These YouTube channels can help make college anxiety (or college application anxiety) a bit more manageable. These channels are a great way to take a break from the news and recharge.<\/p>\n
What’s inside: cooking, harvesting, fermenting, building furniture, and refreshing foods that you may not have seen before.<\/p>\n
Li ZiQi posts videos on foraging, planting and harvesting, preparing food, building furniture, and making clothing, shoes, and home items.<\/p>\n
In one of my favorite videos, you can watch Li ZiQi forage for chestnuts, roast them in a homemade clay oven, coat seasonal fruits like apple and hawthorn with hard sugar (\u51b0\u7cd6\u846b\u82a6, or bingtanghulu)<\/a> and make marshmallow candies filled with chestnut, cranberries, dried strawberries, and little crackers.<\/p>\n Dianxi XiaoGe posts from Yunnan, one of the southern provinces in China. You\u2019ll notice a more extroverted video style compared to Li ZiQi. If Li ZiQi videos feel like a meditation, Dianxi Xiaoge\u2019s videos feel like having a best friend show you their hometown and culinary culture.<\/p>\n Watch Dianxi Xiaoge prepare multicolored rice dumplings<\/a> for the Lantern Festival, harvest and prepare sour Chinese bayberries with dipping chilies<\/a>, make soybean skin from scratch<\/a>, cook hairy tofu<\/a>, or make varied sweet and savory dishes with an unusual local Yunnan papaya<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n Kimi\u2019s channel posts videos on planting and harvesting, fermentation, and other traditional Korean cooking. Expect closeup shots of onions being pulled for lunch, beautiful fresh peaches pulled straight from the tree, and bubbling soup. Keep an eye out for the several kittens and cats who live on Kimi\u2019s farm property! They like to play among the plants and you can often see a little paw or tiny furry tail sticking up between the family vegetable plots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can see Kimi\u2019s family prepare kimchi for winter using homegrown cabbages<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019d like to see what happens on a farm in the fall, watch Kimi\u2019s family harvest persimmons, apples, and grapes<\/a>. In the same video, Kimi\u2019s family harvests perilla seeds and uses local equipment to extract oil from the seeds. Kimi also picks the remaining zucchini flowers and uses them to make fritters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n XiaoXi posts calming videos of cooking, basketmaking, toolmaking, blacksmithing, and gardening. I\u2019m continually amazed by XiaoXi\u2019s abilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the video on making cookies, you can watch XiaoXi build a spider strainer from scratch (a \u201cspider\u201d is a culinary strainer used for fishing fried items out of oil, pasta or vegetables from boiling water, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n XiaoXi <\/strong>weaves steel wire by hand to create the strainer basket<\/a>, carves the handle from a wood branch using chisels and a rasp, tempers the steel basket directly in fire (then quenches it in water), and attaches the basket and handle together. They carve a rolling pin before making small cookies (or biscuits, if you\u2019re British) from scratch and frying them. Finally, they watch a Japanese drama while drinking tea and enjoying the cookies. Make sure to watch to the end to check out their collection of woodworking tools!<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also watch XiaoXi weave baskets from bamboo<\/a>, <\/strong>carve a mold to make homemade mooncakes<\/a>, <\/strong>make soup dumplings<\/a>,<\/strong> or weave a net to catch river shrimp<\/a>. Xiaoxi\u2019s handmade Chinese style oiled umbrella<\/a> is particularly extraordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wife\u2019s Cuisine posts videos of traditional Korean food, recent Korean dishes, and decidedly non-traditional versions of American and European cuisine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might enjoy watching Wife\u2019s Cuisine\u2019s bubbling budae jjigae<\/a>. Budae jjigae (\ubd80\ub300\ucc0c\uac1c) is also known as Korean Army Base Stew because it was invented due to food scarcity during the Korean War. It includes traditional ingredients such as kimchi, kelp and anchovy broth, and rice cakes, and also incorporates foods that were available at American military bases in the 1950s such as canned beans, Spam, sausages, and sometimes cheese. It\u2019s the kind of dish that sounds like it shouldn\u2019t work, but has become wildly popular in South Korea. I first tasted this dish on a rainy December night, and it was delicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For something unusual, check out Wife’s Cuisine\u2019s video of croffles<\/a> (croissants crossed with waffles).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This video shows several different flavors of croffle including one version with cream cheese, jam, blueberries, and basil, a chocolate croffle dipped in Nutella, and a third version with ice cream and grated brown cheese (which I assume is the Norwegian cheese by the same name).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you\u2019ve never put a raw croissant in a waffle maker, you might want to do it after this video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LongMeiMei posts videos on planting, harvesting, and preparing traditional Chinese foods such as hairy tofu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might enjoy watching LongMeiMei make unpleasant sounding but likely delicious cow dung candy<\/a>, a treat which is made by processing sweet potatoes and wheat sprouts. Boiling down the natural sugars creates a huge brown candy that is then shattered into bite size pieces. For extra cuteness, watch LongMeiMei offer a small piece of fresh candy to their child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also watch LongMeiMei make honey citron tea<\/a> out of Pommelo skins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Almazan Kitchen is an ASMR channel with beautiful videos of cooking in nature using minimal kitchen equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\nDianxi XiaoGe<\/a> \u6ec7\u897f\u5c0f\u54e5 (Yunnan, China)<\/h2>\n
Kimi \ud0a4\ubbf8<\/a> (South Korea)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
XiaoXi\u2019s Culinary Idyll<\/a> – Culinary, Handicraft, Gardening \u6211\u4eec\u7684\u5c0f\u559c (Taiwan)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Wife\u2019s Cuisine \uc544\ub0b4\uc758 \uc2dd\ud0c1<\/a> (South Korea)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
LongMeiMei \u9f99\u6885\u6885<\/a> (China)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Almazan Kitchen<\/a> (Serbia)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n