Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

boy, I loved the premise. the 'okaaay...so' ...has already made me nuts. I keep expecting them to beat this out of her before I see another episode. recipes are great. I would love for her to make it but I wish she would just stop trying to be so cool and just teach us!

I'm with y'all: the skin is the best part.

My favorite baked potato is simple: just a pat of butter, kosher salt, and ground white pepper mashed into the potato flesh. When I'm in the mood I substitute truffle oil for the butter. Always save the skin for last.

In grad school a frequent dinner for me was a microwave-"baked" potato, which I'd top with a soft fried egg, salt, and pepper. The yolk made a lovely sauce for the fluffed potato.

sounds weird, but i think they are the best with cottage cheese, salt and pepper. mm.

What is the point of baking a potato if you're not going to eat the skin! Yummy! I love to cook up ground beef and mushrooms split the potato and fill with the mixture then top with Worcestershire sauce... Sometimes I like to fill the potato with queso fresco and salsa verde... Or just some good ole pulled pork and bbq sauce!

Butter Butter and more Butter. I'm the Paula Dean of baked potatoes. And the skin is the best part. I finish off the inside of the potato saving the skin for last. Then I butter the skin (yep, more butter), add some salt and pepper and...heaven.

I love potato skins, but not the ones on sweet potatoes. For the sweets I just put butter and sometimes a squirt of orange juice on them. For Irish potatoes (what we call them down here in NC), I wash the potato, put holes in it and bake for about an hour. On top? Sour cream, scallions, crumbled bacon and cheddar cheese just like I had down in Texas years ago.

I like all the other ideas as well and might try them when I get into a potato mood again.

definite yes on the skins, washed, oiled, salted, baked in the oven for an hour or so. I usually top with some butter, kosher salt, and freshly ground black pepper although recently my wife introduced me to the idea of putting canned chicken ala king on them. This is surprisingly good.

I was thrilled that Melissa won. I think that if it had been Debbie vs Melissa that Debbie would've won. Jeffrey was always bad to me. I wanted them to kick him off a lot of the time. He was too frenetic. I think that Melissa will do well. I don't understand why they changed the concept of her show though.

Did you notice that one of last year's losers also was part of Chef vs City? Kelsey? She's a "NY Foodie" along with Claire Robinson? Geez, I can think of real foodies that would've been better competition for Aaron Sanchez and the other guy (who I can't pronounce his name). So it seems they do bring back some of the losers. I couldn't believe that they gave Adam his own show. Did you notice though that it was a travel show, not a cooking show. They didn't like him enough to give him a real cooking show.

OK, I'm late to the party, but having watched the series (and hated myself for it) I wanted to chime in. From a marketing standpoint, I completely agree with Melissa's win. She engaged the viewer/the camera in a way that Jeffery simply did not. Despite having the more interesting concept (I know what harissa is, yet I'd never seen it used the way he did!) he just cannot relate to the camera. I found him stiff and uncomfortable, and it may well be, as someone above suggested, that what sutis him is a NO RESERVATIONS-type show on the travel channel, rather than a dumbed-down dump-and-stir show on FN.

Having said that, I'm a working housewife and I cook - a lot. I'm not Melissa's target audience - I prefer Ina Garten, Lidia Bastianich and reruns of Molto Mario - but her value to the network is huge. She's must more likeable than either Rachael Ray or Sandra Lee (less frenetic and phony) and really gives good camera. Her "four-step chicken" is indeed a great idea (albeit a very simplified version of any standard chicken saute) but she puts it into terms that the so-called harried homemaker can remember as they run through the grocery store to pick up dinner. Plus, unlike Sandra Lee - and sadly now Rachael Ray - she seems to use all real ingredients rather than lots of premade stuff loaded with preservatives, which should be a nice change for this network.

Overall, I think FN shoudl get rid of everyone but Bobby Flay (who is annoying, but can really cook), Alton Brown and Ina Garten and start over. But again, as someone above pointed out, I don't think FN is really interested in targeting the Serious Eats audience!

I agree with Remander. We're not the Food Network's market, though I'm not sure that I completely agree with Erica Gruen in the statement that "people don't watch television to learn things."

We're people who like food and like to cook (not to mention eat!). But there are a lot of people out there who don't cook. They either don't like to cook, didn't learn to cook or think that it will take hours of slaving over a hot stove to get dinner on the table every night. If these shows start getting people in the kitchen that's a step in the right direction.

The last two paragraphs of the Pollan article says, "Crusty as a fresh baguette, Harry Balzer insists on dealing with the world, and human nature, as it really is, or at least as he finds it in the survey data he has spent the past three decades poring over. But for a brief moment, I was able to engage him in the project of imagining a slightly different reality. This took a little doing. Many of his clients — which include many of the big chain restaurants and food manufacturers — profit handsomely from the decline and fall of cooking in America; indeed, their marketing has contributed to it. Yet Balzer himself made it clear that he recognizes all that the decline of everyday cooking has cost us. So I asked him how, in an ideal world, Americans might begin to undo the damage that the modern diet of industrially prepared food has done to our health.

'“Easy. You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”'

I listened to the podcast and Melissa has some good ideas -- and they're ideas that the novice cook will benefit from. I liked her concept recipe for chicken and I can see that this could be done with other quick-cooking cuts of meat or fish. A new cook might not know this.

I read a lot of cooking blogs and I'm constantly amazed how little people know about cooking. They don't know that you can use more or less (or none!) of something, especially seasonings, and still have a recipe that tastes great. Maybe not exactly like the original, but still very good.

I don't like Sandra Lee, but a friend of mine pointed out that the way she "cooks" is not only the way a lot of people cook, but what they think cooking is. If the Food Network can pull people in with Sandra Lee, then maybe they'll move on to Rachael, Giada, Paula, the Neelys, Aaron McCargo, Ina, Alton and others. Maybe after that they'll get interested in Julia, Lidia, Marcella,

And maybe they won't. But if they're inspired to actually cook more, that's a good thing.

Wanna know why they pick people we (people who want to learn to cook) think suck?

Read the NY Times piece from Sunday: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/magazine/02cooking-t.html?_r=1&ref=dining

Here's the excerpt that tells it all: "Erica Gruen, the cable executive often credited with putting the Food Network on the map in the late ’90s, recognized early on that, as she told a journalist, “people don’t watch television to learn things.” So she shifted the network’s target audience from people who love to cook to people who love to eat, a considerably larger universe and one that — important for a cable network — happens to contain a great many more men."

We are not their market. Food Network is no more likely to be concerned about teaching us to cook than would be Soap Opera Network. Not their thing.

What brought her to the show?
Her culinary point of view was "stay at home mother (that can cook)".
FN is marketing her as "mom".
Hubby has a new job, and the family relocates to Washington state.

So this stay at home mom, will be leaving the kids to fly across the country to New York City for TV. And it has nothing to do with "supporting the family", it's all about her.
Leaving the nanny to raise the kids...
It won't take long for mom's (stay at home or work out of home) to see through this farce, and those that can afford a nanny don't care about her $10 meals anyway.
I really don't see who her audience is.

I'm not woman bashing, I am a woman - that happened to raise her own kids while working full time.

Melissa tasting her peppers was a really smart thing to do. First of all, heat levels can vary widely, even among the same pepper variety. I recently failed to taste some serranos I was cooking with and the dish turned out way too hot because I had a hotter than usual batch of peppers but I hadn't tasted them so I didn't know. So, rather than a sign of inexperience, tasting the peppers was a sign of cooking savvy. And didn't that dish get great reviews? So it also proved that she can take an ingredient she doesn't have a whole lot of experience with and still produce delicious food.

As for abandoning her family, shows on the FN are filmed in clusters so it probably only takes a couple of weeks to do 6 shows. Lots of FN cooking show hosts live in places that aren't New York. And yes, it's incredibly sexist and irritating that Melissa's parenting decisions are questioned but Jeffrey's aren't.