"Oh heavens no..."
One of my favorite shows is The Simpsons, long may it reign on Sunday nights, and one of my very favorite episodes involved Bart sitting with Mrs. Skinner after he's done a chore for her and is waiting to be paid. I think she pays him in ribbon candy. Anyway, she's showing him an album of photos of cakes that she's cut out of magazines and cookbooks. He asks her if she ever ate any of those cakes and she replies, "Oh heavens no..."
This is a long way of saying that I loooooove reading recipes in magazines, cookbooks, newspapers, and online but I never make any of them. I love pictures too, especially when the cooks show the ingredients and steps they take, not merely the finished product. I love watching cooking shows on television, especially PBS which has loads of old Julia Child-Jacques Pepin episodes. I love travel shows that involve cooking like Anthony Bourdain and Man Vs. Food. I love Gordon Ramsay's shows like Kitchen Nightmares (the British version is best) and Hell's Kitchen and I love reading restaurant reviews, even for places in cities and countries I will never visit. Ever. In my life.
But I rarely make anything more sophisticated than pasta with vegetables. I don't eat meat or cream sauces or dessert. And most nights of the week, I have a salad because I get home from class very late and don't want anything heavy before bed.
So why on earth am I a voyeur when it comes to food? I don't know. But here is a link to one of my very favorite recipe blogs, Smitten Kitchen. I actually did use a recipe from this site, a muffin recipe, I believe, and they came out great. Love the pictures, too.
