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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Arts: The Only Recipe for Ice Cubes You?ll Ever Need

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The Only Recipe for Ice Cubes You'll Ever Need
By Jeffrey Bloomer
Posted Wednesday, Aug 22, 2012, at 01:50 PM ET

Comment sections on websites can be nasty places, but they're rarely more useless than they are on popular recipe sites like AllRecipes, Epicurious, and the like. The comments there are not full of the obvious trolling you come across elsewhere, which is generally easy to ignore. Instead, you find one recipe "review" after another that pointlessly recounts an innocuous substitution, describes a husband who thought the dish was too spicy, or shares a breathless complaint about "no flavor" that could surely be fixed with a teaspoon of salt. Occasionally one finds a flash of genius from a clever cook, but usually the comments are an endless slog.

So I was happy to discover that my despair over such commenting practices is widely shared—and even happier to read a perfect parody of this corner of the Internet. In a glorious recipe posted to Food.com that has been making the rounds on Twitter, a frustrated cook offers a recipe for ice cubes, noting that it may come in handy for "families who have members who don't know how or have forgotten how to make ice when the ice tray is empty." The rundown proceeds as expected—water, freezer—and it's funny enough on its own: a passive-aggressive plea to refill trays that anyone can get behind.

But then the commenters get ahold of it, and the magic begins.

"This recipe is horrible!" declares Chef #1408275. "Maybe I should have left them in longer than two minutes (the ...

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