Thoughts on Food blogs

I am a little obsessed with food. I like to eat it a lot. I like to think about it a lot. I even dream about it. Food is my friend.
One of my favorite things to do is to menu plan and to come up with "perfect" meals. So if I know we are having someone over for dinner, or if we have family coming to visit, I spend weeks crafting out the perfect menu. This usually means that I do endless recipe searches to find just the right menu combinations.

So sometimes I use food blogs to help me find new ideas, and I realized this last week (perusing for the perfect Easter plate), that most blogs follow a pattern that I have come to find frustratingly annoying.

1) They reel you in with a beautiful picture of the finished product.
So I think, "hey, thats looks delicious, I want to make that-- where is the recipe?"
2) Then, they spend a few paragraphs (or pages) telling you exactly how the recipe tastes, and how they felt as they tasted their recipe, using a lot of punctuation like "BEST. COOKIE. EVER!!" and exaggerations like "when I die, I want to be dipped in this caramel" and suddenly...
3) you, the reader, become their confidante, and they start telling you how they had not one, not two, but three helpings of this recipe and couldn't help but eat half of the dough before they had even put it in the oven (because you know, its been a really stressful week for them and the kids have been driving them crazy and you just HAD to make some comfort food), and how their hips were going to hate them in the morning, and how their spouse normally hates this kind of food, but this recipe- it changed his mind, etc., etc.
So I think "great, this woman (because they are mostly women) is finally going to stop beating around the bush and give me a recipe" but instead...
4) she starts taking me painstakingly through the entire cooking process. First she shows me a picture of all the ingredients, in case I didn't know what "sugar" looked like. Then she shows me some carefully taken pictures of her turning on the stove, boiling water, pouring a teaspoon of salt into the water. Then in case I didn't know what it looked like, there is a picture of the pasta boiling in the water. Then there is a picture of a can of tomatoes because it is about to make its entrance. And amidst all of the gorgeous, beautiful lighting photos of her chopping vegetables and mixing things in bowls, there is a running commentary, in case the pictures have not been explanatory enough. Boil water. Go ahead, throw that rice into the boiling water.
After scrolling through pages and pages of photos and commentary, the blogger then proceeds to 5) give her final thoughts on the process, including some words of command:
You HAVE to make this. TONIGHT. You will thank me for it later. And don't plan on any leftovers because last night I found myself at 2 am finishing it off for a late night snack. So without further ado, here is the recipe.

and usually by that point I am a) either so disgusted by the time consumed out of my life waiting for this recipe to magically appear at the end of the 20 page blog post or b) completely wrapped up in the drama of the blogger's life so I have to tune in next week to find out how spring break did turn out...sheesh!

So yeah, I have some issues with food blogs. I have considered doing my own, just posting the vegetarian recipes I make with a picture (or not) of the finished product only. Because if there is one thing I hate, its eating cold food that is best eaten hot, and I just can't take the time to make sure I am photographing my curries from the right angle with the right amount of beautiful blur in the background.
But would anyone read a food blog that was just about....the food?