Don’t get me wrong, I have a history with kitchen equipment – it’s a sad, sad story involving a large quantity of Red Bull, an all-nighter at University, an offer of 50p, a camera, a toaster, and my genitals. The problem is that the output of my culinary bodgejobs tend to be either inedible, burned, or contain more cheese than the average human is capable of dealing with.

It’s hard to deny that cookery is fun, though. Get in a kitchen, crack out all kinds of implausibly-shaped apparatus, put squishy and goopy and chewy things together, bung it in the oven, hope for the best. It’s like science, but with an end product that will either serve as your dinner or a cheaper alternative to Polyfilla.

So, if you’re like me and you feel that, for the sake of all involved, cookery is best done vicariously – it saves on cleanup, anyway – fear not, because the Internet is here to help.

It Begins: Epic Meal Time

Epic Meal Time is where it all started. A bunch of guys got together with a camera and made some brilliant, stupid food. The preview frame for each video contains a picture of the eldritch horror that is produced, along with its calorie count.

Previous creations include their riff on the turducken – the TurBacon Epic (79,046 calories, pictured above, and described as ‘a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a bird in a pig’), Fast Food Sushi (11,816 calories of I assure you that you really don’t want to know), and the Valentine’s Day special – 190,400 calories of ‘Super Sloppy Sundae‘.

I think we can rest assured that this is the kind of cookery that would give Jamie Oliver an aneurysm, and the rest of us a nasty case of angina. And why the hell not? It’s your body, and you should choose exactly what you want to put into it. If you can have a good time with your friends in the process, so much the better.

Epic Meal Time was brilliant, witty, and otherwise furiously entertaining for a long time. It got the idea that cooking could be a gentlemanly pursuit out there to a lot of eyeballs, and that has value. What ruined it though was, like so many things, its own success. Suddenly, the self-parodying bravado of this group of friends became actual bravado. A sponsorship deal and continuous references to ‘Internet Money’ took the metaphorical axe to the humour.

Behold: Epic Meal Time’s personal twist on gender balancing.

It wasn’t just that, though. You can be damn certain that if I’m getting the arse on at something on BadRep, there’s a gender angle too, and sure enough, there is. When the bravado became too genuine, the continuous (and already tenuous) references to ‘bitches’ went from problematic to outright misogynist. Attractive women started to feature in the videos – but only eating the food, never participating in its creation as part of the group. I can’t even remember a single video in which you hear a female voice.

Once it stopped being self-parodying and just became self-aggrandising, the shark had been jumped.

Scandinavia Steps In: Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time

A Swedish gentleman with the kind of facial hair not seen since the heady days of Technoviking decided that Sweden could do better without making any special effort.

With the ancient Swedish tradition of bacon tug-of-war, everyone’s a winner.

Our host regaled us with fairly uninspiring, everyday meals, prepared in a wonderfully over-the-top manner. Mayonnaise was eaten straight from the jar (“PRE DINNER SNACK. IT’S GOOD FOR YOU”). Butter was smeared by punching it. Cardboard packaging was opened with teeth. Water for boiling pasta was collected in the form of snow.

There’s undeniable machismo, but since this show is meant as a parody of Epic Meal Time, I think there’s a reasonable argument to be made for it being exaggeration for the sake of comedy. It doesn’t grate in the same way that Epic Meal Time started to.

Cooking is a better experience when combined with facial hair and shouting. Fetch yourself a horn of mead and check it out.

The obligatory, if unorthodox, musical: Vegan Black Metal Chef

Black metal conjures up imagery of teenagers in too much makeup running through the woods, filming themselves on their Dad’s camcorder, while they scream about the Grim Frostbitten North and wield ludicrous knives that they bought on eBay.

What it doesn’t conjure up, however, is vegan cuisine.

This is exactly the reason that Vegan Black Metal Chef is amazing.

The Dark Lords of the Deep are well-known for their vegan tastes.

The effort that goes into the Vegan Black Metal Chef kitchen is pretty mindblowing. The whole place is outfitted with studded black leather, occult symbols, skulls, you name it. The food isn’t particularly inspiring, but that might just be how I see vegan food. Fortunately, the food is far from the point.

Black metal is another field of intense bravado. Though I don’t want to paint an entire subculture by the failings of its extremes, it’s hard to avoid the fact that black metal fandom is a subculture full of homophobia and transphobia, and is often popularly associated with Nazi music. It’s wonderful, then, that Vegan Black Metal Chef is so inherently subversive. It’s self-deprecating mockery in which you’re invited to laugh with someone at the sillier bits of their own subculture, and that makes it a pleasure to watch.

The extensive make-up is a  wonderful parallel here with more ‘traditional’ female-led cookery shows, particularly Nigella Lawson’s sexualised content where her appearance is pushed to the audience just as much, if not more, than the actual food. Vegan Black Metal Chef, it could be argued, takes host-over-food cookery content to the next level.

In any case, do you want to see a man in corpsepaint invoke Lovecraftian horrors over a bowl of Pad Thai? Of course you do. Vegan Black Metal Chef is for you.

Booze and brilliance: My Drunk Kitchen

As far as I’m concerned, My Drunk Kitchen is the best cooking show on the Internet right now. Hosted by Hannah Hart, it’s a very simple premise – drink booze and cook some stuff.

Shortly after this frame, the self-heating bag begins to billow smoke. If that isn’t selling you on My Drunk Kitchen, I don’t know what will.

It’s the first of the shows that I’ve covered here to feature a female host, and what I find particularly important is that it doesn’t fucking matter. There’s the occasional line that bugs me, but by and large the humour is genderless, and there’s no (or very little) cutesy look-at-me-I’m-a-girl-on-the-Internet-teehee. Hannah Hart is Hannah Hart, and she’s drinking beer and belching and overdoing it with the cheese and burning herself on the oven because fuck you, that’s why.

Far and away my favourite episode is the one where the good Ms. Hart tackles military Meals Ready to Eat – known as MREs – outdoors and clad in a bodgejobbed Braveheart-esque shawl.

It’s not going to teach you to cook. It’s going to make you grin repeatedly. Watch it.

And the rest

I’m absolutely certain that I’ve missed some gems. Have I neglected to mention your favourite homebrew cookery show? Let me know about it in the comments. If there are enough, and BadRep haven’t fired me for overuse of the term ‘bodgejob’, I’d love to write a followup with the fan favourites that I’m currently unfamiliar with.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a massive foodie. I will happily spend an entire day poncing around making dinner from scratch for my friends (including sugar-coating rose petals for Rose Martinis. Helpful hint: overdo it and they glue to saucers, never to come off). I was the only person at school who wanted to take Home Economics at A Level, with the result that it didn’t run so I had to do Chemistry instead, which is just Maths Cookery anyway *ducks*.

So, I love food, food prep and all things kitchen related. Yet there’s a Bad Reputation (geddit?) between women, feminism and kitchens, and I’d like to talk about that. Not just in the wake of the Great British Bake Off, either.

Women’s Lib, to coin an old phrase, has been linked to the rise of labour saving household appliances, yet it’s a fact that women do most of the shopping and cooking, probably because whilst we’ve made great leaps forward in terms of being able to vote and not being treated as the property of husbands, there’s still a massive social expectation around looking after the home. Separate Spheres for the 21st century.

Now, on a practical front, this means that it’s women who are often in control of what a family eats, what a family thinks about food. This can be both a good and bad thing. This setup means that many families understand a “woman’s role” as one which involves spending time feeding and looking after them, and whilst it’s great to be the nurturing one, the one who can make the AMAZING pie, the one who keeps the place feeling like a home. It’s less great to be that person because you are female. And that’s the problem.

The kitchen is the centre of a lot of families and households. Control of the kitchen means control over a lot more than that. Women are, whether they realise it or not, at the very centre of what kinds of food we eat and hence the sort that is offered, produced and sold. Realistically, the entire industry of FMCG products – and the potential for increasingly environmentally friendly products, fair trade products, and organic products – is supported by the habits of women when they go to the store.

In short – women can make a huge amount of difference to the world by leveraging their role as consumer. And this is where the feminist bit comes in. It’s not about consigning the entire role of “homemaker” to the bin of 1950s retro parties and relief over how we’re not Betty Draper. It’s about using the history of women in the home, women cooks, our mums and grandmothers, to think about (and act upon) a new tradition of taking charge and getting on.

My gran taught me how to cook. She also taught me many other things about making my own way in the world, which included a damn good shortcrust pastry.

Wooden spoons at the ready? Here we go.

First up, and an easy starting point are some big name women cooks. From Mrs Beeton through to Delia and Nigella, these are women who have helped shape how we think about food, our homes and ourselves.

They’ve even helped us understand more about countries and cultures beyond the UK and Europe – food being an excellent and tasty way of enjoying a bit of intercultural sharing. In the 70s, Madhur Jaffrey’s travel-diaries mixed recipes with vignettes on where the food was found, who made it and interesting titbits of stories on Indian culture. More recently, Harumi Kurihara has given us access into the world of Japanese home cooking.

Next up, we can look at women’s roles in the kitchen in connection with the economy. The recent waves of recession after recession have seen a rise in cost of living with a corresponding reactive change in shopping habits as women revolt every day against the high cost of food prices by changing where they buy things and what is being cooked and eaten in the home. The fact that the cuts fall more heavily upon women, and that the burden of dealing with households with lower incomes also falls into the pockets of female aprons, has led many women to become increasingly political.

The revolution begins in the kitchen. Bake for victory!

The connection between politics at home and the wider political world is not a new thing.  Many food awareness and food movements have been driven by women, such as the aptly named Kitchen Revolution and the almost too awesome to exist Isa Chandra Moskowitz who heads up the Post Punk Kitchen a refreshing mind-spin for anyone who thinks vegan cooking is about boring mung beans. The memory of her peanut butter and chocolate cookies are making my mouth water right now.

I’m going to close by saying that I really believe that teaching everyone to cook, to know where food comes from and the value of properly sourced, sustainable food products is part of the feminist movement. The power of the kitchen is not something to be set aside in the belief that we are letting down the sisterhood by being chained to the oven. Instead, we can help make a much better world by getting everyone involved.

And yes, you can lick the spoon afterwards.