My doggo
My cat. With cats you get a better bang-for-your-buck in terms of maintenance costs vs years of utility.
(please don’t be offended, this is meant as a joke. I love dogs. However I do refuse to get one because I personally am too emotionally delicate to fall in love with someone who I know might not be around for more than 12 years. I know it’s better to have loved and lost, etc, but I don’t know if I could handle it. Everyone who adopts an older dog, you are my hero)
I just adopted a senior dog two weeks ago while I love her very much, my brain is already jumping to conclusions 🥺
I got my cats for free, so that was a really good value in my case.
I bought a Bethany Homes Lefse griddle. It’s cast aluminum, gets up to 500 Fahrenheit, and is the closest thing you can get to a restaurant flat top without rewiring your kitchen. I’ve saved my wife and I so much money cooking at home. I’ve owned griddles before, but nothing this high quality, high temp, and easy to clean. I now prefer my homemade smash burgers to eating out and by the time my patties are done resting, I’ve already cleaned the griddle.
Lefse griddle…500 fahrenheit
I’m super confused isn’t a lefse pan just like a really big cast iron pan? Since when are they heated?
I hear rumors that these are meant for making flatbreads, but my fat Texan ass took one look at it and said “mmmm… Burgers and tacos.” What it’s intended to be, how it’s intended to be used, or how it’s traditionally designed is all beyond my concern. I make 16-inch crepes filled with bananas, Nutella, and peanut butter and then pretend like I’m a classy mofo because I say words like “crepe,” and “cholesterol-induced hypertension.”
They sell those things here in Norway, but always as like a way to make American style pancakes or way too many eggs at once. Never seen them as a lefse pan, which is why that name confused me because like, we invented lefse. If any country would make a pan for lefse, it would be Norway
The company claims to have been making these things for 50 years, so on behalf of my forefathers, thank you for loaning us culture long enough for me to get the best fucking griddle I’ve ever owned. Imma gonna make my wife and I some chilaquiles tacos on it tonight.
YOUR QUESTIONS OFFEND ME!
So, for serious, that’s the nonstick version; I’ve never tried that one. I have the cast aluminum one, which I guess would be pretty similar to using a larger cast-iron skillet. The problem with a cast-iron skillet is there care and maintenance and how long it takes to heat up and cool down. If you try to wash a hot cast iron skillet, it can eventually crack.
This thing has a built-in heating element, so it heats up a little faster than on an electric stove-top (I don’t have gas elements), within 10 minutes, the whole 16-inch surface is at a relatively uniform temperature and it maintains that temperature nicely, and when I’m done I can immediately clean up. Cleanup consists of pouring hot water on the surface and then pouring/scraping off the greasy water over coffee grounds, then a little more water and wipe down the surface with a folded bar rag to get off any food or remaining grease, flip the rag and wipe the dry surface/check for any dirty spots. I also use metal utensils all over the surface without worrying about ruining a seasoning or flaking off nonstick coating.
Ha! Your answer is a not cast iron pan, but I’m pretty sure the cast iron collection I have totalled under $100 and has been used for thousands of meals, plus bread baking, making lard from pork skin, and like flannel it gets better with time, instead of wearing out. I don’t like cooking on aluminum though. You have some funny ideas about cast iron - you can’t ruin it with a spatula, or with dish detergent, it’s not fussy at all.
I love my big ass cast iron skillet but my girlfriend says it’s too heavy and that is completely understandable. It’s not for everyone.
I joke that I’m doing overhead press when I take them off the high shelf. But am a mid 50s lady and would worry if I couldn’t wrangle the iron pans. I do agree that it depends on your cooking style though. I am not careful enough for nonstick pans and a lot of what I do make works best in those wonderful heavy nearly indestructible pans. I have one steel not heavy skillet, and pasta pots and loaf pans and baking sheets and cake pans, so much stuff at this point but the things I need most and use everyday, my essentials, are those cast iron pans, the big chef knife, and the cutting board.
College. For me, anyway.
Toothbrush
$5k on a car like 6 years ago, still running as perfect as the day I got it. Can’t imagine the amount of money I’ve saved with these things. I’d be in debt with car payments otherwise.
A car.
Freedom of mobility is huge. Not worrying about how to get groceries home. Being able to go to a doctor when necessary.
Recreational aspects, took a drive through Washington State, up the Olympic Penninsula and down through Seattle and Everett.
I’ll tag onto this- not because I think my option is better, but because it’s a complimentary thing that hits a lot of the same points in different situations.
My bike has given me joy, fitness, new activities, and new friends. When I didn’t have a car it got me to work, gatherings, shops, etc. The enjoyment of riding got me out exploring nature around where I live. I’ve done multi-night bikepacking trips. I’ve met friends on rides. I’ve made new friends at work when we discover we both ride in sometimes. I chat to people at the bakery about their bikes.
All that, with a side effect of keeping me healthy and fit.
I’ll say right off the bat that my roomba i7 self emptying vacuum cleaner has been a game changer for me. 2 big ass dogs and the dirt/fur that comes with it made me loathe sweeping/manually vacuuming. $700 well spent.
Bidet is up there.
Saxx underwear or B3neath. No more batwing. Play around with some other brands, Hanes makes one with a pouch that doesn’t feel right for my body type but I could see it being comfortable. All citizens makes a good one. Duluth ballpark pouch was too lazy of a fit and held sweat.
I’ve only tried the Hanes, and they were a game changer for me!
My cold brew coffee pot.
It makes about 2.2 US quarts of cold brew in a batch. It’s plastic, but I’ve used it consistently for over 6 or 7 years now.
It has a center sleeve/filter for putting grounds in. They should be coarse ground, but I’ve used Cafe Bustelo (espresso ground brick) and had good results.
Just let it soak for a day or two in cold water.
Now, I don’t use it per the instructions. After it has appropriately steeped, I pull out the filter, empty it, rinse it, and put the empty filter in a 2qt pitcher, and run the coffee from the brew pitcher into it. This leaves a little extra which goes right into my cup.
I then immediately prepare a new brew pitcher and drink out of the 2qt.
That cost me $30 back then, and I brew 2-3 pitchers per week. I don’t know what that works out to in Large Dunkin’s, but I’m sure it has paid for itself, several times over.
We may have the same one, is it shaped like a lab flask? Love it. I agree any grind works, and I double filter through cloth.
No, I think mine was called a Primula. Want to say I bought it at JC Penny. Not sure if they still make the same model. This one came with a tea/fruit infusion sleeve too but I never used that. If I want to make cold brew tea I just get a dozen or so (black) teabags into a 2qt and let those steep overnight.
Dutch settlers purchased Manhattan from the indigenous Americans for beads and other goods valued at 60 guilders (about $1,000 today).
At best that’s a myth, at worst it’s whitewashed history to hide a genocide. The Lenape didn’t have a concept of land ownership, they didn’t believe a person could own the earth, so they couldn’t have had anything to sell.
deleted by creator
Hell, if somebody offered to give me $1000 for the Grand Canyon, I’d congratulate him on his new canyon.
Agreed, thanks for clarifying.
Form me personally, I’d have to say my automated espresso machine. For context; I was buying 1-2 coffees from a shop per day (let’s say 10/week on average).
Cost me $700 on a sale. Grinds & presses the beans by itself, then pushes boiling water through to give me espresso shots. It paid for itself in 6 months of ownership by weening me off the local shops, and it’s lasted for over 6 years so far.
Instead of ~$4.50 per coffee, it’s like $24 for a bulk bag of beans at Costco that lasts me 3 weeks, and a carton of half-and-half that lasts me like a month. That’s like $180/mo → $35/mo
Where do you live, that makes you pay 5$ for an espresso?
Not just straight espresso shots. I drink Lattes and Breves. Typically larges, and truly strong (like 4 shots).
Prices have gone up even, but what I just described costs $8.65 at my local Starbucks. But even the cheaper local shops would charge me like $6 nowadays.
It’s ridiculous. I had to cut back on Starbucks (Caribou Coffee). It was that or get a second job to support the habit.
You should change your username to MrCaffeineAddict
Came here to say this. Wasn’t as often but I’d get specialty coffee for $8-$10 a couple times a week. I bought a off brand espresso machine for $100 that is running to this day. If I include various accessories I’ve probably spent around $200. I did wind up getting a work bonus and splurging on a $400 Eureka grinder so I can have freshly ground.
Last I did the math at most I spend around $1.00 a cup, for a savings of around $8. I’ve made at least a couple hundred coffees it has definitely paid for itself and then some.
deleted by creator
Mine takes a minute or so? I single-dose grind my espresso so by the time my portafilter is ready the machine is ready.
I bought counterstrike source way back in like 2008/2009 when I got a computer fast enough to play it. Steam was pushing garrysmod as a 5 dollar bundle purchase with counterstrike, and I bought that too on a whim.
I liked garrysmod more than cs:s, and played it a bunch. Eventually I figured out how to add wiremod to the game, which also involved using svn (a source control precursor to git)
I learned basic digital circuits and boolean logic by making bases with elevators and fancy alarm systems that would shoot intruders with turrents and stuff.
Eventually wiremod added a programming language called expression2, which was a mashup of c and lua. I basically taught myself coding because of a video game.
This lead me to get into computer programming, and eventually computer security, which ended up being a lucrative career path… So thanks Garry for your mod, and thanks Gabe for pushing said mod to kids that just wanted to shoot virtual terrorists. That 5 dollar game is responsible for a good chunk of my life :)
That’s very neat. Motivation and some ability to see ways to use something make learning it much more fun.
Just as a sidenote, SVN is not really a precursor to git. More like a contemporary step in an opposite direction. There’s a video somewhere with Linus commenting on his opinions on improving CVS. :)
A computer when I was still a kid. I wouldn’t be the quant and maths PhD I am today without it, that shit literally shaped my life.
I just kept messing around with it when I was 7 years old. I learned to write
.batfiles and create DOS bootable floppy drives for my games at that age (you needed to play around with Soundblaster drivers and DOS extenders at the time). Then at the same age I quickly discovered BASIC thanks to the fact that MS-DOS used to include QBasic. Then learned some basic assembly using MS-DOS’s includedDEBUGtool. Then my father got me floppy disks with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C++ on them and then I learned that shit again just by fucking around and looking at the examples, all at the age 7~8.I coded like a monkey but I still coded and at a very early age I already knew what people usually learn first in university computer science classes.
By the age of 14 I already knew how to write my own minimal bootloader in assembly and a basic 32-bits kernel in C. (then later on math ironically won me over, so ended up formally pursuing applied math with a tiny bit of computer science because I just didn’t need it and the whole exposure to programming at a very young age helped me a lot)
All of that was just thanks to the little spark I got when I first got that Pentium MMX computer.
That’s almost exactly how I got started, except instead of Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal it was whatever free or bootleg programming language I could get my hands on. I remember when I first learned Java I used an online compiler where you just plopped your code in a text box, then I found some compiler called not
javac, butjc. I pointed it at the directory for the Java class library in Netscape and I was off to the races lolThis is an awesome story. I started early too but all that got me was into some sketchy early aol rooms lol.
Community Rec center membership. For a one time fee of $10; it’s easily the best $10 I’ve ever spent and is a great city perk. I’ve gotten in great shape since going there.
Wireless devices. 📡📶📺📻
Everything on my desktop looks so clean now. ✨
