You want to cook something. You search for a recipe. You click on one that sounds pleasant. Easy right?

And then, the site loads.

 

Instead of a recipe, you're thrust into a 54,612 word mire about the author's emotional state, childhood memories of dried plums, climatological predictions, and musings on the economics of the saffron trade during their first pregnancy. You trudge forward, scanning left and right, narrowly dodging an autoplay video of a bacon-crusted croque monsieur as your pulse rate begins to spike. There has to be a recipe somehwhere on this page, right? Your lips go pale and cold as blood is recalled from your extremities through constricted veins and redirected to your vital organs. Thirty seven pictures of the final product fly by on your screen as you scroll faster and faster, wondering if there's a limit to how long a web page can legally be. You grind to a halt and scroll back up when a list makes a brief appearance, thinking - praying- that you've finally reached the ingredients section. Terror sets in as you begin to process that the list is actually titled '7 reasons that children will love this recipe!' Madness! WHERE IS THE FUCKING RECIPE? 'RECIPE' is in the title of the page! Your ventricles strain under increased demand. Left Right Left Right Left Right Left Right, faster and faster and faster until the individual beats are indistinguishable from one another, until your heart no longer functions as a rhythmic, churning locomotive but as a turbine, a jet engine, an unbridled bronco tearing through the corral fence and into the cold dry desert night, breaking unshod hooves on jagged rocks and tearing flesh on outstretched cacti. Your alveoli burst under pressure and you keel over on your keyboard, gasping for air, scrolling scrolling scrolling, as an advertisement for a slotted spoon reflects mockingly off your sweat-drenched scalp. No recipe is found. You regain consciousness just long enough to order Domino's for the 36th time this week.



No longer will we stand for this experience. JTFR.org (Just The Fucking Recipe) is an illegitimate, unregistered non-profit organization that was formed to counteract the epidemic of shitty, un-usable recipe websites. Here you will find recipes presented in plain text, with no ads, no pop-ups, and hardly any formatting or design whatsoever, because I don't have formatting or design skills. Welcome.