Yeah, the focus the landscaping part is weird. It seems more relevant to me that 5 years ago, he was in high school, rather than that he did landscaping.

Seriously, I think a big part of solarpunk ethos is combating the notion that everything has to always be available 24/7. Society pays a lot to deliver every convenience like fruit out of season from the other side of the world.

I’m sure you know this, but some of the maesri pastes are non-vegetarian.

Strongly agreed on the delicious, lazy, vegan food, though.

Generally, when you want to heat the beer is after fermentation has peaked. Higher temps means faster fermentation (obviously to a point), and fermentation generates heat (positive feedback loop), which is why you need to cool beer through the initial stages of fermentation). After peak though, the temperature drops and causes a positive feedback loop downwards. This means that your beer really crawls to the finish line. Your beer might be 90% done after 3 days, but then take a couple weeks for that last 10%.

Another benefit is if you are bottling the beer, you need to know how much sugar to add. Calculators ask for the beer temperature post fermentation to determine residual CO2. With a dropping temperature, it’s hard to say what that point is, and if fermentation is just stalled, not complete, you could have residual fermentation sugar. Bumping the temperature up at the end solves both problems.

I also second adding a fan. No need for anything crazy, just something little to move the air. I used a old computer case fan wired to a random DC charger from the “miscellaneous chargers” bin at the thrift store: just make sure the voltage works with the fan.

Moisture can be an issue when you are keeping a fridge above the designed set temperature, but below ambient. I just keep a long sock filled with silica beads in mine. To recharge, I can just pop it in a low oven. They sell devices to do this (evadry is the brand name), but you might get literally 20x less silica for the convenience of a case and built in heating element.

“Tastes like it’s from your local Thai restaurant” is different than “tastes like it’s from Thailand”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america/

The TL;DR is that the Thai government has sponsored many Thai restaurants around the world as a form of diplomacy. Menus and recipes have largely been standardized by the Thai government, but adapted to local tastes.

Personally, if I want takeout style Thai curry, I use maesri brand curry paste cans. They are cheap and don’t take up much space, and they have instructions on them like “add curry paste and 100 ml coconut milk to wok and cook till fragrant. Add 400 g protein …”. It’s easy to keep a selection on hand of the different flavors. Yeah, it won’t be the same as doing it 100% from scratch, but a lot of Thai restaurant food like pad Thai is notorious for requiring a lot of ingredients.

Total War: Empire. I’ve previously played Rome 1/2, Medieval 1/2, and Atilla. For anyone who’s played other total war games, there are a couple of game mechanics that are new in Empire.

There are actual naval battles, where you put ships into a battle line, and you can board enemy ships. It’s cool but hard (for me) to control. Also many of the buildings in a territory aren’t located in the capital because it’s meant to represent colonial holdings, so you can have a sugar plantation or something outside the protection of a city, and a lot of the warfare ends up being small skirmishes sacking outlying buildings.

The new campaign missions seem a lot longer than what I remembered of the original campaigns. I like that they tutorials now give you some strategy, too.

They aren’t talking about rolled or steel cut oats, they are talking whole grain as in unprocessed other than winnowing. They are also known as “groats”.

One of my friends had their water hookups backwards, too, and they had no clue until I checked after they complained to me about how all their clothes were shrinking despite only ever washing on cold and hang drying. Sounds like a nice feature to have a sensor in there.

I’ve definitely got a soft spot for any electromechanical appliances. Computers have gotten so cheap that every appliance built now runs on them, but it’s much harder (for me, at least) to do anything about it when one stops working.

• My chest freezer stopped working, and i was able to put in a new relay for $2. The circuit diagram made it easy to diagnose with a multimeter. Oddly enough, i had to buy a 10 pack, so i likewise have a bunch of spares I’ll never need.

• My dishwasher stopped working, and the manual specifically showed which wires to connect to to test resistance of each component to see if anything needed to be replaced. It turned out that the float was gunked up, so it read as having enough water even though it didn’t.

• My fridge ice maker stopped working, and I just had to stick in a jumper wire to put it through a test cycle that immediately made it clear what was going wrong (a short), and i was able to fix it.

This is all in contrast to my clothes washer that runs on a computer, and it gives me an error message that basically just means “it’s not draining right”, and there’s like 8 potential causes, and I’ve tried to address them all, but it’s still get the error message.

I like to add basically a chai spice mix. I’m a snob when it comes to chai, so I’ll mortar/pestle up spices to use for chai, and I’ll often do enough at once for multiple batches (even though it’s best completely fresh). It goes really well in oats. If you want the lazier version, “pumpkin spice” mix in the US is basically a chai spice mix.

For savory oats, I treat it like congee. There’s a lot of ways to make it, but you can either take it in a western direction (chicken stock, bacon, fried eggs, etc) or more Asian (dashi/miso stock, soy sauce, sesame, ramen egg, etc.).

There are 2 types of non-enzymatic browning: caramelization and maillard.

Caramelization is done by breaking sugar down, which then actually recombines into bigger molecules. I think it would happen with all sugars. If you do this with sucrose, it has to first break into glucose and fructose. This is done faster at a low pH, which is why if you’ve ever had to make invert syrup (which is just sucrose broken down), you add some kind of acid before heating it up. My assumption is that starting with glucose/fructose, caramelization will be faster, and not pH sensitive like when using sucrose.

The maillard reaction is the combination of sugar with amino acids. It takes place faster at higher pH (which is why you use lye or baking soda to make pretzels). It only works with certain types of sugar, though (glucose, fructose, galactose, lactose, maltose, et al.). Sucrose alone technically won’t do it, but if you are heating sucrose, you’ll be creating at least some glucose/fructose that can do it. Basically, you should get way more maillard reactions with the monosaccharides.

Basically, if you are baking with them, you may need to adjust recipes a little to prevent over browning.

Also, the monosaccharides absorb more moisture from the air, so they will stay moist longer, which is why some recipes tell you to use honey or invert syrup in recipes. It could be a good thing in some recipes, but a bad thing in others.

You can buy plain glucose (dextrose) and fructose. Glucose isn’t quite as sweet as sucrose, but fructose is sweeter. I’d bet you could mix 2 parts dextrose to one part fructose and use it as a drop in in recipes that call for sucrose. It may affect browning and resulting moisture of any baked goods, but it’s worth experimenting with.

It’s like instant pulled pork

Pipikaula is the Hawaiian equivalent to biltong, and it’s really good.

“Meat floss” is a disgusting name in my opinion, but it’s the translation of the Asian equivalent of machaca.

That’s actually the original way chili would have been made. Vaqueros would have access to salted, dried beef, and dried peppers.

I’ve made pemmican with peppers in it, and rehydrated while camping. It worked out all right. I ended up adding cornmeal so the fat didn’t end up like an oil slick on top. I could basically melt it down and dissolve the cornmeal into it before adding water.

In the US, the concentration of tomato paste and tomato puree is legally defined. 8%<puree<24%<paste. “Sauce” is not defined the same way, and commonly has other stuff added to it like salt, oregano, basil, or other herbs.

My guess is the recipe has to be paste, otherwise that’s barely anything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_rice

Personally, I really like the version from Iran. They (and I’m sure there is regional variation in it) mix some yogurt into the rice, which seems similar to the dish you had.

Plain, white rice will brown a little where it contacts the pan. Adding a fat like oil or butter will conduct heat better so you get a thicker layer of browning. It’s basically frying. The addition of an acid increases the rate of caramelization, so yogurt helps with that.

There are companies making good instant coffee these days. The problem is that it’s quite expensive since I’m pretty sure it’s rotovapped or something like that.

Not to try to oversell you or anything, but I wouldn’t write out ovens that have convection capability (often marketed these days as airfry). They cook faster, with more even temperature, and it’s literally just a fan to blow air around. It shouldn’t really have much effect on the price. I think it should theoretically make the temperature oscillation much lower, too. Personally, my dumb oven swings by like plus and minus 50 degrees F with a 25 degree offset. So if I want 350, it will bounce from 275 to 375. Newer, smarter ovens can have better control methods to maintain temp.

If your current oven heating element melted itself, I would suspect that there’s something wrong with the thermostat, so there may be additional parts that need replacing.