who is your favorite food network chef?

It would be hard for me to say. I like them all. I absolutly love the next food network star, worst cooks in america, top chef and hell's kitchen. I just love to cook........

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I'm more of a Cooking Channel person. But I do like Giada and Paula Deen. I'm not impressed with Aarti Party. she kind of annoys me. On the Cooking channel I like Laura Calder David Rocco and the Two Fat Ladies.

Paula Deen always has recipes I think I'd enjoy, and she's so warm and down-South (ooh, and I love her sons!) Alton Brown is another favorite because of his geeky food knowledge, I find that stuff fascinating. But my top is Guy Fieri, his recipes kick a$$ and he's SO sexy lol!! P.S. Anyone else remember Bobby Flay when he first started on Food Network & had the Grillin and Chillin show?

Chef Anne Burrell from Worst cooks and Secrets of a restaurant chef.

First of all, can I say how much I LOVE your question?!?! If other people asked good questions like this one, I'd be on this Yahoo! Answers even more hours out of the day and night than I already am!

OK. As much as I love your Paula Deen (being born below the Mason-Dixon Line, myself, and all...), I have to say she dumps waayyyyyy too many cans of soup and sticks of butter into everything she makes. But, she's so adorable--and I love the way she flirts with some of her guests. I bet her "after dinner parties" are even more sinful than her food! Giada's a lot healthier, and she's certainly cute. I like the way she talks about growing up around good food.

Now, before I get to the ones I love, I have to say I HATE Rachel Ray. I worked in the food industry for years and she is one cheap *****, the way she always suggested an extremely LOW tip for the servers on her budget travel program that got her her start in the industry. Not only that--her food sucks. Does she actually ever even taste her recipes, besides those fake, MMmmmm'ing, lip-smacking moments on her show? She has the palette of someone who really does not care about food. At all. And I hate her smiley, bouncy cutesy-ness. Those kinds of people are always monsters when the mask is removed.

I waited on Jeff Smith once (the "Frugal Gourmet"). He was a nasty, alcoholic bastard--one of the meanest, moodiest jerks I've ever served in my entire life. He sucked down Bombay Sapphire gin like it was water. Good riddance he died soon after it was made known that he was a sexual predator. Creep. I hope he rots in hell. "I bid you peace", my a**.

OK, now on to the cooks I love.

The first tv cook I fell in love with was Nathalie Dupree on PBS about 30 years ago. She is a sweet, gentle Southern lady who smiled the whole way through, and had such a nice, relaxed attitude about cooking. She would tell honest stories about her mistakes when she was learning to cook and share her knowledge without ever being condescending or imperious. Perfect Lady. And a great cook.

I don't care for all the male-dominated, corporate-sponsored, frenzied, macho-man "reality" cooking on tv these days. They can have their BANG! and their stop-watches, and their snooty spokesmodel judges. They all suck, and they have tossed the grandmother out of the kitchen--let's hope not for good.

That said, I have to say that Lidia Bastianich is a lovely woman with a temperament I could spend months with (in a villa in Trieste, of course). She's very knowledgeable about every level of food--from the planting to the leftovers, and amazing to watch--even if I don't make any of her stuff! Always gracious. And easily THE most graceful cook ever to be caught on film. Watch her hands. They move like a ballerina's body.

Jacques Pepin is also graceful, but his food never interests me much. Never could get past Julia Child's voice or her francophilia. Yan Kan Cook was a riot; Great attitude; good for a kid like me, back in the 80's, wanting to cook. Too young to remember the Galloping Gourmet...

I like the Italian-American woman, Mary Ann Esposito. She's a great cook, and I don't have to go spend hundreds of dollars in high-end specialty stores to make what she makes. Her food is evolved American Italian food. It's fantastic. The lighting on her show is awful, though, and that ghost of a husband drifting around in the background waiting to be fed just adds to the depressing quality of the lighting.

Ina Garten is sweet and makes nice food (a little over-the-top for every day), but there's somthing "sad" about her. She looks like she has "everything" out there in the Hamptons, but I sense a deep sadness that no amount of high-end fussy dinner-partying can fix. I usually don't make it the end of the show--when that husband finally pulls up. Sad, sad, sad.

Martha Stewart is a perfectionist, but everything she makes is good. It's all definitely been tested, that's for sure. Maybe a little too perfect? There's another mask no one wants to see removed...

So, yup... Long story short: Lidia and Nathalie. They're my faves. Always will be. But I do want to go to Paula's for after dinner drinks...

I love em all. I am like a sponge when it comes to insightful cooking lessons!

Anne Burrell. One word, AMAZING. She is incredibly simple.

i like Morimoto and Bobbby Flay.

Wanted to ask this question too this evening