Too Many Recipes

I keep seeing more and more cooking recipes in my newspaper and on line. Maybe this is the 'Age of the Recipe'. On the whole people have always liked and shared recipes among themselves. But in the age of instant information it seems the recipe is away of one upping the other person. That's because today's recipe is often unrecognizable to most of us. Whereas in former times one pork recipe, for example, was similar to the next, now we have the most weird versions of the same dishes.

This year's magazine web site or newspaper recipe for cooking that pork often has a list of ingredients, so rare, that the cook would practically have to break and enter someone's rare ingredient store to find what's in the dish.  Want to make a trendy dessert, add aceroli (it's a rare fruit). Today's mushroom omelet recipe is likely to insist you use enoki mushrooms. Where would I find that? You think a mushroom omelet would be inedible if a more common mushroom were substituted? I should ask a French chef that one. On the other hand, I have no desire to be attacked  by a chef who is wielding a meat clever.

You get the idea. Today's recipes have a multitude of trendy and rare ingredients, which may or may not affect the taste of the recipe when constructed.  But I guess the people who write those recipes need to make them weird in order to make them look interesting enough for the publication to buy and use them in their magazine, newspaper or on their web site. I am suspicious enough to think those recipe writers are probably never themselves using any of those ingredients when they cook. In fact, I suspect they probably consist on a hamburger and french fry diet. They probably dine at Mc Donald's.

Many of the new, proliferating and useless recipes I see are diet or......horrors...."health food" recipes. I always close the publication in disgust when I see those. The notion that quinoa, chia seeds and the rest of those foul tasting, new age, food fouling substances will never pass my lips. Yet, because they see themselves as enlightened if they use bad tasting ingredients when cooking, some people love to cook with those kinds of ingredients. If you see any of those folks in a kitchen and are offered an opportunity to sample their food creations, just smile and say you just ate fast food pizza for lunch. If you are lucky, the cook will have a heart attack that will render them unable to ever cook again.

New recipes are fun, but only is they are created with real ingredients and taste good. Everything else is just a rancid basket full of chia seeds.