I Like Recipe Stories

 I like it when I find a recipe online and there's a story at the beginning of it. There I said it. Cooking is a social task! Learning about the recipes that bring people comfort in bad times or remind someone of an exciting moment in their life feels really special, even intimate. For that reason I find it really beautiful when I find a recipe online with a cute story at the start. 

It's one of the reasons I love getting the Cook's Illustrated magazine. There's always a spread with a nice recipe and the author's experiences with the recipe! Here's a page from the most recent issue with a crab rangoon recipe. 

Along with a straightforward recipe, there's a whole article on the history of the dish and the author's personal connection with it. I love it! Cooking is a social activity and it feels so cold and wrong to simply pull a recipe online. It's lovely to hear why the author liked it, or their experiences in cooking it.

That isn't to say its always good. Many times the sections preceding a recipe are SEO slop, with headers like "easy [recipe name]" immediately followed by a header like "[recipe name] for dinner" with essentially the same information under it. I'm not a fan of those, it makes the recipe feel robotic and alien. It's the same with AI generated recipes, but respectfully if you are asking a chatbot for a recipe it may be too late for you.

Completely aside I was looking at my camera roll for photos of food and I realized I have a truly insane number of photos of dunkin cups.

  

dunking donuts 

It's snowing a little today, I watched the Smosh reddit stories and traveled far away to get my cat a very specific flavor of food because she will not eat anything else. I love her. Thank you for reading, I think this is a week of blog posts. Wherever you are reading from I hope you are having a lovely day!