On air cooking 101

TV McGill cooking show offers tasty
recipes for the poor, clueless student

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: April Engelberg

Age: 21

Occupation: Producer of TV McGill’s The Hot Plate

Bio: This perky McGill Ghetto chick is currently finishing up her last year of undergraduate studies at McGill, expecting to emerge this spring with a BA in English/cultural studies. Although she’s always felt a career in media would be dreamy, once she hooked up with TV McGill she realized immediately “that I just loved it, and the more TV I did, the more I loved it.” After securing two highly prized summer internships at CNN in New York and later at Al Jazeera in D.C., April returned to school inspired to produce her own cooking show. The Hot Plate, which she created in 2008 with her friend/host, inspired foodie Amanda Garbutt, has since quite likely become the biggest hit to ever grace TV McGill’s airwaves, meaning it’s not impossible that more than 100 people lounging around the Shatner Building could have seen it. Geared towards those on tight budgets with limited knowledge/interest about the culinary arts, April is hoping to find a home for The Hot Plate somewhere in cable TV-land upon graduating later this year.

How The Hot Plate came to be: “I saw how Amanda’s passion for food was infecting all our friends. Her whole life revolves around cooking and food, you know, she’s totally obsessed with it. She’d always be having these potluck dinners and cooking for people, and as more and more people started learning her recipes, I found myself fascinated by all this influence she was having, starting to see her as a potential Food Network star. So we filmed a pilot and, well, everything just sort of took off from there.”

How The Hot Plate differs from the next cooking show, other than being on a channel that only broadcasts to a few buildings on campus? “Basically we’ve tried to create our own brand and niche, which is a student-oriented cooking show, meaning it’s budget-friendly and easy, plus each show is only five minutes long. The idea is to make cooking accessible to people with limited resources, both with respect to food and cooking equipment. Like, on our next show, we’ve got two guest stars from McGill’s rugby team showing people how to make burgers. The idea is to show people who don’t normally cook that if these guys can do it then they can too. And most people watch us online actually, both at TVMcGill.com and on our own website, thehotplate.net, which has everything on it: recipes, shows, everything. One of our shows on YouTube got 700 hits in just two weeks, so we were pretty excited about that, while TVMcGill.com gets something like 65,000 hits a year.”

Wouldn’t even the most coddled McGill student already know how to flip a burger, or is this something their Filipino nannies have always done for them in the past? “Those burgers weren’t cooked on a barbecue, you know, but on a stove, although true, this was one of the easier recipes we’ve done to date. The show before that was a chicken dinner with tomatoes, asparagus and mashed potatoes, which was a lot more complex but still easy.”

Musical preferences: Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Radiohead.

Last book read: Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin.

Words of wisdom: “You miss every shot you don’t take.”

Comments: dimwit@hdot.net