Because who buys spices at the regular grocery store, it’s like $4 for a 50g bag. You gotta go to the Asain grocer or Indian market for those delicious half kilo bags for $6.
Then put them in an old pasta sauce jar and shove them in your pantry and let them get old and off gas their aroma until they’re just bland sawdust…but act like you’re still better than other white people because you own spices.
Get a rice cooker. Get rice and FROZEN pre-processed (chopped) veggies. These are still very inexpensive, require no preparation, last forever in the freezer, and are actually FRESHER than “fresh” veggies, since they are picked when ripe and then flash frozen rather than picked prematurely and sprayed with a ripening agent. Your rice cooker should come with a veggie tray so you can cook the rice and veggies simultaneously. Drop them in there and fire it up. Get yourself some “simmering sauce” and heat it up in a pan for ~15 minutes and baby you got a stew goin’.
It’s just like a pre-mixed (typically middle-Eastern) sauce with coconut milk and spices and thing like that pre-prepared. It shouldn’t have any preservatives or anything you can’t pronounce.
There’s many options for sauces, depending on your preferences and dietary requirements, but there are a few key common steps.
For example many Indian curry type sauces can begin with frying diced onions, some ginger, garlic, chillis, coriander seed powder, cumin powder, turmeric powder, black pepper, and tomato paste, then coconut milk to form the main body of the sauce. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to all of these, mix and match. Then finish with fresh coriander leaves.
Or a simple marinara type sauce begins with frying diced onions, garlic, tomato paste, followed by a glass of wine and a can of tomato to make the main body of the sauce. Add basil at the very end, as the flavor is delicate and destroyed by heat.
Notice in both cases we begin with aromatics - onions, garlic, spices - that get heated up to release the volatile flavor compounds. Then deglazing the pan and simmering with something that constitutes the main bulk of the sauce - e.g. canned tomato or coconut. Then finishing with more delicate herbal flavors that get desroyed by extended cooking. This is a general pattern that appears in foods from all over the world. The crucial part is learning how long each ingredient requires to cook for, and therefore what stage it gets added.
Once you get used to this you can begin to enjoy the creativity and rewarding nature of cooking, and explore the world through food. Like the Indian example above can be quite easily modified into a Thai green curry with a few substitutions such as extra green chillis, galangal instead of ginger, and finishing with Thai basil.
I’d say another crucial aspect is appreciating the importance of emulsions - a colloidal suspension of small fat particles in water - which results in a rich and unctuous mouthfeel. Many of our favorite foods and sauces are emulsions (butter, mayonnaise, pesto, curry). But I don’t want to overload you with information as I’ve already written a lot. Good luck.
Also a starch slurry or roux are easy ways to thicken sauces, controlling the consistency of a sauce can be important depending on what you are tossing in it or putting it over.
As an adult who thought that they hated pretty much all veggies (especially broccoli and corn) and found out that I absolutely love them when prepared fresh and that the bagged versions tasted like ass, I’m gonna call bullshit on that.
It might work for you, but nothing beats freshly-prepared corn, whether grilled in the husks or cut and sauteed.
Food starts rotting the instant it’s harvested, and continues doing so while it’s packaged, transported, and stored on the shelf. Modern flash freezing techniques preserve foods perfectly, halting the microorganisms that cause decomposition, and avoiding the damage caused by large ice crystal formation that’s inevitable with slow domestic freezers.
Interestingly with the sweetcorn, it used to be that it had to be eaten immediately after harvest, so much so that you’d have the water boiling before even picking them. However with modern developments they can remain fresh much longer.
It’s really bad for anyone who needs to move out of a house they can barely afford.
In 2008, people that had multiple properties they were buying and selling were financially crippled when the market dropped out from under them.
This happened even to middle class people who were buying cheap housing and selling it as their only income. At the time, housing was still affordable enough that upper middle class people could make a living doing that.
No one who had a house they planned on staying in for a long time, who kept their job, felt that crunch.
Very much like a 401k that takes a hit when you’re 30. On paper you lost money but in reality you’d never notice. The market always bounces back.
This happened even to middle class people who were buying cheap housing and selling it as their only income. At the time, housing was still affordable enough that upper middle class people could make a living doing that.
Definitely don't feel any pity for them. Market speculation is always risky, even if the market you are trading in is "safe" or "risk-free". I especially don't feel bad at people speculating on a good like housing that 100% of people need.
No one who had a house they planned on staying in for a long time, who kept their job, felt that crunch.
These are the only ones to pity. They may have lost their job because of the economic conditions, and been forced to move to another place to get another job. So in trying to sell their old place to be able to buy a new place these folks suffered the same difficulties unloading their property as the speculators.
Everyone I know keeps telling me to buy a house I stead of renting a “luxury” apartment in a big city. I lived I. NYC for 5 years and was paying anywhere from $2500-2700/month for a studio apartment (anywhere from like 400-600 SQ ft). I just moved down to Downtown Miami and got a place for $2600/month in an apartment complex that is truly luxury compared to what they call “luxury” in Manhattan.
Everyone keeps telling me that I’m stupid because I’m not building equity and I’m just throwing money away. My parents own 5 properties (both of their parents houses and a rental property my grandfather owned, their own house, and a small cabin in PA), and in the past two months they’ve had to put a new sewer line in and a new gas line, along with a new heater into my dad’s parents house because it sat empty for a few years and now friends of the family are moving in. It was weeks of back and forth with the city and the furnace people. It cost about $15k. They also had to re-shingle that house. My mom has roofers working on the house that was her parents. That was about $10 grand. Our shower broke about 2 months back and since my dad didn’t want to pay people he decided to do it himself… Which took like 5-6 days.
When something breaks in one the places I live in, I put in a maintenance ticket and it’s fixed in a day. I’ve had ACs break and a dishwasher break, and they were fixed in like 2 days. I didn’t have to spend a penny or lift a finger.
My buddy spent 80 grand on a cabin about 20 minutes from where we grew up and had put about another 60-70 grand into it and he said he’s nowhere near finished.
This is one thing that people who dont own forget. Shit breaks. Thats why the bank will refuse you a $2400 a month mortgage when your paying $3200 in rent. In the middle of winter when the hot water heater shits the bed, you will miss a payment to fix it. What about next month when the cars transmission explodes? Thats why banks need you to prove so hard you can cover a mortgage.
You are losing money long term for convenience and freedom and thats fine so long as you’re aware thats what you’re doing.
12 months of rent at 2500 per month is about 30,000 per year. In 5 years you’ll have paid 150,000 and have nothing to show for it and nowhere to live. Your buddy will have spent the same, admittedly maybe more, but will have a roof over his head that can be passed down for generations or sold to recover se of the money spent.
Paying rent is just paying off someone else’s mortgage. Why would you rather pay for someone else’s loan instead of getting your own?
Your rent is more than my mortgage, and while it’s not a very fair comparison, I live in the Midwest and housing here is cheaper, you’re still paying 5-7 times as much per square foot as I’m paying. So let’s balance it out, even if my costs doubled I would be paying half what you’re paying per square foot.
And yeah, over the next 15 years I’ll probably spend 10-15k in repairs.
I’m still spending significantly less per year.
That’s not to say you’re a sucker. Renting works for some people, some times it’s the only option you have. I have a stable career in a city I have no intention on ever leaving. If both of those things aren’t true sometimes it’s easier to rent.
You’re still paying for those repairs, you’re paying the taxes on the property, if utilities are included you’re paying for those too. Your landlord is absolutely not cutting you a deal on any of that stuff. The difference is you’re paying monthly, and upfront, and the difference goes to your landlord. Your landlord is also charging you enough they even after all of that, he still makes a profit.
I’m paying all at once when it’s needed, and I don’t spend anything extra, well at least no more then my wife demands, lol.
I’m not lazy, it’s society that’s manically hyperactive.
You know… I meant that as a sort of joke, but it actually isn’t too far from the truth. Some manic-obsessive individuals set the tone, and some places are worse than others, South Korea being most famous for it.
A number of clinical trials have shown improved academic and occupational cognitive performance using psychostimulants in therapeutic doses. This includes improved inhibitory control, memory recall, and awakefulness. Some studies have even shown a measurable (4-5 points) increase in performance when taking an IQ test.
my sister’s cat ended up chilling in the walls of our basement, and my brothers kitten discovered a hole she could fit thru between the kitchen counters. they are sneaky
Actually managed that once. Basement was half finished by the previous owners but left a hole for the well window. The result was a gap between the window and the drywall. Cat wanted to look out the window and ended up falling onto the insulation. He cried for a while until we figured out where he was, and when we grabbed a ladder to mount a rescue he hauled his own happy ass out unassisted. Same cat also managed to find a way ABOVE the ceiling of a basement closet.
I love watching videos about plane crashes on my old tablet when I’m cooking or rinsing (non-native here, is that right for doing a dishwasher’s job by hand?).
I’ll join with Technology Connections in being that guy who says (in a friendly way, not condescending):
If you have to rinse your dishes ever then you’re using the wrong soap, have a reeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaally crappy dishwasher (like a multi decade old cheapo model that’s breaking), or are loading your washer wrong. I think TCs video showing literally cooked on cheese coming off of dishes is pretty good proof that no dish out there needs rinsing.
I used to think my dishwasher couldn’t handle most things without rinsing, then I realized one of my sprayers had been blocked up and i also switched to a powder soap and suddenly everything is clean as fuck without any other changes to my loading habits. This was on a model slightly cheaper than the one TC uses in his video, and was about 7 years old when I saw improvement.
This is not criticism or anything, but simply trying to spread awareness of a simple thing I know a lot of people are surprised by when I tell them. Many of us are wasting time and effort on rinsing shit that doesn’t need to be, free yourselves!
My ex sent me a text asking a question, I didn’t respond when I noticed it because she would have been asleep and promptly forgot about it. In three weeks it’ll be two years.
I should wait until then and reply with a simple “Nope”.
Sometimes a trash bin is located near the door, so I’ll use the same paper towel I used to dry my hands to open the door, hold the door open with my foot, then throw the paper towel in the bin. But these make hygiene so much easier:
It might not be related, but they’ve found mold inside the reactor room of Chernobyl. Apparently it’s evolved a chlorophyll like molecule that captures gamma radiation. It’s literally living of the energy that makes the environment lethal to almost anything else (organic or electronic).
Edit. Just checked and it’s not confirmed how it’s growing. They do know it grows significantly faster in a high radiation environment. They haven’t pinned down the exact biological mechanism.
Unlikely. Biochemistry, as we know it, relies on a carbon-carbon backbone. That breaks down long before the temperatures on the sun’s main outer layers. The electrons get stripped off, and chemistry, as we know it, stops working.
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