Everyone;
I saw this in the NY Times on-line version and it struck me as a great example of find a need and fill it and they shall come to thy radio or iPod..
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/22/dining/22radio.html?th&emc=th
If you don't subscribe to the free on-line version it's easy to subscribe. However, included below is the article for non-subscribers.
Ron Getty
SF Libertarian
The Sizzle and Pop of Radio Cooking
By KIM SEVERSON
TALMA GUY runs long-haul trucks out of Jacksonville, Fla., with her husband, Roger. To pass the time, they used to listen to political rants on talk radio or music on CD's.
Then they fitted the cab with a satellite radio, and Mrs. Guy discovered cooking shows.
"I could listen to them go on all day and all night," she said.
One day, she got caught up in a show called "EatDrink" on Martha Stewart Living Radio. The subject was chicken roasting, something Mrs. Guy had long abandoned after too many dry birds.
Encouraged by the conversation and a guest's admonishment to always use a meat thermometer, Mrs. Guy thought she'd give it one more try. The minute she got off the road she sent an e-mail message to the host, Lucinda Scala Quinn, asking for an in-depth tutorial on meat thermometers. She got an answer the next day.
"It's not like TV, where there's a celebrity chef and you feel like you could never get through to them," Mrs. Guy said. "I feel like the people on the radio, I know them."
In a world of glossy food magazines, $50 cookbooks and television hosts who seem to care more about make-up than marinades, a quieter, cheaper and decidedly more old-fashioned way to explore cooking is getting new play. Driven by inexpensive podcasting equipment, the freedom of the Internet and a nation obsessed with what it eats, food broadcasting is more democratic than ever.
At the top of the market is the polished work of the Kitchen Sisters, a pair of Bay Area women whose National Public Radio series "Hidden Kitchens" this year became the first piece of food journalism to win a duPont-Columbia Award, widely considered the Pulitzer Prize of broadcast journalism.
At the bottom with a bullet are hundreds of food podcasters, whose ranks have been growing in number and quality almost daily. Since the summer of 2005, when Apple first offered an organized way for people to file and find podcasts, the company's list of free food-related shows to which listeners can subscribe has grown to more than 300.
The rank of podcasters includes chefs and food journalists, among them The Times's restaurant critic, Frank Bruni, and its wine critic, Eric Asimov. General Mills and Sub-Zero produce podcasts to build their brands and sell products. But the real action is among podcasters with not much money or technical expertise but plenty of passion.
AMATEUR food podcasters are filling computers with the practical, the boring, the delightful and the strange. Shows range from the dull but smartly organized "Wine for Newbies" to the political rants of the Vegan Freaks. The Lunch Lady has a cultish following of people who call in to hear her recorded readings of the daily lunch menu at a Northern California convalescent home � embellished with some freestyle song and folk wisdom. She has now moved to podcasting. On "Girl on Girl Cooking," listeners recently learned how to make a hot drink from shaved Scharffen Berger chocolate in a homey show that felt a lot like hanging out at a friend's apartment.
"Sometimes I think it is a whole backlash to the Food Network stuff," said Sally Swift, a radio producer who founded the radio show "The Splendid Table" with the host Lynne Rossetto Kasper.
The show, which began a decade ago on Minnesota Public Radio and has a devoted fan base among the food elite, has doubled its audience in the last five years. The number of stations that carry the show has grown by 72 percent.
Fans of the medium say that radio taps deeply into one's food memories, feeding directly into the brain in a way the written word can't. Where television cooking evokes a sort of slack-jawed passivity, radio requires the listener to hear the sizzle of butter and bread on a griddle and conjure the sight and smell of a grilled cheese.
Television might be the superior medium for actual cooking instruction, but radio fans say it's easier to cook and listen than it is to cook and watch.
"You know how you feel like in your living room and your friends are over and you just have that easy vibe? That's what radio feels like to me," said Ms. Quinn, who was food editor for Martha Stewart Living Television before becoming the host of the "EatDrink" radio show on the Sirius satellite network, which announced earlier this week that it had 4 million subscribers.
The current interest in radio has been primed by the niche community building on the Internet, where one can discover other lovers of hibiscus or create friends simply by posting a photographic record of recently consumed bowls of ramen.
"Food radio nowadays gives you that access you learned to have from the Internet but with the live interactiveness of TV," Ms. Quinn said. "It can be a private experience but it also is a public one."
She recalled a recent show where Peter Hoffman, the chef and owner of Savoy Restaurant in Manhattan, was the guest. He explained how to break down a pig carcass, which prompted a caller from Texas to ask how to get the gaminess out of the wild boar her husband liked to hunt. A listener in Northern Canada called to suggest she soak the meat in buttermilk.
THAT kind of exchange is reminiscent of the radio homemakers of the late 1940's and 1950's, who shared recipes and household tips with listeners in small towns and rural areas. Some versions of those old-fashioned recipe-sharing broadcasts are still going strong, particularly in the Midwest, home to shows like the Open Line exchange on WMT in Iowa.
Technology is moving that kind of longing for connection to new audiences, said Michael Straus, who in 1999 began broadcasting the "Beyond Organic" show in the small town of Point Reyes, Calif. He now uses a mix of e-mail, audio streaming, podcasting, satellite radio and small broadcasting stations to distribute the show, which blends food, the environment and politics.
Steven Shaw, one of the founders of eGullet, a popular food Web site, this year began broadcasting eG Radio. The shows, which are largely interviews with chefs and restaurant profiles, are possible only because equipment that can take sound from someone's dining room to a Web site became cheap and easy to use.
"With $1,500 of equipment and a few hours of training we can do something that to an amateur listener is the equivalent of NPR," Mr. Shaw said. And, he said, chefs might not have the skill to write about their craft, but they can easily spend an hour talking about it.
The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, rely on the same tools they started with when they began working together in 1979: hand-held microphones mixed with shoe-leather reporting.
For the pair, who along with the producer Jay Allison created the series "Lost & Found Sound" and later did an audio history of the World Trade Center for NPR, food turned out to be a rich conduit for telling American stories.
Their latest project, "Hidden Kitchens," which also became a book, takes listeners deep into back street, out-of-the-way places where people cook. The idea came to Ms. Nelson when she was in the back of a taxi in San Francisco and discovered that the city's Brazilian cab drivers liked to eat at a secret temporary night kitchen near a cab yard.
They opened a phone line and collected stories of hidden kitchens across the country. Among them were tales few could have imagined, like how the George Foreman grill became an unexpected kitchen for homeless people, and the saga of the women known as the Chili Queens of San Antonio.
They also found Robert King Wilkerson, known as King, who created a clandestine kitchen during his 31 years in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. He went in for robbery, but his supporters say he became a political prisoner after he joined the Black Panther party.
At Angola, he learned how to make pralines using a soda cans for a pot and scraps of paper for fuel. He's out now, speaking out about prisoners' rights. And he's selling those pralines, which he calls "freelines."
Radio brings an intimacy to his story that requires a commitment of both imagination and emotion. Mix that intimacy with food, and the story becomes instantly accessible.
"If King was a guy talking about prison, no one would have listened," Ms. Nelson said. "The pralines are the way in."