#X Files #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #food #embarrassment squick? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
One absolutely hilarious part of human existence is the repeated incidents of spicy bananas. People who have lived their entire lives up to this point just assuming that a specific fruit or vegetable is supposed to taste bitter, tangy, or spicy, having no fucking idea that all this time, they’ve been allergic to this plant. Because how would they have known? You learn what things taste like by tasting them, nobody’s going to tell you that bananas are supposed to be one of the mildest flavours out there. And people already eat so many things that taste hot, bitter, tangy and tart! Because they like how that kind of thing tastes like!
You can just happily much on a plant, thinking “ah, this angry plant tastes sharp because it hates me. Much like all the other sharp angry plants that people eat because they like the sharp”, and it wouldn’t cross their mind to think that the plant just hates you, specifically.
My best friend’s husband didn’t realize he was colorblind until after they were married in their mid-twenties and she watched him run a stop sign that was in front of a big bush. He’d lived his entire life not knowing. So when they did some tests and realized “hey, you’re super colorblind,” he got to thinking, it’s X-linked, right? Which means it had to have come from Mom’s side of the family, so he started digging and asked his mom’s dad, and Grampa was like “Well that would explain a lot, I suppose. I kind of thought your grandma was just pulling my leg about the tomatoes.”
Because Grandma had apparently banned him early on from picking the tomatoes in the garden because he was constantly coming in with unripe ones, and he thought she was just being super nitpicky about it. This was a lifelong family joke, that Grandpa couldn’t tell a ripe tomato to save his life, and nobody ever stopped to wonder if maybe he and the grandson who routinely colored the grass red on his drawings might have something going on with their ability to see red and green as distinct colors.
i thought aloe vera gel was SUPPOSED TO burn your skin. like how rubbing alcohol burns when applied to a cut. figured that everyone else was just better at gritting their teeth and bearing the full body aloe sting than i was. i just didn’t feel like the stinging was worth the mild healing properties aloe had.
yeah… turns out it’s NOT supposed to burn and i was just allergic to aloe
My husband comes from a “weird” family. Like, the whole county knows. “He’s a total weirdo. AAAH THAT’S HIS LAST NAME THAT EXPLAINS IT OKAY NO PROBLEM GO FLY FREE DUDE WE LOVE YOU!!” The family’s just a bunch of freaks, like the Addams Family meets the Beverly Hillbillies. I ADORE them.
It was celebrated because they’re so valuable to the local community. This one sells meticulously grown veggies at the farmer’s market, then hisses at you for suggesting they wear soemthing that isn’t tie-dyed. That kid was in kindergarten before she said her first word, and that’s cool because her older sister translated for her NO THANK YOU TEACHER WE DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR THAT IS NORMAL FOR THIS FAMILY GO AWAY. She’s got two quiet kids of her own now and WE STILL DO NOT NEED A DOCTOR GO AWAY. That uncle knows everything there is to know about every car engine ever, and he never wears shoes with laces because he literally never worked out how to tie them (He’s 60). He’s also the top mechanic in his town and makes serious dough that put his super-smart daughter through college, and now she’s an ace veterinarian who pterodactyl screams at acrylic sweaters and keeps everyone’s pets alive. I shit you not, the family matriarch gets excited for tax season every year and begs everyone to bring her their taxes so she can MATH at them. It’s her freaking hobby.
Whatever. They’re in OUR family. It’s totally normal for us. The family’s just full of freaks, that’s all. We encourage our people to go with their strengths and use their skills to make our little corner of the world a nicer place to live in, then teach them how to manage the difficult parts of the world because we all had to learn to do it ourselves. “Because this family’s full of people just as freaky as you. You’re one of us.”
No, most of them don’t go to college. It’s rural Illinois, of course they don’t. Lots of them end up in specialized trades, like electricians or farmers, and they always kick ass at it. They tend towards jobs that require a lot of focus, and attention to detal, and very specific, in-depth knowledge that is almost useless outside of whatever field they’re in. We’re mostly spread between two or three small towns in Illinois, and I do not think these three towns would function without my husband’s family fixing and growing everything they do.
One of our cousins’ kids got diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder a few years ago. His now-ex-wife insisted that something was wrong and that our cousin was a jerk for not caring enough to notice. The family reacted with “He’s fine, it’s normal, we all did that when we were his age… wait… shit… what do you mean it’s genetic?”
It turns out that like 70% of my husband’s side of the family is autistic as fuck. We’re talking about grandmothers. Uncles. Cousins. People are in their 70s just now figuring out why they are how they are.
They’re just so famously weird in our community that they attract the other weird people as partners, and then they have weird little kids, and no one really looks twice. A bunch of the people (including me) who married in were informally adopted first. “Oh, your parents punished you for this behavior? We all do that here. Come to the barbecue!” Two years later, I had their last name and was helping watch their adorable little handflappy babies.
We’ve got an entire gene pool over here of autistic people thriving so well that no one noticed we were all autistic.
Also, that cousin got RID of his wife when she started talking about how “tragic” their son’s autism is. Their son is a perfectly normal child in our family and will be raised as such. We joke now that when something needs fixed, “Oh, just call Uncle So-and-So, he’ll autism at it.”’
Beautiful, wonderful story, no notes (except maybe asking if there’s room for one more at the dinner table).
Anyway, back to the original post, I am in deep gratitude for it, because it’s the only reason I thought to wonder if chickpeas are supposed to be spicy.
(Hint: Apparently they’re not. The genetic lottery locked the good tasting falafel and hummas behind an allergy wall.)
#that one post with the thing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #food #allergies #autism #PSA #embarrassment squick #poison cw? #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.
The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.
The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely. “Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean says.
Before she reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.
Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means they have to be soft enough to fall apart.
Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is. If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”
MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs,” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”
Not every (human) guest realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on an episode and decided to share in the muppet’s delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.
“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Blech!’ ” MacLean said.
#(note that the above is an excerpt and not the full article) #Sesame Street #food #the more you know #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#art #cats #adorable #domesticity #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #food #fire #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one
while i actually made this post back in May, since New Year’s is approaching here’s some of my fave suggestions from the tags if you’re looking for inspiration!
other favorites from the notes I didn’t get screenshots of at the time:
learn the names/species of local plants, bugs, and birds where you live (iNaturalist or Merlin the bird app help with this)
learn the rules to 10 new card games
steal the colored paint cards from hardware store paint aisles and use them to make art
try out every different apple variety you can find and rank them
similarly LOTS of people in the notes doing soup quests, and a few cheese quests also
similarly lots of people reading/watching certain amounts of media over the year, and tracking/rating it
track the number of cats/dogs/etc you see over the year
there’s plenty more in there too :)
Tags:
#New Years #that one post with the thing #interesting ideas #food #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#overly literal interpretations #language #food #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #adorable #Christmas #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #food #illness mention #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
In case you’re a buffoon (like me) and thought someone was out here meticulously hand-poisoning applesauce:
An FDA spokesperson said that one of the agency’s theories for the WanaBana cinnamon applesauce contamination was “economically motivated adulteration.” (…)
Economically motivated adulteration, or “food fraud,” can occur when a cheaper ingredient is added to a product to enhance it or bulk it up, but is not disclosed, according to the FDA. One example, the agency said, is when lead-based dyes are added to spices to give the product a certain color.
We love cutting corners to maximize profit at the expense of our consumers
Turmeric is also frequently affected by this. A lead compound with a bright yellow color can be used.
I’m not gonna dox myself by saying precisely what I do for a living, but I am involved in public environmental health, and in the past have conducted home investigations in child lead poisoning cases. For years, foreign spices have been a problem, particularly for immigrant families who visit relatives overseas and bring spices back from south asia in particular.
During and immediately after covid, however, we started finding domestically sold spices coming back from lab testing with high lead results. Sam’s club, wal-mart, etc. We used to tell families to buy domestically instead of bringing things back from India, Pakistan, etc, but even that isn’t safe anymore.
You might – might – be safer with higher end organic products but I really just don’t trust anything anymore. This isn’t a new issue, but it’s definitely becoming more widespread.
if the spice you’re using is water-soluble, you can mix it with water and then use a water testing kit. they sell water-testing kits at the hardware store; ones that you send off to a lab are more reliable (but also more expensive).
you can also buy lead-testing swabs on the Internet. some of these are not reliable, so I’d recommend testing the lead-testing swabs. use a swab on something that you know is lead (a fishing sinker, a car battery, etc) and another swab on something that you know is lead-free (most things in your home, hopefully) and make sure you get the expected results.
note that lead-testing kits are not food-safe, so you should not just put pipettes / test swabs / etc into your spice jar. spoon out a small amount (onto a plate or whatever), test that small amount, and then throw that small amount away. (and then wash the plate.)
gonna add this consumer reports investigation from a couple of years back that made the rounds. they looked into a bunch of american spice brands and found that this is a huge problem across brands, regardless of whether or not it’s organic (exact quote: “CR’s tests could not determine whether one brand was consistently better or worse than any other. And organic products did not have consistently lower levels than conventionally grown ones”).
I highly recommend reading through the article @alugard linked because it gives a lot of good information.
Also, close to the bottom, it gives a rundown of the spices that were tested with a helpful visual graphic for which brands and which spices were more concerning or less concerning, starting with this disclaimer and table:
[Text description: A screenshot with the header in larger bold text that says “CR’s Herb and Spice Test Results”. Below it in smaller text is a paragraph that reads, “CONSUMER REPORTS tested 126 herbs and spices from 38 brands for arsenic, cadmium, and lead. (We did not test spices that tend to be used in baking, such as cinnamon and nutmeg.) We tested two or three samples from different lots of each product. Our findings are a spot check of the market and cannot be used to draw definitive conclusions about brands. The products are organized alphabetically by type. Within each group, the products are listed according to the degree of concern. Regularly consuming ¾ teaspoon or more daily of a product in one of the concerning categories could, over time, pose a health risk to children as a result of the combined levels of the three heavy metals. Unless noted, they could also pose a risk to adults. The more red boxes next to a product, the higher the concern.” Below the paragraph is a graphic of four categories: a green circle with a white checkmark in it, labeled ‘No Concern’; a single red circle labeled ‘Some Concern’; two red circles next to each other labeled ‘Moderate Concern’; and three red circles next to each other labeled ‘High Concern’. /end text description]
Whiiiich is definitely helpful if you’d like to be more careful with what spices you use based on the information available. (That said, they only tested 38 brands, and there are a lot more out there than that. Again, I highly recommend reading the article.)
Tags:
#here’s the other thing I was referring to re: turmeric #food #home of the brave #PSA #poison cw #what’s the warning tag for brain damage‚ I feel like that should have a specific tag
When you’re lamenting with friends online about how far apart you are, or a far-away friend is sick or going through some bullshit, don’t forget that you can just send them some Thai food. You can 100% send them some chocolate dough balls from domino’s or whatever. You can order pizza for both of you and compare your results. Most restaurants let you tip your delivery guy in the app. Get your friend some chicken makhanwala and sit in the dark together.
Tags:
#you must be at least a level 5 friend to unlock fine-grained location data #and restaurants are so expensive for what you get #(unfun fact: did you know that the Walmart-US website won’t let you pay with a Canadian credit card?) #(and don’t get me fucking started on Paypal’s international-transfer fees) #that all said‚ though‚ a while back I did have a pack of KF94s shipped to the person I’m reblogging this from #which in many ways fits the spirit of the thing #give your (not-so-)local extrovert the gift of accessible public spaces today #proud citizen of The Future #food #the more you know #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 