apsies in the kitchen

“ In the typical high-end food magazine story, a writer travels to an exotic locale, gets exclusive access to an exclusive restaurant or master chef’s kitchen, obtains a closely guarded ancient recipe for a complicated dish, which she then executes flawlessly back in her own kitchen. On a typical food-blog entry, the blogger returns from a frustrating day at the office, deals with a crisis involving his cat, turns to the uninspiring assortment of items in his pantry (middle-aged eggplants, a single, forlorn-looking tangerine, cumin), and then, with the help of several cookbooks, cobbles together a tangerine-scented Moroccan eggplant couscous that he enjoys with a bottle of beer and some Tivo-ed reruns of House. If the popularity of food blogs is any indication, our current vision of ourselves, as preparers and consumers of meals, is not as kitchen pros who can magically make the complicated look effortless, but as bumbling amateurs who can miraculously pull together a meal that actually tastes good. Gourmet billed itself as the magazine of good living, implying that by the time you had the means and inclination to subscribe to a glossy food magazine, you had the living part down, and now were ready to improve upon what was already working well. It assumed readers possessed a mandoline, a passport, and a working knowledge of Portuguese. The napkins in your pantry not only were cloth, they also matched, were clean, and had even been ironed. Food blogs, by comparison, assume that for readers, life itself is a daily work in progress.

— How Food Blogs Led to the Demise of Gourmet