Cook Like a Man

When you get home at the end of the day hungry, you've got a choice: make dinner or order take-out. But a new video-based cooking site is promising that you can whip up easy, guy-friendly meals in less time than it takes to have a pizza delivered. Blade & Skillet is the brainchild of Toronto-based food lover Dorian Burns-Coyne, who quit his job in advertising to launch the handsomely designed and utilitarian resource. "It really stemmed from my own personal frustrations of coming home after a long day and having to sift through multiple cooking sites to find something that worked for me," he says. "Everything targets the 35-55 year old mom, cooking 4-6 servings, with a long list of ingredients and hardware I just didn't have." So he started refining recipes down to their core, cutting out what wasn't needed and improvising with the equipment he had—namely a good chef's knife and a cast iron skillet.

With those two kitchen workhorses, he started whipping up meals and testing them out on friends, roommates and dates. Pulling in the connections he made in the ad biz, Burns-Coyne assembled a crack team of art directors and film crews to produce the easy-to-follow three-minute videos. The recipes themselves are simple suppers for one or two that don't demand exact measurements—a handful of this, a spoonful of that or a few glugs of oil—and most take less than 30 minutes from start to finish. "Simplicity was key," he says. "We see that as a huge differentiator for us, as the site itself gives you a much more pleasant experience than say a YouTube video riddled with ads." We also found that the site's minimalist design works particularly well on your smartphone, which makes for effortless referencing while you cook.