Cooking eggs
Cooking lemons
We’re approaching lemon meringue, which is one of the most difficult difficult lemon difficult baked goods
Eggs are one of the easier things to cook - what way are you trying to cook them?
Rolled Japanese style, aka tamagoyaki. That is really difficult.
Over easy is as easy as the name though.
Okay, sure, there are ways to cook them that are harder, but the vast majority of the ways people eat eggs are pretty simple. Basted is a way to cook them that comes out a lot like poached, but it’s more foolproof - it’s my wife’s favorite.
Scrambled. I have managed to fail that one, it did not scrambled or cook.
Someone else gave elaborate instructions for scrambling that would work well. I usually just melt some butter over medium heat, crack the egg into it, wait like 30 to 60 seconds, stir it up with a spatula, wait another minute or two, then turn/stir the hunks so that any runny parts are against the pan and give it maybe another minute.
Well I had a heated pan on high and I cracked an egg into it… and then I kept having a raw egg floating around in the pan. After poking at it for some time it started cooking and after more poking it did scramble, so I did succeed in the end but I also managed to fail the cooking part of it.
You don’t want the pan too hot, and you need a fat. Otherwise you were probably about right.
Thank you
I feel you, but the truth is that they’re easy to cook. It’s just that they’re also easy to cook badly.
Get pan heating. Medium high. If there’s a number scale from 1 to 10, go about 5 or 6.
Plenty of lubricant (oil, butter, whatever), ready to go. One pat of butter to the side
Crack eggs in a bowl.
Add pepper to taste.
Scramble eggs in bowl with fork.
When pan is hot, which is when you can hold your hand about six inches over the pan and feel it, add lubricant of choice. Just enough to cover the bottom of the pan.
Give eggs one last stir with fork, then pour in.
Count to six slowly. Then gently move the eggs around with. A spatula, spoon, or whatever is handy and won’t burn.
Once you’ve got chunks of eggs, stop. Count to six them move them around again.
Add in extra pat of butter. Let it start to melt, then gently move the chunks around until most of the liquid is now a jiggly mass with a tiny amount of liquid making the surface shiny.
Cut off the heat. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt or two. Put it all on a plate if it’s just for one person, in a bowl or individual plates for a bigger table.
That’s it. Bare minimum scramble. You can get fancier, but that’s a choice.
The reason most eggs people make suck is too much heat for too long. They get rubbery. Lower heat, gentle scrambling, then let the heat that’s in the eggs finish the last bit of cooking on the plate or serving bowl. You’ll get fucking excellent eggs. Might take a few tries to really nail things to perfection, but the methodology will work to make yummy eggs before that.
Seriously, eggs don’t need to be in the pan long. A minute or so for a big batch as long as you’re moving the curds that form is plenty most of the time. When it isn’t, it’ll be because it’s a huge batch rather than just big.
Same principle applies to over easy, over hard, and sunny side up, but flipping those is a skill that takes practice. But use lower heat and you’ll fuck up less. Trust me, if you leave things less done than you think is done, there is plenty of heat there to finish the job and they’ll be safe to eat even if not pasteurized. I promise. Carry over cooking is a thing.
One of the most foolproof ways to cook eggs, in my opinion, is basted. Probably easier than scrambled even.
- Heat butter in a pan over medium heat until the bubbles are subsiding.
- Crack eggs into pan, spaced as far apart as possible.
- When the bottoms are looking mostly white, add about 1/3 cup of water around them.
- Reduce heat to medium low and cover (a glass lid is very helpful here). The steam is going to cook the tops while the pan cooks the bottoms. You don’t have to do anything but watch them.
- When the top of the yolks look hazy white, they’re done. You can touch the whites with a fork to make sure they aren’t running.
- I like to take them out with a spatula and set the spatula on a paper towel for a second to soak up any water before putting them on the plate.
- Add salt and pepper if you want.
They come out kind of like over-medium or poached.
Putting the lid on to finish sunny side up works even without adding water. If you don’t have a lid for your pan a piece of baking paper over the top of the pan works.
Seeing In The Loop and not watching it
Picture frames.
Looks like an incredibly simple project for a beginner woodworker, doesn’t it? Get some nice wood, rout in a rabbet for the glass/art/backing, rout on a nice decorative profile, then set your miter saw to 45 degrees and make 8 miter cuts, apply some carpenter’s glue then wrap it in a band clamp. What’s so tough?
I’ll tell you what’s tough: the precision with which those miter cuts must be made is exceptionally fussy. Say each cut is a quarter degree off. Well, after eight cuts that’s two degrees of error. Three of the joints will look fine, the last one will look like an axe wound.
The issue isn’t making the cuts at 45°, it’s making them at 45.0000°. Or, more realistically, making them truly complementary.
This same issue applies to moldings around cabinetry, with the added bonus that the carcass of the cabinet won’t let any of the joints close tightly, so they all look like trash.
I’m not a woodworker, but this is the reason I always finish with sanding. You can sand sand sand, check… sand sand sand, check… Just repeat that 500 times and you’re done!
Everyone should have to sand a piece of wood to within spec at least once in their life.
Measure twice; consider a finer grain of sandpaper; sand once.
Repeat 500 times.
*stressed depressed lemon zest
Most things you see a real professional doing.
Just look at the ease a window washer cleans a window stripless and fast, or a bricklayer just gets stones on the same height with 2 small taps on the brick consistently. Many more examples like that…
Years of experience and muscle memory make it look easy… but it isnt.
And humans want to replace some of this shit with robots.
Window washer working on sky scrappers? Sure, I guess it is a job that can be done by robots.
Bricklayer? Why the fuck???
I don’t see why a robot can’t lay bricks just as effectively or more than a human.
For one thing it is a tough, dirty, physically taxing job. If you can reduce the strain on humans and not wear them out as fast I’d call it a win…
Sure, but I’d imagine that Joe the Bricklayer may have a slightly different reaction when you tell him the exciting news that he doesn’t have to lay bricks anymore because a robot can do it.
That’s because something’s wrong with our system. Joe the bricklayer has others things HE wants to do, but reaping the rewards for the businesses he helped build is in the cards for most.
I don’t disagree, but that bigger picture sentiment isn’t keeping the lights on at Joe’s house.
For the record: I am completely against the notion that we should stifle technical progress to preserve jobs and the status quo, but I just also feel it’s something that we owe it to ourselves as a society to manage that issue alongside the progress so nobody gets left behind.
That’s how we ended up with the solidly blue rust belt turning very purple over the past 50 years, and a state of coal miners like West Virginia becoming blood red.
No doubt. People live and die in the hear and now. Its just frustrating how normal the idea that automating or making things more accessible means that it might ruins peoples lives. Like what a nutty notion, only made possible by the disconnect.
Tell that to all the seamstresses, or do you think we should go back to manually made textiles?
But the thing is, we don’t have to replace Joe with a robot. The hard part about being a bricklayer is having to make cement, carry that cement in buckets, carry concrete blocks, amongst other things that I don’t even know (I watched my father in law working a few times). Why can’t we just replace the “heavy” part with robots?
Let’s use robots to our advantage, but keep people doing jobs they actually like.
Bricklayer? Why the fuck???
Why the fuck not? The goal should be to automate all the jobs, so we humans can enjoy our time on this planet instead of spending it working.
Honestly, stuff like underwater welding should be done by robots. Stuff like that is so unbelievably dangerous. I could see a lot of dangerous jobs getting swapped over to robots (bomb defusal, hotwork, chemical processing or oil rig repairs when the plant is shut down, etc).
If bomb defusal isn’t already being done remotely by drone then someone needs to be fired immediately
I was never able to center clay on a pottery wheel.
Just be yourself
Easier to say when things are equal opportunity.
Who’s that? I’ll copy everything they do!
Seizure ensues
Art
Just find someone who needs to launder a lot of money
Making an otherwise simple change in a game made by a big company.
There are tons of things that could be done relatively “easy peasy” when it comes to correcting an error in the code or making a change to a number or even adding a thing. What makes it difficult is red tape. You’ve got assigned tasks to do that probably don’t include making that simple fix or adding that thing or changing that number. If it’s just 1 dude in his garage working at a hobby project, it could get done in 10 minutes if he wanted to do it.
Of course this assumes things aren’t done in a way that make doing something that might be easy even harder simply because you don’t have many options to do the things you want within the system you’ve made without dismantling part of it and getting into a whole mess of other shit to make the “simple” change. Sometimes it be like that, too.
Perfect example is changing text in a game (maybe 10 mins) vs adding emoji to text in a game ( weeks?) does the text engine support emoji. Do we need to add support for all arbitrary images? How big can the emoji be? So many issues come out of “simple” requests.
Lemon meringue pie
Merangue is the perfect food to make when you’re angry as hell.
Lemon Merangry pie.
Meringue is easy if you have an electric mixer. Difficult if you don’t. Make sure the eggs are not cold and use the cream of tartar, mix by hand and then with the mixer.
Wouldn’t that only make one angrier?
Do you mean merang-rier?
One thing I learned about meringue is that the slightest bit of fat will turn it into frosting.
Even a mixing bowl/whip that has been sitting in an open kitchen may have accumulated enough aerosolized cooking oil to effect the outcome. I’ve never failed after washing the utensils and then being scrupulous about broken yolks.
Preach. I keep my kitchen as clean as possible, and it’s still so easy to miss something that will mess up the meringue, or even the curd.
The crust is at least foolproof lol. I’d been making pies long before I decided I wanted to tackle meringue.
Parenting. Before I had kids I was often judgmental of parents, but now I’ve realized all the things I didn’t take into account and all the things you just don’t have control over. In my case, I was not expecting to be a single parent, there was the pandemic, and I did not factor in how impactful the lack of sleep and autonomy would be.
Even without suddenly becoming single, or a pandemic, or anything, being a parent isn’t something that can be explained to anybody who hasn’t experienced it, IMO. You can use words to explain, that you think are accurate. But it just has to be experienced to fully understand. The fatigue, the change in stress levels, the amount of time you lose. Conceptually not hard to grasp. But the way it feels, different story. “Wow, this is worse/more than I thought.”
But given all that, it’s also hard to explain that it’s all worth it. One of the best things about being a parent right now for me personally, is watching my kids learn everything for the first time, and the wonders of learning, beaming from their eyes. It’s such a privilege being the one to have a chance to teach them a bunch of things. Being a role model, being someone who they build trust with.
Also walking into their room after they’ve fallen asleep and watching two absolute gigawatt units expend their energy non-stop all day, now completely still (and silent, JFC), and just so peaceful. Their eyes just two lines, rather than two open balls all day. Adorable.
100% accurate.
Once they become teens, the joy is in seeing them realize how much they don’t yet know. It happens rarely, so make sure to document it.
Nothing is more entertaining than being a parent.
There is also nothing to explain the disassociative feeling of having them kidsplain to you things that you taught them, or were actually there for. It’s like, dude, you didn’t know how to wipe your own bum until I taught you. I think I have a handle on 9/11, liberal vs. conservative politics, the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, or how to drive/ shop for groceries/ pay taxes/ vote/feed my dog/apply a bandaid, or whatever thing you think just came into existence because you learned it.
you didn’t know how to wipe your own bum until I taught you. I think I have a handle on 9/11, liberal vs. conservative politics
I agree completely with the one exception being the current aging generation that is so completely brainwashed by Murdock et al, that think the working class are the badies, among other misconceptions…
lmao that’s funny. Yeah this is already somewhat the case with my 3 and 4 year old. Even sometimes when they were 2. They’ll tell me things I told them, repeatedly. Things they learn in preschool. Things that they make up on the spot that are completely untrue bullshit. And you’ll just go “oh really, wow, how interesting”. It’s all about sharing with each other at this point lol. Everything doesn’t have to be exactly right or true. I’m trying to remember that because my oldest is a bit of a know-it-all. Trying to prevent further damage to him being a little annoying prick with that behavior. 😆 Especially towards the younger one.
I was out shopping for plants this morning when a little girl wanted to point out the spilled dirt and the hedges they had to me. It was adorable.
My girlfriend and her 5 year old will be moving in with me this summer, I’m so excited to see her learn and grow.
You’ll be a great addition to her life, I’m sure. 💛
I have a friend with kids. I’m also an aunt. I think it’s absolutely fantastic when people can be parents, but I also don’t at all understand how anyone is capable of doing that shit. I’m more than capable of briefly watching and playing with kids for several hours at a time, but not caring for them 24/7 forever.
It’s especially wild to me when parents basically explain to me that they are constantly legitimately going through extreme suffering in what you describe in your first paragraph.
But then they tell me how literally suffering 24/7 is somehow all worth it to them and it makes even less sense. I’m guessing there’s some sort of hormonal thing going on to trick the brain into giving periodic happiness episodes in the middle of what sometimes seems to be flat out torture.
😆 Sounds very accurate to a normal parental experience indeed.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily hormonal. I mean… Everything brain related is, perhaps. I don’t know about such things. But it’s mostly for me about how beautiful it is to have such a purely innocent being put their full trust in you and love you unconditionally (whether by instinct or not). You get to have an extremely tight emotional bond with someone who is completely dependent on you, and that really sharpens your morals. It grows you the fk up. You start having a lot more empathy, even if you thought you had a lot of it before.
It just changes you, completely. Like, I’ve explained it now, in some pretty well-chosen few words, but there’s still this explanatory gap here that will never be bridged by words, only through experience. It’s… hard to explain. 😅
You even feel a little conned, sometimes. Always tired, annoyed, want to be alone, stuff like that. Then when the kids are away for a day or more, “I miss them”. Like what the actual F. 🤡 Am I infested with brain parasites or am I a parent?
I went through Army training where they intentionally deprive you of sleep for 9 weeks, and I had still never been as tired as I was the first 6 months of parenthood. I didn’t know that you can get that tired and still be alive.
I know, holy shit. And I’ve been a bad grown up and staying up sometimes until 3 am playing games, and the next day I’ll sleep at like 7:30 pm.
My mom told me she used to judge the parents in the shops with screaming kids, we didn’t do that and she thought it was her excellent parenting. She said “Then God gave me Janet” to cure her judgemental hubris, lol.
Nobody is a good parent all the time, we aren’t robots and exhaustion is such a drain on intelligence and compassion. But most of us are good parents enough of the time, thankfully.
Fucking Janet
I’ve got one thing to say and that’s
Dammit Janet
I love youuuuu
I was one of those rare, quiet kids, so until my brother was born my parents were just reinforced in their belief that other parents were just shitty parents.
And those people in comments that are always shitting on parents? Wait until you see what they look like and how they live. Often the most outrageous comments are made by the most outrageous people.
What do you mean, like finish work then go straight to playing games? I know parents who manage that (somehow!)
I can’t even conceive of the lack of sleep. Like I’ll miss out on a few hours and feel like death, but staying up an entire night? And then having to drive, with a sick kid in the car?
But I mean ultimately I don’t want kids of my own, so I don’t have that internal ember to stoke my motivation. But man, parents must really want it to go through all that I see them doing.
Anyway hope things are going alright for you. One of the nice things is that it can (generally) get easier over time, and then eventually you have a new adult family member that you helped make :)
Manual on a bike
Ollie on a skateboard
Who’s this Ollie I keep hearing about?
He’s a little jumpy
Squeezing lemons
That’s easy. Keeping the seeds out of the juice takes some extra work.
That’s probably why they don’t say “easy peasy take seeds ouf of lemon juice squeezy”
Based on my recent failings: apparently hitting a little white ball into a hole.
Golf is a beautiful walk in the park, ruined by a tiny white ball.
I don’t know if I should be making a golf joke or a billiards joke
If you’re hitting a white ball into the hole in billiards, then you’re doing it wrong.
Working in a kitchen. Iykyk
I don’t work in a kitchen but notice many people take it for granted. If someone is on crutches, people won’t see the irony in saying “pick up that heavy object and put it in the oven”. Hence all those old graphic kitchen accident commercials.
I don’t understand the crutches part of what you said. I’m not trying to be a dick or anything I just genuinely don’t understand what that means.
They’re like stilts people with leg handicaps use to move around. You may have seen someone use them in school if they injure themselves. If you’re using them, your hands aren’t exactly free enough to toy around in a kitchen setting.
I know what crutches are and how they work, I’ve had to use them before.
If someone is on crutches, people won’t see the irony in saying “pick up that heavy object and put it in the oven”.
This is what I’m confused about. Do you mean people would ask someone using crutches to put something heavy in an oven without taking into account they’re using crutches?
Yeah, you’d be surprised what tasks people don’t have second thoughts about asking about.
That’s wild. I’ve had the opposite problem where people with obvious disabilities get angry because I can’t not help them.
