Down The Rabbit Hole: Trying Not to Fall In While Looking Up A Recipe On The Internet

I sat on the couch and opened my computer to find a recipe I had saved “somewhere.”

Had I saved it by sending it to myself as an email attachment? Maybe I had done the aforementioned and remembered to move it into my folder named “Recipes” as part of my email coordination to keep my emails more orderly?  

Let me check there first. Nope, didn’t move it as I had hoped.

Maybe I found it in the NYT and “saved” it in the fake recipe box they set up for the convenience of their readers to keep the thousands of recipes we peruse in a neat place (that is as long as we keep the $100 per month subscription active).

Ahhh, there it is. Found it. I had saved it in the “recipe” file from an email. Phew.
I felt a sense of relief wash over me since I planned on making it soon and needed to double check the ingredients.

Let me see if I can find the Cardamon Rugalach recipe I set aside from Melissa Clark. Gratefully, I found that one with ease. At the end of the recipe I noticed an article called, Baking Cookbooks That (Gently) Push the Limits, mmm let me click on that. Melissa Clark doing her wonderful analysis of some baking cookbooks, one called, The Violet Bakery Cookbook by Claire Ptak, including a recipe for gooey brownies made with rye flour.

The recipe looked simple enough. I have rye flour from some recipe in another cookbook I planned making last month. Unopened, it sat waiting for me to try this new recipe. 

Maybe I will try them this week, I thought.

Scrolling past that I came upon another cookbook reminding me of my trip to Copenhagen to visit some friends. Scandinavian Baking: Loving Baking at Home by Trine Hahnemann, a Danish author.

Oh, how I loved Copenhagen, my mind longingly wandered back to that visit.
Let me buy it so I can make some surprise Danish for my pseudo brother friend who is from Denmark.

Only one left, $40.00, the Amazon cart said. A familiar rush flooded over me.

I must have this cookbook now.

I had no intention of buying anything when I sat down at my computer. Mindless shopping has reprogrammed my brain and taken it hostage.

Placing the two cookbooks in the cart, I moved on to some other articles that grabbed my clearly and easily distracted, short attention span attention.

Raspberry Rose Rugalach, As I sat on the couch curled up by the fire,  I remembered that I am out of rosewater, without getting up, my mind traveled to my pantry for a brief inventory.

My busy brain thought, Those look so yummy to make for my Hanukkah party. Will I have time to drive to the Lebanese bakery to pick some up this morning? I actually considered this, albeit brief.It was Christmas Eve morning and I had to be at work in less than two hours.

Wait, let me see if I can find the rosewater online to hold me over until I can get to the bakery. Outrageously priced, I kept scrolling down until I came upon what I knew was a more palpable cost.

Added to the cart, I decided to wait and see if I needed anything else before placing the order. Somehow I found another link that brought me to Rosemary Shortbread which then brought me to the Ten Easiest Shortbread Recipes.

How convenient, I just bought a shortbread pan! (on impulse, I know you are surprised here).  I will add this recipe to my recipe box so I can make them too.

At this rate, between the vast quantity of cookbooks I own, the recipes saved from my inbox, the cuttings from food sections over the last ten years and all the recipes I have accumulated from family members will surely outlive me.

When I am gone, my poor son will sift through the recipe mass and not recognize a most of them since the likelihood of me making even a tenth of them is, well, unlikely. Perhaps he can lay my body on the bed of recipes and give the cookbooks away as parting gifts to my friends at my funeral so they don’t go to total waste, like my mind from all of these links and clicking and printing.

Wasn’t adding recipes to the internet supposed to make our time in the kitchen so much easier?

Not for me.

The links are like gotchas along the otherwise soothing path of reading a good solid recipe.

My plan was to simply look for two recipes. Instead I purchased two cookbooks, a bottle of rosewater, and spent over an hour instead of what should have been less than five minutes in my real recipe box.

The links sent me down the rabbit hole and I couldn’t remember how I got there  or find my way back.

This is reading on the internet versus reading an actual cookbook or a newspaper. I fear this is only the beginning - AI hasn’t even entered in a way I don’t want to even imagine.

My 27 year old son would say, Mom, this is to make things easier, more convenient. I suppose there is some truth to this. Will his generation and generations after even read recipes from cookbooks? 

Is this really a time saver or is it a wolf in sheep’s clothing that easily becomes a time sucker? 

I am a curious soul and everything I don’t know is so potentially interesting and fascinating. All these links seem to be just distractions to get me to buy buy buy, distract, distract, distract.

As I end this year of 2024, the last year of my fifties, as I head to that lovely 60, I have a few goals, and one is to be more deliberate with my time. I want to physically shut off my phone and put away my laptop when I am anywhere near the kitchen.

I need to discipline myself and consciously turn off the digital noise that so easily causes my brain to distract.

I want to pay attention to what is causing me to only take in short bite sized sentences rather than bask in the pages of words and recipes.

I want to open my cookbooks, place the real hardcover and its pages on my recipe stand clipping the page with a clothes pin to hold it in place.  I want to watch the butter and chocolate melt and allow it to drip and smudge on the pages while it leaves its indelible imprint of rich smells and delicious memories of time spent with myself.

(No links are included in this piece today. I know it is not a good choice for algorithms and google searches, but adding links adds so much distraction not only to the reader but to the writer. The time it takes to add links behind the scenes is abhorrent. I feel free already.