Recipes

I love the idea of finding recipes on line It is especially handy for is cooking recipes. One can find the good, bad, and ugly recipe on the net almost instantly. In fact, many of the cookbooks that we all use have some of their recipes posted on web sites throughout the internet. You might think the internet recipe search would make the cookbook obsolete, but it will never happen. People like to hold on to and display their cookbooks too much for that to occur.

Whenever I want to cook something and am not sure of an ingredient or to, or when I want to combine recipes or find an alternative way or ingredient I do search for recipes. The Food Network web site is a good one, as is allrecipes.com and many of the local Louisiana cooking web sites (I cook a great deal of New Orleans and Cajun/Creole dishes).

But there are some weird recipes on line that can discourage a cook from even going near the stove. Something like "Grilled Lamb Chops with Curried Couscous and Zucchini Raita". I think any self respecting zucchini would be embarrassed to have "raita" associated it. The more fancy words and the longer the name of the recipe or its ingredient list, the less likely it is to taste good. It's style over substance. You can bet that grilled lamb recipe will tell you to use "Greek Yogurt' or some obscure ingredient you don't have in the house and don't feel like searching the city to find.

Chefs and cookbook authors have to come up with new gimmicks to keep the interest of the people who buy their products. That's probably one reason they have weird food combinations in their recipes or weird recipes, something like 'Tofu Chocolate Fudge'. It's an insult to chocolate eaters to associate with tofu. they should feed the prisoners that dish, not the rest of us.
You can bet if the recipe they give has a picture of it that it will look better than it tastes. The pictures the photographer takes after the dish has been doctored or simulated looks unlike anything most people could cook. It always looks too good to be true. Ignore recipe photos and look at the ingredients when deciding whether to cook it. And if you see 25 recipes with one unusual ingredient posted, squash for instance, you can bet the web site is sponsored by a squash seller.

On reflection, maybe it's better to forget all those recipe web sites and just cook what mom and grandma did.