[00jimbo]

it's not really that. it's because of google's arcane search requirements. these authors want their results to appear high up in google search results and one of the ways to do it is to have all this accompanying text.

because their list of ingredients and steps are still not copyrightable even if all the surrounding text is.

[hnick]

Yeah it's definitely SEO fluff. No one is enforcing copyright on their blog's recipe. And another site can still extract the recipe portion anyway.