I don't have time for a lot of hobbies these days, but one of my favorites is preparing food. Whether that's cooking four courses out of Julia Child¹, grilling some meat, or just tossing a salad together, there's something deeply satisfying at turning ingredients into a meal. In some ways, it's not unlike programming; anyone can do a passable job using inferior tools and following other peoples' recipes, but there's almost infinite space to tinker, invest in better tools, and learn to make your own recipes. Also, as long as you follow some simple rules, the worst outcome you're likely to have is something that doesn't taste great.

More than that, though, it's something that's just fundamentally human. Despite what some of my Soylent-chugging former executive leaders might thing, making and eating food is an activity that connects us all. The forces of capitalism are trying as hard as they can to give us a world where everybody eats soulless chain-restaurant slop delivered by underpaid Gig Economy workers, but you can still make something all your own; you can still find joy in something that has no product-market fit, no CSAT, and nothing to optimize².

Some good things

I got a new knife recently (a 200mm Senzo bunka knife). Does it make the food taste better than if I'd cut it with my 15-year-old chef's knife? No, but it makes the act of prepping food a bit more fun. It's wildly too fancy for my skill level, but ¯\(ツ)/¯.

I also replaced my 15-year-old All-Clad stainless steel frying pan with a new 11" Demeyere frying pan³. The old one's rivets were starting to come apart, so I got one without rivets!

The original Moosewood Cookbook continuous to be joyous; any recipe you cook is sure to include some novel ingredients and techniques.

Some good fresh spices can make all the difference to a simple dish — some tellicherry peppercorns and Calabrian chile powder (and oil and salt, of course) is really all you need for some quick sautéed or grilled vegetables.

The Temescal farmer's market is a great place to blow $50 on berries that your 5-year-old will eat all of on the walk home. And lots of other good produce, too. Oh! And the Garden Variety Cheese Hollyhock is so good.

Some bad things

Fuck Samsung appliances. Our house came with two of them: a range and a fridge. They're both stupid.

The range (which doesn't have a model number on it, but looks like the NX60A6511SS/AA) has capacitive touch buttons on top of it. Which are triggered by steam. Which means that if I boil something on the stovetop, it will turn on random settings on the oven. It's infuriating to be making a sauce and suddenly have the oven turn on at 700°F for no reason. Also, if they're damp, then don't respond to finger touches, which means that you then can't turn the oven off without getting a towel and drying the buttons. Such a fucking stupid design.

The fridge is a four-door model with a "Flex Zone", which means you can convert half of the freezer from a freezer into more fridge space. I have no idea why you'd want this (it leaves you with an absolutely minuscule freezer), but it's mapped to a single touch of a capacitive button, which means once in a while someone will brush by it and not notice and then half of your freezer will melt. There's a "control lock" feature, but it also completely disables the ice maker⁴ and water dispenser, so it's not really usable.

Outside the realm of Samsung appliance crap? It's become impossible to find recipes or blog posts about cooking on the Internet that haven't become LLM-slop-filled-nonsense. Thankfully, there are hundreds of years of writing about food that predate Truthiness as a Service.

Auf Wiedersehen and good night