Open Letter to Rachel Ray

Dear cacklin' Rachel Ray,

Everyone knows what nutmeg is.

SHUT UP already.

Thanks,
Everyone

Fettucine with Green Pea Pesto and Spring Herb Salad

I've been watching Jamie Oliver's new series on FoodTV and getting inspiration from some of the things he makes. Not so much lately, though, as the latest few episodes have been about game and lamb, and I do my best to be a pescatarian, if that's a word.

A couple of weeks ago, a salad he made inspired me to try to recreate it, and for some reason, I thought it would go nicely with a green pea pesto and pasta dish. I'm not going to write out a recipe, because I used a recipe from Gourmet magazine for the pesto (with the addition of a little tarragon and parsley), and the salad was just arugula, Belgian endive, Italian parsley, and raddicchio tossed with a lemon-tarragon vinaigrette. The point is, it was really good, and I remembered to take a picture of it.

Actually, there's more: My son LOVED the pasta. In his little mind, pesto now means the pea mixure that was on that pasta, so I have finally found a way to get him to eat vegetables. As long as I puree cooked veggies with garlic and parmesan and call it pesto, he seems to be willing to eat them. (I recently tried this with roasted cauliflower and called it "white pesto" and it worked.)

Aside: The plates in my house reflect my mom's taste, not mine so much.

Tyler Florence Does Not Understand the Concept of "Buddy"

On Saturday mornings when I have nothing to do before a play date at 1:30, I do not tidy up my room or go for a walk or write my best-selling novel. No I do not. Instead, I park myself in front of Food Network programming for, like, five hours. I watch all the shows, whether I like them or not. In fact, I think I like the shows I don't like more than the shows I like. I mean, Jamie Oliver just makes me hungry, but Paula Deen provokes deep, philosophical questions like "What were you mainlining when you thought Velveeta should be an ingredient in fudge?"

Today, I watched Tyler's Ultimate with Tyler Florence, which I don't find particularly interesting in either respect, but what am I going to do -- laundry? He was making something out of a beef shoulder, and in trying to describe where on the animal the cut comes from, he said, "You see, our cow buddy here . . . " and pointed at the beef.

Pssst! Tyler! When you have an animal killed so you can eat it? It stops being your buddy pretty much right away. It probably questions whether you were ever really friends at all.

I guess this didn't bug me as much as when the Cuban lady kept saying "shrimpies," but . . . sheesh. One Rachel Ray is way more than enough.

An Open Letter to Guy and His Big Bite

Dear Guy, from "Guy's Big Bite" on the Food Network,

Surely I'm not the first person who has begged you, for the love of all that is holy, to stop tasting your oh-so-manly, meat-stuffed-meat, pseudofusion greasetronomy and pronouncing it "money."

If an actual cool person ever used that expression, he stopped ten seconds after Swingers came out. (Psst! Swingers is about guys who think they're hip, but are actually pathetic. Okay?)

Clearly, you think you're a rock star, but real rock stars don't use hackneyed expressions like "That's so money" and "It's on like Donkey Kong." Plus, I hate to break it to you, but there are no rock stars on the Food Network. No matter how blond you bleach your hair, no matter how often you refer to yourself in the third person (smooth, dude), and no matter how many times you name one of your wake-n-bake entrees after a cocktail, you're still just a no-repeat Saturday throwaway on the Food Network. Your audience is way more Good Housekeeping than Maxim, so you might as well just try to make good food instead of a spectacle of yourself.

By the way: It's 2007. I know! That's fifteen years later than you thought it was.