I love getting cooking tips from the shows and the magazine produced by the Food Network. Last month, my husband,Robert, our friend Dan, and I had the opportunity to have lunch at their headquarters in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market. I had won this wonderful experience along with a tour of their studios on an on-line charity auction.

We took the elevator to the third floor administrative area to meet up with our tour guide, Scott from the network’s publicity department. Scott then took us to the building’s sixth level to Food Network’s main kitchen where such shows as “ThrowDown with Bobby Flay” are filmed. In fact, we were scheduled to have this lunch a month earlier in October, but we were bumped because, at the last minute, Bobby needed the kitchen to shoot one of his shows. We rescheduled the lunch, but we were permitted to still visit at that time to take a tour and to watch Bobby in action.

After we got off the elevator to the sixth floor, we made our way to a huge kitchen.

If you’ve watched anything on the Food Network, you’d recognize it as the set for many of its shows including Bobby’s.

We were then  introduced to Robert Bleifer, the Executive Chef of the Food Network and a graduate of  our area’s Union College, and the French Culinary Institute. Click here for more info on Robert’s background. Robert and his food stylists  are the ones who actually prepare the finished meals that we see on those shows and even tweak many of the recipes that are designed by some of the lesser known celebrity chefs .

Robert graciously showed us around and told us what we would be served for lunch. As we sat at a long wooden table, the dishes were carefully prepared in front of us and served to us one by one.

Everything was great, but I have to say that my favorite was the dessert-pumpkin tarte tatin with brown sugar vanilla ice cream.

What an amazing experience! But, as if that wasn’t enough, I also got a behind-the-scenes look at how recipes are tried out before they go into the Food Network Magazine.

Tomorrow: Food Network Magazine.