Happy Birthday, Food Network!

Food Network's Original Logo from 1993

I would easily consider myself, Jordan, my dad and sometimes my mom as foodies. We enjoy eating new food, we enjoy cooking with obscure ingredients and experimenting with flavors. But it wasn't always this way and I realized that one of the biggest influences on my life - not just what I ate, but how, when and what I learned to cook - was Food Network, who is celebrating their 20th birthday this month.

My parents have always kept me in the kitchen with them; there are pictures of me standing on a stool cooking and I won a blue ribbon at Mountain Heritage day as a five year-old with green beans I helped can. But I only owned one cookbook of my own, a children's version of the classic red-and-white-checkered Better Homes and Gardens classic cookbook. I enjoyed making dishes from it and memorized my first "signature dish," cornflake chicken, from within its very retro pages and realizing that I enjoyed cooking.

I was only five years-old when Food Network first started airing their food-laden programming, mostly talking about cooking and some segments with locally known chefs like Emeril Lagasse, and at that time we certainly did not have satellite or cable. I remember us starting to watch FN when I was in my tween years and I began to understand that there were so many flavors and techniques I'd never tried and that cooking (and eating) could be fun and exciting.

On a special birthday show aired this weekend, FN revealed that their most downloaded recipe is Alton Brown's baked mac n' cheese from his Good Eats show. I remember the first recipe I downloaded and made at home was from a Bobby Flay show where he visited a high school home ec class and taught the students how to make a braised pot roast. I copied his recipe and made some of my own changes to make a spicy, robust roast that my parents loved (ironically, my first FN dish was too hot for me to enjoy).

We'd always eaten traditional Southern food, inexpensive frozen foods and our ventures into the exotic and fancy were limited to occasional trips to Olive Garden and making copy-cat recipes with jars of alfredo sauce, frozen broccoli and canned chicken breast. Good Eats made the unfamiliar comfortable and brought new techniques and flavors into our home. Unwrapped brought us information about the production and development of our favorite foods. Jacques Torres transformed chocolate into art. How to Boil Water introduced us to Tyler Florence and taught us cooking basics. And Emeril brought "Bam!" into our vernacular.

Everyone changes as they grow up and of course our life has changed in obvious ways - my parents are more financially stable, the Internet puts everything at our finger tips, the racial make up of our area has changed and brought with it a change in grocery and restaurant offerings, and we've travelled more and met new people - but thinking back on it, I can't deny that FN was a major force in our culinary change. We've grown with FN from simple shows like Water that taught us how to pick good recipies and ingredients, to 30 Minute Meals that pushed us to be more organized and skilled, to creating our own recipies and thinking we could win Chopped.

A recent story of NPR's Weekend Edition discussed FN's growth and 20-year evolution and postulated that they may be tired and blase. But I couldn't disagree more. Between FN, FN magazine and Cooking Channel (owned by FN but with a hip, young, edgy vibe) there are programs for novice cooks, half-assed cooks (Sandra Lee, anyone?), big eaters, connoisseurs of food porn, reality tv junkies and lovers of good stories (check out CC's My Grandmother's Ravioli). I assert that as long as there are people - and especially families - who love to cook, shop, eat, drink and talk, there will be an audience for the Food Network.

Here's to 20 more years. Cheers!