Meaghan's Blog

So a little while ago Mom and I picked up a small box of books from the library in a sale they were having. I picked up old books like I usually do. We paid $8 for them, the money we’d gotten from taking the bottles back to the redemption centre, since it was by donation. When we got back home I looked at them a little more closely, I looked them up online if some had no date on them, and there were two German books (and one about learning German), another novel from the same guy who wrote Das Schweigen Im Walde, and one with songs. I didn’t look at the songs very closely, and from glancing it looked like German, especially after seeing the German foreword, until some days later I looked the title up in Google Translate:

‘One Hundred Eskimo Songs’ (complete with a German foreword!)

I don’t know a lot about the people up north, but this is the first I’ve heard of them reading German. I found out the songs are traditional German songs translated into Eskimo, and only one person is selling a copy, which has no picture, for $195 dollars. It is dated as 1872 in two places, but it’s in extremely good condition if that’s the case. I noticed yesterday that you can see the bumps from letters on the previous page, possibly from being embossed letters. Dad suggested it was probably a souvenir for a family and was in a special case, so nobody ever read it, explaining why there’s really no damage to it. (Picture here!)

Other good books I picked up were two copies of  History of the British Empire. One looks like it was hardly used and the other has all kinds of damage, including missing pages and pages falling out and it’s really soiled. The copyright says 1865 (!), but it’s possible it could be younger than that. The copies look the same from a glance, but both of them have some slight differences with the cover and what color it is, so maybe the one in better condition is not as old. (More pictures!)

Today I was making Lemon Shortbread and came across a flaw or two with the recipe, one I’d gotten off of a food blog. It took vanilla, and you know how brown that is, right? So of course I didn’t think of this before I put a teaspoon of it in the dough. Something I noticed was the fact the directions never mentioned this vanilla, and neither did the food blogger. In fact, her cookies looked bright and yellow and very not brown. I always automatically put a teaspoon of vanilla into a recipe, because it’s always listed that as that much. Imagine my surprise when I re-read that there was supposed to be a tablespoon of vanilla in the cookies. What??? (also: why not put lemon juice in lemon shortbread?)

Sadly, this happens all too often. Baking times are left out, ingredients magically go nowhere, and wrong amounts are put in the recipe. I sometimes forget when writing a recipe, too, but I usually always catch it. Somehow, I always seem to be the only one who ever notices, because everyone in the comments says how great it looks, I loved the recipe, I’m trying this sometime, and things like that. More than once I’ve left a comment to correct people, and countless other times have just left it alone.

What I’m starting to realize more and more is that food bloggers aren’t as good as they think they are. I’ve always felt that old, tried, and true recipes were hands-down the best out there, rather than the by-product of someone experimenting in the kitchen with in some cases limited experience on cooking. I’m not an expert, but once you make cookies and cakes and other desserts so many times, there aren’t any surprises left and half of the time, I don’t even read directions. It’s easy to tell when a recipe just isn’t right, and sometimes I don’t find out until it’s too late.

A while back I once read on a food blog that the person who was writing trusted food bloggers more than (I can’t remember what it was anymore) because they had experience in the kitchen and their recipes were guaranteed to be good, or along those lines. I’m finding it the exact opposite and I’m tired of it. It isn’t because they use chocolate constantly and I’m not a huge fan, as a lot of people know, and not because I don’t like really sweet things. I think every once in a while I come across a great recipe, but I don’t think I’ve used more than one or two recipes from the internet more than once, and another one I had to change.

And lastly, there’s the sort of mind set they have. It’s hard to describe, but it’s sort of to do with their love of everything chocolate and things sweet enough to put you in a coma, or one person (the blogger) calling something they made ‘the best’ and everyone else seeming to feel the same (except me). It reminds me of when Mom gets mad at sewing blogs or craft blogs. They’ll discover something ‘new’ and everyone will ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ over it, but Mom will tell me how long the technique has been around for years or decades.

Well, that’s it for food bloggers for me. I don’t have anything personal against them, I just really can’t take bad recipes anymore.

So now Mom doesn’t have to upload my pictures on to her Flickr. Yay!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/46472989@N08/

Dad doesn’t laugh hard very often. He usually just chuckles at things or smiles, but you know it’s really funny when you hear him laughing. Here’s an example from a month or two ago.

(On Mythbusters) And last but not least, Kari will try making diamonds out of coal, a microwave, and peanut butter.
(There’s a pause)
Dad bursts out laughing.