Kitchen Gods

I love food. While my eating habits should be supplemented with a little more exercise, there's very little better than cooking and baking and sharing a good meal with friends.

I'm not a religious person, but I really do appreciate a good explanation into how things work. For this reason, I have a list of Kitchen Gods, each useful in their own way, and I know they'll help me fix whatever mess I've gotten my food into. I also have a list of Lesser Kitchen Deities, to whom I look for guidance and recipes. I get recipes from all over (lots of cookbooks, and periodic web searches), but there are a few I go to consistently.

Here are my Kitchen Gods:

• Alton Brown. C'mon. He's funny. He's informed. He makes me forget how much I hated living in Atlanta. He has food anthropologists and food historians on his show. And sock puppets. And he's on tv. What more could you ask for?
  
• Harold McGee. The guy who wrote THE book on how food works. It's not a cook book, it's literally how food works. Not a quick read, but definitely an informative one, backed up with peer-reviewed scientific papers on the history of dairy products, possible health benefits, and protein denaturing.
  
• Joe Schwarcz. While not strictly a Kitchen God, he has some great but why? books out there. As one of the head honchos at McGill University's Office of Science and Society, he gives talks and has a call-in radio show that tries to explain current scientific knowledge to anyone who asks about anything. I met him once and was almost fan-girl speechless. Sad. But Dr. Joe is awesome.
  

And the Lesser Kitchen Deities:

• Seriously Good. KD Weeks is a Tennessee-turned-Oregon-turned-Tennessee chef and all-around experimenter with foods and stuff. He's got interesting recipes with everyday materials, especially when the farmers' markets are in full-swing.
  
• Chocolate and Zucchini. Clotilde is a French woman who loves to cook and bake. She messes with recipes and gets delicious results, especially her desserts. Besides her eloquently-worded stories to the recipes, the pictures are scrumptious.
  
• Manjula's Kitchen. I found her while looking online for Indian recipes. I can't get enough of her delicious vegetarian tasties! And watching Manjula make bread doughs on her YouTube stream is like magic.
  
• Herbivoracious. He's vegetarian and into haute cuisine, like super-fancy amuse bouche and molecular gastronomy. I've never made any of his recipes, but the mixes of flavors is intriguing.
  
• Post Punk Kitchen. Found while trying to to figure out how to eliminate eggs from various recipes (and yes, they tell you how). They also have some suggestions for other dietary limitations.
  
• Epicurious. A great search engine for looking up recipes. Following the user reviews is pretty reliable, although there aren't many people who are adventurous eaters.
  

Who are your Kitchen Gods?