Kevin Weeks

Book Review: Bananas

“Yes we have no bananas, Yes we have no bananas today.” – 1923 novelty song Many years ago, as a teenager, I ate lunch in an Indonesian household on most Fridays. The meal always featured a huge platter of what I thought at the time were fried potatoes. They were

Read More »

Review: the Art of Eating

Although I seldom buy cookbooks anymore, I do subscribe to food magazines. The magazines offer loads of ideas even if I don’t follow a specific recipe. That’s also why I publish recipes on my blog, Seriously Good. It isn’t that I expect a reader to follow the recipe explicitly –

Read More »

Review: The Elements of Cooking

During a recent episode of Next Iron Chef America Michael Ruhlman, serving as one of the judges, criticized one of the chefs for serving a consommé that wasn’t perfectly clear. “Technically, consommé is a clear soup or broth,” according to Ruhlman and in this case the liquid showed the red

Read More »

Review: How To Pick a Peach

Russ Parson’s How to Read a French Fry is an outstanding introduction to the science of cooking and I enjoyed reading it immensely. So when his latest book, How to Pick a Peach:The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, was released I was looking forward to reading it as

Read More »

Fire Builder

Unlike most folks, I learned to grill meat over wood. I grew up on a small farm in Eastern Tennessee within sight of the Smoky Mountains. Only about half of the 40 acres we owned were cleared, the rest was forest. This meant we had a ready supply of wood

Read More »

Tools of the Trade

As a cooking instructor, the single most frequent question I’m asked is, “What kind of pans do you have?” Americans are probably the most brand-conscious consumers in the world. They care about their brand of car, they wear labels on the outside of their clothes (Polo, for instance), they buy

Read More »