Burns My Bacon: Waste-of-Space Recipes

Maybe I’m just grumpy these days, but I seem to find annoying food-related practices everywhere I look.  Today I bring you: ridiculously inappropriate label recipes.

When it comes to cooking, I’ll take my ideas wherever I can find them: cookbooks (I own many too many), blogs, allrecipes.com, and on and on.  And sometimes, on the food packaging itself.  This seems highly logical at times.  For example, if I have a bag of cornmeal and I want to make polenta, the first place I look is on the side of the bag.  And–aha!–there it is.  I’ll try it, and if it works, great, and if not, my next stop will probably be The Joy of Cooking, followed by the vast plain of the Internet. Sometimes, a recipe can be useful even if it does not directly utilize the enclosed ingredient, like a good dip recipe on the back of a bag of chips.

Let me tell you what has never happened to me, though.  I have a can of olives in the pantry.  I am trying to decide what to make for dinner.  I pick up the olive can and notice, “Hey, look, a recipe for island chicken and rice!  And all I need is…every ingredient on the list.” Because olives aren’t even included until the very last line, as a garnish.  Seriously, I understand that you, label designer, had some space to fill, but really, that’s the best you could do?  I think that an olive-themed word puzzle, a la the cereal box, would have been preferable to this lameness.  But maybe it’s just me.