STEWED: One of my family’s favourite stories — and one that inevitably used to come out when I talked about a career in journalism — was the time my mom appeared in a local newspaper, her photo next to her favorite pie recipe. The problem was that it wasn’t my mom’s recipe — she’d never baked anything like it in her life, didn’t remember talking to anyone from the newspaper, and hadn’t a clue where they’d got her photo.
My mom was just a housewife from Mount Dennis, so in a way her moment of newsprint culinary fame is even more curious than the one that saw Conan O’Brien’s favourite recipe for Irish Stew appear in Good Housekeeping magazine’s March issue. “I’ve never cooked anything in my life,” O’Brien told viewers during Monday night’s Late Night. “I didn’t send this to them; they completely made this up.”
According to a story in Women’s Wear Daily, O’Brien stressed he wasn’t angry, but he wanted to set the record straight, rationalizing “it was me or Ted Kennedy.”
A spokeswoman for the chagrined magazine responded: “According to a reputable source, which has regularly provided celebrity recipes to the magazine, this was Conan’s personal St. Patrick’s Day stew recipe. Now that Conan has made us aware that he can’t cook ramen noodles, let alone a stew, we will no longer be using that source and would love to invite (O’Brien) to the Good Housekeeping Test Kitchen to take a cooking class with our food director Susan Westmoreland.”
ATTENTION GALACTICA GEEKS! I know you’re out there, based on how often I’ve been asked when the show was returning and when the Season 3 box set was coming out. Well, the wait is finally over, and the fourth and final season airs on April 4 on Sci Fi in the U.S. and Space here in Canada, though the Sci Fi website will stream the season premiere live from noon to 1 p.m. earlier in the day. That’s completely meaningless, of course, for Canadian viewers since, unless you can perform some jiggery-pokery with your computer’s settings, viewers outside the U.S. probably won’t be able to get access.
A story on the Wired magazine website let slip a few more teasers: the two-hour pilot for Caprica, the BG prequel, has been green-lit and will air this fall; there will be new webisodes, but no BG movie; neither Michael Hogan (Col. Tigh) nor Aaron Douglas (the Chief) were happy to find out that they were Cylons; Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck may or may not be a Cylon, but everybody assumes she is; no one likes playing a Cylon, since it’s more work appearing multiple times in the same scene.
