My friend Mike found a great cooking website recently which he shared with me and which I think deserves passing on.

Former home economics teacher Kathy Maister has created a website (and blog) – www.startcooking.com – full of instructional videos that contain helpful cooking tips and techniques and lots of sound and visual effects. The videos are fun to watch and educational too. The site also has a great selection of recipes with step-by-step directions and photographs to help both novice and experienced cooks perform better in the kitchen.

While poking around the site, I found a list of a dozen tasty ways to spice up instant hot chocolate. With cold weather moving into southern Ontario tonight (could snow be far behind??), hot chocolate seems especially appealing.

I noticed this post a few days ago on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, it was called A Lot to Learn From Start Cooking. It is a site that literally shows you how to cook something by showing it using a step-by-step process. I’m a terrible cook so I particularly enjoyed this site. It has a ton of videos showing how to make a bunch of different sort of recipes. It shows you the quantities of each ingredient, tells you what kind of cooking supplies needed, how long it should take to cook/bake and of course it shows you what the final product should look like. This site is very beneficial to those people, such as myself, that are visual learners. Though the videos on the site are quick, you can pause it while you gather your things and follow along. It is also an added bonus to do things at your own pace.

Another awesome feature of this site is that you can view the videos many different ways, through iTunes, RSS readers, TVTonic and you can also receive emails with the new recipes and demos available. 

While I thought this was a great site, it sure isn’t the only one out there. There are millions of other instructional videos on the web. You can pretty much think of anything and there will be a video on how to do it, whether you want to watch it or not is another story. YouTube has some out there, but I find that they are either not of particular good quality, and they are randomly added and inconsistent. It amazes me on how reliant we have become on the web to show us how things are done. In the past it was pretty easy to pick up a cooking book or phone a friend for a recipe for example and now it is just that much easier to look it up on the web instead.

Jen

There’s quite a few cooking shows out there, and I have subscribed and unsubscribed from quite a few of them. The one that has remained in my list the longest, however, is the Start Cooking podcast.

Start cooking is a video podcast hosted by Kathy Maister, and presents a variety of simple but tasty recipes (though the realse dayes are not very regular). This may not appeal to advanced or professional cooks, but it’s perfect for beginners, or those looking for something quick and easy.

There are two things that I like most about Start cooking: firstly, it’s short (generally just 2-3 minutes long). You get to see all stages of cooking, but the production style is unique in that it is a series of still images rather than a 15 minute full motion video, so they can cram a lot of information in a short period while keeping it easy to follow. Second, the recipes are reletively simple using easily available ingredients, which is more than I can say for most TV chefs.

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