I got into cooking during lockdown, and have managed to get surprisingly good at it, to the point where if you asked me to make a meal of your choosing I could probably make it without looking up a recipe. It’s actually unbelievably simple to make even complex stuff, basically using all the same rules you apply at work:
- Use the right tools for the job
- Plan it out first, do your prep and the actual work is simple
- A simple dish will take much longer than you think
- RTFM. Many sauces and dishes from classic cooking are basically a mixture of a small handful of base ingredients/techniques, and they’ve been written down for decades.
- Once you have the basics down, you can basically make it up as you go. You’ll make amazing meals, and you’ll never be able to replicate it again because you eyeballed it or cooked it in a way that made sense at the time. You say you’ll document it well, but deep down, you know you won’t.
- Nothing is original, everything is stolen. Adapt recipes you see, look at ingredients of sauces and sachets you buy/use, etc.
- You can be a solid hobbyist, but against a pro that does this shit all day every day, you don’t know a fucking thing. You’re also probably not going to replicate what they can do in a professional setting while at home unless you’ve got money.
“RTFM” My irritation is that most recipes make a huge amount of assumptions - at least as many as code that assumes a certain version of library. You can get recipes that say things as vague as “prepare the chicken” and aren’t at all clear what they mean, unless you’ve seen someone do it first, but it’s published in a book like you should just know. I hate that. I also frequently see quantities like “1 can” which just drives me insane as though that’s a standard unit.
There’s also plenty of cooking specific jargon, so densely packed that beginners might spend the majority of the recipe looking up what the terms mean. “Chop” parsley - how finely? “Mix the ingredients” how long? What the fuck is Golden Brown actually?
I’m a sysadmin by trade. My hobbies are:
- cooking with nothing but a cast iron pan and a knife I forged after a medieval design
- tinkering on bicycles ('90s MTBs, the golden age of component compatibility)
- sewing clothes by hand
- smashing printers with baseball bats
smashing printers with baseball bats
I have years of IT experience, offer Linux support, and am visibly the kind of guy you just know can fix your computer problem (or, if I take my glasses off, I look like I sell weed apparently), and when asked to help with printers I have one answer:
They’re sentient and they hate you. I was trained in IT, not exorcisms. Send it as a PDF, PNG, or smoke signal before you try troubleshooting.
Like, I broke my big office one the other day so bad the tech had to come out. What had I done to brick it so badly? Tap a menu option, tap back, then tap a different menu option. If you don’t wait 3s between the second and third tap it errors and freezes and they have to send a tech out to do some sort of 2 hour long ritual where he rubs it and whispers how sorry he is.
What the fuck is wrong with printers
Fun fact: the entire Free Software movement exists because Richard Stallman got pissed off at Xerox one day, for not giving him the source code so he could fix his printer.
Framework printer when?
Brother :(
HP
worse than HR
HR with an HP
HQ? I need my HK!
Kill that with fire
4.3 ??? Hell, I haven’t updated my peeler since 2.1 - no wonder my stove won’t even boot.
If you missed the 2.3 security update, you peeler is now mining crypto
I know you’re joking, but semi-related, I highly recommend the Kuhn Rikon peelers.
I’ve tried those but I prefer the traditional long-axis blade style.
Workaround: Potato peeler extends peeler, so just cast your carrots as potatoes before you peel them, and then cast them back to carrot afterwards
To cast them, it uses libvegs however. It is not available in any standard package libraries, so just quickly build it from source
Yeah but the current build of libvegs has some conflicts with libfruit, so if you need to use both you have to build libvegs in a different directory and then simlink it in /lib.
Tomato keep being casted as fruit, even that for any practical purpose it should be as vegetable
That’s it, let’s re-write the entire backend in C++ to make use of multiple inheritance to tackle this one use-case!
What do you mean “this is overkill”? Do you have any idea how many tomatoes go into a fucking salad!?
Someone should do it in rust now
Maybe cooking isn’t for me.
Yeah but that’s all my replacement’s problem to deal with
Unfortunately, casting from potato to carrot is a narrowing conversion so your new carrot will lose some properties
You say “potato” I say “caroto”
I hate that I understand this. Well done.
Internal screaming.
only hobbyists and artisans still use the standalone
carrot.pythat depends onpeeler.in enterprise environments everyone uses the
pymixedveggiespackage (created usingpip freezeof course) which helpfully vendors the latest peeled carrot along with many other things. just unpack it into a clean container and go on your way.I know you’re joking but you basically just suggested buying a pack of frozen mixed veggies so you can pick out and use only the carrots for your stew, and the idea of someone actually doing that sends my brain into a tailspin
Do NOT give the carrot industry that idea
Big Carrot is coming for your stew
So you’re saying pymixxedveggies is bloated?
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So funny story. My stove is currently inoperable because the door lock on the oven is fucked up somehow. Why an oven needs a door lock and why the door lock being fucked should prevent the whole thing from working I cannot tell you. I’ve literally never used it. Thanks whoever programmed that…
The door lock I can understand for safety reasons. Bricking the whole thing because one part broke is lazy programming.
Every stove I’ve had with a self cleaning option also has an automatic door lock. The oven gets extra hot during self cleaning mode.
So… just don’t let me use self cleaning… Why does the whole thing need to be bricked because the lock doesn’t work for a single function I’m not using? It doesn’t lock when you use it for baking.
So that’s why I like cooking! Always wondered about that.
I really enjoy programming, but generally I dislike cooking. I just want to eat, not spend time preparing to eat.
My experience with cooking has been that because I don’t do it enough, I’m constantly dealing with food expiration dates and having to plan carefully around them.
In comparison, I’ve got some servers that have been running maintenance free for 5+ years. (Probably not the most secure thing, but meh, I don’t have customers other than myself)
I think programmers often have hobbies that are more physical though. For me, I like working on my car because turning bolts and working with my hands lets my brain turn off for a while. I could see cooking and following a recipe being in the same category for others.
The code for the peeler is stale, it stopped working three carrot seasons ago, but no one wants to rewrite the PeelerBladeRdge class.
main reason more people dont get into programming. a=b=c. no a>b<c
No no it’s the pot that’s behind . After you already peeled and chopped .
Unless this is an agile thing
An agile pot?
Will it run from me while I try to put ingredients in it?No, but the dish ran away with the spoon.
Just fork peeler from 4.2, rename it to “Skininator 4000” and set up a BuyMeACoffee button.
Why would you peel a carrot?
… is the most upvoted stackoverflow answer.
Depending on the carrot, the skin can be significantly more bitter. And sometimes peeling can be quicker than trying to scrub dirt out of particular lumpy carrots.
YMMV
I tend not to when cooking for myself )unless it’s been in the fridge for a while and the skin is a bit unappealing, no pun intended), but some people prefer carrots peeled for aesthetic reasons.
Yeah, I can totally sign that. But it is struggle to have so many peelers in drawer. Last addition was new potatoe peeler
