damn i really popped off on that one i gotta say i love serious eats but only because they attempt to explain why you should do the things they're telling you instead of saying "do it like this, jackass" - having said that it's unfortunate that kenji and co. have stunted child palates and only go full analysis on three-ingredient american staples like "the burger" and "the egg" and "the boiled potato" - and you know what, boiling potatoes with 2 qt water 2 tbsp salt 2 tbsp white vinegar makes some baller potato salad so i'm not hating but at a certain point it gets embarrassing to overthink some of this stuff to be honest the extreme basics of cooking from scratch will take you beyond the average and into the zone of "i feel this was worth my time to make dinner instead of buying smth premade" and that's good enough unless you have a hobbyist interest in cooking it's kinda like cosmo sex tips for food - you don't need to weigh each patty to make sure they're all exactly 12.5 grams each, just ask her "does this feel good" and you'll get there
They're so judgy tho. Food Network really ruined everything. The mantra prior to the fetishization of food was "the minimum number of necessary ingredients of the best quality available." But you can't bukkake all over that. So it was all about squeezing lemon juice through your fingers and separating eggs through your fingers and avoiding unitaskers and Dr. Science™ vignettes about maillard reactions and sous vide and scraping your goddamn teflon pans with your goddamn metal spatulas and nobody will care if you're throwing together a bagful of semi-homemade vomit if you can go whack whack whack whack whack with your serrated K-mart Rachael Ray cooking knives and turn an onion into dice like it stole your lunch money. The groceries suck too, of course. Why teach people to buy in season if they mostly slurp down Healthy Choice frozen entrees and watch Aarti's Party while they do it so they can feel half-alive. Not that it matters much anyway because it's all ripened on a container ship between Patagonia and Peoria. When there's little difference, taste or texture, between "grapes" and "tomatoes" you might as well pimp your "grape tomatoes". But yeah. If you have a few good ingredients on hand you can generally make any number of meals out of it. Four sauces, four proteins, two starches, all of American-style Chinese food. Don't let the secret out, though - we save that for "challenges" on Chopped and whatever the hell Gordon Ramsay is doing now. Step on the elevator have to cook on an electric range! The...Horrah My white trash barbecue food is fresh pineapple and chopped chicken thighs soaked in Mr. Yoshida's for a few hours. Served that up and like three different people decided to try it because apparently we're so busy freaking out about the proper way to use "steak rub" that we've forgotten that less is generally more. It's fucking sad. And these are the same people who wax fucking poetic about their Instant Pot, which they will use three times, and never realize that their grandmother's pressure cooker did the exact same goddamn thing without taking up a third of a counter. I can't buy rice crispies. Apparently the only place that has them is Target. Rice crispies treats? Yeah they're high-enough margin. But why would you make rice crispies treats, let alone just eat cereal? I can't buy Havarti. I can buy fucking Hatch Chile in eighty goddamn things but I moved a thousand miles so I wouldn't have to eat that shit ever again so fuck you, Kroger. No I don't wanna eat your gray-ass steak. No I don't wanna eat your gray-ass steak that you "finished" on the grill so that it would be slightly less gray. No I don't care that you boiled it in a plastic bag for three hours at a hundred and thirty five degrees. Actually, that's precisely why I don't want to eat your fucking gray-ass steak. Jesus, man, you spend $200 so you can photo-lab a piece of pork and then insist we go to a fucking restaurant where I pay extra because I have to cook my own food? And fuckin' Serious Eats is at Ten Things You Must Do To Your Burger If You Want to Date My Daughter and it just wears me the fuck out.
The butcher here also sells craptons of hot sauce. It was a dude - DD - who passed on to his son - also DD - so it went from being "DD meats" to being "Double DD Meats" and it's now run by DD Jr's wife, who added a bunch of groceries. Prior to the pandemic they had like five kinds of havarti. It was awesome. They had the dill stuff, which I love, which she would buy in like ten pound blocks and then chop up into 3/4lb slabs that she'd sell I swear damn near at cost. Then covid hit and steadily the havarti went away. I asked her about it. "Will it be coming back when things are back to normal?" "Probably not. I don't have time to cut it up anymore and frankly, you and I are the only ones eating it."
and i don't remember where you mentioned it but vegan meat substitutes are actually popping off, i had some "sausages" that were shockingly good in both flavor and texture and i've kinda been craving them over the regular meat - i'm fine with eating the soy byproduct instead of the cow it would have gone to, it's actually praxis to cut out the middleman tbh smh btw
'twas chat. I think the sooner Americans realize that falafel is a better than eating a burger in effigy the happier we'll all be. There's plenty of delicious meaty things you can do with non-meat but in order to get it to where normies can access it easily we have to have Impossible Burgers.