I recently started a website and Facebook page for my cooking adventures, called The Improper Chef. It's all very foreign to me, especially the webpage, which is under major "construction" (a.k.a. I am reading up on how to manage it because I have no clue). I still write my recipes down on cards and place them in binders, and I even have several (gasp!) recipe boxes. I love the feel of a cookbook or recipe magazine in my hands. So when people started telling me "You need to blog" or "You should start your own web page" I resisted for as long as I could. Don't get me wrong, I love technology. I'm just not very advanced. My website is in the beginning stages but the Facebook page is really taking off, so I figured I'd give in, and get my blog on.
http://theimproperchef.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Improper-Chef/205571772839179
A little background on the name. My husband Eric and I were having dinner with a couple of our favorite family members, Darryl & Nadia, the other evening. We started catching up on our lives, and they asked me: "Where did the name come from? Why are you the Improper Chef?" That's a good question. In part, it refers to my "technique." I have never taken any formal cooking classes, and I couldn't even boil water until I was in my early 20s. I worked in the restaurant industry for about 10 years as a waitress and bartender, and have always been a fan of going out to eat and trying new dishes. At some point, a light went on and I started experimenting with different recipes. And they tasted pretty good!
I learned how to cook the Italian way- my grandmothers and my mom all cooked the same way. A pinch of this, a dash of that, never making a recipe the same way each time. My mom is the most organized out of all of us, I wish I inherited that from her. I am a mess in the kitchen. I don't use prep bowls. I don't measure things out before I start cooking. I chop and portion as I go. Then there's the yelling. It's not angry yelling, but rather loud, excited talking over the noise of the kitchen appliances. When my mom and I make Christmas cookies every year, my husband refers to them as "Italian Yelling Cookies." But that's how we communicate, and the cookies are always fabulous.
Getting back to the name, I started up a recipe sharing network on Facebook this past winter, and I recently posted a recipe using all kinds of slang and improper abbreviations. Juli, a longtime friend and one of the members, called me out and said that a proper chef would know the correct terms. Eric, who is extremely supportive and has been pushing me to do something with my rough culinary skills for years, said "That's you. You're the Improper Chef." And it stuck. If you know me personally, it's an appropriate name. Aside from the misuse of technical terms, the informal approach that I take with my kitchen creations, and the yelling, I'm not the most "proper" of people. I'm polite (mostly) but I'm no Martha Stewart. Well, maybe prison-era Martha Stewart.
Anyhow, enough about me. What you really want to see are the recipes! I'm going to work hard to catch this blog up to where the Facebook page is, and then I'll be able to integrate the two. I have been advised that I should have done the blog first and then linked it to Facebook, but that's not my style. That would have been the proper way to do it.
