TGIF: ThanksGiving ... It's Friday!?

Hey there! Yesterday, I headed over to the Food Network kitchens in Chelsea Market to tape segments for an episode of Dear Food Network. It's a show where viewers write in, email or send videos of their culinary questions to us and we answer them over the course of a show. I participated in a couple of episodes last year, so I was totally excited to be asked for a return. This time around the topic was Thanksgiving. I developed a couple of recipes for the show and also offered some holiday tips for a viewer. The cool thing about this show is, plenty of people have the same issues around the holidays, so the questions are unique, but they cover great ground. Here's my POV of the 'set' ...
You can jusssst make out some of the ingredients to one of my recipes. Here are a few blurry flicks of me at work ...
A view through a monitor on set, so the crew can see how the viewer at home will have the image framed and seen on their television ...

And the camera men working hard to focus on the food!
Question: In blog world ... Do 4 blurry photos equal one clear one? If so, here's a clear one of myself and another guest on the show, along with one of our coworkers ...
On the left is Jay Brooks, she works in the Food Network kitchens and does so many things. To try and encompass them in a sentence would be silly. She's an amazing chef, food stylist and before I even began working at the network she was a smiling face of encouragement through my final screen test. I can't even really tell you how much the latter means to me. To know no one on the kitchen staff and have her as my first working introduction, was pretty neat. Again, I can't really say enough. She was there to help prep the ingredients and lend support from the kitchen. BTW, if you subscribe to Food Network Magazine, you can catch many of her recipes out of the 100s in each issue ... yes ... HUNDREDS. The mag is a mini cookbook and really, think about it, some cookbooks don't even have that many recipes, and there are pictures for every recipe in the mag! I know, this sounds like an ad ... but it isn't, you gotta check it out. Pretty nice and it takes up less bookshelf space! And hey, I just thought to tell you ... remember this post? Well, in the new issue on stands now, the team at Food Network Magazine feature a small story about Food Network chefs and their tattoos. They caught my blog and asked if they could use the picture I took of Michael Symon's leg for his part of the tattoo story. Of course I said yes and now I'm pretty happy to have a picture credit in this fine magazine, even if it isn't a photo of food. Kinda makes up for all the blurry photos I post up here for viewing, eh? No? I digress ... :-)

Then on the right of me is Claire Robinson, host of 5 Ingredient Fix! I met her for the first time a few weeks back, but it was so brief and I didn't get a flick, so I didn't tell ya, sorry. . Again, if I tweeted, I'm sure I would've ... these are the things people tweet, stuff they can tell you in detail later I guess. It was a quick chat the first time, this time we sat and chatted while I devoured a tuna nicoise salad for lunch. She's funny and lively and lives right here in New York. She was there to tape segments on Dear Food Network as well, though I'm not quite sure it's the same episode, but it may be. I didn't check, bad reporting skills.

I don't know when the show airs, but when I do I'll post it. Until then ... want a couple more hints at one of my recipes for the show?? While developing and testing the recipes for the episode at home, I took some pictures along the way ...

Any guesses?