TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
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User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
9hr ago
Worst cut is definitely something like top round.
Ah, yeah.
I do like, and purchase and eat, filet; it's just, as you say, pretty dependent upon some kind of fat sauce (I'm a huge fan of steak au poivre which generally wants filet) or an elaborate construction like a beef wellington, where it's saved by all the duxelles and buttery pastry. But I have seen people buy and cook filet 'mignon' (def not) with just salt and pepper, and then muscle through it with their molars, the whole time convinced it's a great steak.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Thankfully not. I just work there occasionally.
Great post. Tangentially,
for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down.
Good. Took my kids to one once. Nothing like when I was young. The homeless people aside, the whole place was a temple of wokeness and the books belonged in a bonfire. I'm aghast that my tax money is going to support this establishment, just as I am when I drive past the local elementary school and see 'progress' flags and coded anti-white messaging in the wall murals. And that's before we get to all the trans stuff in both.
Down with all of it, I say. I'd pay twice as much in the relevant taxes to be rid of them. If I could send the people who've been running them to prison I'd do that too.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Yes, that's definitely been something we plan to look into, and I'm not sure why we haven't gotten around to it yet. The economics make perfect sense and I'm more than happy to use all the weird cuts that would come along with it. Probably I should put Claude on the case.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
For some reason this took me a lot of effort to parse but, yeah, that does make sense.
Some of it's also just the legal environment. Easily half the time I spend running my business goes toward managing insurance and compliance stuff instead of actually accomplishing any kind of productive work. And those costs apply to every level of every transaction, so prices balloon all around. Granted this is also directly downstream of overregulation.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
I work in a very different field but consistently find that those of my clients which are least profitable are also by far the most troublesome.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Learning to sharpen a knife on a sharpening stone sounds much more difficult than it actually is, and totally worth doing. I touch mine up all the time and it does make cooking more joyful.
I'd say check out some youtube videos, and you probably should, but in my experience they all make it seem much more stressful and involved than it is when you're actually doing it.
Don't overthink it, I'd say. Get a whetstone, wet it, scrape knife over it in a common-sense way and angle, repeat for the other side, then go back and do a few more strokes on each side. I like to use the printer-paper cut test to verify that it's acceptably sharp, but mostly don't really bother any more.
Rinse and dry the knife before applying to food.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Here the chuck roast I'm buying is $10.99/pound whereas the flank steak is usually more like $27.
But most people probably aren't feeding a wife who insists that every piece of meat be organic, pasture-raised, and from an animal with an endowment set up such that buddhist monks will be praying for them in perpetuity; etc.
Ah -- yeah, haven't cared for them the couple times I've tried, but that mainly did have to do with their, uh, take on meat. The 'tocino' was particularly egregious. Can totally believe their veggie options are good.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Not a Chipotle enjoyer, generally, and when I go I don't get a burrito but I believe you.
Where do you like in SF? I find that the tortilla matters more than almost any other particular.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Sure, but no need to boil a soup! I'd guess I keep it below 180 (f) at all times and only bring it up that high initially. We eat a lot of stew and I'm fully convinced that it tastes better when it's not boiled.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Yeah, read it when it came out (but thanks). Wordier than it needs to be but I think it nails several points that aren't typically discussed anywhere else.
I've replaced almost all of our (unground) beef intake with chuck roast. Slice it thin (and maybe pound it a little) and I think it's better than flank steak for fajitas. Else I just cube it and braise it. Couple hours of that and it's so delicious and tender. Plus you're getting a lot of nutrition and flavor out of the connective tissue that's converted to collagen. Hoping nobody else figures this out. Also, typically about half the roast is suitable for cutting into steaks and cooking normally, whereas only the other half is something you wouldn't want to cook that way.
Real steaks, like ribeye, have become exorbitantly expensive, but I've found that in almost all cases I like lamb shoulder chops better anyway and they're less than half the price per pound. My go-to is to marinate them in a little bit of very high-end soy sauce and rice vinegar.
Cannot for the life of me figure out why filet """mignon""" (it almost never is) is so expensive. Worst cut of meat on the cow IMO unless you're doing something very specific with it, but people go nuts and I sincerely think it's because "mignon" sounds fancy.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Coastal California here and there's no way I'm getting a steak burrito for less than $16; $20 totally normal especially after tax.
Now, machaca burrito will be a couple dollars less, but not worth the savings IMO.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
The bigger issue is that she hasn't quite yet figured out how to harvest the basil without inflicting any amount of unnecessary damage upon the plant. But she's getting better, and basil is pretty hardy stuff anyway.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
German toast, mainly. Only that didn't sound so great during the first world war.
So after 9/11 when they wanted to call it 'freedom toast' it was extra-deliciously ironic.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Does boiling actually kill nutrition?
Yes, heating anything up that much is going to destroy all sorts of compounds.
I can't be bothered to steam them, and boiling is one of the easiest ways to heat them up
Steaming is just boiling with a basket on top.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Nothing wrong with frozen, and as you say the nutritional content is pretty close to fresh-picked, but idk why anyone would ever boil them. That's definitely gonna kill both nutrition and flavor. Steaming is preferred in every case I can think of.
Haven't had a microwave in ten years so idk about that part. Maybe fine.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
And, oddly, french toast.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
The peak is from your own garden. There's nothing like dinner being almost ready and sending your two year old out to the yard to pick some tomatoes and basil. Every time we do that I can almost see the glowing border of the memory as I'll experience it in my old age. The bright colors, the dirt between her toes, her hair in the sunshine. Were I Japanese, I'd see ghostly cherry petals blowing. And it tastes great, too.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
ETA: almost everyone should learn to cook.
My autism insists upon finding out what sort of exceptions you had in mind here. Not looking to argue; just more curious than I probably should be.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
1d ago
Definitely gonna give that a watch. Love the genre.
TitaniumButterfly
Rivers in the wasteland
2d ago
Translation: She was low-status/suspect enough that when she said something they ran it through a filter which would otherwise have not been engaged. Also, to be clear, she was leveraging this intentionally and clever for it.
Yeah, we used to go every week and I'd come home with like 8 books and read half of them. Wish my kids could have that experience.
One daughter is now going to a private school that has its own pretty good library, though they only go up through grade 8, so unfortunately limited for someone at her reading level.
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