Mesnier quipped.

Mesnier, 65, a native of France, told story after story at Blue Ridge Community & Technical College, where he was a celebrity judge for the book fair’s Edible Book Contest.

“There was a time when he ate alone a lot,” Mesnier said of Clinton. “Even the dog wouldn’t eat with him. I don’t know if you remember those days. They were rough in the White House.”

“No more comment,” Mesnier added as the audience laughed.

Mesnier said thousands of people visit the White House daily during a three-month period around Christmas. If he didn’t start the season with 120,000 pieces of cookies and cake, the pastry shop couldn’t keep up.

Part of the demand was from what Mesnier called “the club of blue-haired ladies.”

Younger women were little trouble — they were usually dieting and trying to fit into size-2 skirts, he said.

But the blue-haired ladies ...

“Beware: Those were cookie thiefs,” he said.

Mesnier described them wandering along, opening their pocketbooks, looking around, whistling — and pushing entire plates of cookies into their bags.

The women later had their husbands drill holes in the cookies, which they would string up and give as Christmas tree ornaments, he said.

“So we had to bake not only for the ... guests, but for all of the neighbors of the blue-haired ladies,” Mesnier said.

Read the rest of the story here.

Cilantro Haters, It’s Not Your Fault

(Even the great Julia Child hated it!!)

By HAROLD McGEE

FOOD partisanship doesn’t usually reach the same heights of animosity as the political variety, except in the case of the anti-cilantro party. The green parts of the plant that gives us coriander seeds seem to inspire a primal revulsion among an outspoken minority of eaters.

Culinary sophistication is no guarantee of immunity from cilantrophobia. In a television interview in 2002, Larry King asked Julia Child which foods she hated. She responded: “Cilantro and arugula I don’t like at all. They’re both green herbs, they have kind of a dead taste to me.”

“So you would never order it?” Mr. King asked.

“Never,” she responded. “I would pick it out if I saw it and throw it on the floor.”

Ms. Child had plenty of company for her feelings about cilantro (arugula seems to be less offensive). The authoritative Oxford Companion to Food notes that the word “coriander” is said to derive from the Greek word for bedbug, that cilantro aroma “has been compared with the smell of bug-infested bedclothes” and that “Europeans often have difficulty in overcoming their initial aversion to this smell.” There’s an “I Hate Cilantro” Facebook page with hundreds of fans and an I Hate Cilantro blog.

Yet cilantro is happily consumed by many millions of people around the world, particularly in Asia and Latin America. The Portuguese put fistfuls into soups. What is it about cilantro that makes it so unpleasant for people in cultures that don’t much use it?

Some people may be genetically predisposed to dislike cilantro, according to often-cited studies by Charles J. Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. But cilantrophobe genetics remain little known and aren’t under systematic investigation. Meanwhile, history, chemistry and neurology have been adding some valuable pieces to the puzzle.

The coriander plant is native to the eastern Mediterranean, and European cooks used both seeds and leaves well into medieval times.

Helen Leach, an anthropologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has traced unflattering remarks about cilantro flavor and the bug etymology — not endorsed by modern dictionaries — back to English garden books and French farming books from around 1600, when medieval dishes had fallen out of fashion. She suggests that cilantro was disparaged as part of a general effort to define the new European table against the flavors of the old.

Modern cilantrophobes tend to describe the offending flavor as soapy rather than buggy. I don’t hate cilantro, but it does sometimes remind me of hand lotion. Each of these associations turns out to make good chemical sense.

Read the rest of the story here.

Pastry Chefs Rising Stars of the Culinary World

SAN FRANCISCO — Not too long ago, the pastry chef was a bit of an afterthought.

Sure, there was tiramisu and molten lava chocolate cake. But, for the most part, kitchen celebrity was measured by thrills at the grill, not by teaspoonfuls of baking soda.

That's changed.

Artisan cupcakes are everywhere, Bravo TV's "Top Chef" is spinning off a show "Top Chef: Just Desserts," and TLC has "Cake Boss." Then there's Food Network's "Ace of Cakes," following the adventures of Duff Goldman as he and his crew whip up such concoctions as Viking ship wedding cakes, detailed right down to the breaking waves.

Pastry chefs are the rising stars of the culinary world.

"There's definitely a lot of interest," says Peter Reinhart, baking instructor at Johnson & Wales University and author of five books on bread baking, including "The Bread Bakers Apprentice." At Johnson & Wales, one of the nation's leading culinary schools, "we sell out our baking and pastry program faster than any other program, and that tells us a lot."

Dorie Greenspan, author of "Baking: From My Home to Yours," thinks blogging has helped shine a spotlight on sweets. There are cake bloggers, cookie bloggers, macaron bloggers. "There's just been a lot more news about what's going on in the sweet world."

Read the rest of the story here.

Young Job-Seekers Hiding Their Facebook Pages

(CNN) -- Justin Gawel says there's nothing too incriminating on his Facebook page.

"There are a lot of pictures of drinking [but] nothing naked or anything -- at least I don't think so," he said jokingly.

Even so, the Michigan State University junior recently changed his Facebook display name to "Dustin Jawel" to keep his personal life from potential employers while applying for summer internships.

Although Gawel ditched his rhyming alias after two weeks when he realized Facebook users also can be searched by e-mail address, school and network, he is not alone in his efforts to scrub his online résumé. Many students and recent graduates say they are changing their names on Facebook or tightening privacy settings to hide photos and wall posts from potential employers.

And with good reason.

A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft found that 70 percent of recruiters and hiring managers in the United States have rejected an applicant based on information they found online.

What kind of information? "Inappropriate" comments by the candidate; "unsuitable" photos and videos; criticisms of previous employers, co-workers, or clients; and even inappropriate comments by friends and relatives, according to the survey report, titled "Online Reputation in a Connected World."

Such prying into his online life makes Gawel uncomfortable.

"I understand that when [employers look] at someone's Facebook page, they're just trying to paint a bigger picture of the people they're hiring -- so they're not just a name on a résumé," he said. "But that doesn't demonstrate whether they can do the job. It shouldn't matter what someone does when they're not in the office."

Gawel said he's not sure that employers would object to the information on his Facebook page. For him, it's more about personal privacy.

"Too many people take pictures of you. I didn't want to go through and 'untag' all of them," he said. "There's nothing illegal or too ridiculous in the photos ... but people don't take pictures of people studying or doing school work. They take pictures of people at parties and doing silly things."

For better or worse, online screenings may be a permanent part of the 21st-century hiring process.The Microsoft survey found that 79 percent of U.S. hiring managers have used the Internet to better assess applicants.

Read the rest of the story here.

Superbowl Triumph Brings Wine, Osteopaths Back to New Orleans

April 5 (Bloomberg) -- “Ever since the Saints won the Super Bowl people have stopped asking if the streets of New Orleans are still full of water,” said Ted Brennan, whose family owns Brennan’s in the French Quarter. “You can’t imagine how important that game was. People are coming back, eating in the restaurants, and ordering good wines again.”

The last time I spoke with Ted and his brother Jimmy was after Katrina hit in 2005 and destroyed vast quantities of restaurant wine, mainly from heat spoilage after the electricity went out.

On the night after Katrina blew through, Jimmy Brennan and his chef Lazone Randolph kept a vigil with loaded pistols to ward off looters intent on robbing their 30,000 bottle wine cellar of its treasures -- all eventually condemned by the health department.

Antoine’s lost 16,000 bottles, Emeril’s 6,000.

“We’re back up to about 5,000 bottles now, which is $500,000 wholesale,” said Jimmy Brennan. “And prices are coming down fast. It used to be very difficult to buy 2005 and 2006 Bordeaux and Burgundy, but now there’s a lot of wine unsold because of the economy worldwide. They got to get rid of that wine.”

Jimmy, 68, says that the older New Orleans restaurants (Brennan’s opened in 1946 and moved to Royal Street in 1955) “held our own” after Katrina and during the recession. “Everybody’s ordering in the medium price range, with very few high notes.”

He prides himself on low markups. “You get a lot more bang for your buck in New Orleans than you would in New York, Boston, or other cities where they jack up the prices,” he said. “If I pay $10 for a wine wholesale, I charge the guest $30; if I pay $50 or more, I just double the price.”

Read the rest of the story here.

Once a Rising Star, Chef Now Feeds Hungry

Madurai, India (CNN) -- Narayanan Krishnan was a bright, young, award-winning chef with a five-star hotel group, short-listed for an elite job in Switzerland. But a quick family visit home before heading to Europe changed everything.

"I saw a very old man eating his own human waste for food," Krishnan said. "It really hurt me so much. I was literally shocked for a second. After that, I started feeding that man and decided this is what I should do the rest of my lifetime."

Krishnan was visiting a temple in the south Indian city of Madurai in 2002 when he saw the man under a bridge. Haunted by the image, Krishnan quit his job within the week and returned home for good, convinced of his new destiny.

"That spark and that inspiration is a driving force still inside me as a flame -- to serve all the mentally ill destitutes and people who cannot take care of themselves," Krishnan said.

Krishnan founded his nonprofit Akshaya Trust in 2003. Now 29, he has served more than 1.2 million meals -- breakfast, lunch and dinner -- to India's homeless and destitute, mostly elderly people abandoned by their families and often abused.

Because of the poverty India faces, so many mentally ill people have been ... left uncared [for] on the roadside of the city," he said.

Krishnan said the name Akshaya is Sanskrit for "undecaying" or "imperishable," and was chosen "to signify [that] human compassion should never decay or perish. ... The spirit of helping others must prevail for ever." Also, in Hindu mythology, Goddess Annapoorani's "Akshaya bowl" fed the hungry endlessly, never depleting its resources.

Krishnan's day begins at 4 a.m. He and his team cover nearly 125 miles in a donated van, routinely working in temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

He seeks out the homeless under bridges and in the nooks and crannies between the city's temples. The hot meals he delivers are simple, tasty vegetarian fare he personally prepares, packs and often hand-feeds to nearly 400 clients each day.

Read the rest of the chef's inspiring story here.

Master Chef Turns His Skills to Cooking for Cancer Patients

By CHRISTINE FISHER
Philadelphia Daily News

JACK SHOOP has owned several top-rated restaurants and is one of just 61 chefs in the United States who've been certified as master chefs by the American Culinary Federation. When the opportunity for a major career change arose, however, Shoop let his mom be his guide.

Less than two years ago, Shoop, a Harley-riding Kensington native, traded in his Florida restaurant gigs to become the executive chef for Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Eastern Regional Medical Center in Northeast Philadelphia. Shoop stresses the clinical and spiritual importance of food in the meals he prepares daily for about 800 cancer patients, their families and CTCA employees.

Shoop's decision to make such a significant career switch was due in large part to his mother's passing. "Even though my mother didn't die of cancer, I just felt like she was telling me to do it," Shoop recalled recently.

Hurricane Katrina played a part, too.

In 2005, the hurricane hit Shoop's restaurant in Destin, Fla. - the fourth such storm to strike the business. At the same time, his father passed away. The coinciding events prompted Shoop to return to Philadelphia to help his newly widowed mother.

She died unexpectedly a few months later.

Upon returning to Philadelphia, Shoop began working at Viking Cooking School in Bryn Mawr. That led to him doing a cooking demonstration for CTCA leaders as a part of a team-building workshop they attended. CEO John McNeil approached Shoop after the event and asked him to join CTCA.

Working in a hospital, he sometimes finds himself thinking of his mother's passing, and it's brought him to tears. "I never cried in my restaurant. Here I've cried about a thousand times," he said. But the opportunity to make a positive difference in the world outweighs any emotional strain from his job.

Shoop sees his work as a way to "redirect passion for the culinary arts to better the lives of cancer patients and their caregivers."

Certainly the job brings special challenges. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 40 percent of cancer-related deaths are due to malnutrition. Cancer and its treatments can affect a patient's ability to taste and smell and lead to nausea, trouble absorbing nutrients, anorexia and fatigue.

At Eastern Regional Medical Center, Shoop and a team of oncologists, naturopathic doctors, nutritionists, mind-body specialists and therapists use a whole-person approach to ensure optimal nutrition for their patients. This approach is based on the idea that cancer does not affect one part of the body but rather the body as a whole - as well as all aspects of patients' lives.

CTCA's philosophy of all-inclusive care centralized under one roof is the result of another man's love for his mother: Founder Richard J. Stephenson started CTCA in Illinois after seeing the unsatisfactory care his own mother received when she battled cancer. CTCA also has facilities in Illinois, Oklahoma, Arizona and Washington state.

The objectives of what CTCA calls its "Mother Standard of Care" are to make a difference in the lives of cancer patients and to treat patients as they would their own loved ones.

Not surprisingly, Shoop enthusiastically embraced that approach. "Every single person can make a difference," he said, adding that he extends that philosophy to how he treats his 52-person staff as well.

Read the entire story here.

"Food Adventure" Clubs Embrace the Unusual

"Food adventure" clubs such as the New York-based Gastronauts are attracting members interested in trying unusual foods such as live octopus or goat kidneys. Pastry chef Jenna Volcheff said she attends Gastronauts events to experience food from different cultures without having to travel.

NEW YORK — Ben Raisher watches as the writhing Octopus on his plate has its tentacles clipped with giant shears, then squirms in amber sesame oil like a pile of bisected earthworms.

With a deft pinch of his chopsticks, the wriggling, still-alive limb is in his mouth and down his throat.

Raisher, 28, smiles. It's what brought him to his local food adventure club, one of a handful of groups dedicated to dining on exotic and bizarre foods from New York to Denver to San Francisco.

The iron-stomached champions of New York City are the Gastronauts, who meet monthly to feast on foods many wouldn't consider, such as pig hearts and intestine in vinegar, goat kidneys or sauteed lamb's brains.

"Nothing's off the table," said co-founder Curtiss Calleo, who grew up in Austria and Italy and wants to bring Old World curiosity to New York plates. "Any restaurant worth its salt has sweetbreads or tongue or pork bellies. There's a food renaissance going on."

Offal is old hat for groups like the Boston Gastronauts and the Organ Meet Society of New York City. There are groups devoted to eating only insects and some that venture into extreme territory, like the San Francisco Food Adventure Club that recently organized a human placenta tasting (the dinner had to be canceled due to potential formaldehyde exposure).

Most of the adventures are in good fun, but some have pushed boundaries. Last week, federal prosecutors filed charges against a restaurant and sushi chef accused of serving endangered whale meat in Santa Monica, Calif.

Read the complete story here.

Dinner is Served, But We Can't Tell You Where

By Jane Black

On Feb. 23, a select group of Washingtonians received an intriguing e-mail: "The orange arrow is pointing at you," the subject line read.

It was an exclusive invitation to "an exclusive underground anti-restaurant," the e-mail explained. "Because the DNA of the magical dinner is unmapped, these events will evolve, month to month, season to season, place to place & plate to plate."

The invitation alone wasn't enough for diners to make the cut, however. For the privilege of attending Orange Arrow's inaugural, $125-a-head dinner, guests had to agree to abide by certain rules.

"If you can't/won't eat certain things, this is not for you."

"No crybabies, whiners or buzz kills can come to our party. This isn't reality television."

"Don't try to sell your ticket on Craigslist. Failure to show basic decency gets you on the blacklist."

Reached by phone, Orange Arrow's co-founder, a James Beard award-nominated chef, made no apologies for the invitation's tone or defiant exclusivity. "We don't want them in if they're not fun or interesting," said the chef, who requested anonymity. "This is a private club. In a restaurant, you're a whipping post. This is a completely different thing."

In a city best known for its see-and-be-seen culinary destinations, a new breed of underground restaurants is emerging. These supper clubs shun pomp, circumstance and plebian steak dinners in favor of more-offbeat dining experiences. Some operate as for-profit businesses. Orange Arrow plans to obtain location and liquor permits for its ambitious suppers, which will host as many as 150 select "hungry, hedonistic gypsies" at venues that range from a museum to an alleyway. Others lurk in a legal gray area, accepting "suggested donations" for the food and wine to get around requirements for business and liquor licenses. Hush, the brainchild of a former World Bank staffer, invites no more than 16 for an intimate evening of home-style Indian food and culinary storytelling. There are even traveling underground restaurants. On Feb. 20, 40 in-the-know hipsters surrounded a long table to eat garlicky shrimp (and learn to suck out the heads) at the area's first Wok + Wine event.

Already, demand is strong. Orange Arrow sold 30 percent of its tickets within 24 hours; it requires visitors to visit http://orangearrowdc.com to list a reference in order to get past the virtual velvet rope. After just one month of taking reservations at http://hushsupperclub.wordpress.com, Hush has an e-mail list of 300 interested diners, and every meal has had a waiting list. "The demand is unbelievable," said the host, who goes by the name Geeta and runs Hush out of her home in Northwest Washington. "I thought, you know, I'd join Twitter and send out some e-mails and maybe some people would check it out. I thought it would take six months to build interest, not 10 days."

Unlicensed restaurants have long prospered overseas. In Hong Kong, si fang cai, or speak-easies, in private homes are considered by many to have the best food in the city. But clandestine kitchens are a more recent phenomenon in the United States. The Ghetto Gourmet, which began serving meals in the basement of an Oakland, Calif., apartment in 2004, was one of the earliest. Soon, the concept spread to big cities everywhere. In Atlanta, RogueApron threw an event in an alley between boarded-up houses. In New York, patrons of A Razor, A Shiny Knife have together learned to carve a 150-pound boar. In Washington, two professional chefs launched a short-lived underground experiment, also called Hush, in Eastern Market in 2007. But it wasn't until this year that the trend took off in earnest.

Washington's new underground restaurants generally divide into two categories: amateur cooks who want to offer a new kind of experience and recovering restaurateurs who want to set their own rules.

Read the rest of the story here.

Another Cable Helping for Food Lovers

By BRIAN STELTER

FOR the upfront season of advance television advertising sales, Scripps Networks has something new to share with clients: a second 24-hour cable channel for food lovers and the advertisers who love them.

Scripps, the owner of the Food Network, plans to turn on the Cooking Channel on Memorial Day, May 31, this year, enhancing its position in the category of kitchen programming. Before meetings with advertisers, the company is announcing half a dozen series for the channel on Friday, including new ones starring Bobby Flay and Rachael Ray. It might as well be called Food Network, the Sequel.

About two years ago, when the company started considering a second culinary channel, “the advertiser demand for Food was outstripping the audience growth,” Jon Steinlauf, the senior vice president for ad sales for Scripps Networks, said this week. “Therefore, creating a second channel started making more sense.”

The Cooking Channel, which is a replacement for Fine Living Network, FLN, a low-rated lifestyle channel, was announced last fall. At that time, Scripps said the channel would focus on information and instructional programming, much as the Food Network did before it gravitated toward higher-rated reality competitions like “The Next Food Network Star.” In recent months, Scripps has altered its plans for the second channel to include more entertaining fare.

“We listened to the audience and realized they weren’t necessarily saying they just wanted more instruction or more reality or more travel shows. They just wanted more,” said Michael Smith, the general manager of the Cooking Channel.

The craving for food programming is insatiable, Scripps executives like to say. (They rarely pass up opportunities for food puns; the first press release for the Cooking Channel said that “the time has come for us to have our cake and eat it, too.”) The ratings were up markedly for the Food Network last year, and shows set in kitchens have flourished on other channels.

“When you see Fox lining up its third Gordon Ramsay cooking show in prime time, I think food’s arrived as a mainstream genre,” Mr. Steinlauf said.

Naturally, Scripps wants to capture as much market share as it can. “If there are 1.2 rating points available for food programming, we want to be able to get the 0.9 on Food and the 0.3 on the Cooking Channel,” he said. “For this to be a good business for Scripps, we have to be able to grow the combined audience for these channels.”

Mirrored channels are not unprecedented on cable, where further fragmentation seems certain. ESPN has ESPN2, MTV has MTV2, and CNN has HLN, formerly called Headline News. Mr. Smith says he expects the Cooking Channel’s core viewers will be the ones he calls “hyper-passionate fans” of Food — the recipe bloggers, the Yelp reviewers, the amateur chefs.

Read the rest of the story here.

Congratulations to Class #57

Congratulations to the graduates of Class #57 of the Second Helpings Culinary Job Training Program. The largest class in the history of the program graduated on Friday, February 12, 2009.

 

Pictured above (front row, left to right) Isabella Barahona, Ellen Funk, Irene Jenna, Breann Brown, Aeshia Tichenor, Laurin Kinney (Second row) Ross Eggers, Brandon Frew, Jesse Chisolm, Brenen Head, Christopher Holton, Judie Sloan, Chef Conway (Back row) David Newson, Kenneth Klimkiewicz, Charles Thompson, Norman Patterson, Jamari Jones.

Alton Brown's favorite Cookbooks

By ALTON BROWN

1. The Joy of Cooking

By Irma S. Rombauer
Bobbs-Merrill, 1936

Maybe it's because I inherited "The Joy of Cooking" from my paternal grandmother, a true witch of the baking world, or because her edition, the sixth, was published in 1962, the year I was born. Or maybe it's because even this 1960s "Joy" was still packed with old-fashioned tips like the carefully laid out instructions for skinning a squirrel. As the diagrams show, the skinning process is easy once you get the tail under your foot. Whatever the reason for my attachment to the particular volume on my shelf, I'm also a "Joy" fan no matter the edition: Every recipe is written in the book's unmistakable style, with ingredients and amounts seamlessly integrated into the instructions. For me this is still the quintessential American cookbook. Try the baked herring and potatoes or sourdough rye. Or perhaps the roast squirrel with walnut ketchup.

2. The Frugal Gourmet

By Jeff Smith
Morrow, 1984

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, "The Frugal Gourmet," made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes. Since it was my only cookbook at the time—I had yet to inherit "The Joy of Cooking" mentioned above—I made every recipe in it, several times. All these years later I still cook the chicken piccata, the pea salad with bacon, and the lamb with beans, not making a single substitution. Unfortunately Smith became embroiled in a sex-abuse scandal in the mid-1990s involving young men who had worked for him. Not only did his career screech to a halt, but his earlier work was also tainted in the process. And that's a real shame, because were it not for Smith, I know of at least one would-be cook who'd still be on the sofa ordering takeout.

See the rest of his list here

Super Bowl Food Fight: Indy Vs. Big Easy

Football fans are looking forward to this Sunday's Super Bowl — and a day full of good food. But the menu doesn't have to be limited to pizza and nachos. We asked two chefs from the Colts' and Saints' hometowns about what they'd be cooking this weekend.

From New Orleans, Donald Link is chef and owner of the restaurants Herbsaint and Cochon. His Super Bowl party continues a tradition he inherited from his parents.

This year, the party will include sausage and salami from Link's butcher shop. But those are just for snacking, he told NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "The main dish that I always cook is the seafood gumbo," Link said — like the one featured in his cookbook, Real Cajun.

Link's party will be at his home, which he repaired after Hurricane Katrina. In those renovations, he said, he made sure to include clear sightlines from the kitchen to the TV.

"We actually stood where the stove was going to go and lined it up to where the TV would be, just to make sure that we had the broadest view of the TV," he said.

And from Indianapolis, Regina Mehallick is chef and owner of R Bistro. Her restaurant is decked out for the big game, she said, complete with blue flowers and cadet-blue napkins to match the Colts' uniforms.

Mehallick, author of Regina's Seasonal Table, also emphasizes locally grown produce and meats.

"We should definitely have blue popcorn," Mehallick said, "because corn is popular here in Indiana."

Her main dish will reflect another local favorite: a breaded pork tenderloin sandwich. The R Bistro version will be crusted in panko flakes. And since Indiana is a large producer of duck meat, Mehallick is considering serving duck wings — "done the classic way that chicken wings would be done," she said.

Both cities have been abuzz for nearly two weeks, as fans dream of an NFL title.

But Link says his Saints party will be a bit tamer than past versions — partly because he wants to be sure to have time to sit down and watch the game.

"I'm getting kind of chills, just about to say it," he said. "But with Mardi Gras this weekend and the Saints in the Super Bowl — I mean, this is a fantastic time to be here."

In Indianapolis, the lingering effects of the economic recession aren't putting a damper on the excitement, either.

The city has been a scene for pep rallies and parties — and people dressed in all blue and white, Mehallick said. She admitted to wearing a Colts jersey as she spoke to NPR.

"This is a big sports city," she said. "This is just a happy time, it's bringing people together. Lots of people on the street are saying hello — and go Colts."

The interview ended on a civil note — up to a point.

"Donald, good luck — but I hope we win," Mehallick said.

"Who dat?" Link replied.

Listen to the full story and download the recipes here.

Career Options Expand for Culinarians

Into the frying pan

By DAN AVERY

Jerome Darby was a successful fashion designer whose clothing sold in

Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. But he never gave up his dream of working in a restaurant.

So he enrolled at the French Culinary Institute in SoHo, and after graduating last June, he went to work as a pastry chef at Mario Batali’s trattoria Lupa.

So how does he feel about trading in a six-figure salary for toiling in a kitchen?

“It’s been awesome,” he says.

As America’s interest in food continues to rise like a well-timed soufflé, more and more people are setting their sights on culinary careers.

“There’s been a huge, huge interest in cooking schools,” says Irena Chalmers, an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in upstate Hyde Park, and author of “Food Jobs: 150 Great Jobs for Culinary Students, Career Changers and Food Lovers.”

In the past six years, applications spiked nearly 50 percent at CIA, which added a satellite campus to cope with the demand. At the Institute for Culinary Education in Chelsea, the surge in interest has been “staggering,” says admissions director Brian Aronowitz. Meanwhile, after a decade when enrollment doubled, the French Culinary Institute just had “our best year ever,” says founder Dorothy Hamilton.

The weak economy has actually boosted interest, in part because people often return to school during slowdowns, and in part because food careers are popular with career changers — including those motivated by a layoff. And to some extent, the food business is recession-proof.

“There will always be jobs in the culinary field,” says Hamilton, who’s written a new book, “Love What You Do: Building a Career in the Culinary Industry.”

One big change, however, is the sheer range of jobs falling under that umbrella. That range has grown a lot wider in recent years, notes Chalmers, who was inspired to write her book by all her students who “had no idea there were so many jobs outside of working in a restaurant.”

From food historian to recipe tester, “There are so many things you can do,” she says.

With that in mind, here’s a look at a few of the food world’s growing niches.

Click here to read the rest of the story.

Key Lime Cheesecake

(Serves 12)

 For the crust:

1 ½ cups vanilla wafer crumbs

½ cup shredded coconut

¼ cup granulated sugar

¼ cup melted butter

For the filling:

24 oz cream cheese

1 ¼ cups sugar

4 large eggs

1 cup sour cream

1 Tbsp grated lime zest

½ cup Key lime juice

Preheat oven to 350°F.
Combine crust ingredients in a small bowl, mixing well.
Press mixture in bottom and 1" up sides of a buttered 10-inch Springform pan.
Bake crust at 350 degrees for 8 minutes. Cool thoroughly in pan on a wire rack.
Beat cream cheese and sugar at medium speed with an electric mixer until creamy.
Add eggs one at a time, beating after each addition.
Stir in sour cream, lime zest, and lime juice.
Pour batter into prepared crust.
Bake at 350°F for 1 hour.
Turn oven off and allow cheesecake to cool in the oven door cracked for 20 minutes.
Remove from oven, and cool completely in pan on a wire rack.
Refrigerate for at least eight hours. Run a knife around the edge to loosen the Springform pan.
Cut into 12 slices. Garnish with whipped cream and lime wedges.

The GREAT Teacher

EVERY chef, unless he or she works alone, is a teacher.  Some are better teachers than others, and some are great.  In my opinion, Julia Child was the best ever.  Another whom I would place on my short list of the VERY best is Jacques Pépin.  Continue reading to find out why.

By Dana Bowen

Source: Saveur

When Jacques Pépin stopped by the SAVEUR offices to show us how to make some of the dishes he wrote about in his memoir and cookbook The Apprentice (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), we were eager to join him in the kitchen. Here was one of the most influential chefs of the past half century—a collaborator of Julia Child's, an alumnus of the legendary New York City restaurant Le Pavillon, and the author of La Technique (Simon & Schuster, 1976), one of the best culinary textbooks ever put into print. We knew we'd glean all sorts of useful lessons from him.

Within minutes of arriving, the chef was rifling through our fridge for ingredients and sharing some of his favorite tips. He showed us how to chop herbs without bruising them, by rocking the blade of a chef's knife forward and back. When cracking an egg, he hit it on a flat surface, rather than the rim of a bowl, to keep the egg free of shell fragments and to prevent the yolk from breaking. Instead of scoring and blanching tomatoes to peel them, he simply used a paring knife, a faster method that also yields skins for flavoring stock. And he demonstrated the wisest approach we've seen yet to cutting up a chicken.

These are the kinds of smart strategies we've always learned from Pépin, but to observe his actions up close—such as when he made a last-minute, pitch-perfect adjustment to his mother's apple tart—was to understand that there's more to his expertise than flawless technique. The chef was always tasting, smelling, touching, looking, and then adapting to the situation at hand. When the tart came out of the oven, Pépin decided it needed more color, so he glazed it with a few spoonfuls of apricot jam, even though the original recipe didn't call for it. Of course, it looked—and tasted—divine. 


Check out some of the great chef's recipes and see some of his techniques videos here.

Behind The Scenes of Food TV

Many steps lead to a cooking show at the Food Network

By Francine Segan, Tribune Media Services

January 6, 2010

"People don't realize how many hands are involved even before Rachael, Guy or Melissa touch the food," says Rob Bleifer, executive chef of the Food Network Kitchen. The names he mentions will be familiar to fans of the network — they are stars Rachael Ray, Guy Fieri and Melissa d'Arabian. "There's an entire kitchen behind the kitchen on one of our cooking shows."

He's not kidding. The Food Network's behind-the-scenes kitchen, in its studio located above the Chelsea Markets in New York City, is a gigantic space with five separate kitchen areas, so chefs can prepare the food for several different shows at the same time. These spaces were designed to function just like a typical home kitchen, each with its own oven, stove top, sink and fridge. It is here that the ingredients are prepared for the hosts to use on air.

"Typically between 15 and 20 people are involved just for the culinary elements of a basic cooking show," says Michelle Betrock, publicist for the Food Network. For a bigger show like "Iron Chef America," she adds, the number could be double or more.

Planning for a daytime cooking show starts several months in advance in meetings between the host of the show and a culinary producer. The producers make sure the recipes selected will make an interesting show and that everything can be cooked within a program.

A lot of enticing recipes don't make the cut. "I had to tell chef Alex Guarnaschelli ("Alex's Day Off") that she couldn't make the chocolate crostata — sort of (like an) Italian chocolate pie — that she wanted to prepare," notes the show's culinary producer Ashley Archer. "It just had too many components for a 30-minute show."

Culinary producers "organize every detail" of a given episode, says Jill Novatt, who oversees the network's programming as executive culinary producer. That includes "what goes into the cabinets and fridge; what cooks on the stove top and what in the oven; and even what utensils and pots will need to be handy."

Claire Robinson, host of the popular Food Network show "Five Ingredient Fix," says she and her producer, Wes Martin, often spend six weeks working on the recipes for just a single episode. "There are sometimes 20 points that can be mentioned for any one recipe, and Wes and I break down those points to fit into the show's format."

The culinary producer also plans all the "swap-outs" — the examples of a single recipe prepared at different stages of completion. "We don't want the TV crew to have to stand around and wait for three hours for the osso buco to cook," jokes Susan Stockton, senior vice president of culinary production. The culinary producer gives a list of recipes to a food stylist, who tests them so the home audience can be assured that the recipes work and are written with easy-to-follow directions.

One of the most surprising behind-the-scenes facts is the tiny earphone worn by many of the cooking show hosts. "Cooking on TV is a hard job," Novatt says. "You need to really actually cook while listening to the culinary producer whispering in your ear telling you to smile and to move your hand because it's blocking the celery, all while you also have to pay attention to the studio director on the floor who is pointing to which camera you have to face."

"What's great about the Food Network studio environment," says Sunny Anderson, star of "Cooking for Real," "is having a team where, if I miss an ingredient in the rush or forget how much time I have left, a gentle voice chimes in my ear to keep me on track."

See the rest of the story, including some nice recipes here.