This 3Quarks Daily post from a few weeks ago takes an easy swipe at TV cooking shows by loosely dividing them into three main types: “Exotica” (lots of unusual ingredients, expensive kitchens, etc.), “Dumb Gluttony”, and “Celebrity Chef”. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the various genres of food television, and he’s missed some of the categories that Food Network has experimented with to greater and lesser success, most notably the competition/reality genre, but some of his observations are good.

Sometimes I wonder how much longer the Food Network and its imitators (mainly the Travel Channel) can go on. I have to admit that the advent of the competition shows on Food Network really revived my interest in that channel after several years of them casting about for programming other than the traditional cooking show. There were definitely a few lonely years in there where there wasn’t a whole lot worth watching. Maybe Food Network will ultimately find itself going down the same road as the History Channel, which is no longer about history, and TLC which is no longer about education (TLC originally stood for “The Learning Channel”) and stop running food-related shows entirely.

Prize-winning journalist Tom Junod is one of the 2011 nominees for the James Beard Award in the category of personal essay for this excellent piece that appeared in Esquire magazine last September. The essay is as much about the things that tie a family together as it is about cooking, but the two are rather inextricably linked anyway. As a man who also cooks for his family “300 nights a year”, the beginning of the story really resonated with me. Thanks to MetaFilter for pointing this one out.

Passover was just a couple of weeks ago, and in the wake of what must have been a pretty crummy Seder, Josh Ozersky at TIME magazine wonders why Jewish food is so bad. If you read the article, he’s complaining more specifically about the staples of Eastern European Jewish cuisine that, like candied yams and green bean casserole at Thanksgiving, simply won’t disappear from Passover. It’s guaranteed to irritate some Jews who are passionate about traditional dishes, the same way some goyim are about their own stodgy holiday food. For the record, as a non-Jew, while I get what he’s complaining about, I think he’s missing the ball on some of the really delicious recipes that come out of Easter European Jewish cooking by painting his target with such a broad brush. But, then again, I am the guy who is soundly defeated each and every Thanksgiving by the “necessity” of making the same four dishes every year. Maybe next Thanksgiving I should make some kugel instead of pumpkin pie.

Tangentally related, The Atlantic’s food blog had an interesting profile of one of the competitors on the most recent season of the Food Network’s “Worst Cooks In America”, Joshie Berger. It was never specifically mentioned on the show, but Berger is a former Hasidic Jew (who still keeps Kosher), and the cooking challenges in the show were also sometime personal challenges for him due to his dietary restrictions. The producers of the show chose not to highlight Berger’s religious background because they felt he was flamboyant enough for reality TV without that focus, so it’s an interesting gloss on one of the more interesting characters from this past season.

This little piece at The Economist’s More Intelligent Life site is a brief introduction to several kinds of fermented fish sauce. The writer focuses mainly on nuoc cham, the Vietnamese version, but he also mention Malaysian belacan. You may also know nuoc cham by its Thai name, nam pla, which seems to be the name I see most often on commercial products in Asian groceries.

Our new toaster-oven came with a special setting just for cooking pizza, but reheating leftover pizza is always a pain in the ass: if you microwave it, it comes out mushy, and if you put it in the toaster-oven it often ends up burning. This Serious Eats post tells you how to use a griddle, or even a skillet, to perfectly resuscitate your leftover pizza.

Douche/Counter-Douche: Ultimately, the writer of this article decides that Guy Fieri is mostly harmless, a sanitized TV version of The Douchebag, and I mostly agree. As a host for a game show of bar stunts or for a national travelogue of greasy-spoons, he’s perfectly fine. His “cooking” show isn’t worth a bucket of spit, but very few of the shows on Food Network that still involve actual cooking are any better. Here’s an older article from The Daily Beast that’s a little more critical of him at a point where his career was really starting to take off. A couple of years later and now he’s just another TV douchebag, so I don’t think the fate of Western Cuisine hangs in the balance.

Over at Neatorama, the lovely and charming Miss Cellania explains why everything “tastes like chicken”.

“Augmented shopping” is a buzzword-y concept that basically means using your smartphone to help you make more informed purchasing decisions, typically through price comparisons. Now there’s an iPhone app called “Fooducate” that lets you scan the barcodes on packages in the supermarket, assess the nutritional information of that product and, if you wish, choose healthier alternatives. Fooducate also has a blog that talks about food labelling issues, nutrition, healthy eating choices, and other related topics. Sadly, my iPod Touch is an older model without a camera, so the app isn’t terribly useful to me right now, but the blog seems worth keeping up with.

Most traditional English cooking is a bit heavy and dull, and the humble Cornish pasty really is no exception. However, it has earned itself a protected geographical status not unlike the appellation systems used for regional food products in France, Italy and other European countries. Any product calling itself a “Cornish pasty” has to be made somewhere in Cornwall (the southwestern “leg” of England). Anything else is just a meat pie.

This NYT Food Section story about pepperoni from earlier this month had me drooling all over my laptop. To me, the true test of whether or not a pizza place is any good stands on the quality of their pepperoni pizza. And that means, essentially, the pepperoni itself. I say this without reservation, having lived in this part of the Boston metro area for fifteen years now: the pepperoni used by the pizza places around here SUCKS. It is next to impossible to get a GOOD pepperoni pizza ANYWHERE around here because to a one they all use the same shitty pepperoni. And that includes the so-called “legendary” pizzerias like Regina and Santarpio. I don’t know which brand they’re using, but it’s terrible, and they all use it. Makes a grown man weep.

This Wired story and accompanying diagram offer a peek into how Iron Chef America is staged and shot in Food Network’s “Kitchen Stadium”. Because the pace of the show is so fast, with lots of quick shots and handheld camera, it’s not always easy to get a sense of where things are on the stage. For example, I always thought Alton Brown’s station was over by the Judges’ Table, sort of up and away from the action, but he is right in front of the chefs. That makes sense, actually, because often when Alton makes a comment about something he can’t quite figure out, the chefs will answer him directly, which they probably wouldn’t do if he wasn’t so close.

My guess is that the layout of the original Kitchen Stadium set at Fuji Television was probably similar, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen any diagrams to corroborate that. Food Network stopped airing the original “Iron Chef” a few years ago, but their new network, the Cooking Channel, will be running it Monday-Friday at 11:00 p.m., so it might be possible to figure it out from watching a few of those episodes. While I have come to appreciate ICA for its own merits, I have to say that it definitely comes nowhere near the high camp entertainment level of the original show. Maybe ICA would be more entertaining if they dubbed all of Alton’s commentary into slightly-out-of-sync Japanese.

Since Tuesday of last week, I’ve been laid pretty low by a bout of food poisoning, so it might seem like a weird moment for me to be posting about food, but in my semi-delirious state it makes perfect sense to me. Oh, and it does seem that I am mostly over the food poisoning, which I blame on a bad shrimp (bad shrimp! bad! bad!). I spent a couple of days talking to Ralph on the big porcelain phone, but my only remaining symptoms are a bit of dizziness and lassitude, which, honestly, could describe my condition most days even without the Shellfish of Doom.

A sure sign that I have weathered the storm is that last night Our Intrepid Trio went to our favorite Vietnamese place for dinner and I consumed the contents of a bowl of pho.

Okay, I cheated a little bit by getting the smaller bowl, and I left some noodles in the bottom of the bowl, but I swear I could feel myself getting better with each mouthful of broth. Basic beef pho also features five or six different cuts of meat including tripe and tendon, which are not typically high on the list of things people like to eat. I have grown to adore the tendon pieces, though, for their silkiness, and eating tripe lets me feel all sanctimonious and superior to people who are afraid of “weird food”. But seriously, tripe is also the prime ingredient of a Mexican soup called “menudo”, which the Mexicans eat as a morning dish as a hangover cure.

So I would like to go find a nice authentic Mexican restaurant that makes its own menudo. Hey, no problem, say my SoCal friends, all of whom have more authentic Mexican restaurants than they can shake a stick at. Sadly, about the best we can do in the Boston area is some not-too-shabby burrito joints, one or two places that really are about Mexican cuisine, and then the range of crap “drown it in sauce and cheese and no one will notice” places. Oh, I know I could invest a day in making my own, but neither of the ladies of the house would go anywhere near something like that, and I just want to eat. Local readers who have insight into potential hidden gems are encouraged to SPEAK UP!

And every time I go to have a bowl of pho, it aggravates me that I can’t get banh mi anywhere near home. As it is, my pho hookup is almost half an hour from home, which is why I only eat there once every two or three weeks, and every time I go I think to myself “it would be AWESOME if these guys would add banh mi to the menu.” They do an enormous lunch business as it is, and I could see them making a killing on adding the sandwiches at lunchtime. Banh mi, if you’ve never had one, is the Vietnamese variation on your basic submarine sandwich, but using stuff like spicy pork pate, hot peppers, and pickled daikon instead of the run-of-the-mill Italian cold cuts. A good banh mi sandwich also comes on a particular type of baguette that the Vietnamese borrowed from the French.

At least in the case of banh mi, I know exactly where to go to find a good one: Dorchester. The majority of the Vietnamese immigrant community settled there after the war, and as you drive along Dot Ave there are banh mi shops every other block. It’s just waaay too far to drive for a sandwich without some other reason for going to Dorchester, and, honestly, I don’t have any reason to go there ever. But I’m going to have to make an effort to take a “road trip”, I can see that, especially if I wan’t a friggin’ sammich. Maybe I’ll go to the Franklin Park Zoo and see the new baby giraffe before they euthanize him (Okay, seriously, Zoo New England people, that was a REALLY slimy thing to say to get some money).

For reasons I cannot quite explain, I have started watching the Food Network again in small doses. There was a time when if there was nothing else worth watching on television, I always knew I could turn to the Food Network and see something good, but those days are long gone. Personally, I blame Rachael Ray, but I think it was inevitable given the slim margins of cable networks and the fickle tastes of viewers. But I think the pendulum might be swinging back to more shows about cooking and about cuisine, and less about cake dropping…er, decorating competitions. I also predict some big swing to old-fashioned cooking if the “Julie & Julia” movie does well, and it’s obvious that the Food Network is thinking the same.

Which does not explain why I spent an hour last night watching Jeff Corwin eat various bugs and grubs straight out of the Mexican desert, but does explain a show they’ve got called “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”. This gets to the heart of the matter — there’s a ton of bullshit about “passion for cooking” and “caring about food” that the chef-wannabe craze laid on top of a very difficult and demanding job which really all belongs in one place: on that table. If you don’t love to eat, how can you love to cook? I have always thought of cooking as a means to an end because when I am done in the kitchen I want to sit down and eat what I just made. So this show helps strip away a lot of that romanticism about cooking and lets people who do cook tell you what they like to EAT.

The last episode I saw was the one about barbecue, which is one of my favorite indulgences, and now this show has me hankering for a trip to New York to check out Daisy May’s Barbecue. This food blogger, who lives in NYC and is just a cab ride away, did in fact make a visit and came away a little bit disappointed, but I definitely have Daisy May’s on my list of places to eat for some future NYC trip.

Now, finally, here’s something I can have for lunch. Those in the know are aware that there are only a very few good barbecue places in the Greater Boston Metropolitan Area, but they do exist. The sleeper among them is a place just on the other side of town from where I live, right on the town line that divides Burlington and Billerica. It opened several years ago and struggled enormously in the beginning — the food wasn’t great, the ordering system sucked, and it just did not seem like it would last. However, because it’s the only barbecue place for miles and miles around, in a place where there are roving packs of hungry men seeking new lunch holes every day to escape the drudgery of their cubicular worklives, it hung on. Now, in my opinion, it’s even better than the well-regarded restaurant it was based on. The last couple of times I’ve had their brisket, it has excelled. Before this week is out, my friends, I will be lunching there.

Oh, and here’s another thing I want to look into the next time I visit New York: a butcher shop in Manhattan that sells American-grown Wagyu beef. Their original plan was to export the beef, which is produced in Oregon, to the Japanese market, but Japan doesn’t allow U.S. beef into the country due to our scandalously lax screening for BCE. So instead they are selling this ultra-premium quality meat direct to the only people in the world who can buy it by the pound: New Yorkers overburdened with too much money but perilously little common sense.

Actually, Wagyu beef must be tasted to be believed, and I have only had the opportunity to try it on two occasions. The marbling of the meat and fat makes the meat insanely tender, but without taking away from the central beef flavor. You probably would not really want to eat an entire steak, and at $50/pound you probably couldn’t afford to except as a rare treat, so the thing to do with it is to serve very small portions, typically simply seared. The butcher shop sells it sliced for shabu shabu, which is a Japanese style of fondue, and that would be just about perfect. On the list.

Finally, I keep thinking to myself that I’m going to go pay a visit to Wilson Farms but haven’t been able to get out of my way enough to do that. But I think that’s exactly what I’m going to do on Wednesday. The wet, cold summer we’re having has probably been hell for local tomatoes, but Wilson’s will undoubtedly have something of their own. I promised Charlotte we could make a real bolognese sauce, and I want local tomatoes if at all possible. Since I stopped doing any serious cooking, I haven’t gone produce shopping at Wilson’s for a long, long, long time, but it’s reassuring to feel the urge.

What’s that you say? You don’t really want to play a video game about Alaskan crab fishermen?

Well, maybe you’ll appreciate this: a forthcoming video game for the Nintendo Wii and DS based on Iron Chef America!

Unlike yesterday’s video game mention, this one is 100% for real and on the way to an electronics store near you. There’s not a ton of information in this brief game site news piece, but my guess is that the game is heavily based on the very popular “Cooking Mama” series for Wii and DS, where you have to chop, slice, grate, fry, and get your dish on the plate before time runs out. Except it will feature Mario (Batali, not THAT Mario), Bobby, Morimoto, and the voice of Alton Brown.

We have “Cooking Mama” for both the Wii and the DS, and it’s a great concept for the Wii. It’s a little less challenging on the DS, because the motion is pretty much always the same. Charlotte likes to play the game, and the TV tie-in is very smart (although I personally would prefer a game based on the original Japanese show), so this one is likely to find its way to our house, too.

Now, somebody needs to come up with a “MythBusters” game (explosives sold separately) and a “Dirty Jobs” game and all my TV show game needs would be complete. (On second thought, the “Dirty Jobs” game would probably involve something very gross, so maybe ixnay on that one)

We spent our President’s Day weekend in New York City. It was a bit of an impromptu trip; Bridget was able to cash in some reward points to score a cheap rate on a Midtown hotel room, so we drove down as far as Stamford, CT on Saturday morning, hopped the commuter train, and stayed until early Monday afternoon. We squeezed in plenty of things to do and see and eat without feeling like we were on a forced march, only got rained on a little bit, and there were no major meltdowns or arguments. I’ll tell you more about it after the jump.

I first started travelling to New York City on a semi-regular basis about ten years ago for work and found that I really liked the city. On one of my trips, Bridget came along and we spent the weekend sightseeing, and thus was born what has become a more-or-less yearly tradition of going to New York. Charlotte’s first trip with us was two years ago and we all had such a miserable time that last year I did not go with Bridget and Charlotte; they went with Charlotte’s buddy Camille and her mom instead. (to be fair, I went to Ireland last year without either of them, so I think that all evens out)

While I would not pretend to say that we are extremely familiar with Manhattan, it is safe to say that after our various trips together and separately Bridget and I are comfortable being there. We almost always stay in Midtown because that’s where she can use her business travel rewards points, but also because it positions us well to go anywhere in the city and get back afterward. Midtown is crawling with tourists because many of the big attractions are there — Times Square, Broadway, shopping on Fifth Avenue, and so on — and we, too, did our time as gawking touristas looking at the billboards and videowalls and such, but now it’s mostly just our base of operations.

After our arrival around midday on Saturday, we hopped a cab downtown to the Lower East Side/Chinatown area. We made our way to the Essex Street Market to have a look around. On our last family trip, we’d gone to see the Chelsea Market over on the southwest side of Manhattan, but the two are very different. Chelsea Market is more of a shopping experience with a bunch of restaurants and food businesses; in fact, the Food Network has their studios in that building. Essex Street Market is an actual food market featuring produce, meat, general groceries, and only a couple of eating establishments. One of those eating establishments is the new home of a New York culinary legend: Shopsin’s. Kenny Shopsin became famous much to his eternal chagrin after Calvin Trillin published this article about him in the New Yorker back in 2002. He’s almost the stereotypical irascible aging New York Jew, and his original restaurant in Greenwich Village was one of those places that people loved to discover. Shopsin was notorious for his huge and eclectic menu, for kicking people out of his place if he didn’t like them, and for telling people what he would or would not cook for them. He closed his place a couple of years ago, mostly because he was tired of the attention I think, but he reopened with a small space in the Essex Street Market last year.

All the tables were full, the line for a table was long, and they close for the day at 3:00, but I insisted we stick it out. After about half an hour, which we spent wandering through the rest of the market, we got seated right at the soapstone counter in front of the tiny kitchen’s ordering window. When Kenny is not cooking, he sits in a chair next to the counter and engages in incessant yelling with his adult children who also work there. One of his twin daughters is the other cook, and the other twin daughter runs the “front” of the restaurant. His son also handles orders, cooks, and spends a lot of time yelling at his father. It was a total blast to sit right in the middle of the whole thing, with Kenny right next to me and the other Shopsins in front of us. Best free floorshow in town. And beneath the bluster they were all really nice — they brought Charlotte extra watermelon slices when we told them she loved watermelon, chatted with us the whole time we were there, and made it an extra-special experience.

After that, we wandered around a little bit. We’d hoped to go to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, but they limit the number of people on the two tours they do on weekends. So, we’d found a website for the Museum of Chinese In America that was also in the same general area and thought we’d check it out. It was cold but sunny on Saturday, so we walked; our stroll took us through parts of Chinatown and also Little Italy, which is sort of surrounded on all sides by Chinatown. The Museum itself is in an old warehouse building on Mulberry Street that also houses other Chinese cultural groups. It’s only a couple of large rooms and a corridor, but the entry fee is only $2.00. There was a Chinese woman running a children’s craft workshop and a bunch of kids (of seemingly every imaginable ethnicity) decorating paper masks. Bridget and I took turns sitting with Charlotte as she made herself a mask, alternating with looking at the few articles on display. The fun and the cozy space made up for whatever disappointment we might have had about the museum. Sometimes finding little unknown treasures like that is far more satisfying than the big and glitzy stuff.

By the time we finally got back to our hotel, it was late afternoon, so we crashed for a bit before going out to dinner. The restaurant was a little French place on West 55th called La Bonne Soupe. From the website, we expected something a bit grand, but it was a tiny, cramped place with a menu that probably hasn’t been changed since 1975. Very old fashioned basic French dishes. The place was packed, and we were lucky to get there when we did, because the lobby filled up as soon as we sat down. Most of the diners were older couples — no coolness factor whatsoever here — and I would wager every single one was a tourist eating early to go to a show. Bridget and I both had a crock of French onion soup, but something was off about it because I was queasy for the rest of the evening. I had gigeau d’agneau in a tomato-thyme-garlic sauce with dauphinoise potatoes and Bridget had a brandade (a puree of potatoes and salt cod); Charlotte had a burger and fries.

Luckily the stomach queasiness was temporary and I felt better by morning. Our day’s plan was to have brunch, go to the American Museum of Natural History and the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, then off to the Union Square Theatre to see a show. It was a busy agenda that would have been unbearable if I’d been sick all day. We took a bus uptown to the Upper West Side, where practically every other shopfront is a restaurant serving Sunday brunch. We’d decided on a place called Good Enough To Eat and once again arrived only moments before the rush began. We got a table in the back and by the time we left the line outside was half a block long. The food was magnificent, so it was easy to understand why the line was so long. Here’s my travel tip for you if you are going to be in New York on a Sunday morning: most of the places seemed to open at 9:00, and if you can be at whichever place you want to try before 9:30, you probably won’t have to wait.

It was only a couple of blocks to the AMNH. Bridget and I have been there before, but Charlotte had not and she had loved “Night At THe Museum”, which took place there. Once we got inside, though, she was scared to death of the display of taxidermied elephants in the main exhibit hall and it took quite a while to get her to calm down enough to step inside the halls. It’s hard to get too excited about 100-year-old dead animals posed in “lifelike” dioramas, but once she got into the swing of it, the kid was a trouper. She wouldn’t go anywhere near the dinosaur exhibit, though. We did, however, really enjoy the Rose Center, which is their new addition with all the cool space stuff, and we LOVED the awesome planetarium show.

We futzed around a bit looking for a place to get a refreshment after the museum, but finally found a coffee shop that wasn’t packed with mid-afternoon brunchers, then walked to the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, which was right across the street from the brunch place. They had a fabulous exhibit about Ancient Greece, including a “Trojan Horse” the kids could climb in. Even though the museum says its intended audience runs right up to kids as old as 10, it’s definitely more for younger kids, even kids younger than Charlotte. But she had fun with the Greece exhibit, and then we went upstairs to a classroom where she got to make her own rain gauge and decorate it.

Still full from a big brunch and the coffee shop, we opted to skip dinner to spend more time uptown, then a quick stop at the hotel to clean up and back downtown to Union Square. It started to rain just as we reached the theater, but we had umbrellas at the ready. The show we saw was a Korean martial arts show called Jump. It’s presented as a comedic play and the performers portray a Korean family trying to marry off their daughter to a bookish young man who is possessed by a fierce martial artist. There’s a plot with a pair of burglars who break into the house, but basically everything is a setup for a ton of corny (and VERY funny) slapstick and displays of tae kwon do and gymnastics. It was utterly perfect for Charlotte, who laughed nonstop for the entire hour and a half.

By the time we left the theater, the rain was coming down pretty hard, and we weren’t having any luck finding a place to eat that wasn’t fast food crap, so we caught the bus back to the hotel and I went out and fetched a pizza, which we feasted on in the hotel room while watching some cheesy Disney movie about ice skaters.

Since we were planning to leave by midday Monday, we stuck close to the hotel Monday morning. Charlotte got to go back to American Girl Place and buy overpriced doll crap. We also went into the Hershey’s store and the M&M store which are right across the street from one another near Times Square. I liked the Hershey’s store better because it was more about the chocolate, but Charlotte and I each bought our own custom-mixed bags on M&Ms, too. Then we walked over to Rockefeller Center, watched the skaters on the ice, and had some lunch on the food concourse at 30 Rock. Then it was time to catch the train back to Connecticut and head for home.

We had a really good time, and I was very pleased that we were able to explore around the city a bit more and get away from the hardcore tourist traps in Midtown. Now that it’s a lot easier for Charlotte to tag along, we can do a lot more stuff and be a lot more open to interesting things that aren’t just shopping or seeing famous places.

Adam wondered if maybe the new ownership wasn’t too happy about published accounts of the Queen of the Food Network calling their coffee “shit” during a commercial shoot and staging a major temper tantrum until somebody brought her a latte from Starbucks, which she called “her” coffee.

Well, I sure can see where that might make the guys who write the paychecks a little unhappy. But there may be a much bigger backlash brewing (pardon the pun). Gossip website PerezHilton.com says that staffers are fleeing her magazine in droves because she is a complete bitch. There’s already a thriving “Rachael Ray Sucks” web community, so it was just a matter of time, really.

Meanwhile, I guess Rachael doesn’t really need to worry about where her next paycheck might come from, even if the ubiquitous Dunkie’s has booted her out on her ass. She just re-upped with the Food Network to continue ruining that cable network for a while, and recently Bridget and I saw bottles of her own branded extra-virgin olive oil at the supermarket.

Here’s a catch-all post about things I’m watching, not watching or looking forward to watching on television. It’s long, so I’ve put it under the fold.

1. First and foremost, I have to rant a little bit about the “Dancing With The Stars” finale. It sucked. This was probably the best season of the show to date in terms of the overall quality of the performances from the celebrities, but the dancing on the Monday night show was just plain terrible. I managed to get over Sabrina Bryan’s premature elimination, I managed to get over the audience vote rigging that sent Marie Osmond to the finals instead of Jennie Garth, but I could not get over the bad performances from Mel & Maks and Marie & Jonathan in the “freestyle” round. I know a lot of DWTS fans are steamed that Mel & Maks didn’t win, but based on their performance on Monday night, Helio and Julianne deserved it, even though they weren’t as consistently good all season.

2. Time was that we were devoted watchers of “Trading Spaces” on Saturday nights, but then TLC ruined the whole damn thing by running it to death, spinning off too many variations, and, most of all, changing the format and dumping the sexalicious Paige Davis in favor of no host at all. Not long thereafter, the home-redecorating genre as a whole collapsed from overexposure (except for that horrible ABC show with former Trading Spacer Ty Pennington), but now apparently TLC is going to try to revive Trading Spaces. Hollywood Reporter reports that a different production company will be making the series, and that Paige is being brought back to host the show, along with some (but not all) of the designers. “Rebooting” is all the rage these days, so maybe they’ll pull it off, but I suspect this is a desperation move and won’t work. I would be more than happy to watch Paige on some new show, but bringing her back won’t make me watch “Trading Spaces”.

3. The Food Network has completed their journey to the Dark Side by dumping the man who made them famous, Emeril Lagasse. As with Mario Batali a couple of months ago, Emeril wasn’t “fired” by the Food Network, as some reports have said, but his signature show “Emeril Live” has been cancelled after 10 years. I am not especially a fan of Emeril or his cooking, but the complete abandonment of real chefs in favor of “food personalities” like Rachael Ray and those unbearable cake decorating competitions has completely driven me away from the Food Network. I used to be able to count on finding something worth watching on Food Network when the rest of the lineup was crap, but now the opposite is true.

4. Speaking of “rebooting”, Hollywood Reporter recently revealed that one of the original producers of “Green Acres” has acquired the remake rights to the series from the estate of series creator Jay Sommers and that he’s starting production on a new version of the series that picks up where the original left off. Casting is already underway for actors who resemble the original cast (most of whom have either passed away or are very elderly now). Other than the obvious use of Paris Hilton for the Eva Gabor role (which is probably too close to Hilton’s own “The Simple Life” series), I can’t think of anyone who could fill La Gabor’s mink-lined, marabou-trimmed slippers, though I could easily imagine someone like Kelsey Grammer as Oliver Wendell Douglas. I think the time for relaunching a few classic sitcoms is ripe, and “Green Acres” could be played with the same sense of humor that makes “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” to great effect.

5. And one last reboot mention. Have you seen the photos of “Heroes” star Zach Quinto on-set as Spock for the new “Star Trek” movie? Here it is just in case:

He’s effing PERFECT! I have all my fingers and toes crossed that this movie won’t suck, but only time will tell. The storyline that has been leaked on the Internet is not the earlier “Starfleet Academy” premise, but a story about a Romulan who uses the Guardian of Forever to go back in time to kill Kirk; “old” Spock finds out about the plot and goes back in time to warn his younger self. Promising, but also has High Suck Potential. This picture, though, makes me believe they’re on the right track.