Brett Valls, a local designer and a moderator from the Cincinnati Cooks Facebook group, emailed us here at CityBeat to tell us about his page — something I personally did not know about and seems like a super helpful resource for home cooks trying to find recipe ideas while staying safe at home. So consider this a PSA for anyone stuck in a food rut.
Cincinnati Cooks is "a group for home cooks or food service professionals to learn and share dishes and recipes with Cincinnati locals." According to Valls, this is "a commercial-free, positive-vibes-only community of chefs and home cooks that are learning how to cook, sharing what they’ve made, or (in normal times) inviting others to eat."
Scroll through the posts and find photos of delicious-looking and sometimes odd dishes (e.g. what looks like a Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs calzone) along with questions, answers and recipes from posters.
Valls said he started the group in 2017.
"My whole life, I have loved food programming but it was really only until three years ago that I started learning to cook and bake more seriously. I started reading a lot more books, and enjoying quality recipe content online to make me a better home chef. I was sharing a lot on my own Facebook profile but I felt inspired to create a Facebook group where I could journal and could invite others to do the same," he said in his email.
The group currently has nearly 2,000 members and three rules:
- Never make fun of anyone's dish! If you have constructive feedback to give, that's awesome, just be polite.
- Do not make fun of or question anyone's dietary regimen. Keep negative opinions to yourself.
- Give more than you take from this group. Self-promotion, job recruitment, and spam and irrelevant links aren't allowed.
Valls said, "When the reality of the outbreak sunk in, on March 16th I posted a call-to-action to those on my own feed and within the group to share the group with others because I thought that we would be entering a period of history where we are likely to be cooking at home than we have in years. And since that happened last week, I have seen a huge influx of new members, posts, shared recipes, and positive reinforcement."
You can join the group or just scroll.
