I deeply empathize and sympathize with the challenge. I also failed to choose “congenitally rich” at birth, and I hope to remedy this error on my next iteration.

But seriously, I grew up very poor and left my abusive home at 16. I was homeless twice. Once in my late teens and again in my mid-20s. Not “crashing on my friends’ couches” homeless, but rather “living in the woods and dumpster diving for food” homeless.

I bring this up as empathy by way of anecdote, and also as acknowledgement of my immense luck and privilege. I know that reaching a place of relative comfort is fucking hard in our modern environment. What’s an even bigger pisser is that cost of living is stupid, the systems required for modern life are expensive, and the attacks on our attention, focus, health, and well-being are legion.

So it comes down to: is your position yet painful enough for you to want to do something about it?

I completely agree with everything you said, both in this response and your response to Scrubbles. I also appreciate your long-form responses in both.

This is, however, the system in which we live. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Choosing to pay cash for big ticket items, real estate, and durable goods when other accounts/portfolios earn more interest than the financing… that’s just throwing money away. If your laddered certificates accounts earn >3.5% and you can get 0% or 1% automobile financing (and you need a vehicle where you live), I don’t think anyone would choose to burn that much liquidity.

You really haven’t ‘bought’ your home untill you’ve fully paid off the mortgage, untill then you’re more or less doing a complex rent-to-own from the bank.

Agreed. My options where I live are primarily rent or mortgage; there are intentional communities with equitable arrangements, but the waitlist is 5 to 10 years. And with rents here going up at about 8% to 12% per year, I chose the 3.7% mortgage. FWIW, most home sales in my area are industrial investors or second homes, which absolutely underscore your points regarding livability, financial violence, and <waving around> all this shit in which we live.

real estate is only a hedge against inflation in a society that is stratifying, becoming more inequitable

Again, fully agreed. Inflation is here. None of us are going to wish away inflation or predatory lending, because primate brain and “they” have our number. If one has interest rate arbitrage available, using it prudently leaves more disposable income, and therefore more time to strive for more equitable systems. For example, I am the treasurer for my regional timebank, and among my offered services are financial literacy, budgeting, and household bookkeeping. This won’t surprise you at all: it’s my most used offer (>100 hours used) and the number of people lacking these skills… it’s almost like this system is designed for a certain scope and scale of financial ignorance.

This is a financially naive and reductionist take, approaching financial illiteracy. Applied correctly, financing allows you to preserve liquidity while still leaving funds in accounts with higher returns. Financing also provides a hedge against inflation, e.g. real estate.

My mother thinks US workers still get pensions if they stay at a company long enough. She also thinks that staying at one employer for decades is the key to higher pay, better benefits, and promotions. This is a constant, exhaustingly repetitive conversation with her every time I get recruited and poached by a company.

The original, the legend.

I am a founding board member and the treasurer for my regional timebank. I also have done custom software development and IT work for my county and city food bank. In the past, I was a founding board member and technology specialist for the local food co-op. I also used to own and operate a community bike shop where I performed free repairs for anyone who said they couldn’t afford it.

I prefer volunteer work that directly shores up my communities, promotes food security and social equity, connects local food producers to consumers as directly as possible, and empowers non-monetary exchange of labor and skills. For me, timebanks are the sweet spot for these goals. Everyone’s time is valued equally, and everyone has something to offer their communities on an as-able basis. More than that, a timebank promotes members to see all in their community as peers and neighbors despite any superficial differences.

So, like proper porn, you fully succeeded in capturing the shot from the sexy angle!

This is exactly the kind of statement that makes a lot of sense upon hearing it, but investigating it is tricky.

You’re just gonna tease us like that and not tell us what all you put in there? :D

I’m all about the gelatiny bits too! When I purchase whole animals, I have the butcher package up the tendons for me. I even buy any extra tendon they have. Braise or pressure cook then, and put them in soups and curries.

For the horror readers, it’s in “Books of Blood, Volume 2.”

Every Paolo Baciagalupi novel and the first two acts of almost every Cory Doctorow novel. “The Water Knife” by Baciagalupi is fictional near-future extrapolation on the excellent non-fiction “Cadillac Desert.” “Walkaway” and the Little Brother books by Doctorow cast a stark light on the nature of power, surveillance, and authoritarianism in Western society. It doesn’t take a lot of social imagination to see that’s exactly where we’re going.

Your list of ingredients there quite carefully left out the entire ladle full of cane sugar. By volume it’s about one third of the sauce by way of how every takeaway place I’ve ever seen prepares it.

0_0 Yowza… even if it’s “just” a #1 ladle, that’s a shit-ton of the white stuff. The place where I worked used ~1.5tbsp of white sugar per pound of chicken thigh. I… almost want to try one of these recipes you mentioned just so that I can get dessert and dinner in one container. :D

I’m in Europe where restaurants and food are generally better regulated.

Ah, gotcha! That right there is an enormous game-changer, and I’m agree with everything you say here. The US food chain is straight-up toxic. You may know this already: the US allows food treatments that are outright banned in most other countries. My travels in Europe were a revelation; I can eat things over there that invariably sicken me here, most notably bread and raw eggs. I would probably dine out more too if I lived in Europe. :D

Totally fair and thank you for the elaboration.

Trying to learn by own practical experience in this day and age seems like a bit late to the party, though.

I’ll counter this point with: I think we’re in a golden age of home cooking. YouTube alone is a gold mine for technique development and refinement. That won’t do anything for your lack of interest though.

So tired of hearing this dumb fuck argument. Ordering food =/= fastfood.

Well that’s good, because I’m not talking about fast food; I don’t eat fast food. Ever. My point was about knowing what you’re putting into your body, knowing how it was sourced and prepped. Dining out is at least three layers of abstraction from that knowledge. I’ve spent a lot of time working in restaurants, including high end ones. Apart from zero-compromise, prix-fixe, tasting menu establishments, recipes are always built to a price point. More restaurants than not use Sysco, First Street, or other nasty industrial sourcing. Most restaurants source their meats directly or indirectly from IBP/Tyson because they cornered the market on meat at scale*. And that’s before factoring in time-saving shortcuts, like not washing produce and using Sysco bases. For just one example on the sourcing risks, at high end restaurant where I worked the pantry cooks had to wear gloves to receive and sort the produce because the pesticides and container treatment gave them rashes.

*IBP used to be a reliable, quality source despite being CAFO meats, and what I used in my own charcuterie business. After the acquisition by Tyson, shit went downhill almost overnight. I closed up operations because sourcing at that scale was no longer possible for me.

The amount of people that seem to think their little bit of homecooking can compete with professional chef’s is laughable.

A chef is a cost engineer and inventory manager. But I get your point: Sturgeon’s Law absolutely applies to most people’s kitchen results.

How does it not? It’s just a boring activity.

I sincerely asked, and I assume you are similarly sincere in asking.

For me, it’s an absolutely quotidian task, every aspect of which I approach mindfully and joyfully. Using a good knife, decent pans, a halfway decent grill/range/oven… the joy of using good tools skillfully cannot be overstated. I mean… where else in our days do we get to play with knives around people and they love the results? :D Woodworking, I guess, but you can’t eat those results.

I love everything about cooking:

• sourcing good local and seasonal ingredients
• prepping the ingredients properly and with the least waste
• layering flavor profiles
• creating a full sensory experience for myself and my circle
• understanding the underlying physics and chemistry at every step
• creating even a simple dish that appeals to all senses
• did I mention playing with knives?
• then getting to feed, nourish, and sate people with my craft… The experience of cooking takes the necessary and workaday task of sustaining ourselves and elevates it to an alchemical and spiritual level.

From a holistic, connected-to-the-land, tree-hugging hippie context, cooking takes the alchemy from Shit Wizards (AKA farmers) and transmutates those inputs into magical energy. Food nourishes the body; good cooking nourishes the soul. Gathering tribe around a meal that I made is even more fulfilling than the literal billions of people who, directly or indirectly, use the software I built.

From a biological context, knowing the provenance of my food is the culinary equivalent of using open source software. From an ethical living context, knowing that my food providers are using fair labor practices, compassionate animal welfare, and good land stewardship enables me to make food that I eat and share in good conscience. Also, garbage in, garbage out on every level. This is stuff you’re putting in your body. The body that carries around your brain, both of which ya kinda need to do other things you enjoy. Food is medicine, and so many ills I see, physical and otherwise, stem from poor food sourcing and prep.

From an efficiency, conservation, and creativity context:

• turning “waste” material into an amazing stock
• turning leftovers into an entirely new dish that utterly slaps
• that on-the-knife-edge, tuned-up feeling of bringing a meal together… it rivals playing live to a sold-out crowd
• doing more with the least amount of everything… give me a good knife, good cutting board, good produce stand, a saute pan, and a shitty butane burner, and I will crank out a meal for you that will get YOU laid :D
• the mind-body connection of skillfully wielding my tools in pursuit of an explicit and relatively immediate goal; it might take me years to build software, but it takes just an evening to make something that feeds my tribe

In the grand scheme of human experience, there are few things that everyone can do that fire on all sensory cylinders while delivering the spiritual high of creativity manifested. Cooking is something everyone can do.

Why does cooking suck for you?

This might be true for the shittiest of Chinese-American recipes. Just like OP, I don’t know where you’re getting your sesame chicken, but I suggest you stop going there.

Now, regarding the bases being mostly sugar, if you’re talking chemically, your statement is true: starches are just chains of sugar. But if your GTC and SC only differ by crushed red, you’re getting robbed.

Source: worked pantry/prep in the most popular Chinese take-out-only joint in Albany NY while in college. GTC was by far the most popular dish, averaging ~700 orders per night, pre Internet.

Granted, Chinese-American recipes are chaos. In my experience though, the best GTC recipes use whole japones chiles which are toasted in oil to make them more fragrant and a much more attractive presentation. Rice wine vinegar, garlic, ginger, and oyster sauce are the other primary notes. The balance of these notes IMO are what define the signature of the best GTC for any given restaurant, and everyone is just bringing their own spin to that mix.

Some of the comments here and some of the “Best GTC/SC Recipe EVAARRR!” that I see on the interwebz… Holy hell, y’all. I want to come cook for you, because… DAMN. There’s some genuinely so-shitty-it’s-hilarious-yet-tragic C-A recipes out there.

I don’t know where you’re getting General Tso’s chicken, but may I suggest not going there anymore? :D

Also saw it. I thought it was a great ride. I avoided reviews, but had very high expectations after “Killer of Killers.” Totally buying the Blu-Ray in 3 weeks, if only to encourage them to make more of these with Trachtenberg’s vision (even though he won’t be directing the next movie). I think it’s hard to meaningfully discuss the movie without getting into spoilers, so those are obfuscated below.

The makeup… Dek’s facial expressions convey loads of inner monologue with no words. Scene pacing, overall pacing… all great. Lots of show-me-don’t-tell-me.