Cooking shares the connective thread of music and travel. Like a good song or a colorful postcard, recipes are shared through friends and generations. Unless you were a fan of rumaki. This sense of community explains why cooking videos have sprung up on YouTube, Chowhound and other Web sites. People are hungry to share their secrets. But can you learn to cook through YouTube? I found it somewhat difficult.
It’s not like those early morning cable TV workouts where you simply roll out a mat in your living room and count along with young women in bikinis doing calisenthics along South Beach.
Cooking through YouTube requires the viewer to step up to the plate and keep his or her eye on the ball.
“Cooking on YouTube is an emerging trend that’s heating up,” said YouTube spokesman Spencer Crooks from YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif. “A vibrant community is sharing recipes and exchanging techniques. Chefs interact with the viewers where people leave comments. There’s a single place to turn for everything from knife techniques to cooking an omelet in a Ziploc bag.”
I made jambalaya for my YouTube experiment. Cajun cooking allows for improvisation, great background music (Clifton Chenier, Lil’ Band of Gold), Mountain Dew chasers and good companionship.
I used my 1984 version of Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen cookbook as a safety template. I embellished with my own ideas and stuff I found on YouTube. This was like re-configuring the Louisiana Purchase.
I came across the three-part series “New Year’s Eve Jambalaya Cooking” on YouTube. It was not very inspiring. The kitchen appeared to be a mess and the droll woman in the background sounded like she was stoned, calling the chef “dude” and asking, “What’s going on here now?”
The worst part was that most ingredients were not introduced. The video’s saving grace: posts by viewers suggesting to add chorizo sausages, pork, blackeyed peas, kidney beans, stock, carrots/onions/ chickpeas and so on.

suntimes.com

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Blogging the new season of American Idol.
That’s a lot of Beatles songs. Don’t get me wrong, I was psyched when I heard that American Idol finally acquired the performing rights from Sony/ATV. But four hours, 23 solos, two medleys, and a Katharine McPhee/David Foster collaboration later, I’m ready to let the singers get back to their regular Idol fare. It wasn’t all bad—though it’s maybe not their thing. The Top 12 worked the hard-won Lennon-McCartney songbook two weeks ago in some innovative and fairly satisfactory ways. And then the producers couldn’t just “Let It Be,” so there was a second Beatles night last week (this time including songs by the Other Beatles!). Has this ever happened before—two successive weeks of the same theme? The answer is no, and now we know why.
While it did provide a second chance to a few who faltered the first time, the reverse situation prevailed. Chikezie, who turned out my favorite performance during Lennon-McCartney night, tried unsuccessfully to replicate the success the following week. His bluegrass-cum-Little Richard rendition of “She’s a Woman” had been lively and so full of sh-sh-sh-showmanship that it drew rave reviews from the judges and sent Ryan running around the stage in a Beatlemaniacal frenzy. But his second attempt at the country vibe, an odd dual-tempo arrangement of “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” found Chikezie trying to board the instrument-playing bandwagon with an ill-advised harmonica solo—it was pretty much just that ingressive-egressive thing your toddler does with his Fisher Price model.

slate.com