I’ve only recently realized that I’d spent years thinking I liked cooking, but I really don’t. I’m not that good at it, and because I don’t have a good idea of how to correct when something is going wrong or tasting bad, I pretty much have to rely on the recipe working right on the first try. It’s frustrating.
What I think happened was I used to enjoy watching cooking shows on the Food Network so much that it tricked me into thinking I liked cooking. Now, I’m realizing that there’s just something relaxing and entertaining about watching a well-made cooking show. One of my favorites at the moment is Aaron and Claire’s YouTube channel. They’re a couple living in Seoul who focus on easy ways to make Korean and other East Asian food. Honestly, I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes (although I really want to try making Kimchi fried rice), but they’ve got the formula down for making entertaining videos, with all the familiar and funny repetition. Don’t worry about it.
- I’m late to the party, but I’m also getting to be a fan of J Kenji López-Alt. His main “thing” is bringing ideas from food science to simpler and easier dishes you make for yourself at home. It’s unassuming, practical, and accessible. But I think I’m as impressed by his overall sensibility, right down to his sign-off to “guys, gals, and non-binary pals.”
- This video by Matt Ferrell is primarily about the work of a French company called Qarnot with a fascinating and ingenious idea: recovering waste heat from data centers and rendering farms and using it to warm buildings or heat water in boiler rooms.
- Tim Robinson’s sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave has been getting rave reviews and being the subject of memes for a while, but I have to say it doesn’t really do it for me. But this sketch about a driver’s ed class and Eddie Munster ruining a woman’s tables is somehow one of the funniest things I have ever seen.
- Much-beloved British comedian Sean Lock passed away this week, and there was an outpouring of respect from people who respected him. I really only know him from 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, where his spontaneity seemed genius. Channel 4 put up a tribute video with some of his best moments from Countdown, but I think the better tribute is actually a compilation of Lock’s best moments that they made in 2019. The sequence starting at 0:55, with a NSFW adlib during a wager with Miles Jupp, is one of the funniest moments of the entire series.