Catfish Out of Water

Cooking isn’t something that you do, it’s a way of life. I get up every morning, connect a hose to my kitchen sink, and water my garden on the porch. I like to cook fusion burritos with pasta salad and put curry on pizzas. And I make dinner at night with a kitten on my shoulder who thinks that she’s a parrot.

There are so many things that make you uniquely you and those are things that need to be celebrated.

So cheers to the things that make you uniquely you! From potted plant gardens to the fur babies that make it all more entertaining.

Working Through the Moniker

I'd been thinking about a blog or YouTube channel for some time. While I was never worried about the content, coming up with a name was a little bit more daunting! I wanted something that encompassed everyday and experimental cooking, the ups and downs of growing produce, the plants and animals that encompass my home life (particularly during a global pandemic), and generally the eccentricities and artistic flair to living life in the modern age.

There are so many things that go into trying to come up with a name. It has to be a catchy title that is simple and memorable, as well as unique enough to encompass all of the food and lifestyle content that I want to have, while also not being used by another brand and having an available domain name that doesn't cost a fortune to acquire. So... not as simple as it initially might appear!

Like a lot of people attempting any kind of business, I started with keywords that I wanted to highlight. This involved countless hours trying to find words that rhymed with things like "cooking," "farming," or "cultivating." I weeded out a lot of chicken and egg puns as well as some absolutely atrocious potato jokes!

Inevitably, I ended up on a site that swapped out slant rhymes with popular catch phrases. One of the results was "Garnish Out of Water." That gave me a good laugh. It wasn't what I was looking for, but it did get me thinking. I'd recently seen catfish in the grocery store and been curious about trying it. Also, can you rhyme fish with fish?

Settling on "Catfish Out of Water"

After sitting on it a little while, I really liked Catfish Out of Water. It was quirky and involved pets. But it wasn't limiting. It didn't pigeonhole the concept and make the blog specifically about just cooking or just gardening. It also added a playful flair that I liked.

So, now we have it! Catfish Out of Water is officially the name. It also abbreviates to COOW. So, that's fun.

It's also obviously named after my cat. Is it not obvious that it's named after my cat? This is Esmérelda. She is not necessarily named after the Disney film. And, yes, I give all of my pets human names. Although I call her Little Miss Ezy Bidezy on a semi-regular basis.

"Catfishing:" The Double Entendre Elephant in the Room

I would be remissed if I didn't address the phenomenon of catfishing. There are a plethora of people who pretend to be someone else on the internet. "Catffishing" a term for those who lie about who they are, either for anonymity, for the fun of playing an alternate persona, or for more nefarious purposes, such as scamming others out of their time and/or money.

This is one of the problems with the internet, though. You have very little way of knowing whether someone is or isn't being genuine and whether the information that they provide is or isn't true.

While the "catfishing" monicker is more commonly used to describe people who pretend to be another person for their own benefit. I like the homage to how much of the internet is a manipulated version of the truth or a flat out lie.

We see this all of the time in recipes. It's not something that people oftentimes talk about, but food styling is indeed a real problem. There is no oversight to what people post in recipes on the web. A lot of the time these are just as fake as anything else.

I make a point of calling this out and only posting recipes that are in fact genuine food that I make at home, photograph with natural lighting, and really do eat.

A lot of the foods that you see in cookbooks and food blogs aren't actually food. After all, you can't do an hour-long photoshoot with ice cream that's rapidly melting! A lot of people are also just lazy, don't have the real foods on hand, want to make them appear more appetizing than they look in real life, or just flat out lie, photoshop, and/or manipulate pictures of their food in order to create what looks like the perfect dish. This creates an unrealistic expectation of recipes on the web.

So, calling my blog the "catfish" of the culinary world? Brings attention to all of the mashed potatoes being used as a stand-in for ice cream. I'm not joking. I have an entire Article about it.

What's Next for Catfish Out of Water?

First and foremost, this is a blog for documenting my recipes. I oftentimes find myself trying to recreate something that I haven't adequately written down the instructions for! As much as I like to cook, my brain is not a vast expanse of filing cabinets with the exact ingredients and knowledge of what I did to make it. We like to think of memories as being firmly planted forever. But they are oftentimes fleeting.

So, while I have some vague recollection of making things in the past and enough culinary knowledge usually to muddle through making it again? It's a lot easier just to write it down and take pictures of it. I really made this blog so that I don't have to go through journals, recipe indexes, cookbooks, saved tabs on the internet, word documents, or whatever scraps of paper that I may or may not have written recipes down on!

In the off chance that all of this actually helps another person learn to cook? Try checking out the latest recipes on the Homepage.

You can follow me in semi-present time. Depending on how much I'm cooking, I might be spot on or just a couple of weeks behind real-time.

I post Recipes twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays. As well as Articles twice a month, on the first and fifteenth. If you're scrolling through posts, recipes have a full featured image. Whereas articles have a half image. Some articles have a full recipe at the bottom as well. These both provide the origin of the dish, in-depth tips about how to make it, and a basic recipe guide.

For more information about this blog, you can find out all about My Culinary Philosophy and About Me.