Misc.

One way of knowing you made a good cup of coffee: it is as drinkable and enjoyable after it has gone cold as when it was hot.

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I now understand why the ancients tended not to write formulaic recipes as we understand them today with delineated amounts, temperatures and cooking times etc. If you read any modern recipe, even baking recipes, there is typically only one or two components in the process that make that particular dish what it is. More often than a particular ingredient, it is a particular combination at a particular time - and not so much even a particular combination of ingredients, as a combination of two different cookings, like, for instance, de-glazing, which is basically dry fry meeting wet simmer.

In relation to what is being cooked and for what result and for how long, there is only low temperature, medium temperature and high temperature. All this business about 350 and 475 and 235 and what have you is really a bunch of nonsense. Same goes for cooking times. Higher temperatures generally mean shorter cooking time; lower temperatures mean longer.

When you understand what the acid of vinegar does, or the saltiness of salt and the sweetness of sugar, and how far each goes in relation to any other amount of other ingredients, it is not so much that you don't need to know what amounts are required anymore, but that you have enough understanding to proceed were you not given the amounts. What you do need to know is that this is a "fat and acid" or a "sweet and sour" or a more complex combination and so forth.

Dry ingredients tend towards concentrated flavour; wet ingredients towards their dispersal, and thus towards dissipation and quick alteration. Bringing the two together is very often a key thing, an essential part of a recipe. That is one example.

Go ahead and look at any recipe. Look for that one essential thing or two that makes that recipe what it is. For that is the recipe. Learn how to rip that out and integrate it into your own arsenal. When you read a recipe that you really want to try but it lists faraway gourmet ingredients, do not say, "Oh, I can't make that!" Strip recipes down mercilessly. Be like the ancients. Be traditional. Don't be a slave.

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When you have to forcefully tell the credit card pushers, "No, I don't want that credit card" three times before they relent; when the credit card pushers send you credit cards without you asking for one; when credit card pushers tell you you are "pre-approved"; when credit card pushers are lying in wait for you at the entrance of the bank, then you know that "credit ratings" mean precisely nothing.

Your so-called "good credit rating" is like the government announcing they balanced the budget. It is utterly meaningless.

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I wonder why the legalization of marijuana issue is always framed as "people being allowed to smoke pot." In my view that is a tiny fraction of the large picture, which is basically people having the right to grow marijuana for fresh consumption, for fibre and all its many other uses, with an emphasis on the right to grow it. Even official organs of the government recognize the powerful medicinal properties of this plant. The stories of people being healed of this and that by consuming fresh marijuana (one can consume as much as one wants in its fresh state; but when it is heated by burning or drying, that is when it becomes psychoactive) are many.

One cannot argue that it would take too much to monitor farmers to make sure they aren't growing it for the drug trade. The dairy industry is monitored - or inspected, whatever term you want to use. And anyways, the stuff that's grown for the drug trade is a special hybrid, if I understand correctly, and it's only really worthwhile grown inside, hydroponically; for outside here in northern North America you could get a harvest of good bud, but not nearly as much as you can continually get growing it inside. Thus farmers growing it in their fields wouldn't even want to be bothered with that when it would be far more profitable for them to grow it for all the many other uses that people are very, very willing to pay for.

If marijuana can heal a person of his or her cancer and there are farmers wanting to grow the stuff for those people, then what the hell business is it of the government to say no? They don't own marijuana. They don't have a patent on it. It is not evil. It is God's creation. It is not a contradiction at all for the government to allow people to grow it while still fighting the drug trade.

What potential there is in growing marijuana! It was grown commercially not too long ago, only it was called hemp. Stop it with this stupid prohibitionist holdover from the very recent past. And stop framing the issue in a stupid way, you idiotic pot heads and prohibitionists.