Things I need: An AU where Bucky hosts a youtube channel cooking anything and everything and his commentary has this dry sassy humor.
He’d have a different apron each episode ranging from the plain, ones with puns, ones with various other sayings, and ones with various patterns.
Sometimes he’d vlog while visiting a market or something, he’d point to a freezer full of meat and be all “welp guess they finally found that winter soldier guy”
“how does this dude wield a knife so well”
“where does this guy get all his aprons”
things i knead
Can we somehow combine this with Eliot Spencer guest starring on the show? In his own punny apron and scary good knife skills? Pretty please?
“And today, we’re going to show you how to break down a chicken.”
“Make sure your knives are clean of any foreign matter first also. Cross-contamination is a thing.”
“How did you get foreign matter on your knife today?”
“Don’t ask. Let’s just say the guy now has a very distinctive walk that will let Interpol nail him shortly.”
RENO MY RENO! Canadians fix people’s home improvement mistakes and are super nice about it but FIRM with man who don’t finish projects!
so far some shows that have worked for me:
Lord & Ladles – scottish chefs cook historical feasts in historical mansions! you meet wacky old money people and learn about strange things their ancestors got up to! you get to watch as world-renowned chefs fail at catching a fish! someone makes a hedgehog out of marzipan! people in the olden times ate some crazy shit! every episode ends with the chefs cheersing each other while lying on vintage furniture!
Big Dreams, Small Spaces – cute british people have cute yards that cute gardening man helps to make into much cuter yards. one lady wants to grow vegetables to share with her neighborhood. one lady wants to sculpt a huge mud head covered in moss coming out of the ground. one dad wants a garden for his down’s syndrome kid so he makes a sensory garden with a thousand different smells and textures. one couple wants to grow flowers for their wedding. it’s all wonderful.
Nailed It! – a bunch of people probably got high and decided to throw money at this show idea. everybody tries their best and everybody comes away either having learned something helpful, having had a rollicking good time, or having won a bunch of money. all the judges are good sports and nobody is made to feel bad for doing bad. also there’s some fucking crazy shit they get up to with modeling chocolate i tell you what.
Skin Wars – actually a lot about artists and their craft??? not really at all about sexy ladies being naked??? very cool stuff done by people with atrocious fashion sense and a complete willingness to buy into the moment. a few bad apples but mostly the reality-show-ness is pretty toned down and people are there to make cool art.
A Cook Abroad – chefs go to different parts of the world and learn about food there. A dumb white guy makes bread with adorable egyptian ladies! A british man gets exhausted by the length of roads in argentina and is only recharged by steak! An awesome woman makes cheese in france!
Love Your Garden – british man does garden makeovers for wholesome deserving families with special needs. Maybe a little bit on the weepy side of things but his assistants are all great and have fantastic hairstyles and people in wheelchairs deserve flowers!
Puffin Rock – this show is supposedly for babies but it is SO PRETTY and SO CHARMING and it’s about animals and nature and stuff and doesn’t really completely shy away from that?? like, one of the characters is a little rodent and the seagulls are the bad guys and he’s actually afraid of getting eaten?? anyway baby birds sing songs with baby bunnies and play splishsplash with baby seals and snuggle with baby animals of all sorts in a beautiful hand painted island.
Animal Airport – hey did you know some crazy shit goes down in Heathrow?? Did you know that there isn’t rabies in the UK? Everyone’s doggies and kitties have a long trip but they all get home in the end and also there are turtles and cheetahs and bugs and fish and everything!!!
this list is so relevant to my interests it hurts.
i’d also suggest the bbc historical farms series–it’s not on netflix, but it *is* mostly on youtube. the metafilter guide that originally introduced me to it is here. there are a bunch of different series of it, now, and each one is a group of archaeologists and historians living on a period location–victorian farm, they live in a farmhouse from the era, and they farm and raise animals and etc wearing period clothing, using period tools and sources as guides. and it sounds like it could be cringey, but they’re all experts in their fields and actually really invested in trying to do things well, so instead it’s a bunch of shows about teamwork and being friends (most of the core team stays the same) and learning things, and it’s delightful.
similarly, the sweet makers and victorian bakers have modern confectioners and bakers recreating period foods wearing appropriate clothing and using cookbooks from the era to guide them. (warning that one of the sweet makers episodes deals heavily with the history of sugar, and the slavery and horrific abuses associated with the same.)
a good list but i just want to point out that Lords and Ladles is Irish. the chefs are Irish. it’s filmed in Irish manor houses. no Scottish in sight.
Also: The Supersizers Go/Eat [historical period]: Sue Perkins and history/food person explore different time periods and cultures. can be found on youtube.
The Great British Sewing Bee – like bake off, but with clothing!
The Great Pottery Throw Down – like bake off, but with pottery!
The Great Australian Bake Off – the comedians are annoying, but the judges are great
Celebrity British Bake Off (Sports Relief and Comic Relief) – hysterically funny because half the contestants are comedians and half have never baked a thing in their life, so just turning the oven on is A SUCCESS
Great British Bake Off : An Extra Slice – Aftershow for the main series with Jo Brand, good stuff
Junior Bake Off – bake off, but with kids! Also, better, because at least the most recent series, they not only had lots of racial diversity and gender parity but a few kids with disabilities!
The Chefs’ Line – awesome Australian show that focusses on the staff of a restaurant cooking against a handful of amateurs, a different cuisine every week. Season two has just started! Also, the judges are amazing and 100% not white, which is super rare on tv.
Family Food Fight – another Australian show with families of different food cultures cooking against each other to find the winner. Season one of this was AWESOME and so warm and wholesome. We’re getting another season soon!
TIME TEAM – Watch British people get excited digging holes, finding tiny bits of pot and floor tile, and different colours of dirt. In the rain!
Britain’s Best Cook – Mary Berry’s new show that is sort of like bake off, but with all kinds of home cooking, not just baking!
I need this list right now because i just finished Lords & Ladles and I’m bereft.
Adding a few more of my favorites:
Somebody Feed Phil and I’ll Have What Phil’s Having – both are travel food shows hosted by Phil Rosenthal. He is the sweetest person I have EVER seen on TV. He loves everything he eats & makes friends in all the random places he visits.
The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure and
The Hairy Bikers’
Chicken & Egg – There are MANY Hairy Biker series…but these are the two on Netflix. These guys are entertaining & enthusiastic. They travel and cook and tease each other and just LOVE all the new culture they are exposed to. The two of them in the US cooking fried chicken made me love them forever.
Cosmos: A Spacetime Oddysey -Neil deGrasse Tyson has such a soothing voice, along with being incredibly excited about space, he calls out the inherent misogyny of the history of science in general & astrophysics in particular. I love this man with everything I have. This just left Netflix, I’m hoping it shows up on another streaming service soon.
Oooh, yeah, Hairy Bikers are great. Their Best of British is super good, too.
Oh, also, The Cook and The Chef. What it says on the tin – Maggie Beer (cook) and Simon Bryant (chef) hang out in Maggie’s real-life kitchen and make food from whatever’s in season or growing in Maggie’s garden or orchard. Heavy focus on local, sustainable and heirloom foods. Pretty much unscripted and adorable.
Ooops-Those-Bananas-Are-Brown Scones! (Minus the two and a half that we ate before photographing.)
I pretty much stuck to the recipe this time, just swapping the two flours out for GF flour blend. I had to add a little extra flour when bringing it together into a dough because my egg was big and I guesstimated the amount of honey left in the jar was roughly the right amount, but it was probably more, so the mix was wetter as a result. I also cooked it for an extra five mintues again, because my oven is still slow, and the extra moisture needed to cook out. It was super hard to cut this into equal portions because it was sticky as and just wanted to glue itself to the knife, even with a little oil on the blade.
The flavour’s really great on this one, so I probably won’t modify it in the future, unless I want to change it up by adding nuts or choc chips or something. I might try using a flour like buckwheat or brown rice in place of the whole wheat, too, to try and get that deeper flavour in there.
I replaced the pomegranate with chopped dried apricots. For the greek yoghurt, I dumped in a tub of strawberry Chobani without measuring and hoped it would do the job. (Given my baking powder is super old and there’s only one egg in this recipe, it definitely worked.) The chocolate was ¾ of a 180g block of Milky Bar, but it was sweet enough to not need more. Also, I had just under 100g of a block of butter left, and decided ‘it’ll do!’ because I couldn’t be bothered opening a new block. (It did.) They’re in American-style wedges rather than British/Australian style rounds, because finding my cutters at 3am was, like, nah, when I could just cut the dough into slices with a regular knife.
So, basically, after Emma has been gluten free for fourteen years, I broke my block to do with trying to make scones because it was late, I had a craving, and I decided that because I was fudging half the recipe, if it didn’t work, it didn’t matter. And they’re pretty great. The texture is cakey, but that’s normal for GF without added xanthan gum, and they’re sweet, soft inside, and have a nice crust. I didn’t even bother to egg wash them despite it suggesting to, and look at that colour! The balance of flavours is nice – the chocolate melted in, so there’s no chunks of that, but every now and then you get a surprise pocket of the flavour of it. The strawberry puree from the Chobani is a mild fruity note in the background, and the apricots are tart and add texture. I think the yoghurt has a lot to do with the nice softness inside. I’ve used sour cream in a number of recipes in the past, and it really makes a nice bake.
In the future, I might add another sharp note, because they are very sweet. A citrus glaze, or maybe zest in the mix. It could be more balanced, but it is certainly not going to be a chore to eat through this first batch.
ETA: I did cook mine for five minutes longer than the recipe time (20mins) but my oven is slow, so I expected to have to do that. If your oven is pretty accurate, you probably won’t need to.
knitting in the dark 