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As you graduate college, get an entry-level job, and learn just how bad weekday hangovers can be, there’s one thing that tends to start to happen: You realize you want to get your shit together. No, it doesn’t usually happen all at once. You start getting the occasional salad or choose to stay in a night when all of your friends are going out. You drink more water, and you take two Ibuprofen before going to sleep on a night when you have one too many vodka sodas.
And as you start going to the gym more, eating Taco Bell less, and crying over the fact that your metabolism is absolutely slowing down, most of us attempt to do something we’ve never tried before: Cook real ass homemade meals.
Now, obviously, not all of us are heathens who have never used an oven before. But plenty of us are literal trash humans and had no idea how to make eggs, let alone a real meal. So, we did what we do best. We pretended we knew what we were doing, we burned a whole bunch of shit, and then we called our moms with our tails between our legs, asking how the hell to bake a breast of chicken.
From there, after learning how to turn on the oven, how to make rice without it turning into charred mush, and how to make cauliflower safe for consumption, we branch out on our own and search the depths of the internet for meals that we can not only make, but actually taste somewhat decent.
Thanks to Pinterest, Google, and plenty of hot millennial girls-turned-food bloggers, there’s no shortage of recipes out there. No matter what you want to make, someone has created a step-by-step guide for how to do it. And while it’s amazing that we can learn how to create basically any dish from pressing a few buttons, there’s a small-yet-painful price we have to pay for this coveted information: The life story.
If you’ve ever looked at any recipe on a food blog, you know that the only way to get through it without giving up and heading to Chipotle is to wade through 500-1,000 words about the person’s life. It’s only after you learn about their husband, children, and sister-in-law that you can learn how to cook chicken in a Crockpot. It doesn’t matter the person, it doesn’t matter the blog. They will, without question, take that opportunity to talk about their daily lives.
Things Food Bloggers Will Talk About Before Giving You The Fucking Recipe:
• How much weight they gained over the holidays.
• Their favorite “cheat” foods. (Helloooo pizza, peanut butter, and nachos.)
• The fact that their children are picky eaters.
• The fact that they’re a picky eater.
• All of the holiday hustle and bustle they just experienced.
• A long anecdote about how they’ve been busy with work this past week and got into a fight with their frenemy, Susan, and that Mike from accounting has been giving them a hard time so they took to the vending machine for solace and now they’ve gained 50 lbs in the past three days.
I know, I know. It’s hypocritical to say this. I mean, I sit here and done on about myself endlessly. So, I get why other people want to do it. It feels good to talk about yourself. And if you have a platform to do it (read: A carb-conscious website filled with recipes for people who have always been a few pounds overweight and never said “no” to a bread basket), there’s no way you’re going to pass that up. I mean, self-control is not our strong suit. That’s why we’re on the carb-conscious website in the first place. Hell, that’s why we’ve created carb-conscious websites.
While I get it, while I respect it, and while I understand it, I just want to say: I absolutely hate it. And I know it’s not my place to criticize a 40-something mom named Deb who supplies me with most of the recipes I make in my shitty apartment kitchen, that’s never stopped me before.
And sure, it’s more cost-efficient, health-conscious, and responsible to just scroll halfway down the page past the paragraphs mapping out their lives, the cost of my sanity is more important to me than my ever-growing waistline and credit card debt. So, anytime my diet is ruined, anytime I cave and get fast food, or anytime I say “fuck it” and order a pizza, I want all of the food bloggers out there to know: I absolutely blame them. I most likely lost patience with reading about their mom-lives and figured I’d rather be fat than waste another three minutes of my life searching for the actual recipe I went online to find in the first place.
No, it doesn’t make sense. But neither does telling me about your ugly fucking kids who drew all over the living room in Magic Marker when all I wanted was to learn how to make a carb-conscious coconut chicken curry, Janet..
Haven’t read the article yet, but just wanted to say I need that tablet stand setup in the picture
I get unnecessarily angry at this and will exit out of the recipe if I have to continuously scroll. Why do people continue to do this. Make a blog AND have a recipe page. You can do both.
It’s always the same twee shit intended to make these bloggers look relatable and quirky. No one cares about your anecdotes. I didn’t know writing a food blog meant you had to simultaneously make it a personal diary also.
Serious Eats is my go to for this reason. They’ll have a long, in depth post about the why’s and how’s of the recipe, or you can click a link right after the first summary paragraph in most articles that takes you to a page with just the recipe and no fluff.
Note: SE is not for the people that can’t turn on an oven or cook rice, there’s definitely a certain level of cooking experience that you need to meet because a lot of their recipes go way beyond a typical weeknight recipe.
Didn’t even need to read the article to know I was going to give a thumbs up based on the title.
Thank you for shedding light on this epidemic. Every Thanksgiving I find myself saying, “I don’t give a shit why your in-laws don’t eat mashed potatoes, just give me the damn recipe for potato soup!”
Highly recommend serious eats for good recipes. They have a lot of theory and testing stuff for what worked best but the recipe is on a separate page and it’s stupid easy. Also chef Kenji is the bomb.
Should’ve scrolled to see someone else touting SE. I definitely check their site anytime I’m in the mood to cook something beyond the standard chicken breast/meal prep bowl.
Pro tip: Make the recipe once, and if you like it, copy/paste it and save it so you never have to scroll through again.
Also the Vogue September issue amount of professional photos of said recipe. I don’t need 20 photos of a 5 ingredient crockpot recipe.
What about the fact that for some reason all of their websites don’t work right on mobile? They look good and are responsive, but so bogged down with ads you can’t see the recipe and they always, always freeze up and stop scrolling or go blank.
I was just complaining about this to my wife (I do the cooking) it is quickly becoming my new pet peeve, right behind people who don’t use turn signals.
I know right?