pan roasted cauliflower

i made this thing last week. my mom had a head of cauliflower she didn't feel like using and i was happy to take free food and also food that would drive decisions about what to make in my house because sometimes i just don't know what to make and end up having ramen because by the time i think of what i might feel like cooking, the hour to start cooking has long past.

so i made that thing. i didn't take any lovely pictures of it because it's just not that attractive in the dish plus i'm not really into food styling. i am starting to be annoyed these days when i just want to look at a recipe and i have to wade through  gallery of pictures that include artfully positioned hardboiled eggs and peels scattered on some twee little kitchen linens and HOLY COW, COULD YOU JUST MAYBE COOK THE THING?

pictures are very nice as is a cute little narrative about how sweet and sunshiny life is in your fabulously stylish home, but i just start to feel like i'm thumbing through the williams-sonoma-martha-stewart-event-planner catalog.

let's face it ladies, there are a limited number of eyeballs out there just looking for a nice recipe and mostly you're just elbowing each other out of the way to be more specialer than each other while you reblog the good recipes and invent "stunning new creations" and let me tell you: if in 60,000 years nobody has ever thought to put those two foods together, there is probably a reason WHY.

i think what i'm saying is that content is suffering.

a couple of years ago i found a recipe for a thing that was good. i liked that i could just look it up on the interwebs when i wanted to make it. but apparently it was "discovered" by the lifestyle bloggers and now if you look up this recipe, you get a dozen versions of it, all meticulously photographed and accompanied by a moving and sunny life story to give it MEANING.

only the meaning i'm looking for is here is a food. it is tasty. here is how you can make it. here are parts of the recipe that can be changed and here are parts that are important. in case you have leftovers, it does/does not freeze well.

yes, i'm fine with an actual narrative about your life and your cooking, but by golly i can sniff out the real deal from smarmily troweled on sunshine commentaries designed not to communicate, but to build readership. one makes me care about you, and the other makes me roll my eyes and start writing a diatribe about what's wrong with lifestyle blogging.

i do not care how it looked on your st. swithin's day party table. i do not care how special you felt when you were thinking of how your mom used to make something that was tangentially related. i do not care how popular you feel you are going to be for rewriting a perfectly fine recipe in a cute font and writing a novella about the thought process that led you to cook it.

and just take this as an example. it looks like a decent enough recipe, but i don't think i want to take cooking advice from someone who apparently has THAT much trouble peeling eggs.

there are basically two kinds of bloggers: ones who are trying to communicate something, and ones who are trying to manufacture a large following.

follow me! tell all your fiends to follow me! the second group will shriek. when i have enough people following, i'll really start to write stuff!

they don't realize they have it sort of backward there.

look, as a reader, i am STARVED for good original content. starved.

oh.

and the pan roasted cauliflower? it is very good. and it's good leftover.