No tomatoes, please

So, apparently, Gordom Ramsay is even gettin in on the whole quick meal craze. Here’s a really interesting story I found on slate.com about his new quick cookbook. It brings up some interesting points about how the recipes completely don’t translate over to American palettes (blood sausage in less than half an hour, anyone? yum), and how American armchair cooks won’t even bother trying the recipes anyway, opting to instead look at all those purty pictures and drool. I don’t do the whole recipe thing, and though I have some cookbooks, I really don’t care about looking at pretty pictures.

Can I just say though, that as long as there are plenty of pictures of Ramsay, I might be in the market for a new cookbook. Seriously, I know this dude is kind of a total douche bag, but look at the man! He’s beautiful. And on the show on BBC where he transforms failing restaurants in a week, there’s always a lovely shot of him with his shirt off while he’s changing into his chef’s jacket.

Even though he’s super mean, I really like that he encourages people that he really believes in, and even though he’s definitely got the tough love going on, you know when he’s nice to you that he really means it and that it means more to the person to have impressed someone with such impossibly high standards. Also, he’s super hot. The fact that he curses like a sailor only makes him more attractive.

So, cookbook. Warm blood sausage in 30 minutes? No. Gordon Ramsay for half an hour? Yes, please.

Man, I think I just realized the completely obscene amount of food blogs that exist on this here interweb. I mean, I’ve always known there were a lot of people out there writing about their food exploits, but it’s suddenly just hit me that there about, oh, 6 million Web sites out there with recipes and ridiculous pictures, and people commenting about how gorgeous the photography is, and how much they want to make that dish.

Today I plucked up the courage to again visit delicious:days, the crazy food Web site of a lady in Munich who makes beautiful Web sites and beautiful food that she takes beautiful pictures of. Honestly, this lady makes me feel like a complete failure, what with her “50 Coolest Websites” award from Time magazine and her BOOK DEAL and her really cool, easily navigable site. Damnit. Not that I’m expecting to be that awesome right out of the gate, mind you, but honestly, I feel like I could never get there.

Then, I kinda realized that I don’t really want my Web site to be like hers, because that’s not really even what I’m going for. I mean, I’m not out there to give recipes with crazy close-ups of the corner of whatever artfully disheveled dish I’ve made. Honestly, I rarely, if ever, use recipes, and only for crazy things that I know I can’t just wing, like bearnaise sauce or candy-souffle-cake or something. So why would I be kinda hypocritical and totally untrue to myself by putting a blog out there that consists of mostly recipes? I wouldn’t, which is why I’m not going to.

I’m really attempting to do a little more than that here, and though I have yet to really settle into what I’m trying to do, I’m working on it, and hopefully soon I can make it there when I stop being a lazyass and feeling bad because I don’t take beautiful pictures of amazing dishes. Can I just say that cropping and resizing pictures in Photoshop is a total pain in the ass, especially if I’m trying to do like, 10 of them, and trying to crop out the blurry part when all I really want to do is write. But I do the pictures because I like to have something more to look at, and I’d like to think that they are endearingly terrible in a funny way. Maybe?

Unlike most food bloggers out there, who have other careers first, and just happen to write about the stuff they make for dinner, I’m a writer. That’s what I am. That’s what I want to do with my life. And writing about food makes me just about as happy as cooking and eating. I want to have crazy food adventures and explore the crazy and not-so-crazy stuff that people stick in their mouths. I want to delve into more than just writing down a recipe, and, above all, I want to be funny. And recipes are just not funny. I’m sorry, it’s a truth. I think they tried recipes a few years ago on SNL, but it didn’t go over so well. Will Ferrell kept tryin’ to improv and just throw crap in willy nilly, and the dishes just never came out right.

So, OK, I’m going to stop feeling bad about myself because I don’t make these ridiculous dishes randomly for dinner and take ridiculous pictures, because I’m way more than that, and it’s gonna be awesome. I always knew that Rachael Ray was so obscenely famous, not because she can cook, or is cute or funny or is some sort of culinary genius, it’s because she had a hell of a gimmick and she milked that baby all the way to the bank and up Oprah’s ass. So, I guess I need a gimmick. Hot and funny. Ooh! And being a picky eater. We’ll go with that one. Yeeeah.