Friday Night’s All Right For Not Worrying About It

I’ve only recently realized that I’d spent years thinking I liked cooking, but I really don’t. I’m not that good at it, and because I don’t have a good idea of how to correct when something is going wrong or tasting bad, I pretty much have to rely on the recipe working right on the first try. It’s frustrating.

What I think happened was I used to enjoy watching cooking shows on the Food Network so much that it tricked me into thinking I liked cooking. Now, I’m realizing that there’s just something relaxing and entertaining about watching a well-made cooking show. One of my favorites at the moment is Aaron and Claire’s YouTube channel. They’re a couple living in Seoul who focus on easy ways to make Korean and other East Asian food. Honestly, I haven’t yet tried any of the recipes (although I really want to try making Kimchi fried rice), but they’ve got the formula down for making entertaining videos, with all the familiar and funny repetition. Don’t worry about it.

I’m late to the party, but I’m also getting to be a fan of J Kenji López-Alt. His main “thing” is bringing ideas from food science to simpler and easier dishes you make for yourself at home. It’s unassuming, practical, and accessible. But I think I’m as impressed by his overall sensibility, right down to his sign-off to “guys, gals, and non-binary pals.”

This video by Matt Ferrell is primarily about the work of a French company called Qarnot with a fascinating and ingenious idea: recovering waste heat from data centers and rendering farms and using it to warm buildings or heat water in boiler rooms.

Tim Robinson’s sketch comedy show I Think You Should Leave has been getting rave reviews and being the subject of memes for a while, but I have to say it doesn’t really do it for me. But this sketch about a driver’s ed class and Eddie Munster ruining a woman’s tables is somehow one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

Much-beloved British comedian Sean Lock passed away this week, and there was an outpouring of respect from people who respected him. I really only know him from 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, where his spontaneity seemed genius. Channel 4 put up a tribute video with some of his best moments from Countdown, but I think the better tribute is actually a compilation of Lock’s best moments that they made in 2019. The sequence starting at 0:55, with a NSFW adlib during a wager with Miles Jupp, is one of the funniest moments of the entire series.