An uninterested pooch. An affable narrator. And a Japanese mom-type doing the cooking. These are the simple components that make up one of my favorite cooking shows, called “Cooking with Dog“.
You won't find it on the Food Network or even PBS. It's only on YouTube.
The shows started last year, and cover the gamut of Japanese dishes, from sukiyaki to its current episode where they make sanma takikomi gohan. Each one breezes through at a fast clip (no show is more than 5 minutes long). And it is shot, lit and edited crisply. The directions are spoken in perfect English without an ounce of snootiness and just a touch of a Japanese accent.
By the end, even if you don't intend to replicate what you just saw, you are always educated.
I've had numerous AHA-so-that's-how-they-make-that moments watching the show. I guarantee you will too.
The only thing that will leave you puzzled is how they manage to keep that dog sitting still.
Before becoming an award-winning restaurant critic for OC Weekly in 2007, Edwin Goei went by the alias “elmomonster” on his blog Monster Munching, in which he once wrote a whole review in haiku.