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What’s cooking grandma?
The cooking recipes that the wise hands of our grandmothers have prepared with love and care for years and years have their own space on the internet. What's cooking grandma? is a social network in which grandmothers from all over the world teach to cook all types of dishes, by means of explanatory videos, with that master touch that only they are able to give to a dish.
Anna, Hilda, Nannie, Ruth, Paula, Sonia... all of them present their culinary secrets in What's cooking grandma? (www.humanbeans.net/whatscookinggrandma), a project of the Human Beans company that has become a way to preserve the traditional recipes that grandmas cook and that for different reasons do not always pass from one generation to the next. With this web site and thanks to the invaluable help of YouTube, these recipes will remain through the years.
The idea was born in summer last year, when Human Beans recorded five "grandmas" cooking in Lancaster (England), as part of a project for the contemporary art exhibition entitled "Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders". "This project was intended to create a virtual cook book with grandmas from all over the world sharing their special recipes", the persons in charge of the site pointed out. "We want people to record their grandmothers while they cook and upload their recordings here", they added.
Sharing secrets
Anyone can send a video of his grandmother cooking one of her favourite recipes. The site, which is only available in English so far, includes several hints about how to do it and upload it to the web.
You just need a video camera, the edition software and, of course, a grandmother. Recordings cannot last more than 10 minutes and they cannot be bigger than 100 megabytes. They will all be kept in YouTube.
But What's cooking grandma? is not a place for videos only; "photo histories" can also be uploaded or downloaded, that is to say, photographs taken during the making-off of the recipes with texts at the bottom explaining the different steps, as well as audio recordings in MP3 format (this way, the recipe can be heard while it is being prepared).
Other webs
Apart from recipes by grandmas, there are a lot of web sites on the Net where you can learn to prepare a great variety of dishes and practice different cooking techniques.
StartCooking (http://startcooking.com), for instance, is a site addressed, especially, to those who are not used to cooking. Here, they can access videos that explain, step by step, how to prepare rice or how to chop an onion. There is a bar in each video that determines the level of difficulty of each recipe.
Similarly, Cookshow (www.cookshow.com) is especially focussed on French cooking, although any dish from any region in the planet can be shared. It has more than 130 recipes, perfectly explained by means of their corresponding videos. Among the most outstanding ones, we can find a Tex-Mex hamburger or turkey with chilli.
The repsolypf.com recipe searcher (http://www.repsolypf.com/SE/CasaHogar/buscadorRecetas/portada.aspx) is another option in order to learn to cook and prepare new dishes, with an added advantage: it is in Spanish. Recipes for people affected by celiac disease and diabetes, vegetarians and for special occasions, such as birthdays or Christmas, are some of the possibilities offered by this searching tool.
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