You Suck At Cooking
Published 7 Oct 2023Hashbrowns. Also known as fried potato shreds. Also known as 2D potatoes. Also known as even greasier potato chips. Also known as hashbrowns.
If you’ve never fried before or you want to brush up on the details, check this out
https://food52.com/blog/18669-the-do-…This deep fry safety page is also very good
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/gui…Basically hot oil can get out of control so you need to monitor your temperature and not let it get too hot. Electric stoves are deceptive in that they can get the oil very hot even at a lower settings, there’s just a longer delay.
RECIPE
Capture potatoes
Apologize to potatoes
Remove outer thermal membrane
Disintegrate potatoes
Rinse potato smithereens or soak them if you want them less starchy
Wrap them in some cheesecloth or a clean dish towel and squeeze the hell out of them (but mainly the water and leave some of the hell)
Cook them in a non stick pan with a tablespoon of oil for around ten minutes so they won’t be medium rare
Let them cool off a bit
Put them in a bowl
For each potato add
1 teaspoon corn starch
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
some pepper pepper pepper
Wangjangle
Form into patties or triangles but NO OTHER SHAPES
Heat your oil in a cast iron skillet but not so hot that you burn your house down
Most recipes recommend around 350 degrees Fahrenheit but as long as you get a sizzle going when you put them in it’s hot enough
Fry until the first size is golden brown. Somewhere between 4-8 minutes
Fry the other side until golden brown which is gonna happen faster, probably 5 minutes max
Lay them down on a paper towel and tell them they did a good job
Let them cool or spray a heat resistant gel inside your mouth and eat immediately
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January 8, 2024
Crispy Hashbrowns – You Suck at Cooking (episode 161)
January 6, 2024
QotD: “Computer people are just people”
Not being a computer person myself, I keep forgetting that computer people are just people, meaning they’re no less silly, cliquish, and fad-chasing than the rest of us. Meyers-Briggs seems like a very short step above astrology to me — do I really need a long questionnaire to tell me I’m an extrovert? — but I shouldn’t be surprised that computer people like it. In my experience, “psychology” is to computer people what “computers” are to psych majors — randomly blinking ooga booga boxes that do some cool things, but are mostly a terrifying mystery. Liberal Arts people (of which Psych Majors are the most liberal) love Apple products not least because they promise to bury all that blinky ooga-booga stuff under “the user experience”; thus it shouldn’t surprise me that a quick-and-easy “test” that promises to unlock the secrets of the psyche appeals to the other sort.
Severian, “For Future Historians’ Benefit…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-02-21.
December 30, 2023
QotD: Post-Christmas dining
Amanda (@Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2021-12-29.
December 27, 2023
QotD: “Healthy eating” after the holidays
So good to be eating healthily again. I feel fitter and better in myself alreadyDay 2 of healthy eating
I miss cheese so much I want to cry. I’ve forgotten the taste of chocolate. Vegetables taste of sadness and resentment. I’ve never known such miseryAmanda (Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-01-04.
December 22, 2023
QotD: Mathematically inclined people
Steve H., “Star Wars Still Sucks: ‘Quick, Someone Put More Minwax on Natalie'”, Hog on Ice, 2005-05-26.
December 21, 2023
9 Ways to Slice a Pineapple
You Suck At Cooking
Published 6 Sept 2023There are many ways to cut a pineapple, but only nine of these are officially supported by the Pineapple Slicers Association of The World. None of those methods are depicted here.
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QotD: Wine bores
Pam Droog, letter to Vines magazine, May/June 2005.
December 20, 2023
QotD: Washing the dog
“No, I can do those now, in ten minutes.”
“That’s okay. It will give me an excuse not to do it today.”
“Ha ha! I’ll be right back, just take ten minutes.”
“No really I’m serious I — ” but he was already on the job. Damned efficient conscientious local hardware store. I also exchanged a propane cylinder, even though it still had some gas in it. I can never tell. If I worked with these things every day I could tell by hoisting it, but it seemed light.
“Probably some in it,” I said to one of the 39 youths who work the store, “but if I can hoist it one hand it’s probably almost done.” To demonstrate my manliness I hoisted the cylinder chest high a few times. Ha! See! Am not old. Strong like bool!
I have a red line of pain running from my scapula to my kidney right now.
Went home, did not paint, because it was supposed to rain. It did not rain. Fixed a few things, napped hard — had got up early for the Roseville jaunt — then grilled kababs, wondering exactly what I was missing that would have added SHISH to the KEBABS. Helped Friend Wife give the dog a bath; it’s amazing how he knows a bath is imminent, and will brook no subterfuge. Anytime someone tries to get him upstairs with a treat, he’s suspicious. If you try to get him in the bathroom with a treat, he is convinced that this will end with humiliation and wetness for no good reason at all, I mean, c’mon, why? He just got to the point where he’s a walking embodiment of all the interesting things that have happened and the interesting places he has been, and we’re just going to erase that? A shower for a dog is like the little amnesia pens the Men in Black use.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-09-16.
December 14, 2023
What Top Gear Really Meant
Aididan
Published 13 Aug 2023Top Gear is one of the most bizarre shows to ever exist. Not because of the quality of the show or anything, but rather because of how it evolved over the course of its existence. What exactly is it about Top Gear that makes it so special? Well, watch the video and find out.
Or don’t, I’m not your mother.
December 12, 2023
Rolling a Reliant Robin | Top Gear | BBC
Top Gear
Published 26 Nov 2010Jeremy takes the extreme sport of Reliant Robin rolling to the streets of Barnsley, aided by a string of celebrities who just happen to be on hand to help keep the fabled three-wheeler upright.
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December 4, 2023
Jeeves and Wooster, in a nutshell …
Barcode
Published 11 Oct 2021A summary of the entire Jeeves & Wooster series in roughly 6 minutes.
P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves (played by Stephen Fry) and Bertie Wooster (Hugh Laurie) have been lauded as one of the greatest comic double acts of all time. Set in the late 1920s-1930s, Jeeves and Wooster (1990-1993) follows the hilarious misadventures of Bertram Wilberforce Wooster — a young, affable English gentleman of the idle rich — and Jeeves — Bertie’s omniscient and resourceful valet. Jeeves discreetly takes control of his “mentally negligible” employer’s life, while Bertie Wooster finds himself pushed and reeled into countless imbroglios, fiascoes, and romantic entanglements led by his hapless friends and imperious aunts. But each disaster is drawn to its own satisfactory conclusion through a concatenation of intriguing coincidences … or so they would seem. Until, that is, the silent force behind every “coincidence” is revealed to be none other than the brilliant and inimitable Jeeves.
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November 29, 2023
QotD: The children of the revolution
As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.
November 8, 2023
Mel Blanc on How He Created His Iconic Voices | Carson Tonight Show
Johnny Carson
Published 27 Jun 2023Original Airdate: May 26, 1983
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October 30, 2023
Halloween Special: Dracula
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2016It’s creepy! It’s classic! It’s surprisingly infrequently read! It’s everyone’s favorite gothic horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula!
Wanna bypass the intro? Skip straight to 3:16 and party on!
For those asking, the outro song is “I Love The Night” by Blue Oyster Cult.
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October 15, 2023
History Summarized: The Castles of Wales
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Jun 2023Every castle tells a story, but when one small country has over 600 castles, the collective story they tell is something like “holy heck ouch, ow, oh god, why are there so many arrows, ouch, good lord ow” – And that’s Wales for you.
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