Cookus Interruptus: Beyond Online Cooking Shows
Many people are trying their hand at online food shows, for entertainment or promotional reasons. Christopher Walken even has one for his chicken with pears. But the format keeps you from really getting into it and sours the fun, when the pears look like 8-bit blobs and the chicken breasts are all pixelated out. YouTube is fine to watch a kitten on a pony, but anything more important can get lost in the choppy, pixelated, slow loading format depending on your connection and your computer.
Enter Cookus Interruptus, a new online cooking show with a mission. Starring local author, nutritionist, and actress Cynthia Lair, the online site produces quick and fun videos teaching you how to produce wholesome meals with fresh, local ingredients. Mixed in with the how to are adorable non sequiturs that give the project its name.
The video plays at a quality far superior to YouTube, shot by Seattle commercial director Brad Huskinson. Huskinson and Lair are partners in Cookus, which they partly conceived more than ten years ago when the two produced a pilot of a similar show, a half hour cooking sitcom focusing on meals made with whole foods. Too ahead of it's time then, the Cookus Interruptus website is definitely still ahead of the curve now. Clean, easy to use, and informative, the videos get to the point, and on the plate, in 4 to 8 minutes.
The site posts a video each week, and each video has the complete recipe right below the screen, with a print option. Under the "menus" page, videos are organized into meals to giving further ideas as to use. Lair is at ease with her expertise; she's taught at Bastyr University for over ten years. Sweetly delivering facts and helpful hints to enrich your daily meals, she deals with interruptions from her husband and adult daughter, who both seem to be in a "transitional period" and spend a great deal of time at home.
Cookus Interruptus launched two weeks ago, and interesting side effect so far are all of the emails asking various cooking and recipe questions. Because of the quick turn around of this format, Huskinson says they can and will turn your questions into future videos. So watch, learn, and don't be afraid to ask!
1 comment(s)
WrightEats says:
Cookus Interruptus has been around for longer than two weeks. In fact, I first learned of it back in February from this very blog: http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/voracious/2008/02/local_talent_cookus_interruptu.php
I love the format, and Cynthia is too funny!
(added: This is the new site, just rolled out Friday before last, a considerable step forward. -md)
Posted On: Saturday, Aug. 30 2008 @ 4:20PM