I just spent Thanksgiving with my family, and was reminded how much my parents love boiling things. Fucking disgusting, no spices either? Fuck bland potatoes. It takes almost no effort to just toss a bunch of fucking spices on them and then put them in the oven.
My dad does this, just boils vegetables and potatoes so long that they’re reduced to their component quarks and then serves them in a bowl with nothing on them. For bonus points, he makes sure they’ve cooled off to room temperature before we eat. I want to blame the Great Depression for this style of “cuisine”, but he was born after that shit.
Isnt thanksgiving a month from now? Are you like from the future? Why did you suddenly come back? Is the whole world doomed and you came back to warn us of something terrible?!?!?
Canada also has a holiday called “Thanksgiving”, and it was last week
I dunno, time travel seems more reasonable.
Omg yikes you’re Canadian?
There’s dozens of us.
And we all know each other!
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Are you of norwegian ancestry?
No excuse for bland potatoes. Even boiled, they can taste good. Low effort, throw some dill on those bastards. It’s that easy. My mom is diabetic, and down a kidney, so salt and sugar are not really things in the food she makes, but it always tastes good.
“Oh my God!” - God
I think God is, by definition, an atheist, though, since God must not believe in a higher power.
im an atheist and i believe in a higher power.
that sun will fuck me up if i get too close
I feel like God would have the capacity to realize he is the higher power. Nothing says there has to be a higher power at each level.
Nothing says there has to be a higher power at each level.
Sounds like you’re just about ready to join /c/atheism
Well in that case I’m not atheist. I belong to species of higher power on this planet.
Depends on if he’s having a bad day, or if he believes in himself. Wait, is that why faith is how you get into heaven? God having shitty self-confidence and not wanting any haters around makes as much sense as any other I’ve heard.
who’s the creator of god and the realm he resides in? hm? hm? hm?
checkmate, theists!
Checkmate? Ha!
Those fools aren’t but throwing rocks at a wall, hoping one sticks!
Ok but why sugar taste so good
Because it’s seasoned with diabetes
CALORIE
Because natural foods are sweet when they’re the most nutritious.
Fruit, for example, or carrots (which convert it’s starches into sugars to avoid freezing.)
Prior to modern food preservation and heavily processed foods, getting calories was hard enough on its own, so we’re primed to seek calorie rich food.
We’ve evolved- technologically- to the point that’s no longer true, but our biology hasn’t caught up yet.
Steam broccoli and cauliflower together in a microwave or steamer of your choice with butter and whatever seasonings you like. Toss in a wok with ripping hot olive oil until golden brown on the edges. Make sure to be rough with the broccoli and cauliflower, you want it to be crushed a bit. Shit slaps and it so easy. Idk if it’s healthy anymore after all the butter and oil but whatever. you can adjust the butter levels as needed but make sure there’s enough oil in the wok
Butter isn’t bad for you per-se, it’s the quantity that gets you. It’s a pretty calorie dense food, and it has a lot of other things in it that, when taken in large quantities will clog up your cardiovascular system.
Used in proper moderation and it’s wonderful. Throwing a whole stick of it into a single serving at every meal is probably too much.
Disclaimer: I am neither a health professional, nor a nutritionist.
Yeah of course but I use a shit ton
I’ve had properly sauteed and spiced asparagus and it still tastes awful to me. I’m just very sensitive to the bitter compounds in it.
Cut off the heads off the asparagus. That’s where it’s most bitter and it messes with the rest of the dish. My wife does this as well.
I have used that trick when served asparagus, it definitely helps. But I would still prefer green beans, or broccoli instead.
don’t cook it, just slice the stalks very finely. delicious. i like the heads mashed in with mashed potato but that’s more effort than it’s worth really. any way you eat it, your piss will stink to high heaven
Oh I’ve tried raw, way too bitter for me to enjoy.
https://youtu.be/ioH53m2cod4?si=4yHlRUfi1MkIN-7h
I feel like this is relevant…
Sauté it in what, God?
…
Sauté it in what?
In the pan, duh.
I’m lazy so here’s lazy delicious veggie tip:
Get a rice cooker. Get rice and FROZEN pre-processed (chopped) veggies. These are still very inexpensive, require no preparation, last forever in the freezer, and are actually FRESHER than “fresh” veggies, since they are picked when ripe and then flash frozen rather than picked prematurely and sprayed with a ripening agent. Your rice cooker should come with a veggie tray so you can cook the rice and veggies simultaneously. Drop them in there and fire it up. Get yourself some “simmering sauce” and heat it up in a pan for ~15 minutes and baby you got a stew goin’.
Can you elaborate on where the stew is going?
It’s chasing after their refrigerator.
Is Stew alright, like in the head?
and are actually FRESHER than “fresh” veggies
As an adult who thought that they hated pretty much all veggies (especially broccoli and corn) and found out that I absolutely love them when prepared fresh and that the bagged versions tasted like ass, I’m gonna call bullshit on that.
It might work for you, but nothing beats freshly-prepared corn, whether grilled in the husks or cut and sauteed.
You can call bullshit on whatever you want but it’s a scientific fact.
The foodtuber Adam Ragusea happens to have two videos addressing these specific topics:
The superiority of flash frozen foods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_PMnCpaJiQ
Food starts rotting the instant it’s harvested, and continues doing so while it’s packaged, transported, and stored on the shelf. Modern flash freezing techniques preserve foods perfectly, halting the microorganisms that cause decomposition, and avoiding the damage caused by large ice crystal formation that’s inevitable with slow domestic freezers.
The selective breeding and genetic engineering of sweetcorn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVG54wNPd0
Interestingly with the sweetcorn, it used to be that it had to be eaten immediately after harvest, so much so that you’d have the water boiling before even picking them. However with modern developments they can remain fresh much longer.
Can you elaborate on this so called simmerin’ sauce please
It’s just like a pre-mixed (typically middle-Eastern) sauce with coconut milk and spices and thing like that pre-prepared. It shouldn’t have any preservatives or anything you can’t pronounce.
There’s many options for sauces, depending on your preferences and dietary requirements, but there are a few key common steps.
For example many Indian curry type sauces can begin with frying diced onions, some ginger, garlic, chillis, coriander seed powder, cumin powder, turmeric powder, black pepper, and tomato paste, then coconut milk to form the main body of the sauce. Don’t worry if you don’t have access to all of these, mix and match. Then finish with fresh coriander leaves.
Or a simple marinara type sauce begins with frying diced onions, garlic, tomato paste, followed by a glass of wine and a can of tomato to make the main body of the sauce. Add basil at the very end, as the flavor is delicate and destroyed by heat.
Notice in both cases we begin with aromatics - onions, garlic, spices - that get heated up to release the volatile flavor compounds. Then deglazing the pan and simmering with something that constitutes the main bulk of the sauce - e.g. canned tomato or coconut. Then finishing with more delicate herbal flavors that get desroyed by extended cooking. This is a general pattern that appears in foods from all over the world. The crucial part is learning how long each ingredient requires to cook for, and therefore what stage it gets added.
Once you get used to this you can begin to enjoy the creativity and rewarding nature of cooking, and explore the world through food. Like the Indian example above can be quite easily modified into a Thai green curry with a few substitutions such as extra green chillis, galangal instead of ginger, and finishing with Thai basil.
I’d say another crucial aspect is appreciating the importance of emulsions - a colloidal suspension of small fat particles in water - which results in a rich and unctuous mouthfeel. Many of our favorite foods and sauces are emulsions (butter, mayonnaise, pesto, curry). But I don’t want to overload you with information as I’ve already written a lot. Good luck.
Also a starch slurry or roux are easy ways to thicken sauces, controlling the consistency of a sauce can be important depending on what you are tossing in it or putting it over.
Any packet sauce mix like curry or gravy’ll work too
I’ve also heard you can cook a chicken breast on top of the bed of rice
Veggy tray? Do you mean the steam “table”?
Sure, let’s go with that.
WTF are you me?!
Because you are designed to seek out salt and sugar as a survival trait; then decided to mass produce it and put it into everything. Now your tastebuds have been ruined, even the standard apple/banana has been genetically modified to have more sugar
iirc the modern banana is actually a less flavorful variety than centuries past, but not for selective breeding reasons. The more popular variety, the Gros Michel, was susceptible to a certain fungus that wiped it out by the 60s. Those apparently tasted closer to the artificial banana flavoring that is still used today and in fact are what that flavoring was based on (albeit probably quite a bit more sugary and concentrated since it’s still a candy flavoring).
And then you have other produce like apples and tomatoes being bred for size and yield, since that will both net more profit and feed more people. This often necessarily means that the produce will lose flavor in the process, as well as nutritional value by weight since the size/yield increase is mostly just the crop taking up more water. (I think the genetic modification you mentioned is in some part meant to correct that inverse relationship between yield and nutritional density, but I’d have to read up more on the subject.)
So I think you can just as much argue that it’s not our tastebuds being ruined so much as produce itself being considerably less appealing to them.
The gros Michel is also not a natural banana. Those were also all clones of each other. Natural bananas have big ass seeds throughout them.
You can buy Gros Michel bananas still you just have to put in some effort. If you are in the USA and have the cash the Miami Fruit Co ships them when they grow them. I haven’t checked but I believe they are in banana season.
Whoa, looks like a really cool company in general! Thanks for the tip!
Genetically modified? That’s a stretch.
Like many other cultures, bananas and apples were selectively reproduced to obtain fruits with more to eat. Corn, carrots, every single kale and cabbage, potatoes, oranges and even strawberries can go into this basket.
The wild banana has almost nothing to eat, being filled with large seeds and we can still find wild apples, by nature very tart but still edible. Every single cereal we plant and harvest today was originally nothing more than a wild grass.
But to call the work of millenia and who knows how many generations of farmers genetic modifications is a bit over the top.
GMOs are very recent introductions and normally for obtaining pest, drought or disease (more) resistant plants.
GMOs are very recent introductions and normally for obtaining pest, drought or disease (more)
Those bastards!!!
resistant plants.
Oh…ok…
How dare people and companies make plants that help people eat. Most disgusting thing ever.
The wild banana has almost nothing to eat, being filled with large seeds and we can still find wild apples, by nature very tart but still edible. Every single cereal we plant and harvest today was originally nothing more than a wild grass.
I cannot help thinking about the first proto-human that started munching on the tips of wild grass.
- “Hey Unk, check out Krug over there, chewin on the grass. That shit’s messed up.”
- “I dunno Greg. Looks pretty tasty to me.”
Our ancestors were primarily leaf eaters, so moving to grass wouldn’t be that unusual. But let’s picture the first proto-human that decided to go for the carcass of another animal, either killed by a predator or by fire or lightning. That would have been an event.
I’m pretty sure most primates are omnivores so they’d have been hunting as well just more in an opportunistic way
If we are to go back far enough, we are bound to find an ancestor mostly herbivore. On that level, going for the scenario I mentioned would have been some event.
Selective breeding and grafting modified the genetics
Bananas all being clones
There’s no reason to separate the terms
Let’s analyse that.
Selective breeding increases the frequency of a given set of genes, already present in a species, in order to better manifest specific, more advantageous - either nature or human chosen - traits.
Random mutations can occur when biological reproduction happens but unless extreme and radical - which often prove fatal for the offspring - are not relevant for the species in the immediate.
These principles are applicable to both plants and animals.
Now grafting takes a part of one plant - usually a small branch - uses another plant to provide the root system - usually something that grows much faster than the graft - and this process multiplies asexually the plant from which the branch was oroginally cut. No genes are carried over between the two plants.
This is valid to get a bunch of trees out of a single one in a very short time but it will not introduce new genes into the crop.
Quince trees are often used as root stock to graft other trees, like pear and apple. If the seeds from those grafted trees were to be sprouted, planted and nurtured to maturity, apples or pears would grow but of completely new varieties. The quince trees used to provide the root for grafting would provide zero genes to the new varieties.
Can you expand on why you consider grafting as a tool for genetic manipulation?
it will not introduce new genes into the crop.
Under normal circumstances new genes would be, but the new plant isn’t considered a new species (like tigons not being a species)
normal circumstances
As in a quince tree cross polinate a pear tree or an apple tree?
A skyscraper and a toolshed are both buildings technically speaking. So in that sense you are correct, only technically correct.
I would have said a skyscraper made of metal and a skyscraper made of cement are both skyscrapers for your analogy but sure
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We absolutely genetically modified pretty much all of our food. We just did it by selective breeding.
The only difference with modern GMO is we’ve learned to do it directly much faster. We don’t need a random mutation to add a trait anymore.
Can we get a geneticist here?
Last time I was taught about biology, selective breeding was a process through which, over a long period of time, individuals with favorable traits were multiplied in order to increase the prevalence of such traits.
The genes were already introduced, hence, no modification. Already existing characteristics were allowed to further express and refine.
Genetic modification, to my understanding, implies introducing genetic information into the genome of an organism to produce another with traits previously completely absent in the species.
Selection vs manipulation.
I’ll concede there are a few cases where the lines blurr, like the golden rice, where a gene that codified the production of vitamin A in the grain was/is already inactive or so receassive, in order to have it express again would require gene manipulation but I think a selective production program was put forward in an attempt to bring out that gene again.
Selective breeding is just one of the methods used to genetically modify our food.
I think you two have different images in your minds. You say “genetically modify” as in “modify the food through choosing which genes are to prevail”, while the other means “modify genes directly to affect the food”, and in that sense selective breeding isn’t GMO because no genes have been modified, but rather encouraged. You modify the genetic structure of future generations through natural means, not the organism directly.
Don’t know what scientists say, I just see the other comment downvoted when they have a fair point.
I can’t agree with that.
The basic notion of genetically modifying an organism implies changes enacted at the genetic level, through artificial means, not biological.
I’m getting an error with the document.
I still don’t understand why the cooking skill of my parents sucked this bad. I started cooking on my own when I moved out and even after just a bit of practise and good recipes you can cook tasty meals. How do you go on 50 years failing this, I don’t understand. If I see another bowl of dry rice, canned peas and ready marinated chicken from some discounter I’m going to throw up.
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Practise is correct UK spelling.
What does the UK know about English?
Practise is a verb, practice is a noun.
I like to remember it with the following sentence.
“The doctor had to practise his surgery skills before he could open his own private practice clinic”
Verb, S=surgery. Noun, C=clinic
It’s funny that you offer correction. UK English makes this distinction, US English doesn’t and uses practice for both. Internationally where many English speakers mix neither usage can really be said to be incorrect. Pedantry fail.
Eh, I’m not that invested as to feel I’ve failed. To fail you need to try. I just like fighting fire with fire when I see people correcting other’s spelling online.
At the end of the day, as long as you’re communicating your message effectively whatever you’ve written has done it’s job. I’m dyslexic, people offering unnecessary spelling advice irks me, so if they make a “mistake” (at least, as far as prescriptive English goes) I’m going to annoy them the same way their comments annoys everyone else. If they’re not annoyed by it, well who cares, nothing gained nothing lost.
Another explanation is that American cuisine got wrecked by the Great Depression. Everything that had flavor was expensive. People’s inability to purchase and make certain foods stopped generational transfer of knowledge on how to make certain things. Thankfully, after several generations it’s finally recovering.
“Ethnic” food (non European) wasn’t as affected as much.
I heard an interview about a book on it a few years ago but now I can’t find it.
Boomers came up as fast food franchises and convenience foods began to dominate. The equal rights movement meant more women in the workplace and less in the kitchen and instead of spreading the burden, capitalism filled in the gaps.
Because they did cook well at one point. It took hours, it involved a lot of cleanup, and 4 year old you whined and complained for some chicken nuggets and the fucking candy bar your aunt gave you without talking to your parents first.
So they gave up. The tantrums, the rejection, the effort. None of it was worth it. Like pretty much every skill in life it atrophied.
I loved to cook and I’m good at it. My 5-year-old won’t eat a burger I made and asks instead to go to the “burger store”. I don’t want to cook much anymore.
Know the feeling. Feel so defeated. Fighting this losing battle against all the crap junk food people want to give my kids on top of the normal tendency of children to only enjoy bland food.
Too many people order shitty delivery so that they can save 15 minutes cooking while spending 3 times more
And damage the organs with the much higher salt and sugar content.
Well to damage the organs you need to eat VERY badly for decades but yes in general i agree
Much can go wrong before 50.
Cuddle fish and asparagus…or vanilla paste?
Yes
Okay, I’ll eat both…just as soon as apple and/or amazon sews your lips to my anus. Maybe I’ll stack some fiberone bars on top of it so that I fart for a few hours before the shit comes out.
Ok God, then why didn’t you make them already seasoned?! God has shitty taste!
Nope. You can’t fix bitter vegetables. Hell, you can barely smother them enough to hide the taste. I’d rather die “young” from eating delicious trash.
As someone who just started liking brussel sprouts because I learned how to cook them right, you’re wrong.
I used to hate asparagus, but turns out it’s because my mom and grandma would always boil it.
Pro-tip: don’t do that, it’s awful.
I didn’t even think you could do that to asparagus. That’s seriously demonic.
furiously typing in German
Whoever invented canned asparagus belongs in extra hell
As well as spinach.
I actually liked canned spinach a lot as a kid, only vegetable I’d eat for a time. Still think it’s okay, but prefer fresh, raw spinach these days
Blanche and shock are the only way I actually like asparagus.
I can tolerate a baked or sauteed spear, but the margin for error is too damned small, and either side of it makes it unpalatable.
I dunno about asparagus, but it turns out the Brussel sprouts we ate as kids were bitter and didn’t taste as good as the ones they sell now. But yeah, with asparagus, you gotta broil those bad boys with garlic/olive oil, etc
Blanche and shock.
Same with Brussel sprout. My step-dad would boil them. Tastes like a soggy sulfur fart. But cut them in half, toss them in a bit of oil, salt and pepper, roast them until crispy in the oven with, and they’re delicious. Oddly sweet, even. Try with other seasonings to enhance further.
Some might say that it makes them less healthy, but a very light drizzle of honey before you cook them, and it becomes one of the best things you’ll ever eat
I love getting the steam bags of sprouts. So easy to steam them and then toss them in some oil and spices. Super easy and very tasty.
You can also steam them (without the oil), fry them (with oil), or put them on a grill (oil optional)
Boiling is just not a good way to cook veggies, it’s just the lazy way
Actually it’s best to roast, then add the pepper. Roasting burns the pepper.
Lightly drizzle some balsamic vinaigrette on them before the oven
boiled (or steamed) white asparagus is quite good, but green asparagus, yeah you should absolutely roast that instead
I love steamed (not boiled) asparagus. Though for most of my life, vegetables were just a vehicle for butter and salt. I’ve pulled way back on how much I use in recent years.
My buddy makes the most delicious grilled asparagus. He’s a real pro and it’s a treat to bbq with him.
Same thing with Brussels sprouts. Don’t boil. Toss in salt, pepper, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar, bake at like 425 for 20 minutes, you’re welcome
Yup, properly cooked veggies are awesome.
But, children’s taste buds are different from adults. Iirc they taste things more strongly, so the bitter notes are more pronounced.
Also, they’ve been breeding stuff like brussel sprouts to be less bitter for a while now, so veggies might actually taste better than when we were kids.
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Brussel sprouts are still terrible
Why not link the actual artist’s website so they can get some revenue? Plus, there’s usually a hidden panel for his comics.
OK, I will link the artist’s website. I usually provide source link to where I found the comic.
Why didn’t you?
Is itthis
That link goes to a parking page, as in the domain is just held by a broker waiting to sell it. You missed the first n in lovenstein.
Here’s a direct link to the strip shown.
Thanks for the correction. Evidently, I need some new glasses.
