I’d Make A Cooking Video If…

Recently I have had a couple friends ask me if I would make a cooking YouTube of recipes I’d written. “I’d like more humor in my cooking instruction and I think that is what I would get from you,” was the tempting request from a friend.
Now, there is nothing I like better than an audience, but I feed off live people so much better than just a video camera. If I ever were to make a video I would at least need a few people sitting at the counter to talk to. Witty banter with one’s self never really works.
There is one big thing that is totally holding me back from video taping my cooking, my cookware. When I watch cooking shows on TV all their pots and pans look brand new. Hell, they are on TV so they might be brand new. In my house my cookware is old and loved. No matter how much I scrub with steel wool or treat with Dawn power wash my half sheet jelly roll pans they have darkened corners and brown stains on the “stainless” steel. I think I have proven that “stainless” steel is a misnomer. I keep a fairly clean house and my cook ware is all “clean”, but it certainly does not look pristine.
I often don’t trust a perfectly spotless pan, certainly not a cast iron one. There is flavor in the pan that has had a million garlic cloves cooked in it that you just can’t get from a brand new and spotless pan. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to have five new half sheet pans that don’t look like Dalmatians, but I am so attached to the five I have that I can’t justify just throwing them away when they cook perfectly. I still remember the day in the eighties when my Sysco food rep sold me those pans for $10 each. They were my first commercial grade pans and they have served me well and will into the future.
Maybe I should have scrubbed the first stain a little harder at it’s first appearance. Perhaps years of baking stains on to the pans have made it impossible for them to ever look factory new. I imagine TV cooks have some stain removing specialists who keep everything looking spic and span, no pun intended. I consider myself lucky to just have Russ Lange who is good at loading the dishwasher. As an expert cook I can’t be expected to be a good cleaner too.  
So no YouTube cooking for me unless someone brings me a new loaf or sauce pan to use for the taping. I can only imagine that no one would see what I was cooking if they had to watch me use my old cookware. “What is in that disgusting pot?” Is all that anyone would say. For now I will keep my half sheet pans in the oven and only serve on my nice, stain free china. I know that things taste better if they look pretty, but no one has to know my secret to making things taste good is my old pot.