I love to cook. It’s meditative, substantive, and life-giving. It’s the best parts of following directions and improvising techniques both. I cook nearly every day and I think I’m getting pretty good at it; not Masterchef level, by any means, but I am at the relatives-asking-for-recipes stage of skill. When I’m looking for something to make, I look in cookbooks (my local library is a wonderful resource!), of course, and I look where everyone is getting their information these days – online.
If you are like me and love cooking, or if you just like cooking, or if you’ve ever looked at a food blog before, I’m sure you’ve noticed that every food blog has a fucking ESSAY before the actual recipe! I mean, I get it, these people are mostly bloggers or photographers or whatever, or they’re trying to leverage their skills at cooking and writing into like, a career, which is great. We need more cooks who are passionate about writing and writers who are passionate about cooking, like those are two pursuits that should be married harder than … people who are really really married. Fine and dandy. But what else we need is like an online version of The Joy of Cooking or print cookbooks in general, but online: we just need. the fucking. recipe. With minimal introduction, if any. Give us weights, give us measures, give us preparation, method, mise en place – we just don’t need the story behind some dish. We don’t care, we promise.
If you must give us your story, possibly because it features Stephen Tyler or a spiritual awakening – give it to us at the end, after the recipe, so we don’t have to scroll for ten years when we’re in the middle of stir-frying some mung beans or whatever. That’s really annoying.
– That turned into a little bit of a rant, so here’s my main point: on this site (actually in the food part), I include recipes of things I’ve made, mostly cribbed from other people (but I’ve checked IP laws around recipes; I’m pretty sure I’m okay as long as I rephrase them in my own words), but without much introduction or any photographs. The introductions are missing because of the reasons given above, though the missing photographs are more easily explained: I don’t have a good camera and I’m lazy and I don’t want to pay to host all those pictures. So if you want to see pictures of the delicious meals and dishes I’ve included in here, please follow the links to the source material – you can be sure to find all the pictures you could want, and more backstory than anyone should have to handle.