By Emma Prestwich
The video starts, and Ryerson student Mark Ellis appears, half-asleep in a bed, wearing a leprechaun hat and sporting an Irish accent.
“After a long night of drinking, there’s only one thing that’ll cure my hangover,” he says. “The Hangover Sandwich!”
The ensuing recipe for a homemade breakfast sandwich with bacon and onion is the latest video for Ellis’ and fellow student Ryan Malfara’s YouTube recipe channel, Rage Against the Cuisine, which Ellis calls the healthy, student-friendly answer to cooking shows on the Food Network.
“Whenever I talk to my friends about [cooking], they always say stuff like, I love that stuff, but I can’t do any of it myself. They either felt intimidated by the techniques that were used or they couldn’t afford the ingredients.”
Ellis said they try to make most of the recipes out of ingredients that students have at home, and are planning on revamping their first video for Fettuccine Bolognese to include more basic ingredients and kitchen utensils. The recipe requires a pasta maker and a rolling pin, two items most students don’t have. It is also nine minutes long.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’d watch that video for nine minutes,” he says.
Since then, they’ve cut the videos down to one to two minutes, and make simpler recipes, like homemade hummus, vegetarian chili and mashed potatoes. The channel also includes short tutorials on basic kitchen skills like sharpening a knife or cutting an onion.
Malfara and Ellis star in the videos, and radio and television arts students Ben Kaplan and Ben Locke record them. Rage Against the Cuisine’s YouTube channel, active since the end of November, has 15 videos, and each has roughly 150 to 200 views. The Fettucine Bolognese video has over 800.
Ellis says when he first came up with the idea for the channel, he wanted to feature healthier recipes to encourage students to buy groceries and eat food that fuels their studies.
“If you eat healthy, you have a more sound mind to help you study for midterms and all that. This is a good time in your life to get those habits down to a tee.”
Although making oversized portions of rich novelty food has become a trend in food blogs and videos, he says he isn’t interested in crafting dishes that blow most peoples’ daily calorie counts.
“I don’t want to be showing people how to cook 2000-calorie meals, if they want to do that, they can go watch Epic Meal Time or Paula Deen or something like that,” he says.
“Personally, [this is] the way I cook. I find as students, we sort of choose convenience over doing things ourselves, but this comes at the cost of eating healthy as well.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdNb5gClHwc[/youtube]
Watch theeyeopener.com this coming week for a Rage Against the Cuisine recipe video with Online Editor Emma Prestwich. I’m sure you’re excited for it already.
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