One of the great things about Food Network and Cooking Channel is that they’re very good about putting the recipes from all their shows online, where they’re immediately searchable. The only exceptions are a few shows produced by outside companies that place some sort of restrictions on how many recipes can be published online, or on how long they can be left online.
This thoroughness, however, has sometimes been carried to the extreme. For example, a TV chef might talk about all of the elements of a meal, or about a day’s worth of food and snacks, and in the course of that discussion the chef might mention something which is not so much a recipe as a way of serving an already-prepared product. In some cases, somewhat absurdly, Food Network has posted such non-recipes online alongside all of the real recipes from the episode in question.
For several weeks now, the web site Food Network Humor — dedicated to mocking all things Food Network — has been calling attention to “Ridiculous Food Network Recipes” for things such as dark chocolate. The readers of the humor site, alerted to the absurd non-recipe, head on over to the official recipe page and leave snarky comments about it.
Someone at Food Network is apparently a little thin-skinned about this, apparently, because whenever it happens the non-recipe and the snarky comments get taken down and that URL is redirected to some other page on the site — another recipe by the same chef, or what have you.
The latest such fiasco: Michael Chiarello’s hot dog recipe. As I write this, it’s still up at the Food Network site, but who knows how long it will last.
