Posted by NaOH 3 days ago
I was baking sourdough since before the pandemic, and will continue baking in the future. It's a bit of work, but it's not too much work and the results are pretty damn fantastic.
Focaccia though, if I baked that regularly I'd have to go back on a GLP-1. Focaccia taught me to read the seals on olive oil in the supermarket and actually pick the right one for the break.
Plus, I can eat it without getting fat.
What a wonderful way to keep your wife's memory alive.
It's a social commitment at least as much as a creative/culinary one, and since there aren't a lot of people you'd want to give a pie minus a slice to, that keeps the extra calories under control.
And you feel like you're growing ever-thinner, as all your friends & neighbors eat more and more pies. ;)
"Yes, I am in shape (round is a shape)"
I suspect that deep-fried-battered haggis might exist which could be very spherical.
Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.
22/7 ~= 3.14
(Yes this is worth fighting over!)
Has nobody here ever done this? It comes out perfectly cooked.
For me, that got shot down in flames over the winter because I kept getting sick. :/
When I started my niche-musueums.com website I bootstrapped it by posting a new museum I had been to every day for a month. It took 15-30 minutes a day and within a few weeks I had a site I was really proud of.
I think the key is to give yourself permission to stop without feeling guilty about it. Any time I start a new streak like this I deliberately tell myself that it's not going to be forever and I can stop any time for any reason.
We mostly live on autopilot, without thinking about what we love to do or what we might love to do.
Every day, we read about people whose lives have been changed by jiu jitsu, CrossFit, or learning a foreign language.
It is dedication, focus, goal setting, and practice that change our lives, not so much the activity we devote our time to.
Although pies are delicious and I love making them.
Eventually had the confidence to experiment with making Naan.
This led to experimenting with Asian-style Pot-Stickers.
The main benefit to me was confidence, and belief in pmarca's "you can just do things".
I made one, for the first time in my life, last week. It brought me tremendous joy not only to make it, but to have something nice to share with friends.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
Once I fed about 20 friends--one of the best days I've lived.
I mean, yes, at worse you burn your neighbourhood down and your dog runs away. But in terms of the more likely failure modes like screwing up the dough, breaking it, messing up how watery it is, etc. you can mostly just keep baking until it's done, mix it up, put into bowls, serve with ice cream, down the hatch.
Pick a country, research what food it has that you've never tried, find a few online recipes and YouTube guides and give it a go.
This was a ton of fun. I have no idea if anything I cooked was even remotely like the authentic original, but it was still a very rewarding exercise.
If you live somewhere with a lot of international supermarkets (the SF Bay Area is great for those) it also gives you an excuse for a shopping adventure for ingredients.
(My favorite recipe we tried with this was Doubles from Trinidad https://www.africanbites.com/doubles-chickpeas-sandwich/)
I'm just making a slight point that walking is probably the simplest most effective thing you can do to improve almost every aspect of your life.
I bake pies but I also like mushrooms and grilled cheese sandwiches. Every other individual here has random associations they can make.
In person, this is seen as commandeering a linear discussion to your personal topic and repeated violations get you uninvited from conversations for being selfish.
On the internet we can just ignore a thread, which is what I should have done here but I've typed this far so I'll go ahead and post it.
Taking a walk alone would be missing the main point.