I really love to cook, and I’m always looking for new recipes to try out, especially soup recipes; I just love a good soup. In fact, if there weren’t already so many, many, many food and recipe blogs out there, I might have considered making one of my own. But instead, I like to leave that up to the people who have time to try out a new recipe every day (see Smitten Kitchen for a good example of this) and write it up and take fantastic photos and so on and so forth. I’m happy to just post a recipe now and then when I find a great one.

With all this in mind, you can imagine that I often search the internet for recipes when I can’t find inspiration in a book. So what really burns me is how many recipes that I find online that are more like something you would find on the back of a packet mix for how to make said packet mix more interesting.

If you’ve ever searched for a recipe online, you probably know what I’m talking about. You see a great looking recipe title, you start reading down the list of ingredients and lo and behold, there it is: 1 can of Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup. What the?!

Now I understand that some people don’t want to spend hours cooking every night and rely on having some premade ingredients in their cooking to speed things up. But seriously, just adding a bunch of frozen vegetables to a can of premade soup and then calling it a recipe for Broccoli-Cheddar Bisque!? That’s not a recipe, it’s a serving suggestion! Not to mention being just plain laziness. In this particular case, the recipe I’m referring to purportedly came from Better Homes and Gardens. Fie! You can do better than that, BH&G!

It’s not just soup recipes either. So many recipes I’ve found call for brand name spice mixes or packet mixes or even breads that you can’t get outside of the country the recipe hails from (I’m looking at you, America), and if you don’t know who Mrs Hockenburger is, it’s likely you’re not going to know what she puts in her All-American Grill Spice. (Note: names have been changed to protect the innocent… or because I can’t remember the name of the particular grill spice in an offending recipe.)

Now before you jump on me, I will say that as much as I’d love to have the time and money to cook everything completely from scratch, I know realistically that I can only afford to do that on the weekends, if I’m lucky. So I have no problem with using premade stock or stock cubes and concentrates. Hell, I’ve seasoned things with curry powder and chicken noodle soup mix along with everybody else. But I don’t give those recipes out to friends and blog readers with “Maggi Classic Chicken Noodle Simmer Soup Mix” written in the ingredient list. These recipe writers should always give an alternative to brand name item, or at least explain what it is so we can find our own alternative.

There is a line to be drawn, however, between a recipe that uses a spice mix or stock cube and one that is just made up of premade foods. I have found, sadly, that this line is more often than not a geographical one. I have far more success finding “real” recipes searching google.co.uk or google.com.au than I do in google.com.

It is also noteworthy that when you make food out of so many premade ingredients, you have more and more trouble keeping track of exactly what you’re eating. Each ingredient will have salt, fat, preservatives and sugars that you can’t always keep track of, and I think we can all agree that in that sense it’s much better to use fresh ingredients wherever we can.

So to end this rant on a positive note, I would like to offer my congratulations and thanks to all those recipe sites and blogs out there that know where to draw this line and offer recipes made with real food, not canned soup, frozen hash browns and packet mixes. You know who you are. Well done.