Month: December 2020

So the world probably doesn’t need another food blog. But it’s also people’s personal choices to read blogs, so if this isn’t of interest, they can browse elsewhere. No one’s going to hold a potato peeler to their heads and threaten to peel them if they don’t cooperate.

As you’ve probably guessed from the second line, I tend to be snarky and sarcastic (which I’m told sarcasm is actually not the same thing as being snarky, that sounds good, so I’ll take their word for it. When I asked for the difference, I was told, “you tend to be sarcastic about things but snarky regarding yourself (i.e., self-mocking) occasionally.“) That totally works for me, so here you go.

How did this food blog come about? Well, first of all, please don’t ever call it a foodie blog or me a foodie. Please! Just don’t. I take that as an insult. The term foodie is complementary to most people, but when someone calls me an expert or guru, I tend to get a bit, well, snarky. I don’t feel I am an expert at something that changes on literally a daily basis.

Now tell me my food is delish and that squashed ugly chef ego raises its ugly head, and I’d say, “Yes, I know!” But marketing self-labeled experts, mavens or gurus fall into the same category as foodies to me. I think I’ll just not go there right now. Um yeah, no, did I mean I was sarcastic about labels? Now why pray tell, do I dislike the term “foodie.” I’ve probably managed to insult people who call themselves foodies, and please don’t be insulted. You can call yourself a foodie all you want; just don’t call me one.

I am a food professional. I was trained professionally, mentored by many very knowledgeable professionals, and worked professionally in kitchens for over 20 years. To me, a foodie is the guy who knows about the different regions that produce olive oil in Italy but can’t tell you how to properly cook with it to save his life. As my husband likes to say about me when I have my ugly chef ego rises occasionally (only regarding food), “Once a chef, always a chef.”

So I digress as I am wont to do (you’ve been warned), the food blog is coming about for various reasons.

One: I’ve been blogging since about 2009, marketing posts mixed with restaurant advice, operations posts, food advice, and the occasional recipe. I started out on a WordPress.com blog originally (still up at https://chefforfeng.wordpress.com), and when I redid my website a few years ago and moved from straight HTML to WordPress.org, I incorporated the blog in it for future posts. It really is time for me to separate it out.

Two: I’ve been getting emails recently inviting me to do contests for recipes using products, not something I previously had any inclination to do. I won some culinary competitions way back when I was at CIA for a seafood contest, and I think there was a cheese contest (it was a long time ago), but I never really had any interest in doing them otherwise since then. These new ones sound like a ton of fun, though, and one of the requirements is to have a frequently updated food blog (i.e., “just” a food blog).

Three: I recently did a level four elective project for Toastmasters (member since 2009 and working on my third DTM) in the Motivational Strategies path; the project was to use a current blog or start a new blog and do 8 posts in a month. Yeah, that wasn’t happening (and it didn’t, but I’ll be doing the elective again in another path because it did not hit my time goal), and I thought it would be a good kick in the arse for me to be more consistent with my blog posts again. When I first started blogging, I was actually terrific about doing at least several posts per month. In the last couple of years, meh….. not so much.

Four: Since Covid hit, I’ve been doing an awful lot of baking and since weekends since March consisted of not being able to go do much with friends, let’s experiment and muck around in the kitchen. I used to hate baking. I really, really, REALLY did. I think CIA brainwashed me (apologies to my wonderful, knowledgeable instructors in baking and pastry), but I didn’t enjoy having to measure things to exact amounts. I loved playing with chocolate and fondant, but ye gods, have to measure everything precisely? Yikes! Give me an excellent savory sauce to mess with any day!

I worked in restaurants for many years, where I was the cook, baker, and candlestick maker. I did not like to bake. “I do not like to bake, I’d rather have a steak.” I think there is a Dr. Seuss rhyme in there somewhere. Since Covid, there were only so many stews I could make, pot pies I could bake, and stocks that I could slake (sorry meant strain, apparently a Police song just went running through my odd little brain). So I decided to go online and find some recipes to torture my husband and neighbors with.

Needless to say, after much experimenting and finding, HEY baking IS fun, and no, you don’t have to follow the ever begotten recipe exactly. I’ve been enjoying the new adventure. Part of the adventure and the challenge is being out of ingredients and finding, figuring out and testing what can be used as substitutions. In the mid-nineties I worked as a chef at a restaurant in Stowe, Vermont that had challenges to beat the band in terms of having to substitute things in a pinch, more on that in an upcoming blog post.

Five: I really like to write. I freely admit I am not the best writer; being dyslexic with an odd sense of humor tends to make things, well, a bit odd, especially the grammar (thank you, Grammarly for catching most of my oddities) at times. But I do like to write, so this is good therapy along with the mucking around in the kitchen. I find cooking, and now baking, very therapeutic, and so is writing, and in this new year, I am resolving to try to write more.

To date, the only new year’s resolution I’ve managed to keep in many decades is to never buy a lottery ticket, but I figure this one is a good one to at least try to be more consistent with writing because it’s fun and it’s a tie into my one true love (besides my awesome hubby and pups)… my love of food.

So I’ll try to keep this blog food-related, some desserts, some savories, some miscellaneous snarky and sarcastic commentary about food and the food industry, and hopefully a few cooking tips that may help you along the way. Requests and questions are always taken.

If you’ve gotten this far, thank you in advance for putting up with me through this intro/rant to my new blog. Let’s have some fun, shall we?

If you missed the last two recipes from other blog, check them out: Chocolate, Coconut and Barberry Biscotti and Chocolate Chip Bourbon Cake