TV chef Emeril helps Dalton family with supper

Sitting down for a home-cooked meal can be a tricky proposition for the Bailey family.

Of the seven adults and two babies, two are vegetarians, two have a sensitivity to dairy products and three don’t care for seafood. So before they took a family vacation in June, Natalie Bailey sought professional help from chef and television star Emeril Lagasse

“With all these different preferences and requirements, we were having a tough time coming up with something that would work for everybody,” said Bailey, a Dalton native and 1992 graduate of Dalton High School now living in Greenbelt, Md. “And that was my challenge to Chef Emeril: help us figure out how we can feed all of these people so everybody will have enough to eat, we’ll all enjoy it and we won’t have to spend all day in the kitchen.”

Earlier this spring, cable channel Planet Green was planning episodes for a new show called “Emeril Green.” The premise of the program is solving dining dilemmas while keeping the environment in mind. Bailey read a story about the show on a Web site and thought it fit into her personal and professional lives. Bailey is the assistant director of the Bushmeat Crisis Task Force (www.bushmeat.org) based in Washington, D.C. The organization is tackling the problem in Africa of humans hunting endangered and threatened wildlife species such as chimpanzees, elephants and gorillas for food.

“The sustainability of food sources is something that is really important to me,” Bailey said. “It’s what I work on for my job, and the choices my family and I make about food is important to me in my own life as well.”

Challenges for the show have run the gamut: a New Orleans resident doesn’t know how to make jambalaya, another viewer has never cooked pork, while someone else is unable to use a knife in the kitchen.

Bailey filled out a questionnaire on the Discovery Web site presenting her challenge. Since the show’s producers were looking for people in the Washington, D.C., area and the show deals with the sustainability of food sources, Bailey felt she had a good chance of being picked. She had the idea of a “make your own taco night.” A casting call followed where she was interviewed on camera. A few weeks later, she learned she would be on the show.

Crews filmed two different segments. The first was a background interview at the Baileys’ Maryland home. Filming took about eight hours, and Bailey said the show will probably use a fraction of the tape — about two minutes — for the half hour episode. Several weeks later over Mother’s Day weekend, the second segment was filmed at the Whole Foods grocery in Fairfax, Va.

There, she met Emeril, described her challenge, shopped for ingredients and the two cooked the dishes. Emeril crafted a meal of different sausages cooked on a grill with vegetables, a marinated mozzarella salad and a marinated olive dish.

“He’s exactly the same when the cameras are off,” Bailey said. “He and the director were kind of play fighting with each other the whole day, just giving each other grief about ‘You were supposed to get that shot the first time! Now I’m going to have to make you do it 50 more times!’ It was funny to watch them because obviously they’ve worked together.”

At the end of the taping, Bailey’s parents (Dr. Bates and Dell Bailey), her husband (Dave), their 11-month-old son (Noah) and a family friend sat down to sample the food on camera. But Bailey doesn’t know whether that scene will make the final cut.

The show, titled “Picky Picnickers,” is scheduled to air Thursday night at 8. Planet Green is channel 122 on Optilink and is not available on Charter.

So how did the meal turn out during the Baileys’ vacation? Well, it never happened. They had the “make your own taco night” instead.

“The meal that he put together was really good, but we couldn’t get the exact recipe until after the show airs because there are proprietary or legal issues,” Bailey said. “And two, we thought it didn’t really have enough for the vegetarians. I think we just ran out of time filming. So we went with what we knew we could do quickly. I feel kind of bad that we didn’t do the meal, but it worked out well and everybody was happy.”

Maybe the Bailey family will try Emeril’s recipes on their next vacation.

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