Get a rice cooker and begin your boycot until prices fall... or perhaps never return to them?
Fuck prices, all of that food is wildly unhealthy and should be avoided even without looking at prices.
All you really need is a slow cooker, skillet, sheet pan, wooden cutting board, and chef's knife to make quick, delicious, and healthy meals. The money you save will pay for all of that in a month.
Listen, I'm all for cooking at home, It's what occupies most of my evenings, but I'm tired of pretending that fast food doesn't WILDLY add convenience to my life. A "30 minute meal" usually drags out to an hour plus if you include prep time of getting the ingredients together and scrubbing all your shit down afterward. I am of the class that does not have a dish washer, so that last step takes a while.
That's not even to mention the time it takes to plan out your meals, shop for ingredients, and at the end of the day, you might not even be eating healthy. You need to incorporate so many fruits and veggies into your diet that, if you're buying fresh and are one of the many unlucky people that live in a food desert, will break your bank right open. Even frozen food isn't cheap.
Eating healthy, cheap, and quickly are almost impossible to get all together without already having conveniences that speed things up. And sometimes, you just want to eat and not think about any of that shit.
That’s why I don’t cook, I just make sandwiches. If I am feeling extra fancy, I’ll add an egg or stir fry some pre-cut veggies from the market. I also just get cooked protein from market. Super easy and fast, and not that expensive.
I agree with you, but at least where I live, it doesn't add much convenience between wrong orders and time taken to serve me. The real bang for your convenience bucks is usually local restaurants at this rate.
Rice:
rice
water.
Wet the drys until they are hot then allow the wets to dry until they are not too hot.
slow cooker, skillet, sheet pan, wooden cutting board, and chef’s knife
Eh, you need a few more implements. Spatula? Ladle? Measuring spoons?
But yeah, it's not a ton of stuff to be able to cook lots of things.
Rice, beans, tortillas, some shredded cheese, and a little bit of sauce of your choice and you've got a delicious burrito that costs a fraction of most other meal options!
As long as you're at the grocery store, please get yourself some kind of green vegetables as well. Even if you just add some cilantro or shredded lettuce to that burrito, it's a start.
I just mix a v8 in with my protein powder. It's gross, but effective.
I used to make my own and freeze it into ice cubes, but it's a pain in the ass. But, a few tomatoes, bell peppers, carrots, and spinach make a surprisingly tasty smoothie base.
I've started adding chopped broccoli into the rice cooker with rice and quinoa. It adds a lot of flavour, and about as cheap as a superfood can get.
I get broccles evertime I groce. Cut off the florets, toss in oil and salt, convection roast at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, stirring them about one or two times
I use that in place of rice for many dishes that just require boiled rice. For things like a rice pilaf, I'll substitute ½ of the rice with riced cauliflower, since it's close to the color of the rice, mostly.
We finally got a rice cooker. It's a cheap-ass one not a Zojirushi but it does fine. I can make rice without it but man it is nice to fire and forget. And it does better than I can manually.
I don't get it. I make perfect rice every time in a cheap pot from Walmart. It's so easy.
My trick is simmering the rice the normal way on low heat for 15 minutes (after bringing it to a boil, of course) and then taking it off the heat and wrapping the pot in a towel for... ever. Seriously. It only needs 5 more minutes of steaming, but I can leave it sitting there for 20-25 minutes and still have perfect, hot rice when the rest of my food is done. Not a single grain will be stuck to the pan. I use an ordinary both towel.
Meanwhile, I used to have a rice cooker and the rice stuck to the bottom every time. It was cheap, but still. It failed at it's one job.
It's not that rice is difficult to do on a stovetop. It's that it takes more time and is an extra thing to think about. You need to be there to start the rice, you need to be there five minutes later when it boils to turn it down to simmer, then you need to be there again 15 minutes later to take it off the stove. If you're cooking other stuff in the meantime, that's multiple timers you have to keep track of. If you want to walk away and do something else, it can only be stuff that's fits into this 15 minutes window.
If you use a rice cooker, then it's one minute to set it up and you don't have to think about it again until you eat. Doesn't matter if it's half an hour later or five hours later, you still have perfect rice. All it costs is a minute of time commitment.
We’ve been lucky with our cheap rice cooker.
But I seriously have to be having an incredibly lucky astrology day to cook rice in a pot — like perfect biorhythms and after having rubbed the head of a leprechaun.
Other than volunteering to help your farmer neighbor butcher his animals, what's the next cheapest way to get meat?
Well… fast food meat, ounce for ounce, is much more expensive than cooking your own. But I can’t recommend “bargain” raw meat.
Where I live there's a big package of chicken patties for 10 bucks at Nofrills. It costs 7 bucks or more for ONE chicken fillet at most fast food restaurants.
Random tangent, it was about 3 years ago that I realized that 1kg wasn't exactly 2.2lb (1 lb = 0.4545kg) but actually 2.2046lb (1 lb is about 0.4536kg).
Idk, I'm not very good at remembering people and names but somehow way better with numbers and a mix of oddly specific things. In this instance I was at a bulk store with a close friend.
Also remember it changes based on location. Weight is not a direct correlation to mass. It will vary by altitude. The easy way to remember it is that 1kg is 1kg at any altitude or location as it is a measure of mass. The same object will weigh a different number of pounds on earth at sea level than high in the atmosphere, on the moon, etc as it is a measure of weight
Actually, while you are correct about weight in general, the pound is legally defined as a unit of mass, which is exactly equal to 0.45359237 kg. Then, multiplying this pound-mass by 1 ft/s^2 gets you a pound-force which is a unit of weight. This implies that the pound-force is a derived unit in US Customary, British Imperial, and the other countries that agreed to the 1959 definition of the avoirdupois pound as a unit of mass.
So while the earth would induce less pounds-force of gravity on an object high in the atmosphere than at sea level, the object would not lose pounds-mass, which is what pounds actually are unless the multiplication by 1 ft/s^2 is specified explicitly or implied. This is the case for any systems that use the avoirdupois pound.
No physicist would use pounds to define mass in the U.S. It is just wrong. Weight sure, but that same 1959 definition you mentioned did not mention it as mass from what I am seeing, rather weight - mass. I'll see if I can find the actual accord to see if they list the terms used when proposed as it would be foolish to use pounds, next thing you know we would get a moon lander laying on its side. Haha. : )
I couldn't find the text of the agreement, but here is the notice from the US Department of Commerce based on that agreement. What's interesting is that they discuss the relation of the 1959 definition to previous ones, and even back in 1893 the pound was standardized as a unit of mass.
So it seems like, for at least 130 years, we have been "using the pound wrong" and no one bothered to correct us.
Haha, So that would require us to use pound and pound to have to different meanings. 1 pound of mass not equal to 1 pound of weight unless you are in the right circumstances haha. How dumb. Thanks for sending me that link by the way!
my understanding is not so much altitude as the density of what's pulling you, as in the ground below you. like if your at the top of a granite mountain it may have more pull than if you're on the ocean. if you search for gravity anomaly maps you can see what I'm getting at. of course the farther you are from something the less pull it has though so I get your altitude point but unless you're in a hot air balloon weighing rice I don't know how altitude would matter. not that there is a big enough difference for weight vs mass to ever matter with rice.
Can you make long grain that clumps up but then breaks down to individual perfectly cooked grains in your mouth?
You’re expecting the wrong behavior and texture from long grained rice. It’s not curry or sushi rice, so it’s not meant to clump. Long grain rice dishes typically prefer unclumped and unsticky rice.
Idk, Panda Express is reasonably priced imo. I'm diabetic so I get super greens instead of rice tho.
Guess I was responding to … another recent meme … the one with the couple able to buy a home on top and the current guy just making memes…
I just get so tired of people making it all about the system— when I think it takes two to tango?
It absolutely does take two, but I'd say the hamster wheel has spun ever faster while we try to plan retirement etc. Medical costs for things like diabetes are out-fucking-rageous, there is no pension system, higher education used to be 1/32nd of a years salary (yes, accounting for inflation) etc etc.
I've taken to planning as though social security simply will not exist by the time I'm ready for it, never mind the possibility of environmentally driven war and displacement.
The future is always in flux, but reflecting on history, it seems things are tremendously more difficult than before.
You and I are in agreement.
Things are tough.
But smarts, creativity, and hard work never go out of style.