About This Project

In the early 2000’s I started to get really into cooking. I was in grad school at the time, living with a friend who had grown up in commercial kitchens working for his father, an executive chef. He got me started and I was hooked. In between classes I watched Food Network constantly (back when it was actually showing cooking shows) and my absolute favorite was Good Eats. Like many fans, I guess it appealed to my nerdy side. I still smile ear to ear when the theme song plays at the beginning.

Over time I sort of forgot about the show, but just recently with the new seasons and with all episodes available online, I’ve rediscovered my love for it. As I’ve been working my way back through the series from the beginning, I had an idea. It struck me while Alton was covering a fish with a dome of salt and I was thinking to myself “This is cool but I’d never actually do that.” Maybe I should do that.

I’ve cooked a lot over the years, but at some point life gets busy. You cook to get dinners on the table for the family. You cook your go-tos because they’re fast and you know they’re crowd pleasers. Picking up something brand new or researching recipes becomes way low on the priority list. In short, I’ve gotten into a cooking rut.

This is the way out. Good Eats has hundreds of recipes waiting, many – if not most – for stuff I’ve never cooked before. Food that my family hasn’t tried yet. Things we’d probably never think of when brainstorming weekly menus.

So here’s the plan. I’m going to go season-by-season through Good Eats, cooking every recipe from each season. I’ll mix and match episodes, trying when I can to put a few episodes’ worth of recipes into single meals. That way I won’t have to, for instance, cook 3 potato recipes in a row. Once I finish up each recipe in a season I’ll move on to the next.

And I’ll track it all here. Let’s go!