There's something so morbidly fascinating about the phenomenon of the USAmerican online cooking influencer. They'll try to make videos doing at-home versions of their regional cuisine but it's all shitty takeaway so they pretend that the act of wrapping a rubbish sandwich filled with grey beef and gelatinous not-technically-cheese in alfoil until it gets soggy is actually some genius technique to improve the final product rather than simply what the takeaway place does because its quick and cheap way to pump out as much slop as possible.
Or the endless efforts to make the "perfect cheese toastie" (often erroneously referred to as a "grilled cheese" even though it's not grilled (or cheese)), despite the fact that it's a fundamentally stupid dish made for little other reason than the ingredients are already in your house and you didn't really feel like cooking - very much in line with "whole tray of chicken nuggets" or "cereal that's 40% sugar by weight" in terms of it's culinary merit and effect on your health. All of these videos feel the need to desperately disclaim that the original preparation (margarine, sweet fluffy white sandwich bread, and american cheese slices individually wrapped in plastic), is already perfect and doesn't really need improving, they just felt like massively over-complicating a dish that's main benefit is it's inexpensiveness and ease of preparation. Couldn't upset the audience of middle-aged white yanks desperately trying to regain their suburban childhood while maintaining some kind of illusion that they're a passable cook.
A popular subject in the realm of baking is the chocolate chip cookie, a dessert with no real balance, contrast, or excitement, not a hair better than the sum of it's parts, seemingly concocted by someone with the palette of a six-year-old. These attempts to improve on what is ultimately a very basic sweet often result in the culinary equivalent of "pimp my ride" - a relatively cheap starting product horrendously over-blinged out with a million extra shitty additions that don't suddenly turn it into a luxury sports car, but in fact into a cheap vehicle horrendously over-blinged out with a million extra shitty additions.
It's so stupid and I will never stop watching them.
