Why I Prefer Cookbooks to Online Recipes

I consider myself fortunate to have grown up cooking new recipes from cookbooks. These days food photos and recipes dominate the internet, with very few good ones to be found. Most recipes seem to be carbon copies done over and over, saying the same thing. Once I wade through the advertisements on the page and finally see the actual ingredients, I’ve lost interest.

Does Everyone Really Own a Food Processor?

I love to find a nice recipe and then discover the meal was made with the help of a food processor. I’m kidding. I don’t love it.

Recently I was looking for a recipe to give me ideas about what to do with some cauliflower and mushrooms I happened to have. Was there a recipe that used both? Yes, some sort of Bolognese which, according to the recipe required all kinds of work, including using the food processor numerous times.

These days when I search for a recipe, I am usually looking for ideas and not specific directions. I’ve been cooking long enough to know the basics. Except for beginner cooks, I can’t understand why people need to follow recipes to the letter.

Which brings me to the next gripe.

Don’t Trust All / Most Recipe Blogs

Aside from the long, advertisement filled pages of recipe blogs, many times the recipes themselves are simply not that good. Some say to add salt at every turn. Some list ingredients which really don’t go together. And many make cooking and baking much more difficult than it needs to be. They lead you to believe that they are sharing their own secret ideas for success.

Let’s face it, most food bloggers are writing to make money. We all have to eat, and mostly love looking at pretty pictures of food, so bloggers have that going for them. They will link to food items, kitchen utensils, and pots and pans while kindly sharing their recipe (which is just a copy of everyone else’s). They make money off those links, and the massive amount of ads which appear on the page. I don’t fault them for that, just the massive overdoing of it.

But do we believe that these bloggers make their own recipes? I suppose some do, but others sound so bizarre and awful, I can’t believe it. Their cutesy way of writing should not distract from the real reason the page was created.

Dig Out the Old Cookbook First

Because of all the moving I’ve done in my life, I no longer have many “things”, but one thing I have kept is my old cookbooks, namely Betty Crocker. Usually I check here first when making a recipe.

It’s falling apart and as you can see the front was burned by a hot stove coil at some point, but it still holds some wonderful recipes which I still use.

Granted, it’s old fashioned. I don’t use “lard” to make anything, and fondue is a bit unpopular these days, but tried and true cakes, cookies, pies and casseroles made from this book are still the best basic recipes out there. No food processors necessary!

Bloggers have to have a lot of words on their pages for indexing and search engine optimization. That’s why they go on and on about all kinds of boring things when you first land on their pages. We hear about their hubbies, kids and baking mistakes, and blah blah… until we finally get down to the actual recipe.

But, open a cookbook, and there you have it, the recipe ready to follow.

Okay, okay… I realize that most younger people probably don’t have old, faithful cookbooks to follow. I’m just saying be careful of which recipe blogs you choose to use.

Thanks to Pixabay.com for the food images on this page.