Mise en place is the first step of making any recipe, but it’s not a step we started doing until we’d been cooking for many years. It’s the step of putting everything in its place, gathering what a certain recipe will need, and preparing ingredients. It’s a step that I love because it means chopping onions at the end of a long day of teaching, answering emails, and writing about things other than food. It’s the step when we find out if we do, in fact, have all the ingredients we thought we did, and when, at least as often or not, we begin to strategize about how to make do with a few things missing, or a few extra ingredients that need using, and how we’ll adapt the recipe we’ve chosen to make.
It’s a strange choice to start a food blog now. When I began cooking for myself, I was an avid user of all kinds of blogger recipes, always scrolling past the personal stories to get to the recipe I wanted to make. In recent years though, we’ve moved almost entirely away to blogs as a source of recipes. We favor the recipes that we know have been rigorously tested, ones that come from a publication with an editorial policy, or a chef with a reputation to uphold. (We do, after all, spend a fair bit of time teaching information literacy in our day jobs). We like trying new recipes as often as we can manage, because new recipes teach us new things. But we still want a fair chance at eating good food at the end of a night, and so we go to a few common places again and again–NYT Cooking, Food and Wine Magazine (we get the actual magazine in the mailbox each month), and, increasingly, actual physical cookbooks from chefs and cuisines we want to learn from.
As I put together the pieces that I have for this blog, then, it doesn’t seem likely that this will be a blog that offers many new recipes–I’m not likely to start recipe-testing at the standards I hold myself to. What I think we’re better at in our kitchen is choosing the recipes, and making them work for our needs. It’s most likely that this blog will have notes on the recipes we love, on the cookbooks we try, and the things we’re learning as we adapt them in our kitchen.
We, by the way, is me and Jason, my partner who cooks with me. A lot of our cooking decisions are driven by our desire to cook and eat well together, all while keeping our kitchen gluten free for the sake of his celiac disease. When he was first diagnosed, we turned to food bloggers across the web to try and find gluten free alternatives to our favorite recipes. With few exceptions (such as the excellent Canadian food blogger MyBFisGF), most of the food we found was a sad substitute, made by folks who had little memory of what the real thing could be. Because I eat gluten outside of our house, those sad substitutes just won’t do it for me. So, while our cooking, and therefore much of this blog is likely to be gluten free, it’s also just good food, and worth trying regardless of what your dietary needs may be. Having the constraint of Jason’s celiac has made us more creative in the kitchen–out of necessity, we’ve learned a bit of chemistry, and turned to ingredients and cuisines that are far beyond what we knew in our own kitchens growing up.
It’s also a strange choice to start a food blog now because, perhaps for the first time in my life, I’m not looking for a side hustle. I’ve (finally) got my PhD, which is not in food, and am finding my feet in my first tenure-track job. I don’t need this project to be big, or go viral, or generate ad revenue. In fact, it will likely need to be sporadic and small. But as a colleague of mine said, now that you’re not in grad school, you’ll need a hobby. As my instagram feed can attest, food has, for a long time, been that hobby for me. I’m hoping that giving it a bit more web-space to stretch out will feel nourishing for me. And I’m hoping it will be a way for the friends from so many phases of our lives, from New York, to Nebraska, and now to Mississippi, to still be part of our kitchen, which has always been a place we like to share.
I’m writing this post from New Orleans, the weekend before Thanksgiving, which is an important cooking holiday in our house. We’ve got a grocery list, and plans to drive back home to Hattiesburg tonight with all the ingredients we’ll need for the holiday meal. It’s our biggest mise en place of the year, and one I can’t wait to begin.