hmm I wonder if there are regional patterns in how matzah is spelled. I didn’t know matzo was a valid spelling. possibly this is because I only interact with matza in verbal conversation. tbh none of those spellings feel right
I think it’s Hebrew vs. Yiddish (same with Shabbat vs. Shabbos), but I haven’t actually checked that. Also: Matza is great – matza coffee, matza brie, the leftovers make great breakfast!
hmm I would expect to have been exposed to the yiddish version, since all the jews I knew were germanic and had jokes about older relatives making yiddish expressions, so I might have just not been paying attention closely enough to pick up the difference. alternately the kids I knew didn’t learn much yiddish outside of the oy vey tier, and did have to go to hebrew school.
The secret to good matzah is to tell the “egg matzah is ~only for invalids~” rabbis to go fuck themselves. Egg matzah is pretty good.
(And yeah, we use surprisingly little Yiddish (and correspondingly more Hebrew) in my family. I remember having a joke fly over my head as a pre-teen because I didn’t know what a yarmulke was: we always called them kippot. (singular kippah)
And all those times on Wikipedia where I was reading about genetic disorders and Ashkenazim were more prone to damn near everything, and I was just kind of like “huh, sucks to be them”, and then when I was about seventeen I found out *I* was Ashkenazic.
(Only half-Ashkenazic, though, so I guess that dilutes the inbreeding. And most of the really terrible ones are things I would have noticed by now.))
Tags:
#*knocks on wood* #reply via reblog #Judaism #Passover #food #language #illness mention
one of the most fascinating youtube subcultures imo is the MRE taste testing community…like those folks who get their hands on military ready to eat meals and do unboxings and taste tests of them? because usually theyre perfectly normal and just interested in testing what militaries around the world eat right now. but some of these folks go the extra mile. they go so hard they threaten to destroy themselves with their own hubris. some of these people are flying towards the sun at alarming rates and are going to not only melt their wings but also their 100 year old preserved foods, causing them to plummet to their deaths, their corpses reduced to stewing in the seawater mixed with the remains of the WWII soviet pea soup they brought with them. im watching a dude eat meat from a 1902 british military ration right now. my dude is deadass out here calmly trying to become the last casualty of the fucking second boer war. as an archivist and general antiques lover ive put my hands on some horrifyingly old and dirty things but the idea of ingesting legitimate american civil war hardtack makes me want to get my stomach surgically removed and i am just so FASCINATED by these people who see these military antiques and think “nice, there’s lunch right there”
“the smell is just awful” SIR you are BOILING cow meat that predates the FIRST WORLD WAR you are boiling beef from a cow that existed at the same time as ELIZABETH CADY STANTON sir this can of beef was canned during the fucking DREYFUS AFFAIR what pray tell WHAT did you EXPECT from this TURN OF THE CENTURY CAN OF MEAT
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#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #food #history #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #unsanitary cw
As a side note… I am really annoyed by one thing about Star Trek.
“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”
That’s ridiculous. In Star Trek, replicator technology is part of the same tech tree as transporters. Replicated food would be identical to the food it was based on, down to the subatomic level.
In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:
1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”
2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.
3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.
4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)
The Vulcans in Starfleet (and Data), of course, remain baffled by this human insistence that “replicator food isn’t as good as ‘real’ food”, as it defies all known forms of logic.
Hmm. This is a fair point. It occurs to me that I once met a Texan who commented that the chili in a restaurant I worked at was not as good as what they made in Texas, and when I pointed out that the cook was a Texan and the chili was his personal recipe, for which he had won awards in Texas, just said “Doesn’t matter. Wasn’t made in Texas.”
I gotta be honest, Replicator technology is one of the things I am SUPREMELY jealous of, and I’m… okay, I’m not a great cook, but I can cook and there are several dishes I do very well. I think if I had access to the technology I would cook a lot less, though, and I would for sure use replicated ingredients.
Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.
The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.
Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.
I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.
Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.
The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.
this is true, but freezer space is typically the most premium space if you’re trying to build up a reserve, since most people have only a small freezer in their fridge (sidenote: if you want preservation over convenience, turning your fridge all the way to cold may convert part of it into a shitty freezer and will improve longevity in most of the rest of it).
anyway I was at the store and thinking about the toilet paper hypothesis – that it’s bulky and low margin, so stores stock as little as possible to not run out under normal conditions – and this totally applies to bread too. it’s cheap, it’s mostly air, and it expires faster than most stuff. so the tp hypothesis would explain why bread goes quickly too.
I was just thinking earlier today about how grateful I am for the eight people who are not here.
Once upon a time, long before I lived here, this house had a dozen inhabitants. They had *much* lower standards for the amount of indoor living space one person should have–by my own culture’s standards this house is not *ridiculously* roomy, though it could comfortably fit perhaps one or two more people–but nevertheless we have quite a bit of storage space, especially in a pinch.
For people with enough storage space and perhaps stability of housing (both of which, I am aware, are in all-too-short supply for many demographics), I continue to recommend supplementary freezers [link]. Very handy for stockpiling of all kinds. Do try to put them in areas where you can keep an eye on them, though: you don’t want it to go unnoticed if they break or get left open [link]. (I admit that our own freezer placement is not great, and we have occasionally lost food to this. Painful, but I expect it’s still worth it overall. Might also take it upon myself to do routine checks.)
(We also have a secondary mini-fridge, but we currently don’t keep it plugged in. Might come in handy for an intra-household quarantine, though!)
Tags:
#my parents may have run out of money but they still have a generation’s worth of accumulated physical capital #which I am very glad to have access to #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #food #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Finally starting to see a real run on the grocery stores in Portland, at least if my local branches are an indication.
The bread aisle was almost completely cleaned out, but apparently people don’t much like whole wheat English muffins or burger buns, which is convenient because I do like whole wheat English muffins and burger buns.
Burger buns make sense as a leftover but I don’t understand English muffins. Compared to most bread items they keep well.
I mean, really, a run on premade bread is inherently farcical – it’s a terrible food item to stockpile, it doesn’t keep and by volume you’re mostly storing air.
But if I was going to, I’d hit the bagels first.
Bread keeps very well if you put it in the freezer. Just scrape off any significant collections of ice crystals before thawing, else it’ll get soggy.
The volume thing is a fair point, though: we do stockpile bread under normal circumstances, but one should probably cut it from the list if storage space is even *thinking* about becoming an issue.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #food #covid19 #adventures in human capitalism #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
Damn. Thinking “Every time I go grocery shopping while hungry, I just shamble around like a zombie grabbing random things of the shelves, but this time I’m aware that it’s a pitfall and I will hold it in my mind to avoid it” totally does not work. brain has a very strong belief that all food is a good idea. to my vexation, in between composing this post I bought girl scout cookies for the first time outside the Safeway while thinking, “I don’t need these, I don’t need to buy these, guhhhhh”.
While I don’t have this trait myself, for unrelated reasons I keep two granola bars in my bag at all times. Would you find that helpful?
(Very possibly you wouldn’t: I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve met with food-related problems that were *so* obviously solvable with granola bars that there *must* have been some reason they weren’t already doing that. But I think you yourself have talked about that being a stupid reason to [completely avoid bringing up a potential solution to something].)
Tags:
#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #food #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
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