West Coast pioneer Yo-Yo is launching a new cooking show called “Downright Delicious” on Magic Johnson’s Aspire network.
The show launched on Tuesday (June 6) and features the veteran rapper cooking her favorite meals while kicking it with some of her celebrity friends.
In an interview with the Huffington Post, Yo-Yo said she started the show because she loves eating and food is such an important cultural marker for people.
“I’ve always had a love for cooking,” she said. “When people ate my food, they would always just rave about it,” she said “Food was the main topic, so I would search for recipes. It kept me calm, it helped me through my depression, it actually saved my life. It was a place where I could be alone, it was a place that didn’t allow me to think of anything else outside of what I was doing. You’d have to do things and give your full attention to it. I became great at what I love to do and I‘d been putting this stuff on my Instagram.”
Putting her food on Instagram secured got the attention of some producers who believed in her enough to offer her a show. As Yo-Yo explained, “I got a call from Rochelle Brown from Powerhouse [Productions] one day and she asked, ‘Can you film yourself in the kitchen?’ I was in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras, girl, got myself a kitchen, filmed this little piece, sent them back to it. They said they were going to create this sizzle reel for me.”
She said two years later her show was picked up and she is now a TV chef like Carla Hall, Bobby Flay and some of the others we’ve learned to love.