Stuff I See Around The old Interweb

It’s like the way I often cook for myself nowadays, and not just curries. “Chuck it in, mix it up and let it do its thing” works for chilli, goulash, tajine, eintopf - in fact most stew-ish dishes whatever their nationality. They’re meant to be low-maintenance, that’s the whole point.

Much practice means I’ve got the knack of knowing what / how much spices / seasonings work with what meat, fish, chicken, veg, pulses…

Put crushed caraway seeds in goulash, a chunk of plain chocolate or sprinkle of cocoa in chilli, a big pinch of cinnamon and a dash of lemon juice in chicken with tomatoes… That kind of thing.

Then there was the time I made a “we’re-out-of-tamarind?” fake-out for a green lentil & brown basmati khichri. The fake involved HP sauce, lemon juice, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and crossed fingers, and worked far better than expected - but then HP sauce has tamarind in it already and IMO thanks to the Raj there’s some much older Indian relish in its ancestry.

Don’t worry about forgetting salt: add it later - that’s what ”taste and adjust seasoning” means - and if you know the people at table salt their food before they try it anyway (as so many do) don’t bother. Not enough salt is easy to fix, too much salt is there for keeps.

Cultural diff means I’m okay with beef, also pork.

AFAIK pork mostly belongs in Keralan and Goan cuisine, especially pork vindaloo, though proper vindaloo is far more subtle than the Brit curry-house standard. I read somewhere years ago that the old Imperial Mughals were at ease with wild boar, treating it as clean “game” not unclean “pork”, but don’t quote me. Lamb, mutton and goat also really go well with Indian spicing.

Lentils, chickpeas, beans etc. (dhal - it’s a class of lentil dishes, but AFAIK also just means “pulses”) didn’t get mentioned, but you can sub them for meat in anything, so long as you cook them properly.

If you do add cubed meat or paneer (pressed curd cheese), then depending on proportions of ingredients that lentil-rice khichri from earlier becomes a sort of dhansak, biryani or pilau. For this sort of cooking the names don’t matter, the tastes do, and the tastes are good.

Dried lentils and dried split peas will cook in a masala (spiced veg base) in about 1 - 1½ hours without advance work; just add a bit more water for them to absorb. Chickpeas / kidney beans need soaked overnight to get them cooking-ready; do lots, drain, divide into recipe amounts, bag and freeze. If you use tinned; drain and rinse them to get rid of excess salt / sugar in the packing water.

The finished food freezes fine (ah, alliteration!) and if your takeaway delivers in those little plastic containers with snap-on lids, stop chucking them out because you’ve got portion-size freezer boxes right there.

Use one for the main and another for the starch (rice, couscous, pasta, noodles, mashed spuds, pommes dauphinoise*, whatever): defrost and nuke one of each and you have a light meal for two or a solid meal for one.

(*NB, must do something about my Firefox spellchecker: “pommies diaphanous” isn’t a side dish I recognise, but conjures up some very odd mental images…)

I seen people say they got Black Fatigue…and I think my community destroyed too many bridges.

Thoughts? I just…not feeling great for being a black guy.

While the focus is often on transportation and energy generation, about one third to one fourth of global carbon emissions come from our food systems. This means that making these systems more efficient, such as by reducing wasting energy on food that never makes it to market, is a big deal--as well as an important economic factors for farmers.

In regions where grid electricity is unreliable or inaccessibly expensive, the lack of access to reliable refrigeration greatly increases the risk that harvested food will spoil before it can reach market. Farmers also have less agency in when and where to sell their food when they have to rush to sell it before it spoils.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. The experiment with paper money failed horribly. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the part with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

About a decade ago there was some noise made about trying to figure out what day on the calendar Ferris Bueller’s Day Off took place. The day that was decided on by the nerds who think too much about this sort of thing was June 5, 1985. This was decided largely by the fact that the Cubs game Ferris, Cameron and Sloane were seen attending happened on that day, and apparently you can’t argue with…