Kelsey Nixon begins her fifth season with the Cooking Channel. (
)
Even Kelsey Nixon, the 28-year-old food TV host, has kitchen mishaps.
“Tomorrow’s my son’s first birthday party, and I’ve been cooking for days to get ready,” she told The Post. “I made this corn salad. It calls for a teaspoon of hot sauce. I tripled the recipe because I’m cooking for so many. I don’t know how much hot sauce I put into that corn salad, but it’s way too much.
“I keep adding things to it to calm it down,” she laughs. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to toss the whole thing out.”
In “Kelsey’s Essentials,” which premieres its fifth season July 3 at 8 p.m. on Cooking Channel, the Utah-bred Nixon helps viewers avoid such calamities with her “essential tips, tools and techniques.” Each episode focuses on one technique or ingredient, and it’s fitting that the premiere’s topic is none other than hot sauce.
“Gosh, when working with hot sauce, slowly, cautiously add, because once you’ve put in too much, there’s no turning back,” she advises.
Nixon has made a career of learning from her bloopers. Now a wife and mother of one, Nixon got her start in food TV with an internship at Martha Stewart Living, working on “Everyday Food.” Back at Brigham Young University, where the aspiring food magnate studied broadcast journalism, Nixon filmed more than 100 episodes of a cooking show geared toward fast and easy meals for college students.
“Please don’t Google it because it’s the saddest thing you’ve ever seen,” she says. “[But] it was a great way for me to get a tape and practice cooking in front of a camera. And if I’m being honest with myself, it was a great way to get to meet football players and people that I had my eye on in the dating scene. I had them come on the show, and it was like my little dating tactic.”
With all that tape in hand, Nixon headed to Hollywood to earn her culinary arts degree at Le Cordon Bleu and prove her kitchen bona fides. The strategy worked — by the time she graduated, Nixon had landed a spot on “Next Food Network Star” in 2008. While she finished fourth in the competition, the network took note of her popularity, which garnered her the “fan favorite” vote that season.
Despite her loss on the show, Nixon soon found vindication.
“The main reason they didn’t think I was a good fit for ‘Food Network Star’ is because I was too young,” says Nixon. “When they created Cooking Channel and were making an effort to target a slightly younger demographic, they did think I was a good fit. So I’m glad that I hung with it, and I was able to stay relevant in that year after I was excused from the show.”
Also the host of Cooking Channel’s “Unique Sweets,” Nixon now calls Brooklyn Heights her home, along with her husband Robby and their son, Oliver. Though the Brooklyn food scene is tempting, Nixon cooks dinner at home for the family four nights a week, with a fifth night reserved for leftovers. It’s the kind of situation husbands’ dreams are made of.
“My husband is not the biggest cook,” says Nixon. “But he’s excellent at doing dishes, and he’s very happy to play a supporting role in the kitchen.”