Music: "Down in the Country" by Israel Nash
System: Thinkpad X230 (running Bunsen Labs linux)
Location: Home (the mountains)
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I do not do Christina's 5 questions too often. But maybe I
should start doing so. I enjoy reading everyone else's
responses, so it seems nice to contribute.
Additionally, I am playing around with adding metadata to
the top of this post to see if it is something I might
want to do more in the future.
---
1. Has a self-help book helped you?
I'm not sure exactly what a self-help book is. In my
head I associate them as being about changing your
mental state or habbits, rather than--for
example--learning how to do a task. I have not read
much of the former, so I guess my answer is no. I have
read a lot of the later, and have learned to do the
things I have read about.
2a. How many times a month do you cook dinner?
I generally prepare three meals a day for my family.
We eat out when traveling, or maybe once a week for
dinner. We do not have many vegan options for dining
out where we live, so most food is from home, or
from friends (we trade off cooking meals with some
friends up here in the mountains, but only do so
once a month or so).
2b. Do you plan meals, or look in the refrigerator?
Breakfast is either cereal, a bagel, or some form
of "hot breakfast" (oats, various grains, poridge
sort of stuff). On rare occasions I will make either
waffles or pancakes, but not too often.
To make lunches easier we have normalized on a
sandwich and a side for every lunch. The side, lately,
is a homemade macaroni salad with chickpeas, carrots,
green peas, onion, spices, etc. The sandwich is rye
bread, vegan mayo, vegan deli slices, vegan cheese,
bavarian sweet/spicy mustard, greek olives, and red
onion. My child usually opts for a peanut butter
sandwich on rye. Sometimes with banana on it.
Dinner can vary from a quick meal: burger from a
frozen patty of some form, to more involved recipes:
masoor dal with chapati, chili, burritos, etc. I
tend to decide earlier in the day if I am going to
do something like that, and then make the time for
it. There is also a middle route: I may pre-make a
big batch of seitan, have a bunch of veggies prepped,
etc. and then stir fry things and serve over rice.
If I do that, I plan the prep stuff on a Sunday and
then make stuff throughout the week with the prepped
items. I am making a big batch of rice and beans
right now as I type this. It will go into buritos or
be served as a side for a few meals this week.
3. Where do you get your recipes?
I tend to cook a lot from pantry staples. I know
lots of ways to combine the things we have. So I
can often throw things together. I went to a small
culinary school program when I was in my twenties.
Doing so gave me a lot of confidence to be able to
just use what I have and know that it will at least
be edible, if not amazing.
Sometimes my partner sends me a recipe. I then tend
to modify it to use fewer ingredients and have more
sensible cooking. Recipes, particularly from cookbooks,
tend to be way more complicated than they need to be.
Other times, I will look around online for how other
people make something. I'll look at 2-5 recipes for
a thing. Then I combine them into something workable
for me and for what I have on hand. I tend to not do
grocery runs for specific recipes and instead use what
we have (which can vary from week to week, but has
a number of solid/dependable staple items).
I often convert recipes to work with an instant pot,
which I find really easy to use and produce good
results with.
If I search for recipes online, I almost never search
for vegan recipes, prefering to convert non-vegan
recipes to vegan ones.
I really like the youtube channel "Hebbar's Kitchen".
They do udupi cuisine (mostly), which is delicious and
either vegan or easily made vegan. Their videos do not
have any talking and only briefly show measurements
and ingredients. Giving you a basic framework for
how the thing is made, but leaves it to you and your
instincts to get it done (especially if you are going
to convert to instant pot or the like).
4. What are your great thrift store finds?
My partner is very worried about bedbugs, so we do
not thrift shop too often. When I was younger I grew
up on thrift store purchases. I loved finding old
computer parts, jazz records, and books by
Ray Bradbury at the time.
5. What would make, or has made, you more patriotic?
If the country had the sense to admit that you cannot
really represent so much space and so many people. If
the country split up into many smaller countries that
were truly independent. If the country found a way to
abandon democracy (see: "might makes right" or
"majority rule") in favor of consensus decision
making practices (something that is very difficult at
the scales most modern governments work at, but would
be doable with smaller governing areas).
I don't see any of that happening. Governments, accross
the board, are a giant tire fire that just keeps
burning and will take everything, the planet included,
with it.
