Last Tuesday I had some fairly minor foot surgery and have been limping around in a surgical shoe ever since. For vast stretches of time I’ve been lying on the couch with my foot elevated on a stack of pillows, a position that makes it very difficult to type. (That’s my excuse, anyway. When my son was going through his cancer and experiencing terrible back pain, he wrote all of his end-of-semester papers while lying back in a recliner and balancing a small laptop on his knees. If he could do that, surely I can type while on the couch!)
So what did I do? Well, I spent a vast amount of time watching cooking videos on YouTube. What’s been really amazing to me is how easy it is to get sucked down the rabbit hole of similar content, all guided by YT’s genius sidebars. You watch one video on a specific subject, and now you have tons more to watch on the same subject. I knew this marketing strategy well and have seen it at work in my life before, but I’ve never spent such an extended period of time letting myself just take it all in, drooling. (Well, drooling metaphorically.) Here’s a rough throughline of how I’ve gotten to know a whole host of cooking people I didn’t even know existed, starting from well before the surgery, showing how researching just one recipe can lead you far astray: