AKMOT

You think? Let’s test that then!

First, you gotta get a cool cup. I got this one from a thrift store for a very affordable price. But if you can’t find one, a standard clear cup or jar should suffice

Now, you don’t need a decal, but I recommend it because they’re cool. I just got some sticker vinyl, traced and cut out the Wii logo and some stars

Now for the drink!!

Start by making or buying jelly. If you make it, you should do so a few hours before you intend to make the drinks, as it will need time to set. You can find jelly at most any grocery store.

Get your cup and add ice and jelly. You should cut the jelly into small pieces or use cookie cutters to make fun shapes. I recommend you don’t add quite all of the jelly, as you’ll need some for the top later

Next, add your flavoring syrup of choice, I recommend blue raspberry or melon. You should be able to find them at any restaurant supply store

Then, add carbonated water. Flavored sparkling waters also work fine, as they don’t taste like much. You should be able to find some at any store that sells drinks.

Next add Calpico, this is technically optional, but it tastes way better with it, so it’d highly recommend it. You can get it at practically any Asian market, or normal market if you live in Asia

Now, add some ice cream, or something of the sort, I use vanilla.

After that, you can top it with some whipped cream, jelly shapes, cherries, really anything!!

I would also recommend using a straw to drink it, because you will need to mix it up a bit. but you can’t really mix it before hand, because it will ruin the cool gradient affect

Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. […] And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.

[…] “It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.

[…] Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention.

Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.

“Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian,” Grandi says squarely.

[…] Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era.

[P]oliticians understand the power of what Grandi terms “gastronationalism”. Who cares if the traditional food culture they promote is partly based on lies, recipes dreamt up by conglomerates or food imported from America? Few things are more reassuring and agreeable than an old lady making tortellini.

It wasn’t always like this. “The grandparents knew it was a lie,” Grandi tells me, finishing the last of his prosecco. “The philologic concern with ingredient provenance is a very recent phenomenon.” Indeed it’s hard to imagine that people who survived the second world war eating chestnuts, as my grandfather did, would be concerned about using pork jowl instead of pork belly in a pasta recipe. Or as Grandi puts it, “Their ‘tradition’ was trying not to starve.”

[…] As Grandi points out, a tradition is nothing but an innovation that was once successful.

Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong

a beef, current and/or historical, with your neighbours (this dish is OURS! nay, it is OURS!)

economic interests, as in farmers promoting local produce and the state legislating in their favour

the EU’s CAP (Common Agricultural Policy), a formidable bureaucratic apparatus which basically came into being so that French farmers won’t violently shut down the entire EU project (which is fundamentally a common market, right?), and then got out of hand. so many people are by now dependent on it, that I think the EU’s legitimacy can’t survive without it.

And a few more excerpts from the article (archive.is/20251227233314/https://www.ft.com/content/6ac009d5-dbfd-4a86-839e-28bb44b2b64c) :

For Italians born after boom years, carbonara has an unalterable set of ingredients: pork jowl, Roman pecorino cheese, eggs and pepper. But early recipes are surprisingly varied. The oldest was printed in Chicago in 1952 and featured Italian bacon, not pork jowl. Italian recipes from around the same time include everything from gruyère (1954, in the magazine La Cucina Italiana) to “prosciutto, and thinly sliced sautéd mushrooms” (1958, Rome’s Tre Scalini restaurant). Pork jowl didn’t come to replace bacon until as recently as the 1990s. But it is carbonara that provokes some of the most extreme culinary dogmatism. Many Italians today learn to cook it at home according to a set of rules that places it in the context of its “Roman pasta family”, alongside cacio e pepe, gricia and amatriciana. The idea is that the addition or subtraction of specific ingredients transforms one classic pasta dish into another, and any deviation from the rules is a matter of national interest. In 2015, the town of Amatrice issued an official statement to correct the Michelin-starred chef Carlo Cracco after he revealed he liked to put garlic in his amatriciana. “We are confident that this was a slip of the tongue by the celebrity chef,” the statement read. “We are certain he meant well.”

'Meal prep can take so much time, especially if you’re disabled. Wouldn’t it be nice if meal prep was easier? I often find myself reading recipes that say, “10 minutes prep time”, and the reality ends up being at least three times that amount because of my mobility issues. Then it comes time to making the recipe and it’s just too many steps.

You may have already read some meal prep tips and tricks. Every meal prep post I’ve ever read has been written by an abled person with the assumption that someone is going to cook every night of the week, telling you to prep things and then stick it in the fridge. Yeah, no thanks. You’re just asking that I throw everything in the compost after two weeks."

orange cardamom earl grey simple syrup and candied peel:

handful of cardamom pods mortar and pestled and husks removed

entire washed peel of one orange, cut into strips

one cup granulated sugar

one cup dark black tea (two bags constant comment, one bag earl grey)

optional to remove the bags after brewing but before pouring strong tea into pot, but I like the tannins

simmer until pith is clear (usually an hour)

sieve syrup into bottle/jar and seal while hot, store at 4°C (fridge)

It's sooo good

Archaeologists are keen to learn more about the specific diets and culinary practices of ancient populations around the globe. An interdisciplinary team of scientists analyzed the residues on prehistoric ceramic cooking pots and concluded that early Eastern European hunter-gatherer-fishers likely foraged for plants as well as hunted fish and other animals for their sustenance, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. And they often combined ingredients for region-specific recipes.

This is a burgeoning area of archaeological research. For instance, back in 2020, we reported on researchers who spent an entire year analyzing the chemical residues of some 50 ceramic cooking pots. The aim was to gain new insights into ancient diets, and the authors actually cooked their own maize-based meals in replica pots to test their hypotheses. They found that the charred bits at the bottom of the pots provided evidence of the last meal cooked. But the patinas contained evidence of the remnants of prior meals that had built up over time. So it depends on which part of the pot you sample.

Most prior research has been typically useful primarily for identifying animal remains; it’s more challenging to identify the kinds of plants ancient peoples might have consumed. The authors of this latest paper combined several analytical techniques to study the residues of 58 pottery pieces dating between the 6th and 3rd millennium BCE. And they, too, conducted their own experiments, cooking various combinations of the ingredients in ceramic vessels over an open fire.

Regional recipes

The team used Scanning Electron Microscopy to analyze their samples Lara González Carretero/CC-BY 4.0

Example of a Mesolithic pottery vessel. Lara González Carretero/CC-BY 4.0

Experimental cooking with modern replica pottery vessels to recreate prehistoric recipes. Lara González Carretero/CC-BY 4.0

The authors selected their pottery shards from coastal, lagoon, riverside, and lakefront sites to get a range of ecological settings, and focused on shards with substantial crusted residues from foodstuffs. They also examined botanical records, where available, to get a sense of which plants were locally available at each site. After initial examination under a microscope, the most heavily crusted areas were imaged with scanning electron microscopy to better examine their fine structure. They also analyzed the lipids and bulk isotopes present in the residues.

The results: The team found traces of wild grasses and legumes, fruits or berries, green vegetables, and roots and tubers native to the broader region. Shards recovered from sites in the Don River basin showed these people used the seeds of wild legumes (possibly clover) and grasses, as well as showing some evidence of bran and barley. By contrast, shards from the Upper Volga and Dnieper-Dvina region contained more traces of guelder rose berries and other fleshy fruits and smaller-seeded Amaranthaceae plants.

Shards from the Baltic region showed higher traces of freshwater fish, with some regions also including berries, sea beetroot, flowering rush, beets, and sea club-rush tubers. There were also traces of dairy products in shards from a site in Denmark, likely obtained from nearby farming communities.

For the cooking experiments, the authors explored different potential food mixtures focusing on two main plant species: guelder rose berries and species related to the Amaranthaceae family (beet, goosefoot, and saltbush specifically). The berries were gathered in the fall from the south of England and frozen right afterward. They boiled the berries with water in replica pottery vessels, combining some batches with freshwater fish like carp, and also varying the distance of the vessels from the open flames and active embers. They then sampled the cooking residues and compared those results to the samples taken from the prehistoric vessels.

ya got

gochujang butter noodles

peanut butter noodles

chili crisp fettuccine alfredo

miso butter noodles

Honey, darling, listen to me. Would I lie to you? No, I wouldn't. If you ever find yourself driving around in the rural southern US, you simply must keep an eye out for one of these gentlemen:

But they are DELICIOUS.

You have to use raw or green peanuts for this, green is best (raw peanuts have been dried s bit, green were dug up but not dried yet). Roasted won't work. You boil them in the shells, tossing in salt and/or a spice blend. Cajun seasoning blends are popular, but old bay is good too.

And then I guess tofu had a moment and brands got scared of losing people to trial-and-error and started manufacturing extra-firm tofu you could use to break a window and escape a house fire with.

And the more Americanized brands went that direction while the traditional brands said “no that’s fucking stupid we’re not changing anything” and SOME brands said “what if we do like the middle of that?”

Asking you to grate the tofu on a cheese grater and bake it? Westernized. You want that red brick tofu. You want Whole Foods amount of extra firm or SUPER firm because if that thing has any amount of moisture left in it it’ll disintegrate like Tubby Custard on the grater.

Tofu scrambled eggs? You want the OG extra firm. You want it to hold its form but still have that softness and give unless your goal is to imitate sad dining hall scrambled eggs.

Hello??

Hello!!!???

Shaking your hand shaking your hand shaking your hand???????

IT WAS EXCELLENT in fact i'm going to post the recipe for you because i enjoyed being asked about eunuchs.

cranberry-pear pandowdy, (adapted) out of Sweeter Off The Vine (Yossy Arefi)

equipment: recipe calls for (and i used) a 10" cast iron skillet but a normal 8x10 dish or any (deep!) pie plate would also work.

ingredients:

crust: you can make pie crust from scratch or use store bought. i decided to make this recipe to use up some leftover storebought pie crust from thanksgiving but my mom had thrown it out so i just used 2 sheets of frozen puff pastry and that worked fine. you only need enough to cover the top of the pie. OPTIONAL: 1 egg for egg washing it.

roll out whatever you're using and cut 2"ish circles out of it

mush scraps together and roll them out again and make more circles. you're going to layer them on each other all over the pie. make sure they actually overlap pretty significantly or you'll end up with uncovered bits of pie once they're out of the oven.

you can refrigerate these until they're ready to go on the pie if you're doing this step first, but i did the filling waiting for the puff pastry to defrost and just whacked em straight on the pie and into the oven.

OPTIONAL: add an egg wash (1 egg beaten, brushed over the top) for browning.

ALSO OPTIONAL: sprinkle some turbinado / big flaky sugar on top.

filling:

1.25-1.5 lbs (2 or 3) ripe pears

1 lb (450g) cranberries (fresh)

1/2 cup dried cranberries. you can add more than 1/2 cup. i also threw in about 1/4 cup of dried cherries.

enough heated port/madeira/sweet wine (OR boiling water) to cover the dried fruit, probably a quarter to a half of a cup

1/4 cup maple syrup

big spoonful cornstarch

spices, to taste. i used cinnamon, clove, bit of nutmeg.

preheat oven to 375 (190c) with a rack set to the middle. butter the skillet/dish you'll be baking in. if you're using a shallow dish or something that might leak, put a cookie sheet on the bottom rack to catch any drips.

put the fresh cranberries in a big bowl.

put the dried fruit in a small bowl and pour the (just boiling) alcohol (or water) over it. let sit until it cools.

peel, core, and chop the pears into bitesize pieces add to bowl with the cranberries, and mix to combine. depending on what order you do all this, add a squish of lemon juice to the pear if it's gonna sit there for a while so it doesn't brown.

when the dried fruit has soaked for a while, drain off the liquid and add the dried fruit to the bowl with the pear and cranberries.

once all the fruit is in the bowl, mix in maple syrup and stir to combine. sprinkle the cornstarch and spices on top, and stir to combine.

add all fruit to the skillet/dish and stir/combine to flatten out. shingle the crust circles on top (+ optional egg wash) and bake 35-45 minutes or until golden brown and bubbling around the edges.