My feeling has always been that 'Good Eats' would have never happened had it been left to a committee.

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes.

Enough people have now mentioned Bill Nye the Science Guy to me that I now desperately avoid it all costs.

I say grace. I'm a big believer in grace. I happen to believe in a God that made all the food and so I'm pretty grateful for that and I thank him for that. But I'm also thankful for the people that put the food on the table.

Good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service.

Flame is bad. Flame does nasty things to food. It makes soot and it makes deposits of various chemicals that are not too good for us. The last thing you really want to see licking at your food while it's on a grill is an actual flame.

Now my wife may think she's locked me out of the kitchen but MacGyver's not my patron saint for nothing.