Add MSG. Another meaning of MSG besides Monosodium glutamate is “Makes Stuff Good”, because besides normal salt and fat, it’s another great flavor enhancer for anything savory. And no, it almost certainly doesn’t give you headaches, that was racist bullshit and has long since been disproven.
Baking soda and the Maillard reaction are friends. You know how they tell you, you can’t caramelize onions in 5 minutes? With baking soda, you can. Add a knife’s tip and bam. Just be careful, it also makes them burn far more easily. This also works with meat, where the meat keeps water better and browns more beautifully. One of my favorite uses is for roasting cauliflower, which gets a deeper brown and tastes so much better in cauli mash.
Sodium Citrate for cheese sauce. You want creamy cheese sauce? Like for Nachos? Add a teaspoon of sodium citrate to your cheese when melting, and it will all combine without any of the fat separating. It’s best for dips, but it can be used for something like mac & cheese in a pinch, but you’ll get better results there if you make a proper roux.
Some people like to think they’re super water-efficient doing the dishes, but they’re not; dishwasher saves water.
About that. I know of one study done in Europe on this, and it was paid for by dishwasher companies, and didn’t exclude outliers like the guy who used about 400L of water doing the dishes by hand.
I once measured water and power usage of me doing the dishes by hand, and it was both below what I found online for dishwashers.
If you do 2-stage cleaning (soapy hot and cold clean water), then dishwashers will be better because they don’t. Amount and source of hot water governs if you are more energy efficient. The advantage of dishwashers is that a badly used dishwasher is far more efficient than badly (= wasteful) handwashing, and even efficient handwashing is not much better than dishwashers (though I wouldn’t know how to calculate production and recycling of the dishwasher itself, not even what order of magnitude that is). Which was, as far as I remember, also in the conclusion of the study, unless there has been another one since then.
I’ve had a cactus die from lack of water, my wife is the green thumb person and only grows chili plants ;) we only have a balcony, so not that much space. According to Wikipedia, rue is European, so I still have hopes of seeing it at the store.
I don’t enjoy it, but I guess I also don’t mind it that much. And I only cook once a day. Mornings are usually cold, evenings only my wife eats and that’s warned up. So dishes are just those 10 minutes, once a day. That’s about 2-4 songs playing on the kitchen speaker ;) if I had to do the dishes middle time a day, I’d probably like it less as well ;)
Also: slow cooker. I gave mine away after I got an instant pot, but as I said, WFH. For people who go to work, a slow cooker is amazing. Throw food in, turn it on, have it done when you are back. Hot early or late doesn’t matter.