There’s exactly one TV show that Jane and I make
it a point to catch every week: Good Eats. It’s a cooking show on the
Food Network, and it’s funny. The chef, Alton Brown, is a regular kind
of guy; he wears hornrim glasses and he’s got bad hair and he usually
wears Hawaiian shirts–or sometimes bowling shirts. The show is filmed
inside of a house the purports to be his (nice Craftsman-style kitchen),
and it’s all about cooking well–not just how to prepare a particular
dish, but the secrets, the gotchas, and why it all works the way it does.

And it’s funny. The show is rife with weird camera angles (it often looks
like you’re looking out of the oven or refrigerator), weird props (a
Magritte-like painting of a roast turkey floating in mid air), and odd
story lines.

For example, there was the show where Butter was on trial, complete with
an English judge in a wig. There have been several episodes of Food
Gallery (a take-off on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery show); one of them
was on how to do souffles, and another was about cheesecake. There was
the Scrap Iron Chef show. There was the show about crepes, where
Alton’s psychiatrist insisted that he get in touch with his French side.
There was the Thanksgiving show on how to properly cook a turkey–and
the following week’s show which purported to be a documentary that was
originally about the making of the Thanksgiving show but turned into a
documentary of the horrible things that happened when the cast and crew
were snowed in together after the Thanksgiving show. There was the show
where Alton’s wife sent him on a vacation to the Pacific Northwest to get
some enforced rest and relaxation with absolutely no cooking; he caught
a salmon and smoked it in a large cardboard box outside his hotel room.
There was the Oats show in which Alton and a partner, both dressed
in kilts, showed (more or less) how to make haggis with a claymore and an
outrageously bad Scottish accent.

You get the idea. It’s on at 6 PM and 9 PM PST (9 PM and 12 PM EST)
Wednesdays and Saturdays on Food Network. The Saturday show is pretty
much always a rerun.