Sitcoms and cooking shows don’t often collide, but when they do, I become disproportionately excited. I can’t imagine a more satisfying and hilarious example than this: Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) and Carol-the-pilot (Matt Damon) discuss the appeal but impossibility of maintaining a relationship like Ina and Jeffrey Garten. Watch the clip here (relevant portion, 1:00-1:49).

The Barefoot Contessa and her part-time husband

As always, Sara Moulton is the voice of reason. She came up in the cult of mise en place but knows that it’s just usually not workable in a real person’s home kitchen. As you can see by his NY Times Magazine missive about “the tyranny of mise en place,” Pete Wells agrees. But what neither Sara nor Pete mentioned here is that Sara was flouting mise en place back in the 20th century on her Food Network show “Cooking Live.” I do go on about this in chapter 6 of WWWE, so let me shorthand it here by saying that Sara’s “Cooking Live” workspace looked more like a real home kitchen than most TV cooking show sets we see today. She didn’t have anything pre-anythinged in little glass bowls. She did it herself while we watched her, so viewers could actually do it along with her  – or at least not get the idea that the recipe was anything other that what she was demonstrating.

Sara Moulton on "Cooking Live," ca. 1996

I’m very happy to report that Watching What We Eat was selected for the 2009 Peter C. Rollins Book Award by the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA), a regional chapter of the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. The award recognizes the best scholarly monograph on any popular culture or American culture topic published in 2009 by an author who lives or works in New England or New York.

Here’s info about the award’s namesake.

If you’re in the area this weekend, a stop at the Festival of Books at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center is bound to be worthwhile. In fact, I’ll be there myself, on Sunday (along with Madhur Jaffrey, Jonathan Reynolds, et al) as part of a spate of book authors talking about food and such. Check out the schedule.