Today's Entertainment

Savannah Guthrie of "Today" on NBC "I like 'Project Runway.' I'm not really into fashion, but I like to see what they create. I think it's really cool." Audra McDonald of "Great Performances: Leonard Bernstein Centennial Celebration at Tanglewood" on PBS "I'm watching 'The Good Place.' With everything that's going on in this world right now, 'The Good Place,' ... something about it is so refreshing, especially since the main goal for all of them is to improve themselves so that they can finally get into heaven. So there's something so refreshing and moving about that, that's my favorite right now." Abigail Spencer of "Timeless" on NBC "I love dance- competition shows, so 'World of Dance,' 'So You Think You Can Dance'... and I also watch 'The Voice.' Anything I can watch with my son, those are the shows we watch together." Maria Sierra is passionate about food and that comes through in spades on her YouTube channel "La Cooquette." With videos shot in English and Spanish, the vivacious native of Honduras shows her more than 640,000 subscribers and other viewers how to prepare simple and easy recipes of her own creation, ranging from American favorites such as Chicago-style deep dish pizza and barbecued ribs to more exotic fare like Argentinian empanadas and frogs legs a la provencal. There are also dishes inspired by television ("The Simpsons" donuts) and movies ("Harry Potter" butterbeer), as well as comestibles that result from her own experimentation (a fried plantain burger). "I loved discovering new flavors, new flavor combinations," she explains. "I never liked measuring when I'm cooking. Only when I'm baking, it's known that you have to follow a recipe otherwise it won't work sometimes. So when I'm cooking something that doesn't require that, I just go at it. And I don't care, I just like mixing stuff together." Interestingly though, the self-taught chef freely admits she wasn't always adept in the kitchen. She began the channel (www.youtube.com/ lacooquettefood) in 2013 after moving from Spain to Los Angeles. There, she and her husband Alvaro Hernandez, an aspiring filmmaker, were taking extension courses at UCLA when they discovered she had a flair for explaining things on camera. The trouble, however, was at that point she wasn't much of a cook. "I was bad," Sierra recalls with a hearty laugh. "You can actually talk to my friends and my husband, they can attest to that. Like they would eat my burnt cookies just out of pity." But recognizing that they may have the nucleus of a web series, they honed their techniques – she in the kitchen and he behind the camera. Eventually her videos took off and Sierra was leaving behind her previous career in marketing to make cooking videos full time, thus enabling her to stay home with her young daughter. "I love being my own boss. I love being an entrepreneur," she says, "It's really good to ... be able to work from home but then you also have to be very well-organized with your time. And sometimes it's really hard to divide, 'OK, let's set this time for personal time and let's not talk about work.' Luckily we actually hired a full-time employee now. She films and edits most of the recipe videos for 'La Cooquette.' " Sierra's other passion is travel and she and Hernandez like to make short food documentaries wherever they go, telling the stories of cities, towns and villages through the local cuisine. "Sort of like ... Anthony Bourdain," she says. "In that way, we were really inspired by him and we have some episodes on that, telling really the story of the mom-and-pop shops, not just the typical places that people go to. We really make an effort to know what the locals eat and what really is their everyday type of food because we believe that it tells a lot about not only the people but of the place." Maria Sierra BY GEORGE DICKIE Self-taught chef Sierra exudes creativity on her YouTube channel 'La Cooquette' Page 8 December 24 - 30, 2018

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