The "mommy blog" problem is real, I think a lot of it is people trying to create a brand for themselves, but honestly I don't care a bit about where you first tried this, who you met, what they were wearing or how your evening went. I also think that sometimes that's to do with copyright - it seems you may not be able to copyright just a recipe, but you can copyright all the rest of the narrative around it.
I'll check your site out...
There are badly written blogs, or manipulatively structured websites, but writing introductions per se isn't bad.
To be honest, the "mommy blog" epithet comes across as sexist to me.
No one would level that label at Kenji Lopez Alt or David Lebowitz but they use the same format:
https://www.seriouseats.com/classic-smashed-burgers-recipe
https://www.davidlebovitz.com/quiche-lorraine-recipe-recette...
You might object and say those are different because they're well-written and informative, but then isn't that my point?
There's nothing wrong with a "just the recipes" website — to each their own, and some things are useful in the right context. But there's also nothing wrong with a website that explains the recipes and tells a story along the way. You might not be interested, or it might not be that well-written, but that's the way written communication has always worked for eons.
When I'm looking for a way to cook a particular thing, the recipe is worth everything, and anything around it is simply a waste of my time and attention.
> No one would level that label at Kenji Lopez Alt or David Lebowitz but they use the same format. You might object and say those are different because they're well-written and informative
I'm absolutely not going to say they're different because they're well written and informative - if I'm just looking for the method and ingredients for a particular dish that I already know I want to cook, right now, which is 95%+ of my interaction with recipe websites, their text is equally useless and obstructive.
You're right 'mommy blog' might be the wrong term here, and may even be sexist, but it absolutely is a blog and honestly, I don't care. I'm here for the ingredients and mechanical instructions.
> there's also nothing wrong with a website that explains the recipes and tells a story along the way.
There's nothing 'wrong', it's not some grave sin to create such a thing, but it's certainly far less useful and not what I'm interested in.
> that's the way written communication has always worked for eons.
Sure, but I'm not looking for communication, I'm looking for a way to make quiche with as little distraction as possible. I'm making dinner, not reading your site for fun.
Some people like the format of food blogs, most people don't. Every single person I talk to about CookTime immediately mentions how they love there is no backstory, context, literary prose they have to scroll through to get to a recipe. We are already solving the problem of too much food blog text on a page.
In a transactional approach, I'm looking for the recipe; and just giving me the recipe (plus some useful tips for how to prepare the dish) is useful. "mommy blog" preamble is useless.
In a social approach.. food inherently exists in relation to people. -- Maybe it makes more sense in person to talk about the context of the meal you cooked, and it just doesn't translate to search engine result pages?
But I do that when I want to read something whimsical, informative or entertaining. 99% of the time, if I've found someone's cooking-blog it's because I want to cook something specific, right now!
I guess the annoyance is someone trying to sell me on one thing when I really want the other :)
Not to humiliate myself, but the level of visual boiler plates and JavaScript crap plagued on these run of the mill dynamic pages is akin to a porn site. And of course that's how high traffic sites operate, people want/need money. I look forward to aggregated recipe platforms. They're straight to the point and commentary is segregated. As others have said, recipes are usually not original content anyway.
I think there's a common preferrable layout for recipe pages and it goes:
Recipe > Instructions > Optional Summary
Search engines like it. That's the entire story.
There's good long-form recipe content, but nearly all of it's only there for SEO reasons. Most of these sites just make up the "genuine" stories so they have something for Google to chew on. No-one involved, reader or writer, cares about it, except search engines.
I wouldn't very much mind all the extra text if the JavaScript didn't interfere so much.