In my lefty ancom bubble I’m sometimes seeing rhetoric opposing meal replacements, but I’m not on board with that. Some brands have a low climate impact per calorie. It’s so much better and more empathetic than the usual “carnivore” trends pushed by the fash.
While I don’t necessarily recommend them (as always, be careful with food stuff) the witch hunt against them is growing to be a peeve of mine.
Normally the wedge issue right wing are the ones hating on vegans, pushing keto, or fearmongering against entomophagia. We can do better.
Usually they are the ones punching down and not recognizing that other people might have different needs, capabilities, spoon deficiencies, tastes, or preferences.
In the seventies Frappé popularized an idea that vegetarians should combine protein sources, i.e. eating grains with beans, just like traditional food cultures have done for longer than recorded history, is a complete amino acid profile as opposed to just eating grains with more grains or eating beans with more beans.
In just a few years this was “debunked” with scientists (correctly) pointing out that the body can easily store up amino acids way longer and combine all kinds of protein even if you don’t take extra care at every meal. You can eat all grains one day and all beans the next and you’ll be fine and you won’t get protein deficiency. Or maybe spreading it across days is pushing it but across different meals in one day is fine.
True.
But protein deficiency isn’t the entire story. A complete amino acid profile in one meal (i.e. yes to combining grains with beans) does a better job at triggering the release of satiety hormones like PYY and GLP-1 in the gut and ghrelin right in the mouth—so far, so proven, but it’s also hypothesized that the combo also is more satisfying for vagus nerve satiety along with learned taste/sensory satiety (i.e. your brain has learned that eating these two things together will be more satiating in an hour so it already craves it on the tongue). Eating a meal of grains+grains or beans+beans as opposed to a mixed double just immediately feels less satisfying and if there’s a psychological component to that, that’s not weird because the psychology is created by these weird hunger and satiety hormones too.
Conclulu: you don’t have to worry and stress that you’re gonna get a deficiency or problem if you don’t combine. The “debunkers” were right in taking that particular load off your mind. But, what the debunkers were wrong about and traditional grandma cooks going back millennia were right about is that there’s an opportunity here for you to make a satisfying meal called a peanut butter sandwich where there actually is a synergy between the two ingredients.
Poison Ivy (2022) is such a good comic but the antivegan rant in the second issue comes to a wrongheaded and mininformed conclusion.
Setting aside animal rights for ten minutes, the idea behind eco veganism or climate veganism is that if you go vegan, ninety nine times out of a hundred that also happens to be the more eco-friendly and climate-friendly solution.
Bringing up one specific example where that is not the case (she talks about agave syrup) is very welcome and appreciated. And there could’ve been a million other great examples since one percent of everything is still a lot of decisions where plant based isn’t the solution. That’s not the problem I have with her rant; that’s the good part of the rant. Framing that good part in a “veganism, god that’s so stupid” is disrespectful and I didn’t appreciate that but the main problem I have with the rant is what comes next.
She says predators are great because they keep prey from overgrazing and that’s why she’s close to being a full carnivore herself. Technically true but crazy misleading since 60% of the mammalian biomass on earth is factory farmed and brought into this Earth for the express purpose of being eaten by “carnivores” such as herself. In the real eco system there’s not a lot of prey nor predator animals out there. Only 4% of the mammalian biomass on Earth are wild animals.
I’m not under the impression that the author agrees with the character on this. The character (Poison Ivy) is a power-hungry killer. But I did want to bring this up because some readers, many even, might still take away the wrong conclusion about predators and prey.
I’m grateful for comics that make me think—I’ll get to that in a second—but in a world where the balance is skewed towards way to much meat-eating, these rants are really irresponsible because a lot of o people (not everyone) might take them at face value and justify their ribs and burgers.
Now to the make thing part. I am realizing that veganism’s three pillars (ethics, planet, health) don’t make any sense. Don’t worry vegans, I’m gonna end up recommending plant eating at the end but do worry a little bit because:
This one makes the most sense of the three. You love the animals so you don’t eat the animals, what’s not to get? But I’m not fully onboard since I love plants also. I know some vegans eyeroll at this and think that it’s satire or not serious or just stupid because obviously to them fish have feelings and daisies don’t. Of course from a burning building I’d save a chimp before I saved a house plant. They’re not equally sacred in every sense of the word sacred. Just in some senses.
Now, veganism will lead to a lot less plants being killed than meat-eating since if you eat a cow that ate seven plants per burger, that’s worse for those poor plants than just eating the one plant, but then we’re still at the “99 out of 100 veganism will happen to reach the right result” land where veganism kind of coincidentally helps but isn’t the whole of the law.
The eco system is a complex web and we want it to keep going in a healthy and good way. Here is where the aforementioned “ninety nine times out of a hundred that also happens to be the more eco-friendly and climate-friendly solution” comes in. Ideally, I’d like to flip it and be eco-friendly first and if ecofriendliness leads to veganism 99 out of 100, as I believe it does, then that’s great, but trying to design permaculture and farm systems based on an idea to entirely exclude animalia sees untenable to me. We don’t need to snack on actual cows but we can have a couple of animals in there like in a worm compost (be careful about worms in the new world since they’re an invasive species there) for example.
I’m still vegan (or at least I am “on the plate”; in materials I do have some animal based but I try to do that sparingly and prefer plant fibers. I just hate plastic more) because it’s great to tie into a shorthand, a community that I’ve got one foot in one foot out of, into a label on foods and at restaurants, a framework, something that’s an existing part of society (when I started out in 1999 it was a very tiny part but it was still something real even though I didn’t know anyone at first). To me I justify that by how reciprocal the 99/100 thing is here in my estimation. Mostly, eating plants is better for the environment and vice versa.
And I really do think it’s awesome when those one percent gets questioned and maybe that can eventually move us to a world where this ecology horse is actually in front of the veganism cart for once instead of the other way around. Again, that wasn’t what I had a problem with in Poison Ivy’s monologue.
Here’s the one that makes least sense of all for two reasons:
It’s not fully known what the most healthy food for humans is. Now while the camp that says “eating plants and cooked starches is the best” is the camp that to me lays out the most compelling argument and has the most evidence and makes the most sense, it is still one camp among several competing “camps” and “schools” in nutrition science. I absolutely do not wanna promote false balance or sow doubts on good science, but I’m just saying there’s a lot of unknowns in the field. Not enough unknowns to justify the animal ag industry’s outright lies, but enough unknowns for me to try to show some uncharacteristic humility and respect for the depth of the topic.
For the planet pillar, I’ve been telling myself that the veganism is a good short hand that gets me 99% of the way there before I have to use my own actual brain every now and then, that is absolutely not true for health. Yes, if we the yay-cooked-starches camp are correct, then yes eating healthy will 99/100 mean eating plants but it’s not a reciprocal relationship this time. There are sooo many ways to eat unhealthy junk that’s technically vegan. To me, this ttinvalidates the entire ‘health’ pillar*. If I would slightly prefer it if the planet pillar was the horse before cart, here it this *vital.
I’m not saying veganism can neglect health. A foundational axiom in veganism is that we shouldn’t harm animals or planet since we don’t have to. And that “we don’t have to” part is only legitimate as long as eating plants can be healthy. It doesn’t have to be the healthiest—if eating pork for example had some slight health benefits over eating oatmeal (which I’m absolutely not saying; this is a hypothetical. Oatmeal forever), we should still stick to the oatmeal for the sake of the planet—but it needs to be healthy enough or “don’t eat meat” would’ve become as absurd as saying “don’t breathe out carbon dioxide”.
So yes, health is crucially important, but it’s not a load bearing “pillar”. If your health journey leads you to eating plants (and to ditching the meat goggles and letting you see the impact on the planet and the animals) that’s awesome but the reverse is absolutely not guaranteed.
This was all vegan philosophy 601 stuff. If you’re a scrub don’t overthink it; eat plants and be happy.
Don’t shoot the messenger here:
I’m not promoting metric,
I’m not advocating for metric,
I’m not saying metric is OK.
I just wanted to help those who are subjected to metric.
You can and should use a conversion app for when it really matters but this is just a rough guide for those who want some basics.
A meter is around a yard, more or less, so ten foot is around three meters. A meter was originally defined as one ten-thousandth of the distance between the equator to the pole, so 1/40000 of the Earth’s circumference. With the garbled measuring powers they had back then, that is not saying much.
Each kilometer is a thousand meters. Five kilometers is around three miles, and ten kilometers is around six miles. Going the other way, ten miles is a little over sixteen kilometers, which means that five miles is eight kilometers.
Going small, this is so dumb but we have both centimeters (one-hundredth of a meter) and millimeters (one-thousandth of a meter) and yes, confusion between those two have messed up many a project. Two inches are approximately five cm which is also fifty mm.
100 mm is 10 cm which is 1 decimeter which is a tenth of a meter. A cube of that is a liter. A liter is more-or-less a quart, a fourth of gallon or two pints.
A cube of one centimeter is one milliliter (yes, this is dumb). Milli means one thousandth while kilo means thousand. A hundred milliliters is a deciliter, which is what we use instead of cups; it’s a li’l less than half a cup, two cups is almost five dl.
Now this is the good part: one liter of water weighs one kilogram, which is a little over two pounds, or a stone is a little more than six kilograms. So you can just double a kilogram weight to get an approximation of the pound weight. Why “kilogram” is the main unit and not a gram (a thousand grams are one kilogram) I’ve never understood. That’s just how it is.
But a good thing for all y’all gem lovers out there is that a carat is actually a metric-based unit already—five carats are exactly one gram.
These aren’t exactly day-to-day for me so I had to look it up. A hectare is an area that’s a 100 meters by a hundred meters. (Or 50 by 200 or any other weird shape just as long as it’s that size.) Usually imperial units are a bit bigger like two cups is five dl, two inches is five cm but with hectare, it’s two hectare is close to five acres. I’ll try to remember that by thinking that “hectare” has more letters than “acre” just like “inch” has more letters than “cm” and “cups” has more letters than “dl”.
For things like apartment sizes it’s a li’l easier; use an app when it really matter down to the exact digit but just to get an overview, 100 square feet is a little more than nine square meters, so just lop off the last digit. When someone says “Oh I manage to live so minimalistically at 400 square feet” I can immediately know their place is way bigger than mine using the lop-off shortcut (“400 becomes 40”; it’s actually 37.16 which is close enough).
Temperature… While there is a formula, it’s convoluted (multiply ˚C by nine, divide by five, then add 32, or the other way: subtract 32 from ˚F, then multiply by five, divide by nine) it’s probably best to just memorize some key values. Ice is 0˚ C, steam is 100˚ C, water is liquid in between. C is actually good for cooking for that reason. 0˚ C is 32˚ F, 37.78˚ C is 100˚ F, 100˚ C is 212˚ F. (Since 20✕9+32 = 212. All Celsius values that are cleanly divisible by five come out as integer Fahrenheit values.) Fahrenhet is good for weather. 0 is really cold outside and 100 is really hot outside. Celsius is cranked up to be about literally boiling things on the stove or in the lab, and it’s off by thirty.
So an increase by one degree ˚C is approximately 2˚ F; if it gets ten degrees hotter in ˚C that’s around it getting twenty degrees hotter in ˚F! Eighteen to be exact! The problem is that F has a 32 degree head start so for a super rough conversion from C to F: double and add thirty.
Conversion is no good if you wanna learn a system. For example, D&D uses imperial and my players came from metric so I was always discouraging converting to metric or refering to metric, instead always pointing to references like “oh, it’s around a foot” and holding up my hands approx a foot apart, or “ten by ten foot is like this room” or “OK, I’m five foot seven so on me the water would go up to here” or “it weighs like four swords”. To start thinking in the other system directly as soon as possible. I know that might sound like a mistake akin to “whole language instruction” but I think this is a different case.
And if you just need a one-off, there are apps for that. If you’re a translator of fiction, remember to round so your characters are saying reasonable things. No one says “OMG we’re going over 160.93 mph!”. If you’re an engineer, of course never round and instead be super precise.
Rough conversion guides like this page is for the middle ground. When you’re subjected to metric more than a one-off but less than actually having to learn it, this page is for you.🎁
It’s for those who are metric-curious but not invested. Who still want to hate it but want to know a little bit about what they’re hating.
Metric is also the name of a super good Canadian band that I really love! Waves is my favorite song of theirs among many many fantastic gems. But I can pretend that the band name means “a metric to measure by” as opposed to “the metric system”.
I get irrationally angry at the idea of cheese–as–meat-replacement like halloumi and paneer since it has the same climate impact as meat. I get more mad at it than I get at other uses of cheese even.
It’s not logical because in reality a greenwashed environmental foul-up is not that much worse than one that isn’t greenwashed, but I just hate greenwashing so much, and that’s what this feels like.
“Hey consumers, go veg to save the Earth and here’s a slab of hyper-concentrated milk”; staring at the meatless moonpointing finger and missing the save-resources-to-save-the-earth moon.
Y’all know I’m on board with an imperfect solution if it’s stepping stone towards something better but this is not that.
Some of the things often said about IWL (which means “intentional weight loss”, i.e. trying to decrease body fat as opposed to it decreasing from some sorta disease) are probably true:
But I believe this is also true:
And that means making permanent changes to eating. There is no “after”, there is no “once I lose weight I can get back to eating such-and-such”, there’s only “during”, there’s only “as long as”.
Now, what the best way to actually & specifically do this, I’d better hold off on. Yeah, I’ve read a lot about this stuff, about nutrition. I’ve probably spent more hours nerding out about that than on programming or on the fields I’ve studied formally (those fields, which since I harp about it constantly y’all know are linguistics, aesthetic philosophy, and game design). But I’ve got to stay humbler than my usual cocky self about this topic since I’m a li’l bit of a failure, for three reasons:
My weight isn’t great. Or maybe it is and if it is, I was too skinny earlier. I haven’t looked at a scale in a while; I’m down from my highest since I can use plenty of clothes that I couldn’t then, but I’m still not down to my lowest since I can’t use all of my clothes yet.
My health is awful. I get sick often and for long stretches. Still haven’t got a good d’x on why that is.
Psychologically I was a mess around the topics of food, eating, and dieting for a while, completely ridden by hangups and obsessions, and I don’t want others to fall into the same pits I’ve crawled out of, nor do I wanna fall back into ‘em myself.
I don’t wanna overstate these caveats (none of these are particularly out-there well, my poor health is, but the degree that’s related to food or eating might be really low) but I don’t wanna neglect them either.
OK, I’ve got to bring this up, too. Society sometimes treats fat people horribly which is completely wack. Don’t hate on someone for something that pretty much all of the time they can’t even help. A lot of the criticism the fat community have against diet culture and against our fatphobic and healthist society is spot on. Yeah, yeah, there’s a sprinkling of some very bad diet advice and outright myths (like “set point” theory, an extreme overstatement of metabolic homeostasis) in there, but that goes for mainstream culture too. I’m glad this community exist so they can support each other, and I wish I knew about it back in high school where I weighed more than I ever have as an adult.
They also criticize IWL, and they have many good reasons to do so. I’m for IWL, but it’s certainly a path to hell paved with good intentions and caveats, which I’ve tried to be mindful of here.
There’s this one thing that I occasionally hear from them that I wanna add some nuance to, because it sounds pretty messed up: “You not wanting to look like me is fatphobic.”
Taken overly literally, that doesn’t make sense at all: I oppose ableism agaist people without arms but I don’t wanna chop off my own arms. So I flinch a li’l at that statement, while acknowledging the applicability of the underlying sentiment when a legit fear of gaining weight turns hysterical or unfounded or leads us to promote diet culture or cash grabs or ableism or healthism or to speak insensitively in front of our fat friends. Going back to the analogy, I can wear safety goggles in a lab without being ableist against blind folks, but I don’t need to wear ‘em 24/7 or be rude about wearing them or be obnoxious about how I talk about ‘em.
Now, that’s the one nitpick I have against fat activism. I disagree with only that one percent of their message. The main message of their movement is awesome: discrimination against fat people is pervasive and that sucks and must change.
So I guess I’m saying a whole lotta nothing on this dumb li’l page. I don’t have the answers. I’m leaning towards 1970s nutrition: slow carbs & plenty of veg. One of the reasons I like that school of eating is for the planet, it’s an efficient use of resources if the goal is to feed plenty of people. (To the point that I only eat vegan food; the questions and puzzles I’ve been struggling with above is exactly what * of vegan food and how much etc. Satiety, nutrition density, which foods even * nutritious and so on.)
Vegans often talk about the three pillars. Animal rights, health, and planet. I don’t grok the animal rights issue fully, my health is a mess, but planet? That’s where I’m onboard; but that argument only goes so far. The health pillar needs to be fully explored. As an analogy, humans need to breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. There’s nothing we can do about that now. If it turns out that we somehow “need” to eat caribou eyes or whatever, then we’d be in a similar situation. It’s pretty important to the other two pillars to find out whether or not we can eat healthy on plants only. Fortunately, nutrition science seems to be leaning yes on that.
I’ve sometimes been slagging Greger (mainly for overemphasizing “chronodiets” in his book before it had been put to the test and it later didn’t pan out) but I was surprised today when I looked up something online (a calcium/protein thing) and what came up was his site and I was impressed by his intellectual honesty, basically saying “OK maybe this is one area where plant protein doesn’t have an advantage but it has other advantages” instead of insisting that it did when it didn’t. Kudos.
Non-vegans, a.k.a. carnists, are an interesting bunch. What many vegans tend to forget is that many vegans themselves were non-vegans at some point. That’s just something that goes into the memory hole.
For example, there is a vegan poster online (I’m not gonna link to her because I’m still holding out hope that she is fake and that she and her team are causing fake controversy for the clicks & cash) who became vegan at age 52 and quickly became blaming others, attacking others, and hating on others.
I’ve become vegan twice. First was as a teenager in the 90s. Instantly, I had one last meat meal and never looked back. The only reason for me were environmental, including climate change, but I quickly fell into the animal rights groups lists of rules and regulation. No honey, no leather, here’s a list of approved bands to listen to. That lasted for over a decade. I had a handful of minor breaches of rice-pudding or sourcream chips or whatever that I accounted for in my online friend group.
Don’t worry, I didn’t take up meat or go gung-ho anti-vegan, but I became lacto-ovo-vegetarian for five years (allowing eggs & dairy), and in the last of those five years, fish. I thought I would be healthier—that was dumb; you can argue for liver or whatever but eggs and dairy aren’t healthy, and cheese is as bad for the climate as pork is—and that my mindset would benefit from being less beholden to rules.
Going back to veganism the second time in 2017 was slower going with a couple of false starts. I also tried to go WFPB which I’ve only intermittently being able to keep up, often backsliding into a junkier vegan diet that allows chips & candy. The longest I was on WFPB was fifteen months, starting from when the pandemic just started in 2020. I guess, as always with disordered eating, I was striving for a sense of control in a chaotic world.
I don’t advertize myself as being vegan now since there are many vegans who wouldn’t consider me vegan since I have (very small amounts of) wool and leather. It’s not that I don’t know how bad wool and leather is, it’s plenty bad, it’s just that I think plastic is so much worse. Linen, cotton, kapok is great of course, but plastic, even many bioplastics (non-fossil origin but just as bad pollutantly) is bad. I eat plants, is what I say instead. Vegan on the plate but not on the wardrobe, I say. Not to diss vegans but to dodge the expectation from vegans since they scare me!
Also I made the rule for myself that I can have fish as long as at least seven weeks pass between times, but since 2017 I’ve only had it four times. It’s super bad for the environment and I’m usually happy with just beans & grains! I pretty much never eat fish but I’d better write this here anyway to manage expectations properly since there has been so many times where a vegan has been filmed eating fish and then torn apart and killed by the other vegans.
Although most of the gung-ho ones who vow up and down that they’ll never ever ever break it are ones that have been vegan for way shorter than my original run, or even my second, current run.
To vegans: be aware & compassionate against non-vegans since they are your own past selves. Stop hating your own selves.
To everyone else: eat plants, you primitive screwheads!
One trick to making sesame tahini with an immersion blender (if you have one strong enough—I’ve tried this at friend’s houses and their blenders were too weak) is to put a few dabs of water on.
The less water the better; water counter intuitively makes the seeds harder to blend (they just float apart) but makes the seeds less likely to fly away out of the blending jar. Juuuust enough so they rest heavily in the jar. I don’t measure it out, I just sprinkle a few drops.
I know it’s a culinary crime against taste & tradition to use unhulled seeds but I do, if I’m cooking for only myself, since they have more minerals.
It’s that cheese has as much of a climate impact as pork does, because it’s so concentrated. This doesn’t apply to the same extent to other dairy or to eggs, which do have more climate impact than plants but beef, pork, and cheese are in a league of their own unfortunately.
Any decrease you can make in these is very appreciated. Of course we ultimately still need to tear down the cruel consumption pyramid of injustice where those at the top pretty much take a private jet to brush their teeth.
I like to run canned diced tomatoes in the microwave for 10 minutes, that makes them super concentrated and umami-riffic. I have a duty-cycling 1000w microwave oven. I use 2m40s on 80% then 7m30s on 30%. You def don’t want them to boil over so when you’re first starting out with this recipe, use lower times and try out what’s perfect for your own microwave oven. The crucial value is the first time period on 80 (or on 100% if you have an 800w), if that’s too long, it’ll boil over.
Do not put the can in there, I use a clean glass jar (being super careful taking it out because it gets hot. I use a terry cloth towel). Also let it cool before cleaning it or it might shatter.
Often I have dried lovage (or fresh basil) and one minced clove of garlic in with it, sometimes black pepper. This gets super weak in the garlic depr but that’s by design. For a stronger garlic taste, use more or put it in later.
I then reduce them further on the stove top, adding it to pretty-much-done sautéd stuff: onions, mushrooms, sometimes TSP. I crank the stove up at this point.
Lastly if I want to add some beans, which I keep pre-boiled in the fridge, I do that last. Stir in some pasta water and then stir in the pasta and ship it.
Diane said:
I’ve got no idea what the right balance between truth and advertising is for trying to get kids to try new food
All truth all the time, when it comes to food! Like, in Swedish, “bovine” and “nut” are non-polysemic homonyms (words that are coincidentally spelled and pronounced the same) so I knew a family that used that to trick their 5yo daughter that beef was vegan. That’s just not right.
Zoodles has a really distinctive taste, too.
Taste is like pain, in that a huge part of the discomfort is in the unfamiliar. First time I had cilantro in my mid twenties I thought there was something wrong with the food, that the detergent hadn’t been rinsed off properly from the plate or that insects had gotten to it (smelled sorta like stink bugs). Once I got used to it, it’s now one of my fave spices. Knowing what it is we’re dealing with can make all the difference.
Of course, some advertising in addition to that truth can be good. An example for me is pickled small pearl onions. I was afraid of tasting them and they smelled and looked and felt weird. But I loved pickled cucumber so if I had realized the similarity I might’ve dared them. (Or cucumbers would’ve also been ruined.)
Sometimes a food sensitivity or low-key allergy can be the issue. I always struggled with paprika a.k.a. bell peppers and I could taste its proximity to anything. Picking it out didn’t change a thing; if it had been touched by bell peppers it had been ruined. Turned out later I had a sensitivity to a compound in it. Powdered bell-pepper / paprika as a spice is fine, and sometimes thoroughly roasted / grilled bell peppers can be.
Other times, people react to the consistency of food; too dry, too gelatinous, too creamy, too crispy. (The typical response pattern for most people evolved as a way to detect freshness.)
There are two layers to taste. The taste-only layer (sweet, salt, umami (a.k.a. savoury), bitter, sour, fattiness, and carbonation. (I’d argue for “heat”/capsaicin in this category too.) And the overlapping-with-smell layer which has thousands of nuances and scents. Most kids have strong affinity for some of the base tastes and distastes for others. I knew a girl who loved stuff like pesto, parmesan etc. Others like sweet and sour. I had a hard time with bitter foods growing up (I like it better now).
Knowing about these two taste layers and about consistency and sensitivities and familiarity can make it a little bit more possible to sometimes be able to predict what the kid will like.
All of this is so difficult with kids before they can communicate specifically what they want or don’t want. Have a base repertoire (it’s OK if it’s small) of safe-tasting food and introduce new flavors gradually and in very small doses, not in the whole dish but just on a small side thing. To build familiarity; the shallow end of the pool so to speak.
I’ve stumbled upon a trick to sautéing that seems to work better.
Maybe this is obvious to everyone else but to me it was news and I just sorta randomly found it this fall while playing around in the kitchen and trying things out.
Old method that I used all my life: First high temp (to get the stove top & frying pan hot) than medium temp.
My new method, instead: First high temp (a little shorter time than before) then medium temp (a little lower than my old method’s medium temp) and then after a while a little higher than my old method’s medium temp.
So on a 12 step stove, I’m going 12, 5, 8 instead of 12, 7. More of a U-curve in temperature than the old L-shape.
This is great both for frozen stuff (thaw it out a bit on the lower temp (although, climate pro tip if you have the foresight: thaw it out in the fridge) and then fry it on the higher temp) and for stuff like fresh mushrooms (let them start to loosen up on the lower temp and then fry them on a little higher temp.
Goes for fresh veg too. The higher temp at the end makes things go a li’l faster and gives more of a Maillard reaction, the lower temp early on makes it so that you don’t burn it or wreck it until it’s ready and the water starts coming out.
I usually cook without oil and this has made it much easier. Things would burn early on but the shorter time at highest and the lower temp for the mid time is making all the difference.
(Also, with both methods you need to stir&flip a lagom amount. Too much and it won’t get maillard-y, too little and it’ll burn and stick even on the lower temp.)
Simon wondered how I can get away with grocery shopping so seldomly.
Do I have a meal planner? No.
Here is how I do it.
I know a lot of simple (not necessarily delicious) recipes using basically the same ingredients. Flour can make pasta, pizza, buns, or scones. Potatoes can go in the oven or can get mashed or just boiled. Oats can go into overday oats or oatmeal. Beans can go in doughs or as hummus or in stir-fried random. Stir-fried random can go with wheat berries, potatoes, or pasta. Tomato cans can make marinara or pizza or ketchup. Mustard powder can go in a masala or make, uh, mustard.
A couple of drawers of specific spices can give more variety than store-bought masala. Among my fave spices, I also count tamari and vinegar.
I try to have some awareness of what is time-sensitive and what can last a few months. Basically, everything in the freezer (mine is pretty bad) and fridge is time sensitive and needs to be considered every time I’m deciding a meal. “Do I want to use these mushrooms before they go bad?” I live alone and my fridge is small.
I see groceries as either “specials” and “staples”. Staples, in my system, have a long shelf-life. Specials will last a few weeks. Even something I buy and eat very often, like mushrooms, is a “special”, if it’s something I’m gonna have to monitor in the fridge and use in time.
For staples, I have a “buffer”. It used to be two packs. If I open the second pack of oatmeal, time to put a new one on the shopping list. These times all my buffers are larger.
For specials, it’s more whim-based (and looking at what’s in season, what’s a good deal etc). “Hmm, I feel like avocados” or “I wanna get some good celery”. It’s something I have kind of a vague, intuitive idea about how to put together during the next week or so. Is that meal planning? Yeah, kinda… But not written down or scheduled, just whim-based with a lot of slack.
This is good because it means that if my supply line of specials is cut off, I can live for a long time on my staples. (I’m SOL if they cut off the water lines, though. Not currently a good prepper in that regard.)
A lot of my staples can sub in for specials. Like, I only sometimes buy leek but I always have onions. If my potatoes run out, I can make do with wheat berries or I can make pasta.
My “bean” buffer is kind of heterogenous, to give me some variety. It doesn’t have to be all garbanzo all the time, but I don’t need to micromanage myself about it either.
I know my advice is to go single-ingredient over mixes (for variety) but that rule is only for the big buffers. I have a jar of wheat berries premixed with lentils, and I have smaller jars of home-made spice mixes. Saves time.♥︎ Then I refill that jar from my separate wheat and lentil buffers, and put that amount on the shopping list. Everytime I refill it before I get to shopping, I increment the amount on the list by that much.
Specials don’t always mean “is ready right away”; for example, when I do get avocados I get green ones and let them ripen at home over a week or so. It just means unbufferable food, shorter shelf-life, food that can’t be staples.
What I like about this mindset is that it can handle any kind of dish or recipe. I want a taco night or do a cookbook recipe (an old favorite or a new one) or experiment with some new ideas or even have the occasional store-bought, pre-made thing, I can.
Stephen Covey tells this story about a guy putting stuff in a jar. Rocks, then gravel, then sand, then water. Moral of the story: you can’t fit the big rocks in unless they go in first. Your time is as precious as the space in that jar; it over-flowing is a failure state. Schedule the important things first and let the small stuff fill up around them.
Great story. Love it, live by it.
For groceries, it’s the opposite situation. You want to fill up the jar, since it represents your meal-hours. The failure state is not having enough.
So the way to do that is to have plenty of “sand and water”—your staples, your pantry buffers, your rote recipes—ready.
Your “specials” will go bad if you don’t fit them in, so don’t overshoot with them, but since you have the staples, you have plenty of slack so you don’t have to stress with precision planning out day-by-day, meal-by-meal. You can just back-of-your-mind it.
Fettisdagen (different day every year, it’s February 16th 2021) a.k.a. mardi gras is the last day to eat semla [until Easter], not the first day.
A few years ago people started getting that completely backwards and seeing it as the start of semmelseason. Sober up and do the right thing! It’s the last day. Ash Wednesday comes Feb 17 and by then it’s no more semlor!
“Whaddayamean, Sandra, we don’t care about traditio…” In that case then just eat semlor whenever but then really stick to that. Don’t be like “hohoho I love to eat semlor the days after mardi gras that’s tradition”. It’s not. That’s backwards.
If you’re like “I wanna eat semlor any day year round” then this post don’t apply to you. Obviously. It only applies to the primitive screwheads who are obsessed about semmeldagen but still gets it backwards.
Any semmel-eating on Ash Wednesday or during lent means friendship over.
“Semmel-” is an interesting noun case.
Normally it’s:
En semla
Flera semlor
Den semlan
Dom semlorna
“Semmel-“ is analogous to “äppel-“ I guess. People writing “äppleträd”
or “äpplepaj” are bandits and heartbreakers.
Or “gurkasallad”*. In lojban “semmel-“, “äppel-“ or “gurk-“ style
forms are called rafsi forms. Not sure what it’s called in Swedish
grammar.
“Semmel” is the form for use in compound nouns. “Semmel day”, “Semmel season”, “semmel eating”. In compound nouns that’s the right way and in non-compound nouns it’s the wrong way.
In other forms it’s not used; “nice day for a semla”, “season for semlor”, “saving the last semlan for later”, “throwing all the semlorna out the window”.
Only very few words (“semmel” and “äppel” are the ones I can think of) have a such an unsual case for this compound nouns.
“Gurksallad” (but c.f. “pizzasallad”), “familjefar”, “arbetarklass”, “fotbollsplan” all follow kinda complex vowel elision or morpheme affixing rules; even both elision and affixing in the same word, like “godnattsagebok”.
“Semmel-“ is the product of
It’s a rare conflux of things that created the form “semmel-“♥︎
Truth is, grammar is a model. A crude map of the beach, not every grain of sand in the actual territory of the beach.
When I use words like “worthlessest” or “dåligaste” or “wouldn’t’ve” or “the guitar’ll sound bad” it’s not because I’m stupid. I mean I am but my language experiments aren’t a direct consequence of that. They are deliberate because I wanna see what is gonna work, what’s gonna feel great to reread in a few months and what’s gonna be cause for edits and revisions.
Humans have an hormone called adenosine.
It tells us when we are tired and need sleep (in order for us to get rest).
Caffeine works by jamming those receptors.
So we grow more receptors, which moves the baseline, so we need more caffeine etc.
Ergo caffeine works when and only when increasing your dose.
Having a daily routine than depends on caffeine is not sustainable because of this.
When quitting caffeine it’s gonna be awful as your body downregulates your amount of adenosine receptors.
My recommendation is to not start using caffeine and get off it if you are on it. It’s gonna be brutal but you reset your baseline.
With a non-caffeinated baseline you can use caffeine selectively, for an exam or something. And then go through the grueling process of resetting your baseline again.
I can’t have caffeine, alcohol or cigarettes b/c various health issues💔 please don’t reproach me for how empty my life has become♥︎
It’s easy for me to be all holier-than-thou and say those things are bad because I can’t have it! I have to rely on horse and acid and good old “inner peace”.
If anyone has any good-faith criticisms, feel free to email me and I’ll be sure to read them. I am still in the process of learning about the world at large, so I know some of the things I say may be inadequately thought through, and I urge people to point it out so that I may learn and reassess my thoughts.(Please remember that I concede some people can’t become vegan before you email me a response.)
Before reading my response to this, please bear in mind that I do try to eat only vegan food. So it’s not like it’s some complete rabid carnist that’s knee-jerk–reacting here.
I started eating vegan food when I was 19 (and I’m 40 now so more than half my life) but I’m not perfect. I had dairy—because my grocery delivery got messed up a month ago, and they had put a little 33cl (that’s like 11 floz approx) can of milk in my bags and I ended up drinking it. (Had there not been isolation times, I would’ve given it a way.) The last time before that that I had dairy was 2017.
I’ve had fish a few times, most recent time was in summer of
2018 2021.
So, pretty much all vegan food all the time. (I emphasize the “food” part because I’ve had some wool mittens etc. I’m not the hugest fan of using fossil plastic.)
I urge the reader to reconsider the relationship they and people in general have with animals, and consider them as more than just a resource. Think of them as fellow beings worthy of respect, commodified in the same way as we are, and go vegan if you are able to.
My main reaction to this is the good old slippery slope argument (or slippery slope “fallacy” as people who don’t like this argument like to call it). Does bugs count? Does bacteria? Does plants?
In veganism, there is this thing called “meat goggles”. The idea is that people who love to eat can easily rationalize away the cruelty to animals, but once they stop eating meat they are able to open their eyes to the horrors of carnism.
I had the opposite problem to meat goggles. I went with a vegan WOE because of the climate—of the three vegan pillars, there’s animals, planet and health, and I certainly can’t validate or vouch for any health claims, my health is awful. Planet on the other hand, that’s my jam—and when confronted with animal rights rhetoric, I… I was already vegan. So I didn’t feel any guilt and I didn’t have that 180° seismic perspective shift.
Which means that I’m not really into animal rights.
Which means I’m an outsider to the vegan community in many ways.
On the emotional level, I definitively do get the animal rights thing: When I see a cute bunny or a beautiful horse I go “awww♥︎♥︎”. I definitely have the opposite instincts of a predator or a carnivore.
It’s just on the more philosophical, rational level I can’t really argue for the anti-speciesist variety of animal rights. I do think horses are worth more than flies and humans are worth more than fish.
That’s not to say that fish are worthless or that beautiful blades of grass swaying in the wind are not holy.
I love life as a whole.
I love the circle of life.
Death and new growth.
Our planet as a sustainable, coherent system, a network of loops.
To me, when I see animal rights veganism I see kind of a denial of that perspective, an unwillingness to be a part of that.
I’ve even seen things like “we need to go out and save all the gazelles from lions, all the flies from spiders” kind of Poe’s Law–defying rhetoric.
Don’t get me wrong.
The amount of animal ag that humanity has is not sustainable. The cute little farms we see through the train windows are not where 98% of meet comes from. And “grass-fed, organic” meat is at least as much of a climate disaster. Fishing is super unsustainable too. This needs to change and we need to get on the plant train.
I don’t want to overstate my criticism of animal rights.
I’m just not onboard with going all the way. That’s all.
I used to have the problem of a hummus that becomes dry and powdery and falls apart, until I worked out this method a few years ago.
In a blender, I use an immerson mixer with the upright mixing pitcher that came with it, put sesame seeds. I use unhulled.
I just eyeball it but I’d say that I usually use at least a quarter cup (which means it’s gonna be the bulk of the hummus’ calories, and, super bitter because it’s unhulled).
Some mixers can’t handle mixing sesame seeds, in which case you’ve got to get ready made tahini. Others can mix them even from dry, so that’s the way to go.
The mixer I use is in between those. It can mix them just fine but they have to be a little bit dampened with water so they don’t fly off everywhere. The less water in this step the better.
Then I add spices and just one tablespoon of beans. I like the beans well rinsed; don’t put in any “aquafaba” for this recipe.
Spices that you want to show in the final hummus, like sometimes you want cilantro leaves to show, you might wanna hold off on and instead mix in at a later step, with a spoon or something.
Then, on top of those things, add water. Water is the only thing I don’t eyeball. I always fill to the same line. In my case, that line is slightly under half of the mixing pitcher.
Then here I blend it up a lot. To the point that it looks kinda milky. That’s called an “emulsion”. The handful of beans I added in this step is what makes it possible to mix fat and water. This is the reason why the hummus is going to stick together.
Since the amount of water can vary because the sesames and spices were eyeballed, at this step I add and mix in beans gradually until the whole thing has the consistency I want. If your pitcher becomes overfull but the hummus is still too loose, make a note and the next time you do this recipe, you need a lower water level in the previous step and use that water level from now on.
Using other fats, like sunflower seeds, peanut butter, or rosted walnuts can be nice, as can using other types of beans. You can also mix several kinds at once. Sesame seeds are also great with red beans a.k.a. kidney beans, while garbanzos not only go well with sesame but also with peanut butter.
One mix I really like is sunflower seeds + freshly boiled lentils with an onion tossed in to boil with the lentils + a lot of basil.
When using lentils, you’ve got to use a lot less water. They come with their own water, basically. You need just a tablespoon or so of water when you make the emulsion.
I’ve heard that it can also be interesting to then bake the hummus in the oven a bit but I haven’t tried that yet.
I usually don’t use any olive oil at all when making this recipe. (I’ve sometimes used whole olives for a bit of a tapenade feel.)
When I was the most frustrated by my keep-falling-apart hummus, I kept upping the amount of olive oil but it just got worse and worse.
Then I saw that a brand of storebought hummus that was really good didn’t have any olive oil at all, and so I also tried skipping it, and it was way better! Then later I came up with the “emulsify in a separate step” method outlined above, after learning more about the, uh, chemistry of the kitchen.
If you want to bring olive oil into this, one idea is to just make it without and then put olive oil on top, like a garnish and preservative. That’s something I’ve seen several traditional chefs do.
Then, of course, now that I know to emulsify, I’m sure it’ll be fine and not get dry and brittle even with olive oil, if you like. Some brands of olive oil can become very bitter when ran through a blender, so watch out for that.
Other cake protocols notoriously “trim” their pieces, ruining them.
Here is my proposal on how to divide a cake more politely.
One person divides the cake into as many pieces as there are cake-eaters such that divider would be happy with any piece. During the rest of this process the divider can’t make claims, they will get what’s left.
Everyone else claims a piece.
During the claiming process, anyone who hasn’t claimed yet may respond to a claim with “Aww, I really wanted that piece”.
If no-one does, then the person who made the claim can take that piece, it’s theirs now.
If someone does, the person who was making the claim might say either “That’s OK, how about I take this one, then?” and make a new claim, or they might say “How about splitsies?”
To the latter, people who have not yet made claims (except the original divider) can say “I want in on that, with this piece” (pointing to an unclaimed piece) to join the splitsies group or “that’s OK, I’m fine with another piece” to opt out.
So splitsies groups might form. Other people outside the splitsies groups can just take their claims and leave.
Everyone in the splitsies group divides their pieces into as many subpieces as there are people in the group.
Let’s say it’s A and B. A select one of B’s halves, B selects one of A’s halves, done. Fair.
If it’s three or more, circle up. Everyone selects a subpiece from their right-hand neighbor, then one from their neighbor’s neighbor and so on. You can only select from the piece that person divided, not pieces they have selected from others. So standing to the left of the biggest piece would be pretty great, if it weren’t for… the recursive “Aww, I wanted that”! Splitsies within splitsies so you’ll end up with just mush (albeit fairly divided mush)! Luckily you can always opt out of a splitsies group, even a sub-splitsies group, and just change your selection instead.
So the drawback of this protocol is that people might not dare to speak up if someone takes a piece they wanted, for fear of the chorus of eyerolls and sighs. But that’s also a good thing. People who are just happy to take any piece rather than have to deal with shaved cake, trimmings, cake mush, divisions etc—or the social awkwardness of unusual algorithms—can do so.
I get that the math nerd version is a bit of a joke, people don’t really deal with trimmings of trimmings of trimmings. But the proposal I present here is one you can hopefully do for real.
The problem I see is that what we traditonally consider to be ‘cake’ is cut into ‘wedge’ shapes, and typically has some kind of filling sandwiched between the sponge layers.
Oh, yeah, Going splitsies makes the cake completely gross. There is a huge incentive to not go splitsies—it’s just a fallback in case the original divider does an awful job. But I mean compare to the original algorithm’s never-ending trimmings of shavings of slicings. It’s a mess all over!
Growing up, I really liked the holes in bread. I guess many do.
A few years ago, a friend asked me why you’d want holes in bread though. She had overheard my other friend and I been talking about baking, and how we were using the sizes and amounts of holes as our primary gauge for how well our bread turned out.
Put on the spot, I suddenly thought that there was no point to all this nothingness that just makes the hummus fall through and the bread difficult to eat. My response on the spot was “The holes themselves fill no purpose. We use them to see of the bread has risen enough, or even too much.”
I had done some bad breads that got too heavy, too hard, uncuttable, unchewable, not properly bakeable and that had insufficient holes.
That was a few years ago.
But lately I’ve been using yeast that has gone a bit borbs and I’ve
been seeing some pretty messed up bread as a result and without the
holes, the breads come out more like floppy pancakes. They fold in
your hand, spilling even more hummus than what was falling through the
holes.
Having holes makes the rest of the bread be like a scaffolding. It’s becomes strong and light, like a atoms in a carbon structure or like a three-dimensional Voronoi net.
JAMA Internal Medicine reported that the Sugar Research Foundation bribed other scientists and journals to downplay links between sucrose, fructose and CHD.
It’s great that these news are coming out – how we humans should eat is a very important and difficult question! – and I wish we can find a healthy, sustainable way of eating.
Sweden’s carbon footprint has gone up significantly due to the way high-fat diets have been implemented the last couple of years. This is an urgent and catastrophic issue also. The amount of meat and cheese is not sustainable.
We need to look to evidence for guidance and it’s clear how that process has not been working because of market forces and market capitalism. The SRF’s lies has caused mistrust in dietary guidelines.