Remember when cauliflower was just...cauliflower, the equivalent of the bland relative you saw once or twice a year and didn't really miss between visits?

Then the stars aligned a few years back, in the cosmic way these things often unfold, and all of a sudden cauliflower was the darling of the food world. 

Shedding its boring reputation, cauliflower's plainness was now embraced as a virtue, a blank canvas for creative foodies to indulge their fancies and slather with big flavors.  

It started showing up on pizza; transformed into pizza crust for the gluten free crowd; in milk shakes - ugh, I kid you not; and food-processed into crumbly cauliflower "rice". 

The rice trick is pretty clever; we'll be making that here at The Good Cooks Academy in due course. But I never really did catch the cauliflower bug until I fell in love with this dish - Cauliflower Parmesan. 

Maybe it was its relate-ability - how could you dislike anything with Parmesan in the name. So...

Hello and thanks for stopping by to check out The Good Cooks Academy blog. 

If we haven't met, I'm Ken Haedrich and I've been cooking and writing about food for virtually my entire adult life. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Going back to the late 1970's, the tally is something like 17 cookbooks, several hundred magazine articles, another hundred blog posts on my other website, ThePieAcademy.com, where - lest you have any doubt - I post pie recipes (sweet and savory), pie advice, and pie making videos. 

The Pie Academy continues to grow and prosper; I hope you'll join us. But over the past several years I've had an itch to develop a second creative outlet devoted to the way I cook and eat when I'm not eating pie, which, let's face it, a fellow can only do so much of.

This blog - The Good Cooks Academy - is that outlet. I'll use it to chronicle my day-to-day cooking, which can best be described as delectable, wholesome, and mostly plant-based.

My hope is that you'll find...

So how do you feel about cutting onions? Is it a chore? A pleasure? Do they bother your eyes when you cut them, enough so that you need goggles?

No matter how you feel about it, one thing is for sure: cutting onions - cutting period - is a daily fact of life in the kitchen.

Make that two things: a sharp knife helps.

Contrary to what many people believe, whether you're cutting onions, potatoes, or even a winter squash, a sharp knife is far less dangerous than a dull one.

I explain why in the video here, and show you a few techniques for staying safe and cutting smart.