FN Dish – Food Network Blog: Go behind-the-scenes at Food Network featuring your favorite chefs, shows, recipes, events and more.

Greenscreen isn’t just for summer’s big budget action movies. It’s also used to place your favorite Food Network stars in worlds beyond their kitchens and imaginations. For example, take Claire Robinson’s show promo for the first season of 5 Ingredient Fix. One of our producers, Olivia, developed this spot after talking with Claire about her culinary point of view, and then shot it on a greenscreen backdrop back in March to highlight the entire season.

Like kernels transforming into summer movie popcorn, here is the before and after:

BEFORE

[pickle url="http://www.pickle.com/flshentrw/cp20/VP/1699/FOOD/1030345"]

AFTER

[pickle url="http://www.pickle.com/flshentrw/cp20/VP/1698/FOOD/1030186"]

CONTINUE READING

Comfort yourself with a bear-shaped potato, part of a series of what the Guardian delightfully calls “wonky vegetables,” released in honor of the EU’s having lifted vegetable-shape strictures.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

A Hare Krishna group in West Virginia (who knew?), faced with what appear to be mounting cases of dissatisfied cows, has launched the nation’s first adopt-a-cow program, allowing you to provide care for a retired cow for $108 a month — or, should that prove too pricey for you, you can feed a workaday cow for $51 a month instead.  And you should definitely click through to the WSJ article on it; the cow-profile woodcut is worth the price of admission.

Charlie, meanwhile, has been doing his part. He’s already adopted three. [via]

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

The kids are home for the summer and the rain shows no signs of ever stopping, so I have two words for all of you cooped-up parents out there: Boudin Noir. For many the dark, almost black sausage conjures up feelings of warm, comfy, home-cooked goodness. For others deep, dark, pure disgust. And for others still, utter confusion. “What is it? Blood?! I don’t understand.”

To those of you in this last category, I’m no Harold McGee, but let me explain briefly. You fill a sausage casing with blood, gently poach it in water; the blood coagulates, becomes solid, and voila, blood sausage. Couldn’t be simpler.

So what will we need? Ingredients: A couple yards of natural hog casings, some ground mace and cloves, salt and pepper, an egg, a little cream, diced pork back fat, and about two quarts of pig’s blood. Equipment: A large pot to poach the sausage, a mixing bowl, a whisk, a funnel and someone (who isn’t squeamish or afraid to get a little messy) to hold the funnel.

Once this is all gathered, the process is easy and fun for all — as long as you don’t make the mistake I made on my first attempt.

Mix the raw ingredients in the bowl, tie off one end of the casing, stick the funnel in the other end and pour the ingredients into the casing. All pretty easy; that is, assuming the mouth on your funnel is wide enough for all the ingredients to pass through. (When it isn’t, you end up spending 45 minutes using your finger to stuff chunks of fat and blood through a hole they were never meant to get through, inevitably losing your grip on the casing and spraying you and your happy little helpers with blood.) In any case, the mission is eventually accomplished.

Then, the sausage is poached gently until all the blood has coagulated, and the sausage is sautéed with butter, apples and thyme and comes out of the pan just in time for your spouse to return home out of the rain to find their happy little family looking like the offspring of the barber of Seville, with a delightful hearty meal ready on the table.

I can’t think of a better rainy day activity. Enjoy!

Charlie Granquist, Culinary Producer

CONTEST!

Submissions are now closed! Three winners will be chosen by our Food Network limerick experts this week and notified by email. Check back on The FN Dish to see the winning limericks later in the week.

*****

We’re giving away THREE autographed copies of Bobby Flay’s new book, Burgers, Fries & Shakes. To WIN, create an original limerick with the subject either about Bobby Flay or burgers.

What is a limerick, you ask? A limerick is a five-line poem with an AABBA rhyming pattern. Here’s an example to get your juices flowing:

There once was a cow named “Fate”
The laziest in all of upstate.
She only ate grass
And passed lots of gas.
Now, she lays on my plate

(By entering a comment, you agree to these contest rules).

How an extremely misanthropic resident of the bovine digestive system such as E. coli travels through four stomachs, 150 feet of intestines large and small, across thousands of miles, from farm to processor(s) to retailers to — at the end of a journey that makes a Yukon river salmon run look like a 5-minute commute — ultimately find new accommodations in some unlucky human gut is one of the most pressing mysteries investigators of food contamination have attempted to solve since the first major E. coli scare back in 1992.

This week that mystery got a new twist with the emergence of a new and wholly unlikely disease vector: chocolate chip cookie dough. Now, a rare hamburger (or even spinach grown downstream from a feedlot) is one thing. But how E. coli 0157 found its way into a package of Nestlé Toll House Cookie Dough, let alone enough packages to sicken at least 65 people in 29 states, is the kind of mystery that adds a whole new layer of fear and distrust to an already worrisome situation. Nothing in Nestlé’s product would seem to pose an E. coli risk. The risk usually associated with cookie dough is salmonella from raw eggs-even Nestlé’s eggs are pasteurized.

One can only hope that the food safety reform bill just passed by a House panel, while far from perfect, will make such mysteries easier to solve in the future. In the meantime 300,000 cases of recalled cookie dough should have landfills nationwide smelling a little sweeter for the next few weeks.

Jonathan Milder, Research Librarian

Yes, it is. Photo, and garbage can over which we’re eating said mango, courtesy of Ashley.

Rupa Bhattacharya, Culinary Writer

[pickle url="http://my.foodnetwork.com/flshentrw.flash/cp20/VP/618966/1/16028346/16027869/1/1/1"]

- Submit Questions to Susie
- Read Episode 3 Viewer Questions
- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 1
- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 2
- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 4

Want to know what Susie really thought about The Next Food Network Star, Episode 4? Now you can ask her!

After you watch Episode 4 THIS Sunday, 9pm/8c, write all of your burning questions in the comments section within this post! Susie will pick a few of the best questions and answer you directly via vlog next Friday, July 3.

- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 1
- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 2
- Watch Susie’s Answers – Episode 3

Fourth of July is upon us, and so Aunt Sandy took some time to talk with me about the holiday and a bit more. From explaining why the fourth is her favorite holiday weekend (her birthday is the 3rd of July, why wouldn’t it be?), to where she learned to grill (a summer job at the Ramada Inn during her college days), and of course Sandra treats us to a yummy fourth menu.

SECRETARY CONFIDENTIAL: SHOSHAM wrote in with this question: “If you could only splurge on one thing for your own July 4th party, which would it be: Food, Decorations, or Cocktails?”

Um….Hello?

SANDRA LEE: I’m thinking…that has got to be the hardest question anyone could ask me! Oh man, that’s like choosing your favorite child.

SC: So, is the answer D) All of the above?

CONTINUE READING