Food News: Meet the 2020 James Beard Restaurant and Chef Award Semifinalists

Plus: Martha Stewart’s hilarious new cooking show, how to prepare your kitchen for the coronavirus, and a new cookbook from Samin Nosrat. 

This week the James Beard Foundation announced the 2020 Restaurant and Chef semifinalists. A big focus for the awards this year is geographic diversity. New categories include “Best Chef: California” and a “Best Chef: Texas,” among others. [Eater] 

Martha Stewart has a new TV show coming out on Food Network, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard of before. “Bakeaway Camp with Martha Stewart” is an outdoor baking competition with “boot-camp-like” challenges. The grand-prize is a new $25,000 kitchen!  [People] 

This Center of Disease Control (CDC) is telling U.S. citizens to prepare for the coronavirus. The editors at NPR talked to a few experts to see how you should prepare your home, including your kitchen. [NPR’s The Salt]

The author of the award-winning cookbook Salt Fat Acid Heat, Samin Nosrat, is coming out with another cookbook. In an interview with The New Yorker, Nosrat said that it will be “a book that’s trying to answer the question ‘How do you know what to cook?’” [The New Yorker]

How do you pronounce “GIF”? It’s a rather exhausting debate that has haunted the internet for years. To help clear up the confusion, Jif, the peanut butter brand, and Giphy, the search engine for GIFs, have teamed up to create a special-edition jar of peanut butter. [The Verge]

Chef David Chang’s Netflix show Ugly Delicious returns for a second season on March 6. In this season, Chang will be visiting Istanbul, Mumbai, Tokyo, Sydney, among other places. [Grub Street]

Barbara Smith, who was often called “the black Martha Stewart,” died this past Saturday at the age of 70. The former model was known for her empire of restaurants, home collections, and TV shows. [New York Times]