What’s cookin’, Wallowa County? I’ll tell you what. Today we’re going to walk through the steps on how to write a cookbook. I just became an authority on trying to do this, because I’ve been struggling to write a cookbook the last couple months. A lot of people ask me, “Jon, how is it that you became a tremendously acclaimed chef with no formal training and very little to no understanding of basic kitchen stuff?” Great question. I tell people in my seminars all the time that anything you can imagine doing – anything at all – is probably going to be much, much harder than you think. A lot harder. So you should just stick with what you know.

Now and then you will be forced into trying new things, so in those situations it’s best to keep resisting, making excuses and trying to duck out until finally you just have no choice. That’s exactly how I learned to cook, on Wallowa County riverbanks as an aspiring guide for Winding Waters River Expeditions.

Rowing a boat through rapids I’d never been through was far less scary than helping prepare meals. What if I burn the tenderloin, or don’t cook it enough? What is a dutch oven? Where, exactly, is the thin yellow line between over-easy and over-medium? So many questions. The answer for all of these was to watch people who knew what they were doing and copy them.

There’s a lot of gifted cooks and chefs and bakers here in the Wallowas, which may account for our unusually robust potluck culture. A recent study of what I think confirmed that Wallowa County probably has more potlucks per capita and square mile than other places. Just think about that statistic.

Now stop thinking about that and let’s focus again on writing your cookbook. Use whatever ingredients you like in terms of recipes. I’m working on a greatest-hits collection of recipes requested by guests on river trips over the years.

OK. Let’s begin. First step is to preheat where you will be writing. I use a drafty shack on my property as an office. It has a temperamental woodstove that’s hard to get going. Here’s a helpful tip: collect a wide range of different cookbooks from used bookstores and garage sales. Not to read. You don’t want to be copying how other people do it. I use the old cookbooks to get the fire going. It can sometimes take fifteen or twenty crumpled recipes.

Once your writing shack has reached 70-some degrees it’s time to start adding words. In a blank document, combine your dry facts. This will be the cups of flour and the title and the teaspoons and whatever. Boring stuff. That’s really the secret to writing. Put all the boring things down first, and while your fingers are already typing, trick them into adding all the other stuff until you run out of room and then you’re done. Easy.

All this recent recipe writing has me convinced that teaspoon and tablespoon look way too much alike and we need a new term for one of them. Even the abbreviated versions are uncomfortably similar. Observe: tbsp and tsp. Wait, what? Oh, there’s a little “b” in there. Of course. No, not good enough. I hereby nominate “coffeespoon” instead of teaspoon. Now we got 1 tbsp of this and 1 csp of that. Aw, man, now “csp” and “cup” look too much alike.

You see what I’m up against. The cookbook genre is actually a pretty tough racket. I may have to start consulting those reference guides instead of using them as kindling.

Good luck out there with your own cooking endeavors and we’ll be seeing you soon once spring gets here and potluck season kicks off. Just remember to keep your teaspoons and teaspoons straight. Wait, no, tablespoons. See? So confusing.

Jon Rombach is a local columnist for the Chieftain.

The gifted cooks, chefs and bakers in the Wallowas may account for our unusually robust potluck culture