When you want to make something new, either an ingredient that you’ve never used before or just a recipe you’ve wanted to try for years, you often want to try a recipe. Normally that would have involved looking through the recipe book or two that you owned that would have one that you could use. Unfortunately in the days of the internet, a simple google search for “how to make a blueberry pie” leads to hundreds upon hundreds of variations on the same basic idea. How is anyone supposed to figure out what the best option is in this modern age of a million recipes at your fingertips? It is a hard question and in the end, it does come down to your preferences but for those who have trouble deciding things, here is a few things to keep in mind with whatever recipe you might go for.
Let’s use the blueberry pie recipe as an example. As I write this, if I google “blueberry pie recipe” I get 5.125 million results. How do we narrow this down to a more sane amount of choices? First thing I would consider is ingredients. If I am allergic to eggs, I wouldn’t pick a recipe that requires eggs; if I liked butter, I would pick one that had butter in it. Using various features that is provided on most search engines, that reduced it down to 1.75 million. Still a lot but a start. Also, it could be that as you are looking for a pie recipe, you keep finding puddings mentioned but maybe you don't want that. I had that problem when finding the strawberry cake recipe as most strawberry cake recipes have gelatin in them and I didn’t want the primary flavors to be strawberry jello. It was a special cake and I wanted it to taste special. So again, removing the ingredient would be ideal. It’s among the easiest ways to narrow down choices.
Another easy way is to keep in mind skill level. Look for recipes that say “easy” in the title, as they are often very basic recipes that you can improve upon. Also, think of the time investment you have to make the pie. I don’t mean just look at the prep and cook times, read the actual recipe. Often people see the prep times for bread and go “a few hours, WHY!?” and that’s because the bread has to sit for a bit. You often can go about and do way more things with the time the bread rising takes. Last time I made bread, I was playing civilization 5 with my boyfriend and his nephew while having my cell phone timer on to let me know when to take care of the dough! Another, albeit smaller concern is the amount of dishes made. I love one pot meals because they make it so much easier to clean up after. As I hate doing the dishes, I like to reduce the amount of dishes required to do a recipe to as few as possible. Also, limited amount of measuring cups means you always need to keep in mind how many of what measurement you will need or you will be doing dishes halfway through making the batter!
Lastly, the biggest tip I’d recommend is don’t dig too deep. Pick the first one that looks good for what you are trying to do, don’t oversearch for the exactly perfect recipe. There may be one that is better than what you find, yes, but if you search all day you will find yourself without anything being made. Narrow down your choices based on what you want and pick a few from the first page or two of google or whatever search engine you are using. Always try to make sure you are choosing from less than ten choices, preferably less than five. This is because the human brain is easily overwhelmed by too many choices in what is called “choice paralysis”. It is why when you tell toddlers to pick out what they want to wear from a whole closet of clothes, it can lead to a tantrum. Their brain can’t process all the different choices there are. We adults can be victims of it too, especially if we are prone to overthinking what we are deciding between. Keep it simple, use a few methods to narrow down your choices and you should find roughly what you want.
Let me know in the comments below if you’ve ever had trouble trying to find a good recipe. I know trying to find my favorite bread recipe was rather difficult, but it was totally worth it in the end. The same goes for the strawberry cake recipe mentioned above. In any case, let me know that or anything else you feel like and I will see you next Horror Tuesday.