How I Got Started On Youtube | My Life Story 📖

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hi everybody this is lenora hawaii's pickle lady today i'm going to answer some questions and some of you have wanted to know about me how i got started so i have here my granddaughter leila hi and her best friend micah hi who are going to be asking me some questions okay so the first question is what made you want to do youtube well you know i i wrote three cookbooks in hawaii and in hawaii it does very well i've sold several thousand but when i come here to vegas there isn't that kind of enthusiasm in doing cookbooks so nathan my son suggested that why don't we do videos and i said what i said i've i don't know how to do it so we started little by little and it's only been about not even six months but it's amazing already we've made over 100 videos and we have over 1 000 subscribers in the beginning you know it went very slow 20 30 50 i said oh i never get there and the goal is to be monetized you have to have within one year you have to have 1000 subscribers and 4 000 watch hours and that's really hard now i've surpassed the 1 000 subscribers but i still need people to watch so that i can get that 4 000 credit so uh i've picked all kinds of recipes to try and every day i'm thinking of new recipes what can i make so the next one is why did you create your cookbook because i love to cook actually i never liked to cook when i was growing up because my mother was a fantastic cook and she cooked everything fancy meals and those days we didn't go to restaurants i never went to a drive-in or to a restaurant with our family to eat the only time i went to a big restaurant was the the chan family which is my mother's side when they had a big dinner that's the only time we went or if there was a big wedding or some kind of fancy party other than that we just ate at home but she was very skilled at doing it and so i didn't pay attention she always used to say you better come and learn to cook yeah i'm gonna go out to play but here comes a time when i had to go all by myself i never left the island not even to go to outer islands never rode a plane or train or a fancy bus i went to university of kansas to study occupational therapy and in those days you your parents didn't take you there like like now they take you several times a year to scout out the schools but i had to go sight unseen alone and that was a real culture shock i went there and of course didn't know how to cook and so we made a lot of dumb mistakes i first lived in a rooming house and this little holly lady or american lady she was very strict several of us girls were in different rooms and we all were hungry we wanted to eat but nobody knew how to cook so we had somebody had a an iron somebody had a we didn't have rice cookers even those days we had a popcorn popper and so we used to try to cook stuff turn the iron upside down and maybe cook something simple and then in the popcorn popper put simon and different things like that that's the extent of it and then later on the the landlord had uh he was a professor at the university of kansas and he had in a a big house next door which he converted into several apartments so another girl and i rented the apartment and i guess that's where i kind of gradually started to cook but i still didn't know what i was doing so i said to myself that i have to learn because i'm hungry and i hated the american food and that's why i only stayed in a dormitory one semester so we oh and the funny thing is we were hungry for chinese food those days there was no chinese store or oriental store there so we had to make do so one of the girls had a car and we drove to kansas city about an hour drive and we were so excited because we were gonna go eat chinese food and when the food came i don't know what we ordered but we sat there and we just laughed and laughed because the food was no way nowhere near new near what we had at home so anyway just just kind of plugged along and then sometimes i would write to my mother those days you didn't really call i would write and ask her how do you make certain things and so when i went home i realized that there was so much more to learn and my mother only cooked basically chinese food a few american foods but i never ate tacos we never made pizza all these kind of other things that people now eat so i just learned from there and it was really funny so i said to myself i gotta learn so my brothers and my aunties always got together on holidays to to prepare the food because my grandmother lived right next door in a big house and that's where all the so-called parties were for the family so they cooked a lot so then what i would do is i would stand in the corner with my trusty notebook and write down the formulas because nobody had a chinese cookbook or they didn't have any recipes written down so i had to kind of look at it and say oh that looks like one teaspoon or that looks like half a cup of soy sauce so that's the way i learned to cook and also when i went home i was exposed to a lot of different nationalities because our family was very only chinese so if one time i brought home a puerto rican friend and my mother was really upset because she was dark skinned and if you also wanted to date you could date anybody that even though they were orientals you couldn't date a chinese a korean or any other kind of nationality so i i just met a lot of different people and that's how i got exposed to filipino vietnamese mexican and all of that and then my husband was burmese so that's how in the videos you'll see there's a lot of southeast asian recipes and then i also wanted to learn how to cook thai food and i wasn't familiar so there was our local library had every spring time a week of free classes and one of the classes a lady from the local thai restaurant came and demonstrated some foods at the end she said if anybody wants to learn to cook you can come help me at my restaurant and i was the only one that took her up on it so i worked with her as a volunteer for a while and then she paid me a little bit so that's how i learned some of the thai foods and of course after that i had thai friends filipino friends and that's how i expanded all of that and then i've traveled a lot too we lived in thailand for about six months and of course thailand is so cheap we had we had maids that amazing those days you paid the maid twenty dollars a month and that's not eight hours a day this is lifetime i mean 24 hours a day they took care of the children they washed the clothes they cooked they shop they did everything so this is i i learned some things from them too so i started my cookbook i guess the first sonas in o5 and then i did two more editions where i updated and added more recipes so this is the latest cookbook but i've run out and i think i only have very few copies left so those of you who've who are winning a cookbook are the lucky ones because after this there will be no more it's just too expensive to publish there when i started selling the cookbooks at some big stores in hawaii some of them would order a thousand at a time and so i've decided i'm not going to do anymore i think the video is better because now people can actually see how to make it if you just read a cookbook it's not the same if you just make it but when you see me make it and i've heard a lot of comments from you saying you like the way i teach and it's easy to follow so that's my goal to teach the world how to cook i'm going to tell you about my work experiences my first job after graduating from university of kansas was working at san francisco general hospital in a psychiatric unit i worked with a doctor whose specialty was in working with lsd patients that was very interesting and then also they from the old days they had a hydrotherapy tub still there it was a tub that they actually put patients in and they put a canvas on top so only their head and part of their hands was visible and they used to actually use that years ago and then after that i worked with some severely disabled individuals and young children who had cerebral palsy and other other disabilities and then i we moved around quite a lot almost every year we moved and so i've worked in california several times i've worked in south carolina for four years as in teaching occupational therapy assistant program and also working with the psychiatric patients there and then in hawaii i worked the last job i had was lasted for 24 years where i retired from the state of hawaii and so i worked with the blind there and it was very interesting because i taught them cooking classes there plus i taught adl which is activities of daily living like how to use the phone how to tell time how to handle your leisure time activities and talked a lot to them because many of them were so depressed that they no longer could drive they couldn't do the things that they loved to do they couldn't work anymore they have to depend on family so they have to learn all new things even how to cook how to how to handle a hot stove and how to fry even a hamburger when you can't even see things like that and i also worked with a group of uh this mentally individuals who were also blind some of them totally some of them not but i also took them on trips by foot by car by bus so that they could experience what it was like outside and also to teach the public that they needn't be afraid because one time somebody came to me and said you told me that i could buy this special coin purse at a store in chinatown but the lady chased me out say get out get out so i said okay let's go to the store and i went to the store and the lady was very apprehensive and she says no no no don't come in don't come in i said no why they said oh they're gonna break something i said don't worry i'm with them i'm the teacher and i want them to come into your shop to give you some business they want to buy a special coin purse so as i explained to them then they understood and then later on when other clients went there to buy their purses there was no problem so you see there was a lot of education in that too and so when i retired i came to las vegas to visit several times to decide if i wanted to stay here and i thought well maybe i'll work again but then when i got here i decided you know what i've worked for 50 years over as an occupational therapist and i think that's enough but even when i retired i retired at 62. i couldn't keep still so i had four part-time jobs so i was very busy all the time and in between that loved to cook and teach other people so that's my story would you ever want to run your own restaurant no because i've seen people and i've heard people and even if it's a small business it's 24 7. you can't go home eight to five and stop cooking you have to prepare the morning before you open then you have to run the business during the day and after that you got to prepare for the next day so it's too much work i mean i'd rather do this i love doing this um what was your favorite food growing up i think one of my favorites as a kid you know we at in hawaii we have rice cakes of course we have a lot of oriental things a lot of chinese things these rice cakes are made with rice flour and there's two types the spongy type that has a lot of holes in it and they cut it like triangles and they steam it in a big steamer and then they cut it in in diamonds but they also used to have one that's more translucent and little thicker but they call it nine layer cakes so they were actually they cut it in diamonds also but they were actually you could peel off nine layers and the top layer all the eight layers were white the top layer was brown i guess they put brown sugar so that was a favorite part so as kids we would sit there and peel it off rather than just bite the whole thing so that was very delicious and now they don't even make the nine layer cakes anymore because i guess it's too much work but you still can can find the spongy one and one day i'll make this recipe what's the worst cooking mistake you've made i don't know there's so many especially in the beginning when i didn't know how to cook i mean i try to combine things and sometimes i just have to throw it away because it didn't look good it didn't taste good and i remember i thought i could make pancakes and i went to my my brother-in-law and sister-in-law's house in california and i said okay i'm gonna make pancakes well it totally flopped it was thick and hard not light and fluffy of course since then i've i've mastered it and i can do it the next one is what was the hardest dish to make i think one of the hardest things to do is the one i just made the cow which is the braised belly pork alternated with potatoes and and the belly pork skin side down so when you put it in a bowl you you alternate skin side down potatoes or taro and then you steam it for two hours and then after that you turn it over so you can look at the video and uh the other part of it is the buns which i call parker house buns because they're actually round raised dough that you brush with sesame oil a little bit and then you fold it in half and kind of smash it a little bit and you steam it and the typical thing is you eat it you put the potato and the belly pork in there but the most famous thing this is known for is peking duck which is that really nice roasted duck with a crispy skin so when you go to a restaurant they bring out the duck and then sometimes they'll show you right there how they take off the skin and a little bit of the meat and they'll they'll put a piece of the the skin in there and put some hoisin sauce and a little bit of green onion slices and you eat it like a sandwich and that is very delicious yeah what's one dish that you enjoy cooking for your family the thing that i enjoy the most making for the family are is tomato based foods so i make a lot of the sauces using all the herbs and tomatoes and peppers from the garden so i i freeze them flat and then when i'm ready i cook chili spaghetti lasagna and other things that i can use the sauces for i go to the san miguel community garden a lot it's a two acre free garden and they have all kinds of things of course right now everything is dead pretty much and they're getting ready to plant some things that'll grow in a few months but the only thing they have is probably some herbs and some of the root vegetables like let's see radishes turnips and also things like kale and lettuce grow very well yeah the next one is have you ever been featured in talk shows or like magazines oh yes i've been very fortunate when my this second edition third edition of the book came out a few years ago i i had gone to the mainland and i had come back but in the meantime i had sent it to the newspaper the berishima bakuro is the food editor for the honolulu star bulletin and before i left i i told her about the book and she said well i'll i'll think about it so in three days she called me back and she said oh your book is very interesting we want to do an article about you so i said okay she said just have maybe two or three things ready and take some pictures well the photographer came and i had a whole table of all kinds of my pickles and they took some pictures and then i said when will it be published she says oh i don't know so a few days later i got a call from the telephone because my phone is phone number is in the book and somebody said oh how can i buy your book and i said how do you know about it she said oh it was in the newspaper this morning so i had to run down to the place and pick up a newspaper and lo and behold it was a title on the top pick a lady and then when i opened the food section there was a big picture of me and um an article written and then another page with some more recipes and pictures and there there were they published like i think four to six recipes in the paper and that's how it got started and from there i went to different stores and i did a lot of demonstrations for them if you're ever in honolulu you can go to the public libraries and they've bought several of my books for almost all the libraries so you can check it out because like i said a very limited edition copies i have left and then also i've been in many magazines hawaiian airlines i think published me twice nice articles and also the best one i think was out of the blue this magazine called hawaii home and remodeling called me one day and said we'd like to do an article about you i said how did you know about me said we've been reading about you and we've never had anybody to to do some recipes so they came over one day the photographer and the editor came over and this is the result of it beautiful pictures this is taken on my lanai and uh stacked up different kinds of pickles it's six pages in the magazine and i was just so delighted when i saw this and here it is another picture that's four pages and then two more pages beautiful pictures and of course the accompanying articles about it but i also did classes i taught classes not privately but i've taught it at almost every job that i've worked in for the blind and these were people who some of them were totally blind and people say well how do you teach them i said well just like you do other people but you just have to be really careful and the blind are very smart especially the young kids as long as you can explain what to do slowly they'll get it and so it really worked and so sometimes i used to have like guests the clients i said okay you you make something that is um for your from your culture so we we exchanged that and i've also taught uh i think two or three years they have a big narcissist festival in hawaii and where they select the queen chinese queen every year and they have runners up well they for the contestants there may be about 10 of them or so they they go through a very rigorous kind of training to learn chinese culture like how to carve narcissus plants into beautiful flowers that'll come up really nice and then culture how to dress how to speak but one of the classes they had was how to cook so they asked me if i would do some classes for them so i taught them different things different chinese things like the chassiu bao and other kinds of chinese dishes and that was really enjoyable and also i've been on tv um let's see about two times i think over there and i've been on radio stations in hawaii and also in las vegas and i've done many demonstrations at almost all the public libraries in honolulu and so and then i've gone to senior citizens to recreation groups to churches to big teachers conferences all kinds i mean sometimes there was over a hundred people that were there and so these are all the different things that i did what advice would you give to people that want to start cooking well my advice is it's never too late no matter if you're young or you're old i have my youngest grandchildren since they were like five or six in hawaii when i lived there i would always go over there and about once a week i'd cook dinner for them and i'd get the kids involved and they were very interested and now they're like 11 and 17. the younger one is five but you know he's too young but that'll come later on and so i've taught them some very complicated kinds of dishes like making laulaus making zhong which is a tea leaf that is wrapped with sticky rice and beans and a duck egg and some meat on the inside and you have to tie it a certain way make it like a cone it's an art to do but the two girls got it just about i think they almost can do it by themselves so hopefully they'll continue practicing and you know my daughter she says uh you better learn from grandma because i'm never making this stuff it's too complicated so uh but you know you just have to keep trying and when some of you write to me i tell you that you know just don't look at the recipes but actually try some and there are some that are very easy oh and then coming up will be new years chinese new year usually in february so i've taught my grandchildren how to do that but this is a very complicated kind of dish that sometimes takes up to 20 different ingredients fresh dried canned and you have to soak them you have to cut them you know there's a lot of steps involved and i'll probably do that on the video because one of you requested this jai j-a-i it's a monk's dish it's all vegetarian and then the other thing that goes along with it is go g-a-u that is the chinese mochi rice cake that you steam and i usually line it with banana leaves or tea leaves and all you do is you mix up mochi rice coconut milk coconut and some slab sugar with water you mix it all up and you line the bowl real heavily oil it and then you pour it in and then you put it in a steamer and you steam it for six hours that's probably one of the it's not difficult to make but it takes a long time and i have a sister-in-law who's korean and she learned a lot from my mother and so she says that some of her nieces and nephews live in florida and different parts of the mainland so she said every chinese new year she makes it for them and she sends it to them sometimes you know that thing doesn't keep very long mochi you can't refrigerate it it tends to get hard but sometimes when it gets to them because it takes several days it's a little bit moldy so they just cut it off and they eat the insides so that's it okay so this is all i hope you've learned a lot about you know what i've gone through in order to come to this stage and i thank my son nathan for doing all the editing because without him i would be nowhere and he spends hours and hours of doing it it's a one-man show and i i do all the cooking and the setup and everything but i thank you leila and i hope that you will learn a lot from me because one day i'm not going to be around and you have these videos to help you and to you my katoo i know you don't cook but start doing it because one day you're gonna be on your own and oh my how do i do that so you can just flip to the videos and learn a lot so remember guys if you like this video don't forget to smash that like button and if you haven't subscribed do so and comment so and if you have any requests let me know i have a long list of requests so those of you just be patient i've gone through a lot of the list already but i think i have about 13 more requests that i have to plow through so be patient so thank you for watching mahalo everybody
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Channel: Hawaii's Pickle Lady
Views: 20,305
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Autiobiography, Schooling, Work history, Travels, Classes, Demonstrations, Books, Publicity
Id: Vhv1KD1gYyg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 30min 13sec (1813 seconds)
Published: Sat Jan 09 2021
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