Commence rant.
Alright, I have a bone to pick. There is something that’s been gnawing at me for a while and this past weekend it finally came to a head. I was browsing the internet, looking for appetizer recipes trying to find something that I could bring to a cookout. I kept going back and forth between my favorite two recipe websites: Epicurious and Food Network.
I was consistently discouraged, because I was making one vital mistake in my search for the perfect recipe: I was reading the online reviews and comments.
Now, as a blogger, I love comments and commenters. Seriously, I didn’t even realize just how amazing it would be to get comments until I started doing this whole blogging thing. Now, they are like crack to me. I don’t even have a problem with all the people spreading negativity over the web in blog comments. I’m pretty much doing it in this post, so I don’t want to be a big hypocrite. What I do have a problem with is people who decide to make a recipe, change ingredients or don’t follow instructions, and then completely slam it in the comments and reviews.
Being a notorious recipe doctorer myself, I don’t blame people for tweaking recipes to their own liking. I do, however, have a problem when they do this and then decry the recipe as a bad one. It seems like every recipe I went to had comments from people who thought the recipe was just horrible, the worst one they had ever tried… oh, and by the way, they substituted five ingredients, baked something that was supposed to be grilled, and left out another two ingredients. It’s great that people want to voice their opinions, but really, until you learn how to follow a recipe, I don’t want to read yours.
I found myself falling into the trap of dismissing countless recipes because of something one commenter said. Finally, I let my normally over-inflated ego take charge and decided that I know better than any of these anonymous cooks.
In closing, I would like to encourage everyone to try recipes that they find online, and by all means, please leave a comment. If you leave out some ingredients, though, or skip steps, keep your opinion to yourself.
End rant. Sorry.
Clacked by Bob Degon
on Sep 10, 2009 @ 10:00 EST5EDT
