Queer Eye’s food & wine expert Antoni Porowski goes one-on-one with fans who need help with whatever ingredients that are in their kitchens.
by Teoh Jae Mie
Show Me What You’re Working With is a new Netflix YouTube series featuring food and wine expert Antoni Porowski. It was aptly released a few weeks into the quarantine that we are all under because of the global pandemic. Netflix invited Porowski to launch this series when his mini-series on IGTV started to gain a huge following.
The Queer Eye star had previously released a total of 17 episodes that he called Quar Eye: Cooking Lessons in Quarantine on his personal Instagram account. He realised that everybody was experiencing difficulty getting groceries from stores during the first few weeks of quarantine and thought that people should still be able to prepare good and healthy food for themselves with ingredients that are easily available around the world.
With a couple of lights attached to a humble tripod and a phone, Porowski began to cook easy-to-follow recipes with easy-to-get ingredients and uploaded simple, unedited videos which viewers instantly fell in love with. He constantly mentions that the recipes can be changed and tweaked to each individual liking and still taste as good, as well as providing viewers with suggestions of what to substitute some ingredients with if they did not have it at hand.
On Show Me What You’re Working With, Porowski responds to emails from fans asking him what to do with ingredients found in their kitchen. He would make a video call to them, asking to show him what they’re working with including those that he calls the ‘wild card’ – ingredients that the fans absolutely do not know how to use. After shopping around for ingredients similar to those shown to him in the call, he would – like on Quar Eye: Cooking Lessons in Quarantine – demonstrate how to cook simple but delicious dishes using just those ingredients.
Besides cooking up some uncomplicated yet appetising meals, Porowski also constantly reminds his viewers ‘not to hoard and buy food for months’ at a time. He had noticed that all the canned goods were gone on his multiple trips to the grocery store, and advised viewers to ‘diversify and go to every section’ instead of clearing out one section and ‘taking food away from other people’.
Who doesn’t love a TV personality who is completely transparent with their kitchen tips and tricks while also telling people to do the right thing? Porowski’s ultimate goal with food is to make it as simple as it can be, so that it is less intimidating for viewers to undertake the task and explore food from various cultures in the comforts of their own kitchens.
With so many of us being stuck at home and spending a fair bit on delivery services, why not switch things up by taking a look at some of his videos (on Netflix’s YouTube channel as well as his Instagram profile @antoni) and experiment those recipes? A new hobby might just spark up for you!
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