There's a (relatively) new Internet sensation involving food. Making food to be exact. Video recipes. I'm sure you've seen them: short, 30 second to two minute videos demonstrating the entire cooking process for specific recipes. Buzzfeed's Tasty might be the most popular and recognizable curator of these videos, but other sites like Tastemade, Cooking Panda, Epicurious and others are creating these quick and easy to understand instructional guides. There's even a Reddit page dedicated to them, but in GIF form (which is even better). And let me tell you, I am an addict.

As someone who loves to cook but doesn't necessarily love to follow exact, specific recipes, these videos are life changing. Every day (literally) I check these sites for new videos. They're mesmerizing. Hypnotic almost. It's like taking the magic of cooking, of mixing ingredients to create something new and delicious, and turning it into short, easily digestible, and re-watchable clips of pure ecstasy. Okay I might be exaggerating slightly. But I am not exaggerating when I tell you that I am addicted to these videos. They're soothing, relaxing, inspiring. After a long day, I can watch these ingredients be combined, mixed, and cooked into something nourishing and magnificent, and the whole process is conveyed in around 45 seconds! I'm a pescatarian, yet I even enjoy watching the recipes that involve meat. It's just the process of witnessing these innocent ingredients become something greater than themselves.

And these recipes are actually really inspiring for me. I love to cook, and I recently came to understand that I have a particular way that I cook. I look at a recipe, get the general idea of the ingredients and directions, then say "I got this," and throw everything together disregarding specificities. This is why I am prone to cooking but not baking. Baking requires specificity. Each ingredient serves a specific purpose: the yeast has to be exact so that the dough rises correctly, the baking soda and sugar and flour and extracts are all fine-tuned for each specific recipe. You can't just throw it all together and know that it will still taste good. If you don't measure everything out, it could end in total disaster. This requires too much thinking and planning for me to enjoy. I like making it up as I go, improvising, switching ingredients out for something different. And usually, it still ends up tasting amazing.

This is why I find these video recipes inspiring. They show the general gist of the process and ingredients, and I am then able to take that information and improvise to create something inspired and unique. There's just something about seeing the whole intricate preparation and cooking process in less than a minute from a first-person perspective that captivates my attention and makes me want to see more. And I'm pretty sure there are worst things that I could be addicted to.