Off Belay Cafe

I love food.

Despite the look on my face, I really am enjoying that meal.

In my mind, there is no better reason to start cooking: love of food.  Once I started cooking for myself, I gained a much greater appreciation for what goes into making a meal, and that made me love the meal even more.  When you've made something yourself, you're always more proud of it than if you had just thrown money at someone in exchange for what they did, and you appreciate it more.  Once you realize how easy it is to do yourself, you're really in trouble.  Then you want to make it yourself, all the time, half because you want to eat it, and half because you just want to prove you can do it.

At least, that's how it is for me.

The first thing I can remember cooking All By Myself was tapioca pudding.  I loved it when Mom made it, and asked for it often enough that she finally told me, "the recipe's right on the box.  You make it.  I'll help if you need it."  I made it regularly after that, and was just as proud of myself every time.  Go ahead and laugh. I was a kid.  I was allowed to be proud of pudding.

A friend of a friend, searching for a topic during an awkward silence, once told me, "I hear you're quite the cook.  How did that start?"  I shrugged and told her, "I got hungry."  That's essentially true.  Despite the tapioca, countless campout meals made on Boy Scout outings, and helping Mom in the kitchen, I don't think I really started cooking in earnest until I moved out of student housing in college.  I knew that I could, but until then, I didn't really need to start.  I wish I had.  Mom was hands-down the greatest cook I've ever known.  I'd love to be able to ask her how to do some of the things I want to do now, or even just show her some of the things I can do now.  Mom is the real reason I started cooking.  I'd settle for being half the cook she was.

While I was in grad school, my main focus was getting through grad school.  My culinary range was limited, and my ambitions were low.  Honestly, my ambition was survival.  I think grad school cooking is like that for anyone who isn't in culinary school.  I never stooped to Ramen, but there was plenty of macaroni, and a cookbook full of recipes with no more than four ingredients.  Luckily, Dad bought me a Crock-Pot at some point, and a cookbook to go with it, and I could feed myself for a week or more on one Crock-Pot full of ... something.  It didn't matter.

Later, I bought a kitchen staple: the Betty Crocker cookbook.  I bought that particular cookbook for another recipe I remembered from childhood.  We had always called it Hot Fudge Brownie Pudding.  There is no reason to call it anything else, but I knew Betty called it something different, and I remembered enough from the one time I had made it in high school to recognize it in the book.  I could give Betty the credit for getting me to expand my horizons, but really, the credit goes to Dad.

After grad school, nobody wanted to hire me.  Nobody wanted to hire Dad, either.  He started doing some home-repair work and hired me.  We'd fix people's houses during the day and play in the kitchen at night.  Dad had some basic kitchen sense, but neither of us really started cooking until Mom was gone.  We both learned an awful lot that year.  Mom might have inspired me to be a cook, but Dad's the one who taught me how to fake my way through it and still make it look good.  Without him, I don't know how long it would have taken me to learn how to improvise with food.  He got really good with meats, stews, soups, and pie crusts.  I got pretty good with cookies and breads.  Between us, we were ready to tackle anything.

Which brings us, finally, to why I started this blog.  A few years ago I started a new challenge: three new recipes a month.  Then I added one improvised recipe a month.  I could wing it entirely, or build upon something else.  When I moved in with the Chief Taster, I suddenly had to make a lot more food each month.  I started sharing pictures of what I had made online, and I was always confused by how impressed people were over things I thought had been pretty easy.  I realized that despite our culture's fascination with food, a lot of people are still intimidated by the process that lies between the raw material and what lands on your plate.

Shelling crawdads for jambalaya

That's where I come in.

I went to school to become an engineer.  My masters degree is in management.  Besides Boy Scouts and having my mom as my mom, I have no background whatsoever in the culinary arts.  But I can still do it, and if I may be so bold, I'm getting pretty good at it.  Point being: if I can do it, anyone can.

Cooking is not the dark, mystical alchemy many TV chefs would have you believe it to be.  There's no reason to be afraid of it, and the only thing keeping anybody from being good at it is their own reluctance to try.

Hence the name of the blog.

Among my many hobbies outside the kitchen is one of my first loves: climbing.  In climbing, the belayer is the person who controls the rope to make sure the climber doesn't fall all the way to the bottom.  That's an important point: the belayer doesn't keep you from falling.  He just keeps you from falling all the way.  I'd like to say he keeps you from falling too much, but some of that responsibility lies with the climber.  Every climber falls at some point.  It's a risk you take, and as long as you don't get injured, it's actually kind of fun.  The same applies to cooking: there will be mistakes.  The mistakes can be fun.  Roll with it, and try again.

The climber is that idiot in the black shirt (me).  The belayer is the much taller gentleman in yellow.

There's a system of calls used to communicate between climber and belayer.  We keep these simple, because sometimes you are very far away from your belayer, out of sight, and trying to yell through any variety of background noise or inclement weather.  The idea is to yell something they'll recognize, even if they don't hear it clearly.

One of those calls is "off belay."

The climber yells this to let the belayer know that the climber has reached the top of the route, set up an independent anchor, and no longer relies on the rope (or belayer) for safety.  The belayer's response is "belay off."  For me, this is one of the more exhilarating moments in climbing a route.  You're at the top, or at least pretty far from the bottom, and without the belayer, you're essentially on your own for a little bit.  The biggest real risk is that you do something silly and drop the rope, which means you have to wait until somebody else can climb one up to you, or lower one from the top, if that's an option.  Still, when you go off belay, every climber is very careful.  You can't make any mistakes at that point, or you could really ruin your day, as well as that of anyone upon whom you might land.

I'm calling this project the Off Belay Cafe because it's about taking that risk of trying something exciting and new, and that moment when you're all by yourself, with no back up, and you know that you've done it.  You have won the day, or at least the pitch.  It may not have been clean, it may not have been easy, but it is always worth it.  Even if it's just tapioca.

I don't advise doing crazy things while climbing, but trying crazy things while cooking is a lot of fun, and it almost never ends in splattery doom.  I'll try to keep the esoteric climbing references down to a manageable level, because despite the name, this site is about food, and the goal is to make cooking fun, easy, and approachable for everyone.  There will be lots of my own experiments with food, How To articles on general skills, and what is commonly called Food Porn.  (If you're looking for the other kind, keep clicking, bub.)  I'm always open to questions and suggestions.  Remember: I'm learning, too.  Now go to your kitchen, flip open a cookbook to a random page, and go Off Belay.  Cheers!