Down the culinary rabbit hole

You’ve never seen a cooking show quite like this.

Forget the usual stuff of cable TV with culinary personalities, food factoids and instructions. Baton Rouge native Clare Crespo’s new Yummyfun Kooking DVD series presents a dreamy gastronomic underworld in which Crespo, as fictional character Yummyclare, approximates Alice in Wonderland more than Rachael Ray.

The children’s series demonstrates how to make whimsical dishes like candy bugs and potato-and-green bean flip-flops from an imaginary sub-ground, middle-of-the-night kitchen. Yummyclare works amid gorgeous colors with ingredients marvelously decanted, while a little girl dreams upstairs. Funky characters, like a house band called the Tastebuds, pop in.

“What got me jazzed about it was the idea of inspiring kids to keep their minds open longer,” says Crespo, 40. “That’s the flag I’m flying. In the world we’re living in right now, I think that’s especially important.”

Manipulating the visual realm is Crespo’s thing. She’s a former music video producer who studied experimental animation at Cal Arts, but she’s always been obsessed with the intersection of art and food, a phenomenon she traces to her Louisiana roots and to the 1977 book Amazing Magical Jell-O Desserts—a gift from her father, painter Michael Crespo.

As a kid, Crespo drove her family crazy by making every recipe in it. “I was really obsessed with Jell-O,” she laughs.

After grad school, Crespo settled in to her production career, but she was still pestered by the desire to produce her own art—and she wanted to do it far from exclusivity and academia. Food was an available and utilitarian art supply, and it presented boundless aesthetic possibilities.

She first created Yummyfun.com featuring a Jello-O aquarium and other wacky food-as-art interpretations. Then Hyperion Books recruited Crespo to write The Secret Life of Food. There, signature dishes like potato-and-green bean flip-flops, along with other recipes, came to life.

The book sold well and earned national recognition, leading to Hey There, Cupcake!, a collection of curious cupcake designs, released just as the national obsession with the hand-held dessert took root.

Crespo first proposed her Yummyfun Kooking show to Nickelodeon and the Food Network.

“They liked it, but they wanted it to be more traditional,” she recalls. “Television wasn’t quite ready for the nuttiness.”

So with husband James Chinlund, a Hollywood production designer, along with friends and colleagues in the film and music business, Crespo transformed her two-car garage into the place that she had long imagined. Two years ago, she began shooting what has become the Yummyfun series.

DVD sales are doing well. She has developed a cult following and appeared in person as Yummyclare around Los Angeles, where she and Chinlund live. Recently, the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan ordered a supply of DVDs for its museum store.

Crespo’s new career path has happened amid another life changes—she and Chinlund have a four-year-old daughter. Being a parent might give Crespo new props amid potential viewers, but motherhood hasn’t been the source of the kooky world in her head.

“That,” she says, laughing, “has pretty much always been there.” yummyfun.com