food blogs: a wellspring of rage

Google “allergy-free bagels” and you’ll find a parade of misformed, roundish blobs, poorly resembling bagels, but uncannily resembling abandoned inner-tubes. One blog in particular boasts its Frankenstinian creation in eight different pictures; each nearly-identical photo is pressed between filler text with brilliant statements like “who doesn’t love a good bagel?” and nearly pornographic descriptions ruining childhood favorites like “their chewy gooey sensation against your taut tongue...”. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper food blog without a touching story about their childhood, aimed to tug at the heartstrings of their banal readership! This sort of trite crap is typical for food blogs, and is the reason why I and so many other hangry home cooks feel the hot rush of rage every time we click on one.

Our deepest desire when perusing these blogs is to find a dish that will touch our grey, lackluster worlds with color and vibrance, something that will remind us why being alive is so great.  So why make it easy to find this life-changing recipe, when you can make things tedious, nearly painful, with a dozen pictures of the same gluten-free, crumbly cookie squashed between lines and lines about the ancient history of cookies? It’s like the mandatory hour wait before entering a ride at Disneyland: you stand there, making idle chit chat with your troop, while the haggard parents behind you ignore the desperate cries of their screaming children arguing over something stupid, like who can jump higher, or whose farts smell worse.  All you want is to get on the damn ride, and maybe as a secondary desire, you'd like those kids to stuff their yelling pie-holes with overpriced cotton candy.

Once I’ve waded through an exorbitant amount of of boring tales from a gluten-free kitchen, I finally reach the recipe and my rage subsides, only to be re-kindled in the comments section. This section of food blogs is usually filled with endless ass kissing and false sincerity. “OMG this looks SO GOOD” says Alice from Boring, Oregon. “I just can’t wait to try this recipe!” and “Wow, you are a life saver Sharon, this is exactly what I need for my vegan vampires club meetup!” Five stars for Sharon, and you haven’t even tried the goddamn crumbly mess of a recipe.

Then, there are those who did try the recipe, but didn’t have “Potato starch on hand” so they used “buckwheat instead” or some obviously nonequivalent ingredient as a replacement. This is usually followed by complaints of “Your recipe didn’t turn out! It was a disaster! Thanks a lot for wasting my whole afternoon on this!” except she would spell “wasting” as “waisting” and use all caps, and all the meanwhile not at all equating her failure to her inability to follow instructions.  I immediately switch sides and commiserate with the food blogger for having to deal with these morons.

Not long after this comment, there is usually another person, who at least asks about nonequivalent ingredient changes before ruining their afternoon, asking things like, “Sharon, I don’t have any salt on hand, can I use baby’s tears instead?” -- XOXO Bethany

I imagine Sharon reading this with an exhausted sigh, her head falling into to her hand as she closes her eyes and focuses on the glorious abyss before her, the one that she wishes Bethany would fall into.  She raises her head with dignity and returns to her keyboard and bravely answers “Hi Bethany, well, unfortunately I’ve never used baby tears in this recipe, so I don’t know, but I think you would have to use a higher volume of tears than salt, and decrease your liquid content. I would try ¼ c baby’s tears, and then decrease the milk by 1/4c. Let us know how it turns out, and good luck!”

She rolls her eyes and takes a deep drink of her coffee and says “You’ll need all the luck you can get, you crazy bitch.”