Shopping for holiday gifts can be [exhausting/dangerous/expensive/overwhelming/other negative adjective]. A copy of Watching What We Eat – one per family member/friend – can significantly reduce your shopping woes. There’s something for everyone inside: food! tv! celebrities! history! little black and white photos! references! This holiday season, you can choose from the handsome, traditional hardcover or the lightweight, portable paperback. What are you waiting for? Open up another tab and order your copies today, while supplies last. Happy holidays!

Avoid holiday shopping dangers like these

Southern cooking maven Nathalie Dupree has declared herself a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina. Restaurateur Ina Pinkney, Chicago’s “Breakfast Queen,” is running to fill the remainder of Barack Obama’s Senate term in Illinois.  Such a power influx could turn Jamie Oliver ’s healthy school lunch dream into a reality. And if gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo wins in November, the would-be First Lady of New York – cooking show host Sandra Lee – might find her “semi-homemade” strategy actually improving (who’d a thought?) the poor state of school lunches.

Dupree for Senate

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.

People are always going on about those NPR “driveway moments” where they halt regularly scheduled activity to listen to a touching story on their listener-supported radio. Well, here’s one for me (though I don’t have a driveway). The other day Christopher Walken sat in for Leonard Lopate on WNYC. Among others, he interviewed Lidia Bastianich and her mother, Erminia Motika. The Walken and Motika families go way back to Astoria, Queens, where the Walken family owned a bakery. Their reminiscences in this interview could not be more dear, complete with comfortable silences and Erminia’s beautiful trilled R’s. I couldn’t help picturing Walken’s Captain Koons telling young Butch about his great-grandaddy’s gold watch in “Pulp Fiction.” That same gentle sincerity was exhibited here, just different subject matter (Lidia’s TV show, oxtail stew, wedding cake fiascos, immigrants). Listeners, it will only take 30 minutes of your time, so click now.

Lidia and mom on "Lidia's Italy"

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you want to find the most beautiful places in the world, just go where wine is made. I’m still glowing from the beauty of France’s Languedoc region where I recently spent some time. We stayed in a tiny village of 120 residents called Caussiniojouls in the heart of the AOC Faugères. Vineyards galore. Perfectly sunny, grape-loving weather. During our stay, we had the good fortune to dine with my friend Anne de Ravel, someone who helped me early on in the process of research WWWE (she was a producer in the early days of the Food Network). Anne is a native of the region and runs Saveur Languedoc where she offers culinary tours and cooking classes. We enjoyed the benefits of her skill when she made us a delicious dinner including the poulet you see below, cooked over burning grape vines.

I didn’t watch any French cooking shows while there because I couldn’t figure out how to work the TV.

Voulez-vous de poulet?

As I mentioned, I’ve been immersed in the world of Dione Lucas for several weeks now, and as a result I find occasion to reference her in just about any situation. We do tend to use our TV guides as life guides a bit too easily (Oprah), and the little things they say have a way of becoming oft-quoted pearls of wisdom (Sue Sylvester). And so it has happened with me and Dione. A kind of “WWDD?” month for me, you might say. For instance, a Facebook friend posted Michael Ruhlman’s recent Huffington Post column lambasting the over-hyped notion of the 30-minute meal. To her post I naturally responded that Dione Lucas used all kinds of adjectives to describe the food she was making, but “quick” and “easy” were never ever among them. She was more likely to say, “This is complex and time-consuming but worth it.” What’s the big rush to get out of the kitchen, people?

"Top Chef" judge?

Anyway, enough about Dione for a while. I’ll give us all a rest. But I recommend a great blog by said Facebook friend, Signe Rousseau, where she holds forth about food and cooking (n.b. this recent post about TV cooking) and some other topics. And another blog with which I’m newly smitten is I Wish I Liked Flan. You might think you’ll hold the title against him (because you like flan and don’t understand how anyone couldn’t), but you will be fine with his taste disability as soon as you read one post.

Please visit the WWWE Facebook page and tell me what foodish blogs you visit compulsively.

Because this never ceases to be fun, and because it’s number 3 on my list of procrastination activities (after checking email/facebook and watching cat videos), voilà the latest word cloud of this very blog you’re so kind to visit. (Wordle your own stuff here.)