How to make the most of the garlic you buy from the store!

[Feed soil with dry garlic skins.]

When the butter is melted, add the mountain of onions, a small pinch of sugar, a big pinch of salt, and a branch of fresh thyme, and stir it all well. Cook the onions over medium-low heat, stirring them occasionally. Add occasional sprinkles of water if the onions begin to stick. If they start to sizzle, lower the heat and cover the pot, then uncover it when the cooking has slowed. This will take forty-five minutes to an hour, and the whole mass will look soggy and unconvincing until right before the onions are done, at which point they melt completely into a golden jam and all of their sugars come out to toast.

[Sunlight helps your skin produce melanin, which keeps hair black, skin tanned, and influences the amount of hair. Eyes also have some.]

[Lack of vitamin B1 (thiamin) can cause white hairs to appear.]

[Copper is essential for producing melanin and can be found in seafood (oysters, mussels, crustaceans), liver, nuts (cashews, Brazil nuts), legumes (lentils, beans) and dark chocolate.]

[Yanking out hairs can destroy their roots and over the long-term create gaps in your beard. Doing it gently can help keep the root alive. It might produce the same white hair again if melanin production in this particular root stopped for some reason.]

[Make a simple paste from olives, garlic, salt, and oil.]

The very end of a batch of olive paste should become vinaigrette. Whisk in a tiny bit of mustard, a few drops of red wine vinegar, fresh lemon juice, and olive oil, and mix with romaine.

If it's hot dogs or cinnamon toast that reminds your heart that it can be moved by food, make hot dogs or cinnamon toast.

Sleep is a process. Sleep is a practice.

What is the Difference Between a Radler and a Shandy? | Druthers Brewing Company

Shandy originated in the 1850s in England where it was earlier known as Shandygaff. The Shandygaff was a mixture of beer and ginger ale or ginger beer. By the late 19th-century, the ginger ale in the Shandygaff was replaced by lemonade or lemon soda, and the “gaff” was dropped to shorten the word to just Shandy.

[Make rice without an occasion, because you'll eventually be hungry.]

NIOSH Sound Level Meter

Monitor for the room volume level made by the CDC.

I’m turning off my website analytics because I’m very brave and I promise I truly do not care about the numbers

Cosplaying internet detective doesn't do much to sate my curiosity, it just lets me spin my wheels and trick me into thinking I'm being productive.

in search of a new tab

[Each new tab feels like a choice: how do I want to spend my time?]

---

What a 'new tab page' this is! I prefer queries (via keystroke launchers like Quicksilver or 'Command-K') over big lists, but this is beautifully personal and makes me drool; stable options can leverage muscle memory and reduce distractions. 👍🏽

Provokes me to wonder about social patterns and 'formats' like /now or 'daily note', ways of organizing that many people can practice and share so that we can all learn from each other.

Growing your own food is the highest form of meditation.

[Soak cardboard in water for fifteen minutes, wrap around a glass jar, and remove just before dry. Use as a plant pot and place in soil to prevent root interference.]

[Chop fresh herbs to bash with oil, or press into butter, or flavour plain yogurt into a sauce.]

In autumn, roast a whole butternut squash. Smash it in a bowl with good olive oil, a little freshly grated Parmesan, and a lot of freshly cracked black pepper. Spread the squash thickly on the toast, drizzle it with more olive oil and a squeeze of lemon juice, and sprinkle it with roughly chopped toasted almonds.

[Stale bread can't be bought. You must wait for it.]

bread soup that's true to the spirit of bread, which is that if you have it, all you need to turn it into a meal is whatever else you have.

[Form leftover bread soup into cakes and fry with olive oil into pancakes; probably better than either the soup or the bread.]

Almost any fruit tastes good sliced, laid out on a plate, and sprinkled with salt and olive oil. Most taste good with herbs, or onions, or olives, or chiles, or nuts added, too.

How to save money and making a homemade cleaning spray out of lime peels!

[Chop finished lime peels and put into a spray bottle, add 1/2 cup cup white vinegar, 1 tsp salt, a bit of dish soap, and fill the rest with water. Shake and spray for a nice household cleaner.]

Melted Onions!

[Halve onions into a muffin pan; sprinkle with salt and pepper; bake for 25 minutes at 425°F then baste with butter; bake 40 minutes more and baste again before finishing.]

More clean hacks because so many of you asked for it!

[Refresh towels in the washing machine on a full cycle with half cup of baking soda instead of detergent and half cup of vinegar instead of softener.]

Only by tasting can you learn to connect the decisions you make with their outcomes.

[Taste, listen, smell, touch, and watch as much as possible.]

I cook mostly with my hands: they're calibrated, by now, to turn things at the right moments, to choose correct amounts of salt. They seem to know before I do when to stop squeezing a lemon, or how much parsley to grab.

Ingredients don't take three or five or ten minutes to be done; it depends on the day and the stove.

While your oven is lit, use its heat thoroughly. When a pan of vegetables comes out, replace it with a toaster tray of walnuts or almonds. They will be perfectly toasted after ten minutes or so and can be stored in the refrigerator for months and used in vegetable salads, added to pesto, or snacked on. Or scatter stale bread in a little pan, drizzle it with olive oil, and make toasted breadcrumbs or croutons.

If you can't find anything to fit into the spaces vacated by roasting vegetables, use the oven's heat once everything is out. Let it warm your dinner plates, or the meal's bread. Use its ambient heat for loosening vinaigrette that's hardened in the refrigerator, softening a stick of butter, or mixing pasta with cheese.

When you don't taste heat first but instead the sweetness of cauliflower or beet, the prickliness of vinegar, or tingle of good olive oil, it is flavor, not temperature, you experience.

All cooked vegetables, whether boiled or roasted, become wonderful salads. They need only a handful of toasted nuts, chopped fresh herbs, a few vinegar-soaked onions, and a sharp vinaigrette. It's really all most food ever needs.

By the end of the week, you will have eaten vegetables a dozen ways a dozen times, having begun with good raw materials only once. You will also have had a number of satisfying conversations. You will have eaten a raw bite of kale stem and wondered whether next time it should be pickled. You'll have tasted a particularly soft, cold, vinegary beet, and realized you wanted to make beet soup again and serve it cold. You will have been silently practicing that ancient conversation in which cooks and their materials used to converse, feeling out unfamiliar conjugations, brushing up.

The bones and shells and peels of things are where a lot of their goodness resides. It's no more or less lamb for being meat or bone; it's no more or less pea for being pea or pod.

Find a turnip that missed the week's roasting, asparagus bottoms, cabbage cores. As long as a soup's ingredients are born in the same season, they will meld together perfectly in a pot and can then be blended until creamy. If there is a final cup of cooked beans or lentils that needs somewhere to go, once you've blended it this sort of hodeepodgey soup is the place.

The amount of food you have left from a meal is always the perfect amount for something.

Good olive oil gets bitter when it's broken by blades.

[Cook all your veggies together once a week and keep them ready to incorporate during the week. Crispers are useless. Maximize your oven or re-use your boiling water.]

[While the oven is pre-heating, prep your veggies from longest to shortest cooking time.]

[When roasting different vegetables, pair the ones thay grow most similarly: keep together roots, stems, tubers. Beets are their own thing.]

[To poach an egg: boil and simmer four inches of water; add a bit of vinegar; crack the egg onto a cup and pour into the water; after a minute and a half, lift with a slotted spoon and prod a bit to check; drain and store in ice water; reheat in simmering water before serving.]

I usually have at least one nicely cold soft-boiled egg on hand to lure my thoughts away from eating lunch out.

[Cooking seems like something to juggle amongst life's many complications rather than a clear path through them.]

[Fast-and-easy recipe books try to sell us akin to 'breathing air more rapidly' while pasta is already 'boil then toss' and omelettes are already a minute away.]

[Cooking is transformation, and transformation is human.]

[Absurd to think that nature starts from scratch at dawn: cooking as well is continuity, picking up where something else left off.]

Stale slices of bread should be ground into breadcrumbs, which make a delicious topping for pasta, and add crunch to a salad. Or they must be toasted and broken apart for croutons or brittle crackers, which ask to be smeared with olive paste.

This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. If we decide our meals will be good, remanded kale stems, quickly pickled or cooked in olive oil and garlic, will be taken advantage of to garnish eggs, or tossed with pasta. Beet and turnip greens, so often discarded, will be washed well and sautéed in olive oil and filled into an omelet, or served on warm, garlicky crostini. The omelets or little toasts will have cost no more than eggs and stale bread, and both will have been more gratifying to eater and cook.

If our meal will be ongoing, then our only task is to begin.

if there is anything that you can learn from what is happening, learn it.

[Adding salt is more than just about boiling: it's a way to cook one good-tasting thing inside another.]

[You already know how everything is supposed to taste: it should be 'good'. And that's as true for water as any other ingredient.]

[Add ingredients together warm, as they're already transforming and open to change.]

[Push re-use of water by moving from less starchy to more starchy ingredients.]

[Taste the broth often and cook until delicious.]

Great hacks to know to start to New Year Clean!

[Put half a lemon in a Ziploc plastic bag and fill with vinegar, then tie to let your shower head soak inside for about an hour to descale and remove dirt inside.]

Be Kind, Everyone is Fighting a Social Atrophy You Know Nothing About

And so we struggle to reach out, and to respond with our fragile hurting brains. We want connection, and we also find the possibility potentially very difficult when we're not doing so well. After all, if you invite someone over, they will see your messy house, and maybe judge you. And everyone's "house" is a mess right now in one way or another.

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love the hack to reach out right before 'correspondence bankruptcy' to reduce pressure on the recipient 👍🏽 i also try to generally cultivate a norm of 'no response necessary' with anything i send; if it's urgent i'll call or say so.

this made me reflect on my frequent desire for solitude, often by saying or feeling that 'my social cup is full'. i never thought that it might cost me some 'social muscles' but i can see that as a possibility if it goes on for too long. nevertheless, i'd like to think that i know when i want to have company and when not, that i have good judgement in balancing this within myself.

in what seems to now be a previous life, where i felt an overwhelming lack of social interaction, friendship, or companionship, i practiced what i called 'shake the tree' once or twice a year: dm everyone with warm wishes and my current city. many were happy i sent this, many reacted with a simple emoji, many didn't respond, but it generally felt worthwhile for me.

Gut-Friendly Fruit Sodas

[Add some ginger bug starter to pressed juice; anything with natural sugars will do, and you can add maple syrup if none. close, and let sit for 3 days or until bubbles form. Burp them daily to avoid that they explode.]

Fermented Ginger Bug!

[Combine 6tsp chopped ginger, 4 tsp unrefined sugar, and 2 cups filtered room temperature water. Close well, shake, and let sit for a 24 hours. Feed daily with 2 tsp ginger and sugar for 3–5 days until bubbles form.]

Spreadable Garlic Confit

[Cover unpeeled cloves of garlic in a bowl with boiling water for five minutes; then peel the skins easily. Place in a pan and submerge in oil, add aromatics (like thyme, basil) if desired, and slow roast at 120°C for two hours. Store in a jar with the oil and use three times the batch in any recipe calling for oil or garlic.]

How to upcycle turkey bones!

[Boil thanksgiving turkey remains for fifteen minutes to remove all the meat more easily; save the broth for soup. Bake the bones for fifteen minutes at 400°F to soften them, then grind into a powder. Mix a teaspoon of the powder with water to fertilize your plants.]

How to make banana water!

[Chop banana peels and let sit in water for an hour or longer, then strain into a bottle. Use as fertilizer for plants.]

A lot of us eat oranges and throw out the peels..

[Pack a jar with orange peels, fill with vinegar, and let sit in a cool dark place. After two weeks, strain into a spray bottle. The D-limonene combined with vinegar is a naturally powerful household cleaner.]

So many of us throw these things out..

[Instead of wasting the ends of these veggies, grow something from them.]

[Lettuce and celery bottoms can be cut around two inches and half submerged with sticks in a cup of water (ideally filtered).]

[Take one stick of basil, remove the bottom leaves, cut the bottom of the stem at a forty-five degree angle, and place the top part in a shot glass for three days. When it grows roots, plant it in soil.]

[Green onions or scallions can be planted directly in soil to regrow in about six days.]

[Carrot tops can be cut to about an inch and planted directly in soil.]

Garlic + Honey = Magic for your health!

[Peel the cloves in a head of garlic filling about a third of a jar. Fill about three quarters with honey and seal standing upside down at room temperature. After about five dais it will start to bubble. Open every three days to 'burp' or release gas. After thirty days it should darken and reduce into a remedy you can take (one spoon a day) to fight cold and flu.]

Super cool ways to use onion peels!

[Many uses for onion peels. Soak in boiling water for fifteen minutes for a sedative tea that can help you sleep. Let sit overnight until the water turns amber and conserve in a spray bottle for relieving itchy skin. Dry and grind to a powder to use in your cooking.]

How to take a lime seed and turn it into a tree!

[Soak the seed in water for six hours. Cut off the tip, peel the outer layer, and plant in half inch deep of loosely covering soil. Mist and cover with a shot glass to increase humidity until sprouting. When six inches tall with some leaves, transplant to a bigger pot

How to Upcycle those fallen leaves!

[Instead of throwing out leaves from a garden, wash and dry them, then break them down, and finally grind into a powder. The micro-nutrients enrich and fluff the soil for grass and plants to grow better.]

How to prevent getting sick as often..

[Mix one teaspoon turmeric, half teaspoon ginger, one teaspoon vanilla essence, and half cup of honey into a syrup and stir in a pinch of pepper. Take one teaspoon daily as a natural antibiotic to help with cough, headache, cold, and flu.]

Jojoba oil

Hydrate skin without blocks.

'Toragesic' is a brand of Brazilian back pain medication recommended by my therapist. I took sublingual tablets; was pretty fast and effective; tried to use it while also resting (not stressing or working during recovery) and I usually was normal after a few days. Some information in Portuguese from tuasaude.com and less in English from rxreasoner.com and drugs.com

Category is 'anti-inflamatorio analgésico' (translation I guess is 'Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug')

Active ingredient is 'trometamol cetorolaco' (translation Ketorolac tromethamine)