Heather Christena Schmidt

Am I the only one getting just a little bit sick and FUCKING TIRED of having to scroll through paragraph after paragraph of banter when I am looking for a good recipe on the Internet?

Seriously.

We get it.

You and Brad were celebrating your two year anniversary and you just knew you had to figure out how to replicate those scallops at home.

You were bored one rainy day and your little Cody – who you so originally nicknamed Buddy – was napping, so you thought you’d experiment with homemade ice-cream cake.

Girls Night Out has been a thing with you and your tribe for years, and you guys always get the best cosmopolitans on the town; so you thought you’d share your at-home recipe for a quarter of the cost of getting them out with your squad (note: you are probably too old to be calling your friends your squad).

You have a good story to tell about how you came about whatever the recipe is you have to share with us. That’s fucking lovely.

The rest of us have our own lives to live and would click just as much on your page if you just cut to the goddamn chase.

You also are absolutely certain that the people of the Internet wouldn’t understand a thing about your recipe if you didn’t photograph you doing each and every mundane step. Like when you say to stir the ingredients together, or to measure out a teaspoon of salt. People won’t know how the fuck to do that without your high quality, high resolution photographs that just – in my opinion – add more wasted time scrolling to the meat of the story (the actual recipe and ingredient list).

I have never done a recipe blog before because it would be something like this:

Open packet of chicken. Pour on BBQ sauce. Put in oven for I don’t know like an hour or some shit, until it’s over 165.

End of recipe.

That’s it, and frankly that’s all that is needed.

At the very least, you could spare us so many paragraphs of unnecessary information. It’s like you people have watched one too many episodes of Giadda At Home, where she regales us with all these useless, faux Italian-American stories about her life (but really, no one throws that many dinner parties); or when the Pioneer lady cracks an endless series of jokes about life with teenagers on the farm.

And if I hear Ina Garten talk about her fucking plants one more time, I swear to God…

I have a secret for you all: NO ONE CARES.

Honestly, I think it’s awesome that you all make recipes for good food. If you didn’t, my family and I would survive solely on packet of chicken with BBQ sauce in oven.

But I also think that there’s something to be said for brevity when it comes to sharing your talent.

Or pick an appropriate venue.

Statistically, the more a person has to click or scroll, the less likely they are to go all the way to your ads. It is therefore a win-win for us if you just shut the fuck up already on your website. Cut to the chase, like I did above with packet of chicken.

A better venue, I find, with recipes is a social media platform like Instagram. People don’t have to do much work on the reading-front, and it’s much easier for them to skip past all your bullshit, quaint stories if they just want to get, as I said, the meat.

I posted a recipe for Gooey Baked Apples on Instagram today and it was both sweary and click-through-able. I would never post more than this on my website. You shouldn’t either.

(Recipe below if you guys wanted it, in a better format than all the other long-winded bullshit I find on the Internet; bad news is there is a lot of scrolling because it’s ported over from Instagram…for my preferred venue to view all this and more, please follow my new Instagram @heatherwriteswords for more sweary fun.)