When You Feel Like A Foodie, But You Can’t Cook

The internet has ruined my expectations of what food is supposed to look like. Before all of these amazing food artists came out of the woodwork I always thought ‘I’ was an amazing food artist. Seriously, there are things I can make with ketchup that you wouldn’t even Believe. But, the internet. And while some people spend their time on here searching through thousands of Pinterest images and imagining what life would be like if they had the right kind of glue gun, I sift through foodie sites and stare longingly at images of brownies and hamburgers and other gut smut and wonder what life would be like if I had the right kind of oven.

Via Bell’ Alimento

Take that brownie for instance…I saw that the other day whilst drooling my way through Google images and instantly Knew I had to find a way to get that into my belly.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I can cook, but there are days when I see images like that and really Really want to make that exact thing and have it look exactly like the image. I mean, how Gorgeous is that brownie? So, I went to my pantry and looked in and, well, it’s a barren wasteland. The other day I saw three mice in there taking up a donation to buy me some cheese and I can’t remember the last time I bought actual ingredients from the grocery store. Like, my house is stocked full of frozen lasagna, salad mixes, pop open cans of biscuits – things like that. But Actual ingredients – flour, sugar, vanilla, chocolate, etc…not so much.

But that Brownie.

So I searched my cabinet to find something SOMETHING that would give me the feeling that I’m not a complete foodie failure and I came up with the following list of ingredients: some icing from a cake I forgot to make, a half empty container of chocolate cookies from a period binge three months ago, and half of a stale bag of Grape Nuts Cereal.

Not exactly food porn worthy ingredients, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

I started by deciding that a brownie could NOT be made with these ingredients, accepting that which could not be changed, and moving forward.

Perhaps, a cake ball. Okay, not a traditional cake ball, sure, but a mock one. Yes! I’d call it a cake ball. I checked the pantry again and found some pretzel sticks. Perfect! Cake balls should be eaten on sticks.

Long story short: cake balls can not be made with those ingredients.

I kind of ended up with a glop of icing mixed with everything and sticks poked into the top. It was disgusting, but it was okay because I ate all evidence of my failure.

So how do these foodies do it? How do they make all this gorgeous food??

Okay, so obviously, their pantries are not barren wastelands. They probably have all sorts of ingredients. Cardamom, even. I bet all the internet foodies have cardamom in their pantries, the show-offs. But how do the rest of us compare? How are we supposed to compete with that?

Maybe the key is to STOP comparing. Think about it: the internet makes it seem like Everyone in the world can do things that we can’t do. And then we feel inadequate. So we try to do them and Pinterest fails are born.

I’m not writing this to be all preachy and tell you to stop trying. Or even to stop looking at food porn. Seriously, I may Never stop looking at food porn now that I know it exists. But, I have to stop driving myself crazy. I have to stop trying to be these people I’m not and accept that while I can write like the wind I can not make a brownie out of cookies, Grape Nuts cereal, and icing.

And you may be able to make your baby laugh with a single well timed look, but maybe you can’t make rubber ducky cupcakes that don’t look like they’ve just gone through a nuclear meltdown.

And that’s okay.

Ultimately, we are who we are. As long as we accept ourselves and love the things we can do, we can find a way to still enjoy these great pictures without driving ourselves insane.