About Me

What this is

This blog is about cooking. Specifically, it is about an approach to cooking that I am exploring that moves away from the procedures contained in recipes and into a more general understanding of techniques and ingredients. Out of this understanding comes one’s personal cuisine. Over the years of cooking and reading cookbooks, I’ve noticed certain techniques that come up over and over again no matter which culture the food comes from; there’s only a few basic techniques of cooking food, although there are many many particular variations on the basic techniques. In the same way, there is a limited number of flavor profiles out there. I think of a flavor profile as the basic ingredients and their combination that defines a culture.

Something else I’ve noticed about cooking is that the actual cooking part accounts for very little of the time spent toward creating a meal, whether it be Tuesday night chicken breasts or a weekend multi-course blowout. I find I spend most of my time thinking about what to make,stocking the kitchen, maintaining the equipment, processing the ingredients, prepping for the meal, and cleaning up. In short, I spend most of my time making sure everything is put in place, which is a loose translation of the French term mise en place, or simply the “meez.” It usually refers to the arrangement of ingredients and equipment that you cook from, but I like to extend the definition to include the whole situation: your gear, the food you have on hand, your knowledge of what to do with it, and your attitude while you are cooking. Hence the name of this blog, Get Your Meez On. The whole point is to explore this approach and become better cooks.

Am I oversimplifying? Sure. But I think there are some helpful and solid generalizations to be made, ones that will improve how you cook and how you think about food.

Who I am

I am a male pushing forty living in Western New York. I have a family of four and I work in the software industry. I’ve cooked, thought about cooking, read about cooking, and talked about cooking as long as I can remember. I am always ready to talk about food, and as fun as it is to talk about, it is way more fun to cook, and more fun still to eat. So, this blog will mostly be about the food. Whatever I say about food will always be grounded in an actual meal. So if you like food and like to cook, I hope you’ll check in from time to time and say hi, and let me know what you think.