How to …..Kitchen Hacks
Before lockdown I was useless with technology. Still am, but back then I would have nothing to do with iphone videos. I wouldn’t even send a birthday message to a friend. I only reluctantly agreed to selfies because arguing my way out of one took longer and was more stressful than grinning into a stranger’s tilted phone.
But Covid changed all that. I found I HAD to come to terms with zoom and her many cousins. At first, I was reduced to tears by our useless broadband cutting out, or my not knowing which button to click while some hapless host apologised for my failure to appear.
It took all afternoon for my long-suffering husband to film me doing a simple shout-out for the NHS at the start of lockdown. But since then we have both marginally improved. To be fair, John was always good at photography and took easily to getting the lighting right or zooming in for a close up of poaching eggs or bubbling jam. Less welcome is the fact that he’s turning into quite a bossy director, barking out instructions. “Look at the camera, not the food”; “Too much umming and erring”; “Smile”; “Love the camera” and so on.
Whoops!!!
I have solved the lack of professional help by deciding my casual and amateurish style, warts and all, will have to do. (In a TV studio there are home economists to do the food prep, make-up artists and clothes stylists to make me look the part, and a whole day filming take after take to get it right.)
I haven’t the patience for re-takes, I’m too mean to waste ingredients on another go, and anyway I reckon my followers know me well enough not to expect perfection. So, when the top flew off the flour sifter, dumping a cloud of flour over everything, I just said, O dear, and kept going, and in another clip I appear with a blue plaster on a cut finger.
I can’t think anyone minds. Some followers have commented the mistakes ‘make me human’. Funny that, I thought I was human.
Accident!!!