Wholesome AF, what a deal!

Broke as fuck this week, made a quick cheap chili that was actually pretty good. Moving out at the end of the month, so trying to use up as many ingredients as I can.

Ground beef (12$ for 3lbs)

Chicken stock (4$)

Red kidney beans (3$)

Pickled Jalapeños (3$)

Canned tomatoes!

Cumin!

Dried guajillo and ancho peppers!

! for ingredients already in the pantry (I forgot to pickup an onion/garlic at the store but the dish turned out okay)

Prep was pleasantly simple for this one pot meal, as most ingredients were canned. Removed seeds and stems from dried chilis, toasted them dry in dutch oven, blended them with stock to create a chili flavor base. Brown ground beef, use the fat to toast spices (cumin, salt, pepper). Other spices that would work well here are paprika, garlic powder, and allspice. My spice cabinet got decimated by roaches though, so I’m stuck with the basics.

Add diced onions, garlic, and tomato paste at this point if have it. Having none of the above, I went in with my can of diced tomatoes, the beans, the jalapeños, the remaining stock, and the chili flavor base. Stir well and let simmer for a minimum of 15 minutes. Enjoy the chili in a bowl, topped with cheese (if its in your budget and you’re lactose tolerant), or over rice, or with bread, or with tortilla chips. Makes approx. 8 servings for an average of ~3$/serving.

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I recently watched my friend beat stephen’s sausage roll, a game that I have not been able to beat in 10 years. That game is bonkers hard. My arbitrary guess is that the number of people who have beaten the game is under 5,000. If anyone is looking for a puzzle game that will make your brain hurt, that is the game for you.

My method is similar to a few other people in this thread, but thought I’d write a really verbose essay about it all. I love rice, man.

My parents are from Hong Kong. For me, rice is simple — cooked with just water. No salt, no stock, no veggies. There is a time and place for that, but I’ll go to Texas for good mexican rice.

DISCLAIMER: Yes, a rice cooker is the easiest way to get perfect rice. Still, just like knowing how to do dishes by hand or how to mince garlic with a knife not a press, making rice in a pot is something I take a silly amount of pride in. (And I find it marginally faster — 20 min vs 30-40min)

Add rice and water to a non-stick pot. I have made rice in a stainless steel pot, but would not recommend it. If you cook your rice perfectly, cleanup is mildly annoying. A minute over, and it’s a bitch. If you burn the rice? God help you. (My tip? A one hour soak to loosen things up.) Non-stick is way more forgiving.

The proportion of rice to water here is KEY. If I were less lazy, I would measure out how much I use. But frankly, I never touch my measuring cups in the kitchen anyway, unless I’m baking. The best tip I can give you is something my mom taught me. Stick your index finger so it’s hovering right above the rice, then fill the pot with water up to your first knuckle-joint. I wish I had more precise numbers to give you, but I think they’d be useless rather than instructive. The amount of water you add varies depending on the type of rice, the diameter of your pot, and the amount of rice you put in. I promise you though, as you keep making rice, you’ll nail down the ratio.

Too much water and the rice will be gummy. It will have the consistency of a soft cheese. This is pretty much one of the worst sins you can commit in the kitchen. At this point, salvage the batch by making congee with it.

Too little water and the resulting rice will be puck-like in the pot. The grains will stick to itself and generally feel tacky in the mouth. This is hard to do as long as you add water above the level of rice. As a general rule: err on the side of less water rather than more.

Turn on the stove. The goal here is just to get the water boiling. If you’re impatient and hungry like I am, and the rice is the last thing standing between you and digging into a delicious curry/stir-fry/chicken and broccoli leftovers, then blast that shit with as much heat as you can, and put the lid on your pot. Don’t worry about anything burning. The water should insulate the temperature of everything in the pot until it starts to boil. Do not, under any circumstances, leave the pot unattended at this step if you are an impatient pot blaster. You will ruin your rice.

Immediately, once the water boils, turn the stove to the lowest setting possible. In the previous step, we put a lid on the pot to help the water boil faster, but in this step, it keeps the pot insulated and the water boiling. The water will continue to simmer and cook the rice. You let this sit until…

You don’t see water in the pot. When you look at the rice it should look slightly moist, not wet or soggy. When this happens, kill the stove. Next, just let it sit for 10 minutes. LEAVE THE LID ON. Under the lid, something magical is happening. The moisture from the rice is evaporating into steam, cooking the rice even further. Excess moisture is condensing on top, dripping back down, and then evaporating again. This step will ensure that the any extra moisture disappears, leaving the rice clump-free. Remember: just like a good steak, a perfect pot of rice requires a little rest.

This entire process should take around 20 minutes. Take off the lid and stir the rice with a fork. Ideally, nothing sticks to the bottom, and the rice is beautiful and fluffy and separates grain by grain. (This is made easier if you wash the rice beforehand, which lowers starch content overall, but who has the time?!)

Clean the pot immediately to minimize starchy stickiness. Enjoy your rice. Leftovers can go in the fridge and make great fried rice after a day. Alternatively, the microwave is a perfect method for reheating old rice, as it resteams the rice from the inside out

Have always been curious about the filters for Aeropress, my brother owns one and it’s a tank, though the disposable filters seem annoying to refill and deal with. Are they proprietary, or is it pretty easy to find replacement filters from 3rd parties for cheap? Worried about what VC money taking over Aeropress means — it’d be like if Patagonia got sold to Blackrock.

Hold placed! The last John Green book I read was Looking for Alaska, 8 years ago. I have vague, pleasant memories of reading it. (I think it was recommended by a crush.) Looking forward to reading your rec!

It does! Grateful for the insight, and glad to hear you’ve found a routine that lets you write daily. One page at a time! There is hope :)

Honestly, this has been the best part about moving to a city where public transit is the norm. My commute is longer. It used to take me 15-20 minutes to drive somewhere, while now I generally budget an hour to get places. Still, most days I prefer the hour of relative calm where I can escape with a good book to the stress of being stalled thirty honking cars deep on the highway.

It’s definitely made me appreciate the escapism of books more, though! Specifically enjoying sci-fi and romance novels much more. A couple recent favorites were The Sparrow and Red White and Royal Blue

Thanks for sharing! My brother just finished the first draft of his big honkin’ fantasy novel (167,000 words) last week. Watching him work gave me such an appreciation for the effort it takes to write and edit! I don’t know that I would ever have the discipline for something like that.

Question for you: how do you find time and energy to write/edit? I’m assuming you have a full-time job. My brother’s just starting his career and mentioned how draining it was to work a full 9-6, get home at 7, and then only have 5 hours to himself before the next day begins. In my own life, I’ve found that creativity is almost impossible when just going through the motions takes up 90% of my energy. Admittedly, I’m an essayist and poet, not a novelist. My projects take days to weeks, not months and years. Would love to share some advice with him from another long-form writer.

Tell me more! Why?

Used to be my favorite book! Enjoy the prose and the worldbuilding in the first book, it’s fantastic.

Project Hail Mary was such a fun read for me! I loved how concrete the engineering problems were throughout the book. It kept me tied to the stakes of the story.

Haven’t been able to finish Three Body Problem, unfortunately, it kind of lost me within the first 100 pages. May have to give it another shot! I hear a lot of good things about it.

Feeling guilty that I’m stuck halfway through two different books: Beloved by Toni Morrison and A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul.

Neither have really hooked me with their characters (the last book to do that was Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin) but both have undeniably pretty prose. Borrowed both books from friends, so I feel the urge to finish them in a way I never did with similarly pretty books. Looking at you, Infinite Jest, my beloved doorstop.