Good Recipes vs. Bad Recipes

While we try to give Elmwood Stock Farm CSA members recipe ideas in their CSA newsletter each week and farmers market customers recipe ideas in our occasional e-newsletter, we know that not every recipe will appeal to every person and that you’ll want to look around for more ideas. Finding good recipes—versus recipes that really need improvement—is sometimes more challenging than you’d think it should be. Stumble upon a few bad recipes in a row, and you might get frustrated and question your own cooking abilities. So we want you to have good recipe-searching experiences!

The Internet offers endless recipe ideas, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Between a general Internet search, food blogs and Pinterest, you can spend a whole day just looking at recipes and getting no actual cooking done. There are some delicious and creative recipes to be found, but because anyone can put any set of ingredients and instructions online and call it a recipe, it’s important to vet the recipes before you start cooking.

Read the whole recipe, start to finish, including the ingredients list. It’s easy to glance at a recipe and think, “OK, got it”—and then realize the recipe is more complicated than you first thought, describes a step that makes no sense or calls for an ingredient that you don’t have.

If you are getting the recipe from a blog, read the blog storyline. There are hints of to how to do this recipe. You might find out that the author actually bought frozen spinach and you need to cook your spinach before getting into the main dish, for example.

Learn from others’ mistakes by reading the recipe comments. It may be that a bunch of people think the recipe is too salty, found it needed to cook longer, or added more garlic and loved it.

If you’re using a cookbook rather than an Internet recipe, you don’t have the benefit of reading others’ experiences. Still, read the whole recipe backstory, ingredients list and instructions before you begin.

Finally, only use this recipe as a guide. Your kitchen appliances and your food tastes are different than everyone else’s, so adjust cooking times and swap ingredients as you’d like. The more creative you can become in your cooking, the more you will enjoy it and the less you’ll stress about finding recipes.

Please send us your favorite recipes so that we may share them with our CSA members, customers and friends. Also, follow us on Pinterest, as we pin recipes for you to find there, as well.