The Friday Fillip

My day to praise websites. And while I could colour The New Yorker website with a vaguely lawyerly hue, this one is definitely something else altogether: Rouxbe is a brand new Canadian “how-to” cooking website. With food the new porn, there is a plethora of cooking sites out there, most of them okay and a lot of them very much sub par. Rouxbe (pronounced “ruby” I imagine) is simply excellent in almost every respect.

You’re presented with a list of recipes on video; you can watch a brief preview or the full recipe. The full recipe takes you step by step through the preparation of the dish, with opportunities along the way to pause and “drill down” to learn about some ingredient or method with which you may be unfamiliar. What blew me away was the quality of the movies. They are visually stunning, beautifully produced and paced, the instruction clear as a can be.

If you cook and want to learn more, this is for you. If you’re already an accomplished chef, tell Rouxbe and maybe they’ll put you on air. Either way, this is one slick, satisfying venture.

Salade Lyonnaise