Fernanda Dórea is sharing the culinary culture of her native Brazil one recipe at a time on her YouTube Vlog.
To top it off, this PhD student at the Atlantic Veterinary College (AVC) in Charlottetown is learning as she goes because before this cooking was pretty much a foreign word in her life skills vocabulary.
"I never cooked. To me cooking was the yummy things I got when I went to my mom's house," laughs Dórea, who also has a how-to sewing channel for first-timers on YouTube, which she started as a stress reliever from her hectic study schedule.
"Halfway through our PhD we have something called our comprehensive exam. It's an eight-hour written test and a four-hour oral test and you spend six months preparing for it," she explains.
"So I was getting really stressed studying every day and that's how the whole thing started, I just needed a hobby."
Dórea tried to paint, she tried to do collages and she attempted cross-stitching but nothing seemed to capture her attention.
"Then finally I decided to buy the sewing machine because I always wanted to learn . . . ," she says.
She was chatting with a group of eight female vet students not long after that and noticed that almost all of them had thought about learning how to sew.
"I realized more people than me wanted to do it. We started talking about it and one of the girls said, 'You should start a Vlog because then we can follow you and we can see what you're learning. . . ,' " Dórea says.
"I couldn't get the idea out of my head."
Her fiancée Holger Meyer stepped in to help out on the video-recording end and she soon posted a series of how-to sewing Vlogs on YouTube.
"Then a male friend of ours said, 'I'm not going to take up sewing (so) why don't you do a cooking (video series) so the rest of us can follow (that),'" she remembers.
There were challenges. In addition to her lack of cooking prowess, Dórea's kitchen set up in her apartment is a two-burner hot plate, a toaster oven and a microwave.
"But the videos were just a way for me to feel like cooking. It was more a push - 'OK I'm just going to enjoy this and I'm not going to pay attention to the size of my kitchen. I'm just going to find a way to make cooking fun,'" she smiles.
Fortunately Dórea's mother had sent her forth into the world with a handy book of her tried-and-true recipes in the hopes that one day she would make use of them.
"It has great sentimental value to me because we went out and bought that recipe binder for both of us and we started a recipe book together," Dórea says.
"My mom always cooked without measuring so for a whole month before I left home she would cook the things that I like and she would measure (the ingredients) and I would write down the recipe in each of those books. . . .
"(But) my mom never wrote down the temperatures because the ovens in Brazil are low, medium or high (settings only). We never pay attention to the temperature. So all my mom's recipes were 'medium' and what is medium here?"
Turns out it was 350F. With that knowledge Dórea decided to tackle one of her favourite dishes, empadinhas, which is like a cheese quiche.
"I started with that one because when I go home it's the first thing my mom will cook for me," she says.
"That was my way of saying, 'OK let's see if I can really do something that I like eating without my mom having to do it for me.'"
There were some growing pains with the first video/cooking experiment.
"I know how they looked when they were done because that's how my mom served them to me. But when I put them in the oven and they were growing I didn't know if that was normal or not because they grow and then they fall again," she laughs.
"So I called my mom real quick and said, 'Are they supposed to grow when they're in the oven?' and she said, 'Yes!'"
Even mistakes can sometimes turn out OK.
In the instance of her cooking a deep-fried cauliflower recipe she accidently omitted a key third ingredient after the cauliflower dipped in beaten egg.
"Someone put up a comment (on YouTube) that said, 'Aren't you supposed to put them in breadcrumbs?'" Dórea says.
"I called my mom and she said, 'Yes, you were supposed to put it in breadcrumbs.' (But) I did it without the breadcrumbs (by mistake) and it turned out great."
Like her daughter exploring the cooking world for the first time, Dórea's mother has only recently ventured into the online world.
"I kept sending her the link but it took awhile for her to actually get to videos. Now she watches them but she doesn't speak English very well so she doesn't always watch all of them. . . ," Dórea says.
"She's a fanatic about kitchen. The other day she asked me to go to the Paderno store and buy her whatever is new, whatever she can't find in Brazil.
And she now watches the videos just to see what I have (Paderno kitchenware-wise) for me to buy for her."
Although her AVC comprehensive exam is now done Dórea plans to continue with her fun Vlog hobby and sharing her newfound sewing and cooking skills.
"It was a stress reliever and it was a way for me to acquire that liking for cooking. . . ," she says.
"So now whenever I have to go to someone's house I will prepare something to take and when I get there I just feel so proud that I am bringing something that I made. (So) I did create that liking for cooking that I never had before."
At a glance
Fernanda Dórea of Fortaleza, Brazil, is a PhD student at the Atlantic Veterinary College in Charlottetown.
She has created two new YouTube channels - one on Brazilian cooking, the other beginner sewing - as a fun way to relieve stress and to enable her to learn some new skills.
Visit these links to see her two series:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BrazilCooking.
http://www.youtube.com/user/SewingAdventure.
