I learned to cook from my Nana. And my Mom and Dad, too.
They taught me recipes. They taught me technique. "A little more of this." "A little less of that." "Cook it until it looks right. You'll know when it's done."
But I learned how to be a chef from Alton Brown. And no, I don't mean that in any professional sense. Nobody is going to confuse my kitchen with a Michelin-starred restaurant.
Especially Jacob. We'll get to Jacob a little later.
Alton's show Good Eats wasn't just a cooking show. Sure there were actual recipes. But he used a unique teaching style - he could take something that was complicated and make you curious about it rather than being intimidated by it. He didn't talk down to you - he brought you into the process and explained the science of why things worked the way they did. And once we understood the "why" we could move from memorization to experimentation.
Learning to cook by watching Good Eats gave me the courage to experiment in my kitchen. And I'd say about 85 percent of my dishes have turned out pretty well.
The remaining 15 percent? Let's say that "horrible" would occasionally be an insult to horrible.
Every summer, I am a host dad for minor-league baseball players... which means that I find myself cooking dinner for a house full of hungry guys. A few summers ago, one of those guys was Jacob.
Jacob asked me to make chicken pot pie for dinner. Not the little individual pies with a crust. The true Pennsylvania-Dutch-style chicken pot pie. Chicken and vegetables in a thick stew-like broth with big, soft noodles cooked right in it.
Jacob assured me it was simple. That should have been my first warning.
I Googled a recipe and started cooking. The stew was fantastic. Seriously. Chicken. Broth. Vegetables. Seasoning. It smelled great. It tasted great.
Then I added the noodles. Oh, the noodles. I don't remember exactly what went wrong after that. To this day, my brain refuses to recall the exact chain of events.
What I do know is that by the time the guys got home, I had made something that closely resembled wallpaper paste. Actually, that's unfair... to wallpaper paste.
Jacob insisted that it would be fine. I watched his face as he took a taste... and we both knew. (The local pizza joint was my savior that night.)
I think there's a lesson buried somewhere underneath all that starch. Teaching isn't about pretending that we never screw things up. Because we do. Sometimes badly. Sometimes horribly. And sometimes so spectacularly that the result could be used as construction adhesive.
But I've learned that if I understand the "why," even failure becomes useful. What happened? What changed? What was misunderstood? What should be done differently next time?
"Teach Like Alton Brown" isn't about simply finding the answer. It's about understanding the "why" well enough to figure out what to do when the answer doesn't quite fit. It's about giving ourselves permission to experiment. To be OK if we screw things up. To make a mess.
And when it goes spectacularly, catastrophically wrong? Laugh. Figure out why. Then try again.