recipes – My Little Country

Several years ago, I wrote about a very first world problem that has, sadly, only grown far, far worse.

Let’s see if any of this sounds familiar. It’s late afternoon and after a long day of spinning plates, juggling chainsaws and running your own personal mini-circus, you realize that you’d better figure out something to eat before you start gnawing on your own hands, faint with hunger.

Let’s say you want to make lentil soup, so you type “Lentil soup” into the search bar and up pops several beautiful soup pictures accompanied by hundreds of five star reviews. You click on the best looking one and here it comes.

First, there’s a catchy title like: “The Very Best Super Easy Amazingly Delicious Lentil Soup”. Great, that’s fine. That’s followed by a paragraph about how delicious and amazing and easy this soup is. One would assume the recipe would follow.

No. You’d think, but no.

The introductory paragraph is followed by a lengthy and personal story on the origins of said recipe or perhaps how the author feels about this particular lentil recipe. This is followed by more paragraphs on what exactly a lentil IS, where they are grown, when they were domesticated, lentil varieties, the full nutritional profile of a lentil, how lentils can be prepared, where to buy lentils, variations on the ingredients, variations on how to cook the soup, what an Instant Pot is, the best pot to prepare the soup in….you get the idea. Then you get a fully photographed series on each and every step of making the soup, and then…only THEN do you reach the actual recipe. Thank God for the “Jump to Recipe” button. Whoever invented that should be sainted.

This reminds me of the Alamo scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure where Pee-Wee finally makes it to the Alamo to look for his beloved stolen bicycle. He was told that his bike is in the basement of the Alamo, so he buys a ticket for the tour. The effervescent and irrepressible tour guide, Tina, (played by Jan Hooks) goes into a description of the Alamo as a visibly impatient Pee-Wee attempts to contain his anxiety as they view different rooms. But the gem…the ABSOLUTE GEM of a line is when they make it to the kitchen where Tina begins to talk about corn. The line is “There are thousands and THOUSANDS of uses for corn, all of which I will tell you about right now!”

And here is where Pee-Wee Herman and I merge into one being. The absolute annoyance, irritation, and dare I say disgust at having to wait for what we came for is very real. Pee-Wee just wanted to see the freaking basement. He didn’t want to hear twenty thousand ways to prepare corn. I just want to see a recipe before I give up and decide to eat a stale bag of Cheerios that have somehow been around, opened, since Halloween. (It’s March.)

I honestly thought this trend would slowly fade away but it’s only gotten much worse, especially with the rise of AI use in blogging. Am I the only one who can sniff out an AI written/assisted blog? It’s like that robotic woman’s voice that was so popular on memes a few years back. It’s human-esque, but creepy and…insincere.

I want to start a trend. Let’s get back to online recipe simplicity. Post a nice picture or two, a few sentences, and get that recipe back to the top, where it belongs!

I hereby declare war on the recipe novels!

End note: Many, many thanks to the awesome soul who created the above image!

Yes, I am about to hit you with a first-world problem. Yes, it is petty and silly but I just wanted to throw this out in the world and see what you think. Let’s create the scenario:

You look at the clock and it’s close to 5pm. “Crap! I haven’t EVEN thought about supper. Better find a recipe,” you say to yourself. You have chicken thawed in the fridge (miraculously…I know this never really happens, but play along), and you are hormonal, so you want something creamy, full of cheese, and at least 7,000 calories per serving. Your Google search brings up several pages of yummy sounding dishes, and you click on one that sounds tasty: “Maw Maw’s Secret Never-Fail Creamy Cheesy Crunchy Super-Easy Baked Chicken”.

It is on a “mommy blog” kind of a blog site, which all great, but as soon as the page loads, you realize you have a problem. The title of the page may be “Maw Maw’s Secret Never-Fail Creamy Cheesy Crunchy Super-Easy Baked Chicken”, but directly below the title, there is no recipe. Just words. A lot of words.

In fact, it is a ten chapter story about how Great-great-great-great-great grandmother Maw Maw created this recipe in the latter part of Colonial times and fed it to the early settlers where it was supposed to have saved an entire village following an outbreak of smallpox. She then passed it on to Great-great-great-great grandmother Mildred, who brought it to a potluck after the signing of the Constitution, where Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin both declared that it was the best thing they had ever eaten. Some years later, Great-great-great grandmother Maypearl was able to save the famous recipe from the hands of the Union soldiers by smuggling it in a secret compartment in her hatpin. Later, the recipe was served at various family functions, saved lives, and was sworn to secrecy and only released upon Grandmother Minnie’s death in 1987.

Interestingly enough, the recipe includes 2 cans of cream of chicken soup, a “99 cent bag of Doritos”, a box of Velveeta (cubed), and a brick of cream cheese. But who am I to be asking these kinds of questions?

It all started for me after reading The Pioneer Woman’s blog years ago. At first, I looked forward to her close-up photos of melting butter, cheesy strands of deliciousness as it was being served, and gooey, creamy dessert goodness. But after a while, the number of photos increased. The story grew in length, and suddenly EVERYONE in the blog world was standing two inches from their cast iron skillets with their Rebel DSLR camera to grab that perfect macro shot of a stick of butter dissolving into a lovely yellow pool. Look, I’m not knocking the woman, after all, she made a mint off of her posts, but enough is enough and I’m certainly not picking on dear Ree. But sheesh. Recipe novellas just need to die. It’s five o’clock, I’m hangry and hormonal, and if I don’t find that recipe (and after reading all of that you had BETTER put it into a print-friendly format!), I am gonna throw this laptop between two sliced of (heavily buttered) bread and eat it.

Something else of note is that I’m sorry, but Paula Deen and the like didn’t pull these recipes out of thin air. They have made a fortune on reprinting the exact same recipes that I can get out of my Junior League of Fussybottom/Possum Holler Full Gospel Baptist Church/Coonlick County Electric Co-op fundraising cookbooks.

Now I’m off to my cookbooks to find something that calls for Doritos, a cream soup, and 2 sticks of butter. See ya!