You Tube - Your Culinary Sanctuary

 Everyone is basically house bound with all these worldwide quarantines. It's a crazy time that may get crazier. The best way to alleviate the anxiety and boredom is looking at how  to videos. It's not only a great way to pass time but also learn hacks and lessons.

For true old school comfort check out any of the Julia Child videos.Her show ran on PBS from 1963 to 1972. She was a ground  breaker with being the first woman with an extensive cooking show as well as introducing Americans to the art of fine French cooking. You can learn everything from her, from the basics as making a good Gallic omelet to creating a flavorful onion soup. There's something soothing about her teacher's voice and the way she meticulously explains techniques. Later episodes have her working with another great chef, Jacques Pepin. Theirs is a harmony that's amazing.Again it's like taking a master class in cooking. There's also that famed Dan Ackroyd Saturday Night Live  darkly funny imitation that will make you laugh during these trying times. Other chef videos to look at are again, are Jacques Pepin, Lidia Bastianich, and Gordon Ramsey. If you like the older classics, then definitely watch The Two Fat Ladies and The Galloping Gourmet starring Graham Kerr for the camp and the valuable hints.

Some of my favorites are the cake decorating and the cooking and baking hacks. There are some truly amazing decorating videos out there. Some  show decorating as simple as just pressing a spoon against buttercream and then spinning the cake stand for smooth concentric circles. Others show you how to create everything from a bouquet of fondant  flowers to a cake topped with a white chocolate Mardi Gras mask complete with chocolate feathers. Be warned. You can be mesmerized by these for hours. The food hack ones are also interesting. Definitely tune into 5 Minute Hacks. This seems to come from Britain. Healthy foodies will be go made for the how to make your own pickle chips while egg enthusiasts will experiment with hard boiling their eggs with a lemon slice. Doing such softens the egg shells and makes for much easier peeling. There's one on fried avocado slices that looks interesting to try from their 35 Crazy Food Hacks video.

If you're bored or anxious then turn to You Tube. You'll enjoy the soothing tones of master chefs and go wild for the eye opening hints. It's what we need during these uncertain , crazy days,

Women In The Kitchen

With this being International Women's Day . it's time we celebrate the impact of women on food and nutrition. After all it's not our dads anf grandads that fed us but our mothers and grandmothers. Yet there seems to be more male chefs than female chefs, while it seems there are more waitresses than waiters. What gives?

Since the earliest of our days, it's been the females that have been providing food, whether from the earliest hunter-gatherers to the first "home chefs" roasting meat on  wood spits over a fire. It's the women who ground the wheat  to make the bread that fed the family. They made sure children had the best nutrition for the time, as they tended to gardens. Our sisters from antiquity probably introduced fruits and vegetables to their families diets, expanding both their husbands and childrens' palates. Some of these recipes exist today in the form of matzoh and pita, roasted lamb and dumplings . The home chefs  that lived during the Roman and Greek empires and the Han Dynasty realized the importance of meals being eaten together too, and how it would strengthen family ties.They passed down themselves and their stories in dishes that the next generation of both girls and boys are making today with electric stoves and all sorts of modern gadgets .Believe it or not we're all eating some form of the Paleo diets thanks to our early female ancestors.

You would think that with women ruling the kitchen , they'd be ruling the culinary world. Not so much, even in this day and age.The cookbooks, were written by women, with the first real one penned by Isabella Beeton in the 1860's but a woman owning a restaurant was unheard of , unless she ran it with her parents  husband, or children.It was a man who gave us the famed Gilded Age eatery Delmonico's in lower Manhattan.it was the great chef Auguste Escoffier , a Frenchman who was the world's first celebrity chef. It took a century later for the first female, chef, Julia Child who captivated American home chefs and foodies in the 1960's./. She also laid the groundwork for the celebrity chef culture that came thirty years later in the 1990s. Still, there seems to be an imbalance with the number of male chefs to female chefs today.   The only successful female chef  now is Lidia Bastianich who has her TV show , restaurants,products and cookbooks. She's on the same par as Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsey but she' really the only one. There's an imbalance lower down the culinary ladder too.. Most of the fast food managers are men, Assistant managers are women, but it seems that this is the highest they can go. The first tier workers are usually female also. Could it be that boys would rather work in the Apple stores as opposed to  a Wendy's or McDonald's? Or that girls are just pointed to kitchens.?

Today is the Internatioal Women's Day. We have fed and nurtured the world for millennia. Yet in some sectors of the food industry  we're still treated like underlings. It has to change- and we have to change it.

Classy Chefs On PBS

Long before the Food Channel, there was PBS's line up of cooking shows.It started in the early Sixties with the famed ,great Julia Child and continues to today.They maybe quieter than the brighter, more in your face shows on other channels but their low key style speaks volumes.Watching them is like spending time ,learning from a master chef. One of the most famous is Jacques Pepin.Chef Pepin is the child of French restauranteurs.His background is distinguished,being one of French President's Charles DeGaulle's chef.He also helped revamped Howard Johnson's menu back in the Sixties.His shows have always been very quiet, yet informative.Even when he and his daughter,Claudine cohosted a cooking program together, it was never loud or sweetly cloying as some family centered cooking shows are.He shows home chefs not to have any fear with dealing with sometimes foreign or unfamiliar ingredients.The way he makes gnocchis and eggs are poetic, quietly going through the steps, acting much like a thoughtful professor.Another great master chef is Lidia Bastianich.Chef Bastianich is known for her amazing restaurants,Del Posto of New York City and Lidia's of Kansas City and Lidia's of Pittsburgh.Watching her explain the different steps along with her hints is quietly informative.There's no gimmicks, no bells and whistles.She is very good at explaining everything, from why a certain ingredient is used to what knives to employ when cutting meat.Her other show, Lidia Celebrates America is a great culinary travelogue where she explores different ethnic groups, enjoying their customs and show viewers, not only different cuisines but the different traditions and cultures that they've come from. One of the best PBS cooking show is America's Test Kitchen.This is a fun half hour,chock full of advice, hints and recipes.The host, Christopher Kimball is like your favorite professor.He is goofy at times, funny but vastly knowledgeable.He is helped by Bridget Lancaster, and Julia Colin Davison.These chefs create the different dishes while Kimball asks pertinent questions and helps out.There is also the very informative Tasting Lab segment where the audience blind taste tests different foods.This is a great way of finding out what canned and boxed foods are the best tasting. Another informative segment is the Adam Reid who handles the Equipment Corner.This is where he shows different gadgets from blenders to cookie presses and rating from best to worst. The show also centers around weekly themes, from pizzas to roast chicken to crumb cakes.While American's Test Kitchen is primarily American cuisine, PBS has some very good ethnic ones.There's Daisy Cooks with host chef Daisy Martinez who brings Spanish and Latino cuisine to viewers.Scandanavian cooking is shown in New Scandanavian Cooking, a rarity, because there has never been an interest in this ancient and varied cuisines along with shows solely featuring Thai and Jewish cooking. PBS may not have flashy food shows with personality super stars,but it does have quality cooking shows with great master chefs. Home chefs will learn as much as if they took a cooking course.There a&e Re lessons to be learned and great recipes to try.