MEME MONDAY: FOODTV

There's a lot of food out there on those crazy interwebs and this feature, Meme Monday, highlights places dedicated to it, be they favored food-related websites, reference sites or, gasp, blogs.

The Food Network. Is it "cool" to say you watch it, use it? I don't know. Sure, there's a little too much Rachel Ray and you're right, Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee is very hateable, but those shows aren't directed at my demographic. I'll do a post somewhere down the road about which ones I watch (Alton Brown's fun and Iron Chef America is a great hour of television especially while food blogging) and which ones I don't (I don't need a live band or bare feet either) but today, let's talk about their website.

When I'm interested in doing a new project, making something a little more complicated that I haven't done before, I'll usually search over their recipes and use them as guidelines. That's probably the way I use their site most, storing interesting recipes in a 'recipe box' the site offers (The Times needs to do this really badly and with their TimesSelect accounts there's no really good reason they don't). The site has some other helpful pages too, including video demos (baking, knife skills, etc.) and an encyclopedia. Is there a lot of celebrity chef going on at the food network? Sure. Is that necessarily a bad thing? No.