For 12 years, Kathleen Finch was a producer at CBS News, the kind who kept a packed suitcase in her office and had her share of horror stories, like nearly being attacked during the riots after the Rodney King verdict. "It was nothing for me to rent a Learjet on my credit card," she says. So it was not surprising that her flair for drama caught the eye of Eric Ober when he was president of the network's news operation. But then Ober left CBS for the Food Network, and it was quite a shocker when he called Finch in the spring of 1999 to lure her there. Insists the mother of three: "I'm not a foodie."

Ober wanted to move the channel away from the "dump and stir" studio-chef programs. The Food Network has plenty of those, including such personality-rich star chefs as Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay. And though Finch didn't know food, she did know how to make great television. So she took Ming Tsai, already a star of his own studio cooking show, and created Ming's Quest, sending the handsome, athletic Tsai on rollicking adventures — a sort of extreme-cooking show. On a journey to the Everglades, he fried a gator on a set rigged together in