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[theinevitable]

I actually thought "I don't know how to saute" the other day, because I have never been clear on what that word means exactly. Glad to know it is "put it in oil and push it around until it is cooked," because that is what I do when it says to Saute. There is some other cooking verb that I recently found out means something much more complicated than "push it around in oil until it is cooked," and it spooked me.

Yeah, Frugal is definitely the wrong marketing angle.

[wombat]

This is how stupid we have become about cooking: people will actually buy this -
https://www.geteggiestv.com/

What could be easier than putting an egg in water and boiling it? How could you convince someone they need more equipment than that?

[jay-ell]

I actually thought "I don't know how to saute" the other day, because I have never been clear on what that word means exactly. Glad to know it is "put it in oil and push it around until it is cooked," because that is what I do when it says to Saute. There is some other cooking verb that I recently found out means something much more complicated than "push it around in oil until it is cooked," and it spooked me.

Yeah, Frugal is definitely the wrong marketing angle.

There is a certain jargon to cooking. Pedro sometimes has to ask me about recipes because he's not sure what they mean when they say "broil" or "saute" or "baste." Tackling these "vocabulary words" is going to be a crucial step in explaining to people how to follow a recipe at home. And I think that's what you want to teach them -- here are the techniques, you can use these to cook a variety of healthy foods cheaply.

Check out Mark Bittman; his cookbooks are very heavy on technique and teaching the reader how to improvise with basic ingredients and not-fancy equipment.

Also, saute literally translates as "to jump," meaning that authentic saute technique requires shaking the skillet (like making popcorn!) so that the food "jumps" and turns itself over without having to be stirred. But that's all for show; it tastes exactly the same if you push it around with a spoon instead. I have learned to saute by shaking the pan, but I really only use it because sometimes it's easier, when I'm cooking several things on the stovetop at once, to just give the green beans a shake every now and then to make sure they don't burn.

[side_show]

Teaching people to cook frugally is something I've been doing since small times. 

One tactic to consider is to take people to a food bank one week, then do the research toward how to use whatever non-perishable ingredients they pick up when you meet up next week to make something with.  This way you're teaching people not only to cook, but also how to meal plan and source out food. 

[Arachno-capitalist]

Every food bank I've volunteered in gives you a government dictated assortment of foods to work with so I don't know how well that works in every place. This also results in good-hearted donations of food going to waste (or taken home by volunteers) because it doesn't fit into the regulations.

[theinevitable]

There is some sort of Thing going on where my friends say we are going to eat pizza, and then eat pizza without me. I do not really get it.

Seriously, two nights in a row. Inviting me to eat pizza with them, and then when I get there there is no pizza for me.


Also today: lady buying 40$ bottle of wine complained about how expensive everything is in St Louis.

also today: guy asked "are you a 99% or a 1%?"
Took me a second to realize what he was even asking. I pointed out that he was handing me money while I wear a dorky uniform in a grocery store. I am probably not in the top 1% of earners.

[Arachno-capitalist]

P.S. You are closer to the 1% than you are farther from it.
P.S.S. There was an awesome tax auction in philly this weekend. Due diligence consisted of taking a semi and breaking down doors. Money consists of work

[theinevitable]

I guess as long as my dad is giving me money every month that he got by evicting families from their homes and whipping them with his banker stick, I do not get to claim to be either.

[Doc]

P.S. You are closer to the 1% than you are farther from it.
P.S.S. There was an awesome tax auction in philly this weekend. Due diligence consisted of taking a semi and breaking down doors. Money consists of work

There is something interesting in all these well educated upper middle class folks fighting against the 'wealthy elite' and all these tea-party welfare recipient types fighting against taxing high income brackets.

[theinevitable]

All of the people I know who are heavily involved in the STL occupy protests are my coworkers at the grocery store. My WashU upper-middle-class friends are too jaded to participate.

[Doc]

Fair enough, might be a mis-perception on my part. It occurred to me when watching coverage of the OWS protest this morning which contrasted talking to the people at the protests (who I thought all looked relatively young and well educated but obviously the latter is an assumption) with the labourers working on a building site nearby who were all 'Damnit I wish they'd get out of that park so we can go have lunch there.'

[littlefallsmets]

Money consists of work

If this were actually true in any useful or functional way, we'd probably agree on a lot more things, man.

Money consists of work, sometimes, if you have the inherited wealth, inherited advantages or luck to make it so.

But most work just becomes just spinning your damn wheels to say alive because you don't have the advantages or luck to turn it into something more.

If there were a level playing field from the start, I'd actually kind of agree with you on this.

But we are so fuck*ng far from starting at a level playing field, we are so deep in the mire of rigged system that the statement "money consists of work" is meaningless.

[Arachno-capitalist]

How many times do you need to hear my and others' tales of going from zero to normal before you drop the self-defeating act?

[JorgeFabregas]

P.S. You are closer to the 1% than you are farther from it.
P.S.S. There was an awesome tax auction in philly this weekend. Due diligence consisted of taking a semi and breaking down doors. Money consists of work

So was due diligence illegal in this case?

[littlefallsmets]

Spider-Man:

Because (a.) most of the people who go from "zero" to something really didn't come from anything close to zero, they were born on second or third and refuse to accept the truth of that reality because it would ruin their personal conception as some kind of mythical self-made man or woman... hell, I have some advantages a lot of people didn't have, I wasn't born on third but I was certainly born on first, hit by a pitch or something (b.) because random chance plays a lot more than the "self-made" choose to ideate because, again, they'd rather hang onto their mythology about themselves than see how hard it is out there for people...

They'd rather maintain ignorance to the narrative of most of the people in the world than go through the work of changing their own personal narrative in the face of real facts...

And more than anything (c.) things have changed radically even in the last few years, the seeds sewn by the people who propped up Reagan are finally being reaped as bitter wheat in full.

Also, your inference that when I'm talking about the economic realities of America today I'm actually talking about myself is deeply incorrect. I chose the nearly impossible path of trying to get into the arts when I was a teenager and I knew it was gonna be hard from the start, especially rolling through that path with an anxiety disorder that short-circuits my ability to project the false self-confidence that seems almost required in artistic fields. I know that my personal problems are only tangentially related to the problems of the 99%.

The 99% aren't people who wanna write a teevee show or be a rockstar or whatever, like my dilettante Hamlet ass, they busted their hump through five or six years of school, just wanting to teach poor kids how to read. Or they ground through twenty-five years working a production line and now they have nothing.

They should not have to be constantly trying to grab more more more to be able to have a little. They should be able to work a good job and have a stable comfortable life.

People like you and me both, our aspirations and inclinations are a ways outside of that conversation.