Does changing the publication dates of the posts on my recipes website penalize me on the SEO?

I have a website about recipes made with WordPress. I recently gave a new fresh look to my website by changing the theme and I also started to improve the pictures of the recipes to make them look nicer than before.

I am using the SmartMag theme, which orders the posts on my website on categories and then on chronological order. However, since I am updating the pictures of my recipes one at a time, sometimes it happens that the recipe for which I update the thumbnail picture is not shown in the homepage, because there are newer recipes that take its place in that category. I was therefore thinking to change the publication date of these updated posts, so that they would be shown on the homepage.

Is this strategy, however, going to penalize me from a SEO point of view? Note that I am only updating the pictures, so the rest of the article would remain unchanged. Therefore, I wouldn’t want to create a whole new post. Moreover, since my website is about recipes and not e.g. news, in theory there should be nothing wrong about changing the publication date, or am I missing something here?