That being said, spaghetti sauce. Yeah, home made is better, but “doctoring” a jarred sauce gets 95% as good without hours of work. You can’t fix the canned shit, but I’ve not found a jarred sauce that I can’t tweak with fresh herbs and some quickly sweated aromatics and end up with something that people love. It also satisfies my picky ass. Now, I will say that fucking ragu is pretty shit overall, and doctoring it only goes so far. But it is still good enough that making sauce from scratch ain’t happening.
Edit:
There seems to be a lot of range in spaghetti sauce recipes. It’s also important to note that I’m not talking about marinara.
So, the real time involved is split between prep and simmering.
Here’s how we do it. Remember this is an american talking here, so don’t redirect expect something traditionally Italian. And I’m a southerner that’s mostly german and Scots-Irish, so don’t expect any new York style stuff lol.
You take your tomatoes, skin them however you prefer. I use a quick dip in boiling water, aka blanching.
You give those peeled tomatoes a rough chop into nice size chunks. Now, the kind of tomato matters for that because something like a roma e isn’t gong to need as many chops as a beefsteak. You’d usually be using something like a roma anyway, but if your neighbor drops off a giant bucket of tomatoes, you can only use what you got, you know?
You chop up an onion, maybe two. You mince some garlic, maybe half a bulb if you really like garlic. I love garlic, so I go heavy.
Now, that’s your usual start. Most people in my family don’t add anything else in the way of veggies. Me? I like to char a couple of red or yellow bell peppers, skin them, and get them in there too. If I’m feeling frisky, I might have zucchini, eggplant, or whatever else cut up and ready to add at the appropriate time too, but that’s optional.
You get the onions sweating. While they’re starting, you feet your herbs together. Idgaf about fresh vs dried, each has benefits for flavor, you do what you prefer. I do oregano, basil, marjoram, a little thyme, and that’s it. I’m simple.
A little black pepper, a little salt (you really don’t need much, maybe a teaspoon for a big batch; salt your damn pasta water instead) to taste.
Once the onions are almost ready, I add the peppers since the quick char and steam to peel them tends to get them halfway cooked anyway.
This is around a half hour of work for most people. For me, it’s closer to an hour. Yay disability!
Then you add your tomatoes, herbs, and any optional veggies. Bring to boil, reduce to simmer.
After that, it’s patience. You’re making sure any veggies added are tender, and after that it’s cooking things down and letting the flavors develop. And, I promise you, anything under a half hour of simmering isn’t going to taste right, and will be super runny. You’ll usually have what amounts to chunky tomato water until close to the hour mark. For a big pot (my biggest is 6 quarts, and it starts damn near full when I do it) an hour and a half is bare minimum for the right thickness.
Now, if you’re going to jar that up, you’re done except for that part, which isn’t involved in what I originally said.
If you’re going to add meat, you’ll want to start browning it off about a half hour ahead of when the thickness will be right. You add the cooked meat in and let it simmer for 15 minutes at minimum. Do yourself a favor and deglaze the pan used with a nice, semisweet red wine, add that to the pot and go at least a half hour after adding it.
Now, exactly how long it needs to simmer is variable because you’re dealing with tomatoes, and the water content varies between varieties, time of year, weather conditions, etc. But I’ve never had a full sized batch take less than an hour and a half counting from the initial bring-to-boil stage.
I dunno, maybe there’s time savers I’ve never thought of. Maybe the folks saying it’s a half hour are doing a different version of “from scratch”, or whatever. But that’s how we do it, and it’s pretty much what the typical recipes I’ve seen online do (I went and checked because I wondered if I was crazy lol), plus or minus some details that don’t really change simmer time.
I’ve had some batches need a full two hours of simmering. And, yeah, you don’t have to stand over the pot the whole time, but chances are you’ll still be in the kitchen cleaning, keeping an eye on things stirring occasionally, adding any herbs or spices to adjust taste as it goes, etc. So it isn’t like you can just pop down to the local pub (or equivalent in your location) and go by time alone. You’ll still be in the general vicinity, with the added heat and humidity from cooking.
But that’s why I rarely go from scratch. I can pick up a jar of whatever, add some herbs, extra garlic and/or onions, brown any meat and then the deglaze and be done in under an hour from start to finish, including prep. The taste isn’t the same, nor is the texture, but it’s still yummy.
Yeah, flavor wise, there’s not any significant difference. Texture wise, that’s where scratch cooked excels. But if you’re going to rice it or cook it down all the way anyway? Dehydrated is going to be as tasty once finished.
Very true indeed. But sugar pumpkins are horrible for jack o lanterns lol. Well, if you do them the way we do. It’s kind of a big thing for us. We do that fancy shit and have a line of them on the porch. Actually, this year we didn’t go all out and only had five, with only one being fancy.
But if I’m making pumpkin pie filling from scratch, you’re dead on. I’m not messing with scraping one out, I’m just cutting it up, baking it and going from there.
Gods! Making it from raw pumpkin takes so fucking long. You can get rid of the strings, but you’re still going to be putzing with it forever. I don’t like wasting food, so I end up doing it every Halloween, but if I’m doing pumpkin recipes any other time of year, and that has run out, I’m buying canned.
I swear, every year I have an argument with myself to just throw the scraped out stuff in the yard for the birds. They end up getting the jack o lanterns anyway so what’s the big deal? But both sets of my grandparents grew up in the depression, so wasting anything is kinda impossible lol.
When you got your first smart phone, be it android or iOS, you didn’t know where anything was, so there was a learning curve.
But, in the same way as phones, there are built in “stores”. Those stores are called repositories, and they’re accessible in more than one way. You don’t actually have to use the terminal, it’s just usually faster since you really don’t type much more than you would entering a search in whatever GUI interface comes with your distro. Indeed, you can actually set up the commands in a notepad, change the package name each time, and copy/paste the commands, and you’re only a couple of seconds slower than opening the package manager, searching, scrolling to find what you want, clicking to install… See what I’m getting at?
Windows isn’t really faster than that. You have to go to a site, download, find the exe or msi in your download folder, then click in the various pop-up windows. And you can find .deb files that do the same thing as an exe or msi, just not for every program, because they’re an unnecessary pain in the ass. It’s extra steps.
I promise you, comparing the way Linux works now, and the learning curve it takes to the learning curve on windows back when it was a new experience (and I’m talking windows 95, the previous msdos shells were worse than that), Linux is way easier. And don’t even get me started on how shitty a user experience DOS was. Jfc, I’m dyslexic, and it was a nightmare. Windows 95 wasn’t a big jump better in dyslexia land, but it was at least better than DOS.
If you were used to something like mac only, and had never used windows, the transition would be similarly annoying. And, for me at least, dealing with installs on windows is more of a pain in the ass now that I’m used to package managers.
I did a clean install of Windows 7 on my media PC (and yes, you valiant security friends, it’s air gapped) maybe two years ago. From start to finish, including programs, took me about five hours.
My laptop that I run Linux mint on? An hour, start to finish. The only differences in the programs installed are in specifics, not in types. I plugged in my live drive, hit install, and was ready to start installing programs in maybe twenty minutes. My media pc is an old gaming PC, btw. Tons of ram, ssd, etc. The laptop is an old thinkpad. So it wasn’t like the laptop was better hardware lol.
Which seems tangential, but it’s pointing to the underlying ease of use once you’re used to the system. I’ve being doing windows installs since the nineties (and a little before, but only in classes), so it isn’t like I’m not experienced. I’ve only been doing Linux installs since about 2015.
Hell, my very first Linux install was Ubuntu on my dad’s old computer just to make sure I didn’t screw a box up that was in use. Even that, going from Ubuntu being ready to go, and having the programs set up to use was only maybe two hours, and that was mostly looking up the very process that’s been described by others in this thread and copy/pasting things in for each program.
So don’t get discouraged. If you end up really not liking it once you get past the learning curve, that’s okay, windows will still be there. You can go back to it. But, if you’re like me at all, once that learning curve is past, you won’t enjoy the extra hassles windows puts in the way.
Which is great, but still does nothing for off-site storage.
You always have at least one off site backup of anything important. For most people, that’s going to be some kind of cloud service. What you use to access that can vary a good bit (as someone reminded me, nextcloud services you can use rather than have it all be on site exist), but syncthing would require that you have someone else willing to have a device at their house, always connected, for it to be a viable pick this that aspect.
Don’t get me wrong, syncthing is awesome, but it isn’t a total solution by itself. Hell, my redundant off site backup is less hassle, tbh. I just swap out external drives when I visit my best friend. I take the most updated one, leave it and bring home the previous one from his place. It’s always a little behind, but it isn’t reliant on connectivity lol.
That’s what I was getting at. If all of your backups are at the same place, physically, you don’t actually have backups, you just have redundant copies. A backup that can be destroyed at the same time as other backups or the original isn’t really a backup at all. It’s good enough for a drive dying, but not for bigger events.
That’s what I was getting at, I just forgot that nexcloud services exist.
However! I encourage people to remember that grandpa joe is not a faker in the world he’s from!
Since the movie is what most peeps remember, and where the memes usually come from, the first thing to remember is that it’s a musical.
Musicals, by the established rules of the overall genre, do not reflect reality at all times. Even mostly dramatic musicals like Man of LaMancha break some reality in order to function as musicals. Take the scene with the ruffians and “Dulcinea” as an example.
Second, the movie. Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory is essentially a fantasy piece. You’ve got the Oompa Loompas as prime evidence of that. Orange skinned humanoids that do not exist in the real world (jokes aside). Many things in the chocolate factory break the laws of physics or otherwise bend reality. There’s geese laying golden eggs, ffs.
Third, the theme of the movie isn’t actually torturing children. The theme of the movie is the redemptive and uplifting power of dreams. That’s achieved by the journey of Charlie getting his golden ticket and everything in his life getting better.
Grandpa Joe hasn’t been laying there in bed faking it (though, in movie, there’s never anything about the grandparents being unable to move or walk at all, they’re just frail and weak).
He is in his eighties or nineties.
What gets him up and dancing isn’t that he was faking and forgot to, it’s joy.
GJ is transformed by joy, by happiness. His grandson has, through luck or destiny, gotten the golden ticket to a brighter, better life! This doesn’t trick Joe into forgetting his infirmity. It gives him the joy to overcome it.
Joe’s transformation, rejuvenation, is because he is so filled with joy that his grandson will have a new life, that it changes him into the grandfather he wished he could be. Don’t forget that he had sacrificed his one real pleasure to give Charlie a chance at that.
But, look, I know that the grandpajoehate is ostensibly a meme. It’s a joke poking fun at the very musical rules that allow a bed-bound person to magically be cured in the first place. But it never acknowledges the fact that his spontaneous rejuvenation is magic, and that the magic is the magic of love.
In a cynical world, we believe that love is not transformative because the real world grinds us down. But love can be transformative for us too. We just have to be willing to let it work.
Depends on how it went. But I’m well armed, and my location honors the castle doctrine, and my town is right pissy about trespassing.
Back when I first got published, I was dumb enough to do so under my real name.
This has led to a few locals seeing my books are the local library, recognizing the name and finding me. They’ve all been quite polite, so no big deal.
But the truth is that anyone that showed up causing problems isn’t going to have a good time. My neighbors are mostly crazier than I am, and we’ve all had to show up for each other here and there when someone was acting a fool. So, chances are, whatever idiot it was would get run off long before I had to shoot them.
And, since I know most of the damn town to some degree, including the chief of police and the county sheriff, it isn’t like an outsider would even be in town long, unless they enjoy the hospitality of a jail. While the police are a problem overall, the local departments have guys in charge that are trying to fix that to some degree. But not to the degree that some assholes from the internet won’t end up being seen doing something they can get charged for.
Jesus, being real, I’m certain my one neighbor would likely kill someone if he saw them taking pictures around here without being warned in advance. He’s touchy. He might not start out planning it, but he’d be up in their face, and if they didn’t just leave, he would try to make them leave. If they fought back? He’s a bit touchy, but a whole lot trained.
But yeah, celebrities don’t have that kind of connection to their area like private citizens do, and not every private citizen does either. When I lived in the city, I tried being nice to my neighbors and got outright told to fuck off.
The owner kind of makes a weak attempt to seem like they’re trying, but if I weren’t there, they wouldn’t intervene at all. I’m asking because I want to make sure that I don’t over react next time.
What's a food you love, that isn't worth making from scratch?
For me, crepes ain’t worth the stress to make fresh. Just buy a little pack from store and focus on filling is my go to.
New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?
mullvad.net/en/help/install-mullvad-app-linux...
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Edit 1 :...
Biggest piece of shit in movie history (lemmy.world)
How would you feel/react if your home address was announced & published very publicly the same way celebrities experience?
I feel second-hand fear & paranoia on behalf of celebs whose home addresses are public worldwide knowledge....
What are some dark sides to cute super-powers ?
For example: being able to turn anything into food but anything can include living things such as humans
What's a proper response to another dog attempting to mount your dog multiple times and the owner really not doing anything about it?
The owner kind of makes a weak attempt to seem like they’re trying, but if I weren’t there, they wouldn’t intervene at all. I’m asking because I want to make sure that I don’t over react next time.
W.... Will they stream it? (lemmy.world)
Could someone explain how to set up a lemmy instance with ansible for an absolute beginner
I tried earlier today and I had no luck actually getting an instance running...
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