Children's variety shows hosted by a real person who carries their personality through to a show's content, environment, and a strange internal logic are few and far between. The last successful one I'm aware of was Pee-Wee's Playhouse, which created a world around a stage character invented by Paul Reubens.

Such experiences tend to somehow be both otherworldly and very much of their time. In the case of Pee-Wee, it was the late '80s and a world suffused in pop art, Plasticene, and a rich subtext that broke taboos by pretending to be too naive to notice them. Although the show featured contributions from a prescient crowd - in music, Mark Mothersbaugh, The Residents, Danny Elfman, George Clinton, and Dweezil Zappa; in acting, early-career Phil Hartmann, Lawrence Fishburne, and many others; in animation, Aardman Studios (later of Wallace and Gromit fame) as well as talented stop-motion and chroma key animators - the format of a hosted variety show for kids goes back to the early days of television. What Pee-Wee brought to the table that had not been there previously was the idea that, while providing certain ritualized segments (the "secret" word, a wish granted every show, the King of Cartoons presenting a random segment from an archaic black-and-white cartoon) the selection of "bits" for the show could be governed not by a schedule of thematically-related events as Mr. Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, or Mr. Dressup typically offered, but by what appeared to be the fleeting, inexplicable whims of its charismatic central character.

There is something of this spirit in Clare Crespo's new cooking series for children, Yummyfun Kooking.

Crespo's character for the show, Yummy Clare, has an unironically sunny outlook, a compassionate tone, and a relaxed attitude, with the languid vivaciousness of a slow-burning sparkler and the tag-along-with-me friendliness of a much older sister who should have somewhere much cooler to be, but actually wants to hang out with you. Her kitchen is actually a 20'-square room in Clare Crespo's home in L.A.'s Silver Lake neighborhood, and the set designer turned the limitation into an asset with a fantastic series of store-away appliances; everything from stove to oven pops out of cabinets and drawers, and is fake, fake, fake. A variety of characters, some human, some puppet, all appear in their own, out-of-kitchen nooks and crannies, including a hand-puppet landlord who must be telephoned when the ceiling leaks a small waterfall (actually the tears of a monster, upstairs, crying for chocolate) as well as whenever Yummy Clare needs to have a certain appliance supplied with (fake) electricity. It's a world that falls just shy of looking like it was built by Etsy crafters, built of bare wooden planks with plenty of gaps and decorated with food tins and bottles with handmade labels, brightly-colored cooking utensils, and the occasional decorative owl. Like Pee-Wee, Clare never leaves her imaginary world, although she hosts a lot of parties there, and the direction of each show's plot weaves along a path her character appears to be whimsically making up as she goes along.

Crespo herself is a Culinary Institute for America-graduated chef who is far more interested in visuals and concepts than in how food tastes, the kind of person who would (and has) filled an aquarium with Jell-O to create an underwater scene that is edible primarily in theory. Crespo is the author of Hey There, Cupcake!, which appears to be a definitive and highly creative book all about decorating cupcakes, and The Secret Life of Food, covers more savory ground, with the same overall goal - of treating food, as Crespo puts it, as "an art supply."

In actually helping children learn to prepare food, I must admit that Yummyfun doesn't have all of its affairs in order. Some errors, like pulling out a pot to boil potatoes, dropping them in, but never putting water in the pot, feel like they are just part of the hyper-imaginary pantomime that Clare makes out of cooking - the stove is fake, after all - but watching her pat raw ground beef into giant meatballs barehanded and then flit about performing other tasks without even pretending to wash her hands had us a bit concerned. There is a happy medium that must be struck here in blending fantasy and reality, not because everything must always be thus and so (Pee Wee Herman bent reality at whim) but because she is, in addition to simply entertaining us, attempting to give children ideas for what they can do in the kitchen that is crazy and artistic. She shows children how to expertly make a mashed-potato head, complete with broccoli hair and a multi-part mushroom nose, and it is clear to all that she is teaching us something of value. Don't kids working with meat need to know, at least through modeled behavior, that washing your hands after handling raw meat is something even Yummy Clare would do?

It's unfair to compare any homegrown, self-produced show with one that received 22 Emmys and had a per-episode budget of over $300,000, and I won't. In fact, while Reubens' team appears to have been given the freedom to create their world without excessive input from studio executives, Yummyfun Kooking is its own animal precisely because Crespo didn't like what networks told her they wanted her to do with her show's concept in order to make it into something they would buy. This takes both courage and vision, and the result is a world that is both genuinely fun to visit and has great potential. The show does feel designed to be more jam-packed with competing creative elements than it is. If there is any justice in TV land, the Food Network will realize they could lay the foundation of a Saturday-morning empire with a cooking show for kids, offer minor tweaks to help make the cooking the blueprint for post-watching kitchen fun it needs to be, and put Cresco on her way to making her mark on children's television. She's ready for it.

You can learn more about the series on Yummyfun's website, and purchase DVDs there or on Amazon.com.

- Jeremiah