My YouTube channel is Now Live!
For the last few months I’ve been working harder than ever, which might sound strange coming from a chef and food writer during lock-down. The cookery lessons I was giving came to an abrupt halt and also a planned foodie trip to the island of Cyprus, so I had to “think outside the box”. I came up with the idea of using Zoom to teach cookery courses online. After taking several courses on zoom and learning how to use its capabilities I still had to figure out how I could give cooking demonstrations, after all my webcam was 7-8 years old and the specs were okay but not great, so trying to do live cooking demo’s was out of the question. Finally, I decided to use my Nikon D3300 to film my cooking before-hand, edit it and the show the clips during the class.
None of this would be possible with my wonderful wife Sophie, who became my camera man, editor and co-director. It has been a steep and very interesting learning curve on so many levels. Firstly, to understand and master using Zoom - I now teach it to others. Secondly, to learn a whole new set of skills in trying to create useful cooking videos. Which meant many hours hunting online to better understand the video settings on my camera because Nikon’s instruction is very basic. Also learning more about lighting and sound equipment.
Years ago I did do some limited TV work whilst working in America, and quite a lot of live cooking demonstrations on both sides of the Atlantic. Even so, in those circumstances I just had to turn up with recipes and ingredients, I didn’t have to worry to much about the technical side of things other than doing sound checks.
The Project:
Was to create a series of useful and hopefully engaging videos that vary in length from 5 minutes to half an hour. The longest is a two part video called The Art of Cooking on a Barbecue, which was made to work in concert with the 3 articles with the same name that I have published on this blog (part 1, part 2 and part 3 ).
My YouTubeChannel:
Quite a few of my students from my online courses asked me if I was intending to upload the videos onto YouTube as well. The channel is now live and I will be uploading regularly scheduled content. The videos correlate to posts on my blogs and are a useful visual aid if you are trying to make any of my recipes. Please follow the link and don’t forget to like and subscribe!
Chef Kevin Ashton YouTube Channel
My Lessons:
Whilst a number of the videos used to support my lessons are available on YouTube, my lessons go into more depth covering more ground and are more interactive.
In my lessons I also cover how to cut up a whole chicken, fillet several types of fish. How to make chicken stock and store it. A series of quick sauces you can make in under 15 minutes. I have also created a series of videos aimed at beginners who want to learn a few basic recipes such as Spaghetti Bolognese, Homemade Pizza, How to roast a Chicken and a few simple dessert recipes such as Easy Bread Pudding or Plum Compote - which is so simple and makes a great topping for yogurt, porridge or even a low calorie dessert.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to plug my other food blogs, all are on WordPress but seem to get overlooked.
Cheap and Easy Student Recipes was set up to offer less complicated recipes that could be used any day of the week and hopefully help improve your cooking confidence.
Old Blog Posts Since I first moved to WordPress back in 2015, I agonised for sometime whether I should republish all the posts and recipes from my old blog which I started in 2006 onto my new blog? Instead I created another blog and from time to time republished recipes and articles. It now has 25 posts on it and is well worth a look but it only has 22 followers, kind of a hidden gem, so I hope you will go take a look.
My Social Media channels Follow to get Followed back
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