For the second time in the last few months, Kathy Cary, who operates Lilly's restaurant in Louisville, has been in New York taping TV shows.

She has also been invited back to do another show for the cable-TV Food Network next month and to cook a dinner for Gourmet magazine in Manhattan. All this follows her November appearance on NBC's "Today" show.

Cary was in New York last week taping five episodes of "Ready...Set...Cook!," which the Food Network will air next fall.

"They told me it was one of the best tapings they had ever done," Cary said. "They were very complimentary and asked me if I would come back and do their 'Chef du Jour' show next month.

"It was great fun and I was comfortable with the camera," Cary said. She taped all five "Ready...Set...Cook!" shows in one stretch. The taping began Thursday at 1:30 p.m. and finished up at 8:30 that night. "My brain just sort of wore down at the end, but I kept going."

The invitation to do the program came after people from the Food Network saw her on "Today" and called to ask for a tape of her work. She offered a segment she had done on WHAS' "Louisville Tonight."

The producers called back and said they wanted her to come to New York to do the show.

"I had never done live TV in front of an audience, and I thought, 'Why not? What do I have to lose?'"

Maybe her composure?

"Ready...Set...Cook!" is the Food Network's version of the classic game show "Beat the Clock." There are two chefs on each show. Someone from the audience brings each one a $10 mystery bag of groceries and plays the role of assistant cook. The chefs have 18 minutes per show to whip up a winning recipe, which is then judged by the studio audience.

Cary doesn't live in a cable area that receives the Food Network, but friends who have seen the program told her what to expect. She said they told her, "Fry, always fry. The audience loves it whey you fry."

Cary doesn't fry much for her restaurant or her La Peche deli.

"It was a really good tip, though. When in New York, try frying. I did fry potatoes with chicken for one of my shows," she said.

Her mystery bags contained a wide assortment of food for her instant creations. There was tofu (she grilled it), kale, veal, asparagus, goat cheese, Japanese eggplant, Asian pears, raisins, corn and catfish, to name a few things.

"And garlic. The audience loved it when you did garlic. They went nuts," she said.

She was on the run from the word go.

"You're very busy," she said. "Food was falling on the floor and polenta was flying thought the air because I'm not the neatest cook in the first place, but the audience loved it all," Cary said.

They loved her, too; she won three of the five shows.

Her daughter, Lilly, after whom her restaurant is named, was along for the big trip.

"I took her because I thought it would be a nice mother-daughter thing to do New York. Lilly sat in the audience for the whole thing and came up and sampled food onstage afterwards," Cary said.

Was her daughter impressed with mom doing TV?

"She didn't say. She's 12, you know, but she enjoyed being there."

The two did New York on Friday, mostly shopping.

"Fifth Avenue in New York has become a fantasy land of stores, and we had fun going in one after the other," said Cary, who found that part of the trip very relaxing after the crazy cooking marathon.

She expected to be nervous on television, but wasn't at all. The experiences have made her wonder if she might like to do her own TV show:

"I'd be interested because it's a new direction, a new twist for my career."

(Kathy has continued her pattern of TV appearances since this article appeared; most recently doing two Kentucky Derby food segments on Martha Stewart's television series.)