The Curmudgeon’s spent her whole life in the food industry and has a lot of opinions. One of which is: it’s a damn shame so many of people don’t know how to cook. But that’s okay, we’re going to fix that. She’s managed cookware stores, gourmet groceries, perishables education programs for the grocery industry, food safety, food supply chain and even was a personal chef for over a decade before her knees said ENOUGH. She’s learned a ton of stuff over the years, and now is going to share it. So, if you like good food, learning about things and don’t mind some opinions, you’re in the right place. Oh, also, swearing. There’s going to be some of that.
I got my degree in marketing. I was going to be a good corporate drone. I was the Marketing Director for a psychiatric hospital. And I hated it. I started working part time at Williams-Sonoma over the holidays so I could get a discount on cookware and…more than three decades later, I’ve been all up in the food industry’s business, from one end of the supply chain to the other. Managing and buying for a now defunct gourmet grocery store…oh, the stories! Think Bourdain but less sex and drugs and way more rats, fires, and rancid dairy in elevator shafts. Although about the same amount of swearing and thrown cookware. Wanting to see what it was like to have holidays and weekends off, edged back into corporate life to manage perishables education and technology initiatives for a grocery industry association. Just when E. coli 0157:H7 was tearing through the meat and produce industries. Water wars between the produce industry and everyone else out west. When GTINs and 3D bar codes were becoming a thing and the pork and produce industry were circling around the extra PLU codes that the dying photo processing industry was hanging onto. Which was fun for a geek like me but the whole suit-wearing, commuting downtown, back-biting, politics-laden nature of association work drove me to finally start my own business as a personal chef. For just over a decade I served dozens of clients, customizing menus and dishes for them, helping them get healthier and throw awesome parties. I headed up a local chapter of a national personal chef association, spoke at conferences on everything from menu development to business practices, won Chef of the Year. And then a divorce and bad knees made it clear I needed a back up plan. With a chair and health benefits. So, back into corporate life, sourcing and negotiating contracts for the hospitality industry. Becoming an expert on the supply chain from production to landfill/disposal. Why things cost what they do, where they come from, how they get to you, what happens to them after you dispose of them. What happens to food and supplies when there’s a global pandemic…like I said, I’ve been through a lot. Learned a lot – and now I’m going to share it.
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The more support I get from readers, the fewer ads I’ll sell myself out to and the more likely I can convince myself that I should be working on another post rather than flopping onto the couch and grabbing the remote.
Wah, why can’t you just give me the recipe? Why do I have to scroll through all those words and pictures?
Look, you entitled little shit, I worked hard to develop this stuff and do you know how I get paid? You spending time on my page, scrolling. Do you work for free? No? neither do I. So, if you want to keep this page from being chock full of ads, you’ll help support me here: link to Tip Jar . But if you can’t afford it, that’s totally cool. You keep reading; I hope I’m helpful.
But the rest of you, the “augh, why do I have to scroll through all of this crap just to get to…THE CONTENT I WANT FOR FREE. Well, fuck you. Do you know why we have crappy journalism? Because you’re not paying for it. Reporters don’t work for free. Once more: do YOU work for free? No? Then why the bloody hell would you expect me…and all the other food bloggers to do so? All the journalists? You get what you pay for, children, and if you don’t pay, you don’t get to bitch about not getting what you want.
Yes, yes, yes, there’s all sorts of free content on the web. AND IT’S CRAP. Look, I can lay on my couch, eat popcorn, watch Netflix and relax in my free time. Instead I’m up until the wee hours, typing my effing fingers to the bone, so if you don’t like the damn stories, the pictures, the exposition, then quite honestly, get the fuck out. Go find what you need elsewhere on the internet. On one of those buggy, ad-ridden, see-if-you-can-get-the-recipe-before-the-page-freezes pages. Or a page that’s just full of recipes that are copied from somewhere else. From someone else, who never even made the recipe they’re publishing. Go do that. Go snag yourself an untested, mediocre people-who-think-Bob-Evans-is-gourmet recipe. I’ll keep my readers who either enjoy the reading (for the record, as the former cookbook buyer for defunct fancy gourmet stores…people LIKE reading this stuff) or are willing to put with it because the content is worth it.
Crediting Recipes
A word about uncredited recipes. You know what really pisses me off? Bloggers who post a recipe like they’re the ones who invented it and all they did was gank it off someone else’s website or cookbook and add new pictures or story to it. Fuck those people. Seriously. I mean, use those recipe…but for FFS, credit the damn author, will you?
Now, having said that, sometimes I don’t remember where I got a recipe from. Or maybe I’ve been dicking It with it for decades. Or I scribbled it down on a piece of paper and don’t remember where it came from. And in cooking, there’s a lot of convergent* evolution going on. But when I can – I’ll credit the author so maybe you can check out more of their stuff. If I don’t and you know who the original author was? Tell me! People work hard developing recipes – and coming up with it in the first place is hard enough, they should get credit for their work. Just understand that if it’s a common recipe, published in dozens of cookbooks/blogs, the horse is out of the barn on that one and I’m not going to randomly pick someone.
*Convergent evolution is when unrelated species develop similar traits. For example, birds, bats, and insects all fly using the same mechanics but arrived at it evolutionary-speaking at different times, with different paths and using different parts. Wait. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that if you cook your gene line is likely to develop different appendages with which to cook. Which would be cool. But I don’t mean it LITERALLY. I’m making an analogy – just as birds and bats and insects all became flyers independently instead of, say bats learning or inheriting the ability from insects. Better example: bread, cheese, beer. It’s not like there was one single person who discovered/invented those things and then it was gradually passed on and spread to all humans. Many people discovered the joys of yeast and fermentation, at different times, in different places. Ditto recipes.