Anyone who's an avid TikTok scroller has probably been inundated with picturesque cooking videos. You know the ones I'm talking about: they're shot during golden hour with a calm voiceover and/or ASMR, a marble countertop, and maybe a few lit candles for good measure. But if you venture to the other, more realistic side of CookTok, you'll find @applesauceandadhd, aka Jessica Secrest, a 30-year-old stay-at-home mom who has gone viral for her self-described "aggressive cooking tutorials."
The video starts with Jessica introducing viewers to the dish she cooked for her family that night. Rather than using the zoomed-in aesthetic food shots and a catchy hook typical of TikTok cooks, Jessica instead slaps a massive casserole on the counter. "Tonight we are having taco tater tot casserole," she says, "This is it."
Where TikTok cooks measure, Jessica eyeballs. Where they use freshly chopped garlic, Jessica reaches for the often-demonized jarred variety. And because Jessica anticipates the question about the amount of garlic in her dish, she clarifies, "To those of you who look at this and say, 'That's SO much garlic,' yes and no. Garlic in the jar is much, much milder."
Instead of gingerly slicing corn kernels off the cob, as another creator might, Jessica rips open a bag of frozen corn with her teeth. "It's frozen. It's fine!" she says to the camera.
Same goes for the comments on the original video.
"My aggressive tutorial lady character is kind of a character, but it's kind of like my internal monologue coming out through my mouth," Jessica told BuzzFeed. She started her aggressive cooking series in August when she saw a TikTok of someone selling an Uncrustable maker and using it incorrectly. "I jumped up off my couch and I said, 'Oh, hell no. You're selling this product, you need to do it the right way.'" So she filmed an aggressive Uncrustable tutorial. The video quickly blew up with 1.5 million views.
After the virality of her first aggressive tutorial, Jessica began getting requests from followers to teach them other household tasks, from folding a fitted sheet to baking banana bread. "After [the banana bread] video, everyone was like, 'That's it. We need every cooking video to be aggressive.' Now every night when I make dinner for my family, I film it, and I film it aggressively." She now has over one million followers who tune into her daily cooking videos.
And while we may all know her as the "aggressive tutorial lady" today, Jessica initially started her page as a way to document the dietary changes she had to make for her son, who was diagnosed with ADHD. She was also recently diagnosed herself. "I think that a lot of my videos and my video style appeals to neurodivergent people," she said, "Something about the way I talk kind of draws people in and gets your ears listening, kind of like when you're a little bit in trouble with your parents, but not quite."
When it comes to editing her videos, she explained that she uses her ADHD as a "superpower" to aid her. "The second my attention starts to stray away from my video as I'm editing, I cut the clip because I can almost predict how long someone with ADHD or maybe who is neurodivergent can focus on one specific thing."
Even though Jessica grew up cooking and genuinely enjoys it, she knows that a lot of other parents will relate to the scolding mother-like tone in her videos. "I think that's why it resonates, especially with a lot of moms that totally feel the frustration of 'I'm making this dinner and nobody's even gonna eat it I bet.'" With two toddlers at home herself, Jessica definitely understands how other exhausted parents feel.
