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:
- America’s Test Kitchen, an ongoing fave, to see their bagel technique. (See my post on how my experiment turned out.) Also branched out into the “What’s Eating Dan” series associated with ATK, with their editor in chief Dan Souza, who takes on a variety of food and cooking issues in amusing short episodes.
- Claire Saffitz, a pro baker who writes for Bon Appetit magazine, specifically for her bagel recipe and then for other vids.
- Adam Ragusea, totally unknown to me before this point, who debunks some ridiculous ideas about how home bakers should measure ingredients and has a good bagel recipe. I’ve now watched just about every episode he’s produced, all 200 or so.
- Sam the Cooking Guy, who showed upon the sidebar in conjunction with Adam. No bagel recipe, as far as I know. The vast majority of his cooking takes place outdoors in his San Diego back yard, where he has a truly amazing array of grills and other cooking equipment. At first I didn’t like him much, mostly b/c he’s one of Those People who thinks partially-bleeped-out bad language is funny, but was won over by his basic warmheartedness and his amazing recipes. My son took note of a t-shirt he was wearing in one episode that said, “Vegan: Someone who opposes the killing of animals but doesn’t mind boring you to death explaining why” and said he wasn’t impressed—something about the guy’s pre-emptively making fun of people. But he changed his tune a little when he saw how many taco recipes STCG has on his channel. Hey, maybe Sam isn’t so bad! (My son is not a vegan, btw.)
- Uncle Roger, the online persona of a Malaysian-born ethnically Chinese standup comedian whose real name is Nigel Ng. How did I get onto him? Because Sam had an episode titled “How to make fried rice that Uncle Roger won’t hate.” I had no-o-o-o-o idea who this “Uncle Roger” was. He sounded like some middle-aged crank. In reality he’s about 30 and looks 12, puts on this comically-exaggerated accent (“video” is “weejio”), and skewers some superly-duperly famous chefs for their Asian food pretensions. He is especially merciless about Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson and their episodes on, respectively, fried rice and ramen noodles. Oh my word. I will never look at either chef in quite the same way again.
And that’s where I’ll end this particular thread. Just the above listing has provided hours of watching time.
Here’s what struck me as I looked back on my copious viewing over this past week: I now know how easy it is to get sucked into content that’s way, way off from where you started. Look at the progression in just those five YT channels listed above: from the completely mainstream for #1 to quite wacko for #5. (I mean that only in the best possible way, Uncle Roger!) I’ve certainly gotten involved in various threads before, especially those concerning theories about the JFK assassination and the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but I’ve always stayed pretty much on the beaten path with those subjects.
But what if YT comprised a big part of my day, every day? What if I started out on, say, “flat-earth theories,” or “stolen election 2020,” or “COVID real causes”? All too easy to get way out in left field and start swallowing stuff I’d never dreamed of. And once you start following the baloney breathlessly—well, there it is. Facebook, of course, is big on its own algorithms, as is Twitter. Whole days can disappear.
So I’m going to do my best to resist the siren call of following any more chefs on YT. Adam Ragusea is a keeper, as is Sam, and I will of course keep on with ATK and the peerless Dan. Uncle Roger is pretty rank in some ways, cute and fresh-faced as he may be. I think I’ll leave him alone from now on. I’m looking forward to getting back into real life.
And I’ll leave the fried rice to my son, who has very definite ideas on the subject. But I think egg foo yung is in my future. My husband loves it, and I just looked it up. Doesn’t seem too complicated, so I may give it a shot. I’d never considered making it for him before, but I should do it. As Uncle Roger would say, “Fuiyoh!” (Meaning, sort of, “Yay!” or “Good for me!”)
What rabbit holes have you followed on social media? Have you had a hard time getting back out again?