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Before you put your shoulder to the wheel and start cooking up your latest creative project, it’s crucial to ensure you have the right ingredients and equipment that isn’t going to let you down.
Videos by VICE
Farideh Sadeghin is one of VICE’s most popular hosts. A culinary specialist, she is best known to our audience as the face of The Cooking Show. Meanwhile, her herculean work ethic currently sees her authoring three cookbooks at once, an endeavor that might devour anyone without effective tools. Luckily, she is able to turn to Microsoft 365 and the popular apps—which include Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—that it makes available to users for free, all over the world. “I get inspiration from restaurants I go to; from friends, when they cook for me; from the farmers’ market,” Farideh explains. “I’m constantly writing down little notes to myself, screenshotting things on my phone, and from there I start refining it—I’ll go to Microsoft Word and start working on a recipe from there.
“If it’s for a crispy chicken sandwich, I’ll just start researching every crispy chicken sandwich I can find, putting it all in a Word doc.”
Though her family home was always fragrant with the scents of traditional cooking, it was only when Farideh flew the nest that she started to explore cuisine on her own terms: “My mom’s Italian, my dad’s Iranian. Food was always a big part of my life; I grew up in Maryland eating tons of seafood and crabs. But it wasn’t until I got to college, when I started cooking for myself, that I got to the point where I actually wanted to drop out and become a chef.”
One of the qualities that makes Farideh such a great host is that she always seems to be learning in tandem with her audience. Her obsession with food, and her devotion to exploring bold, new recipes, surges out of the screen. Her vibe resonates as extremely honest to any novice cook who’s had to wipe splatters of passata off of their computer keyboard. “I basically stand in the kitchen, developing recipes with my laptop next to me,” she smiles. “I’m constantly making changes in Microsoft Word, tracking those changes… and then tweaking and tasting it while making little notes: ‘Okay, tasted pretty good; let’s up the butter next time.’ Going through and being able to look at all those changes in real time, as I do it, just makes it a lot easier.”
It’s not just the different stages of a recipe that Farideh updates on the fly; Microsoft Excel also allows her to make sure that costs aren’t getting too precipitous. “I can make spreadsheets of everything I need, in terms of ingredients and amounts,” she explains. “Excel tracks everything, which is always really important, whether I’m doing recipes for cookbooks or pop-ups.”
Farideh sensed her desire to drop out of college to become a full-time cook might be met with opposition from those closest to her. So, before launching herself into that world completely, she decided to stress-test the idea by becoming a food content creator. “I was like, ‘Well, my parents will probably be pretty upset if I drop out!’ So I tried to combine video-storytelling with all the stuff that I was doing with food.”
Like many others, Farideh first started using Microsoft apps on a daily basis while at college. With the online versions of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint available for free, college grads are able to keep hold of all their precious files from those pivotal years—whether it’s a thesis on dark matter and string theory, or a cherished recipe for Malaysian chicken curry.
Though cooks have earned a reputation for cutting lonely and isolated figures—from perennially unimpressed real-life super-chefs to the fictional yet tortured cooks who make up some of TV’s most beloved characters of recent years—Farideh believes firmly in the powers of collaboration, bringing her ideas to life with the help of an inner circle of trusted confidantes.
“Another nice thing about using Word and Excel—and this is especially helpful when I’m working on a cookbook with my editor—is that you can chat with any other collaborator, see their comments and respond in real time,” she smiles.
This teamwork has been essential to Farideh’s rise as a food storyteller of real renown, a vibe that reflects her openness as a host and the deep connection she has forged with her community. “For me, working alone isn’t ideal,” she continues. “I really get a lot more inspiration from others. Sending my thoughts to other people and having them take a look helps me get more ideas, and with Microsoft 365 I can make little comments, tag that person, and have them see directly what I did—and then they can come right back. My whole process is right there.”
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