Eat Me Daily

Cookin' with Coolio: By the Numbers

November 25, 2009, 10:50 am   3 Comments

Photograph: Paula Forbes / Eat Me Daily

As you may recall, rap superstar Coolio has been producing YouTube cooking videos for about a year now, and, like any good online cooking phenomenon, he got a book deal out of it. Cookin' with Coolio: 5 Star Meals at a 1 Star Price (Amazon) is a collection of fairly basic recipes that remind me of church cookbook dishes, but described in terms that are decidedly not church friendly. Full of tips on how to become a Kitchen Pimp, Cookin' with Coolio is more a novelty read than anything that could be considered truly instructional. Below, we break it down like Coolio: by the numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4...

• Number of stars Coolio's food tastes like: 5
• Number of stars Coolio's food costs: 1
• Number of items in the "pimptry": 28
• Number of items a Kitchen Pimp has in his or her Weaponry, including a FryDaddy: 13
• Units of measurement used: a "peench," a dime bag, and a nickel bag.

Photograph: Paula Forbes / Eat Me Daily

• Number of recipes it will take you to become a "master kitchen pimp": 76
• Number of recipes for steak: 8
• How long it takes to make "Night-Night Chicken," a casserole for late night drunk munchies: an hour and twenty minutes, if you have everything already "cleaned and chopped in your fridge, like a respectable ghetto gourmet."
• How much the "ten droppings" of barbecue sauce for the Swashbucklin' Shrimp equals, in "landlubber" speak: 1/2 cup.
• Number of "Cool-Mandments": 10
• Number of chefs thou shalt have before Coolio: 0
• How much Hennessy you should drink while cooking, for all Coolio cares: a fifth

Photograph: Paula Forbes / Eat Me Daily

Coolioisms

And now, because not everything in life is quantifiable, some of the best quotations from Cooking with Coolio:

• "Hell, when I was growing up I could make a meal out of a package of Top Ramen and a bottle of Windex."
• "Everything I cook tastes better than yo' momma's nipples."
• "I may not be an iron chef, but I'm the only chef with platinum records."
• "You can't have your spatulas and your whisks runnin' around like they own the place."
• "My marinades add color and flavor so intense that it makes the Mona Lisa look like the Sunday edition of Marmaduke."
• "If MacGyver could turn a paper clip and a roll of toilet paper into a Jet Ski, then you can use a slotted spoon to create a breakfast of mass destruction."

Photograph: Paula Forbes / Eat Me Daily

—Paula Forbes

Tags: by the numbers, Cookbooks, Cookin' with Coolio, Coolio