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By Caroline Mora
As a part of my 2025 goals, I’ve decided to start learning more recipes and improving my cooking abilities. To do that, I began sourcing recipes from online cooking blogs and so far, my new meals have been super fun to make and just plain tasty.
Cooking is a necessary life skill and as I approach my 18th birthday, I’ve made it my mission to ensure I’m prepared for adulthood and collecting recipes like Pokémon Cards is one way I’ve chosen to do so.
I just want the recipe. That’s all I ask. Why must I trudge through a swamp of emotionally charged context and backstory to get to the ingredients list? I didn’t come here to read about why MeeMaw passed this recipe on to you or how many compliments you got on your dish during Thanksgiving.
If I wanted to read about the very graphic tragedy that made you want to tweak this classic meatloaf recipe, then I would’ve gone to a personal blog, not a recipe blog.
And by the way, I don’t think that adding celery to your meatloaf warrants a whole new blog post. That’s something you tell your friends to try and then you wait patiently for them to make the recipe your way and then years go by and you wonder, desperate to know if they ever tried it.
Most respectfully, I don’t need to read about how many kids you have, how many hours you work, or how the pain in your back gets worse by the day. Just stating that the recipe is quick to make and feeds a lot of people gets the job done.
There are tons of instances, like in a TikTok or a YouTube video, where I would love to just read someone’s opinion or listen to storytime, but I’m never looking for that in a cooking blog.
But of course, you don’t have to click, “jump to the recipe” if you don’t want to. Reading the blog post or skipping it doesn’t make you any better of a person, everyone has their own internet preferences. And even if a food blogger writes a multi-chapter story before their recipe, it doesn’t diminish the recipe’s value either.
Read it, or don’t. Write it, or don’t. I don’t care. I just wanna cook.