At any given point throughout my life, I’ve been unable to eat various types of foods. That has not, however, stopped me from enjoying food vicariously through others, in the forms of photography, magazines, and cookbooks. I spent hours as a teen reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s food essays (especially The Man Who Ate Everything, which extends to the cover design through a clever cutout on the book jacket) and Cook’s Illustrated magazine, creating the tastes and textures of each recipe in my mind.

You’d think it would make me feel deprived (I would too, from the outside looking in), but in fact quite the opposite: during the times when eating essentially amounted to torture I could still enjoy food, if only in my imagination.

Even as I’m trying zero carb, I find it gratifying to watch high-quality cooking videos (low-quality ones like Tasty I find to be much like consuming junk food–cringey and ultimately unsatisfying) like this one documenting the creation of an Earl Grey-Grapefruit cake. The color palette of the cake is especially delightful, along with the promise of earl grey + grapefruit + cream.

I must confess, however, that I skipped to the cake assembly segment of the vid. AMSR-style videos tend to make me a might twitchy.