As it pickles, the contents will likely get a little softer, and the weight might drop down into the larger portion of the jar. If that happens, you’ll be able to rotate it out of the way, and get all your stuff out of the jar. Then you can actually stick your hand in and grab the weight and try to pull it out perpendicular to the opening. Odds are that the weight (and the jar opening) are not perfectly circular, so you can try rotating both to pull it out.

Borosilicate glass (which this probably is?) has low thermal expansion, so heat probably won’t help.

Slow cooking? How long does that take? I’ve used a pressure cooker to make applesauce really fast, but then obviously you’d have to evaporate off a lot of moisture to get butter.

I have one that’s bamboo, and it’s not that great, but i also have one that is probably maple, and it’s great. You don’t need it to be actually “sharp”, but i suppose there’s no reason I couldn’t sharpen it periodically.

I think one of the biggest things that they don’t really teach you is that most jobs end up having only a small percentage of your time spent doing the unique element of that job.

It’s import because a lot of people get scared away from careers that they think involve a lot of math, which they think they don’t like. In reality, even in math heavy professions, math is only a small part of what they do, and the parts they do are so routine that they aren’t hard.

Did you start from dried chickpeas? That’s the key

My only complaint about my immersion blender is that the part at the bottom is 100% metal, which sounds good, but it makes me paranoid to use it in my enameled pots for fear of scratching up the enamel. I wish I had one with nylon or silicone overmolding.

In terms of really simple “gadgets”, my favorites are wooden spoons that are flattened and almost sharpened like a chisel. They are great for scraping the bottom of pots/pans to get up fond.

In terms of more complicated stuff, I really like my Anova oven. It’s basically an overbuilt convection toaster oven that has a thermometer for wet-bulb temperature and a water tank to create steam. You can control temperature to the degree, and humidity in 10% increments. It also has a built-in probe thermometer. What this basically means is that you can set the oven to a strict temperature to hold with steam and convection, and you can cook a roast to an exact temperature for an exact amount of time (which they call sous vide, even though there’s no vacuum sealing involved). You can then set it to automatically ramp to a high temperature for browning.

It’s really nice for baking bread.

They made a new version at double the price with even more advanced features, but they’ve given it the nebulous “AI” treatment, so it might be enshittified.

Pressure ovens are a thing; I know someone with one. I think it has potential to really do some interesting stuff, but since they aren’t common, I figure it’s a lot of trial and error.

Meat is an obvious good use case, but i also use my thermometer to check the doneness of bread. Recipes often tell you a time/temperature, but it’s going to really depend on your oven/pans/the rise/etc, which is why recipes will tell you to insert a toothpick or something like that. It’s way easier to just stick a thermometer in.

I’ve found that you need to use an instant read for this, though, not a leave-in thermometer because bread has much less thermal mass and thermal conductivity than meat (which is mostly water), and the probe of a leave in thermometer will conduct heat into the bread, giving an arbitrarily high reading.

I also use my thermometer for checking the temp of leftovers because I hate when something is cold on the inside, and I don’t like jamming my finger into like 5 different spots to test to see if I heated something up enough.

Anyone replying “stretching” is basing their response on grade school gym class, not science.

Studies have not shown that stretching has a positive impact on injury prevention, and this has been widely known in the literature for over 20 years. Stretching can improve performance in some sports like gymnastics where increased flexibility is needed, but that is unrelated to injury.

Stretching has a negative effect on performance in other cases because it actually decreases muscle force generation.

Think about it, would you think that loosening all the belts on a machine would automatically make it less likely to break down?

So what does prevent injury?

• Good warm-ups. Walk before you jog before you run. Lift an unloaded barbell before a loaded one, etc.
• Strength. A joint surrounded by muscle is a stable joint. That means doing exercises that strengthen all the muscles, including minor ones. It’s part of why most people who know what they are talking about will try to get you to do compound lifts with free weights over single joint exercises on machines.
• periodization/progressive overload. Basically slowly building intensity and then backing off to recuperate.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/382128

Yeah, you are spot on.

So many people way overuse the term “sterilize”.

For anyone unaware, “sterile” means zero life remaining, not “really clean”. You serilize things with a pressure canner and strict protocols or an autoclave (which is essentially a pressure cooker). With steam, you need 15 minutes at 121 °C or 3 min at 134 °C. Dry heat requires 2 hours at 160 °C.
There are a handful of other ways (like tyndallization), but not common or convenient.

For fermentation, you don’t need sterile unless you are working in a yeast lab or something like that where you are trying to grow up pure cultures. Sanitization or disinfection is good enough. Basically you want to kill enough of the bad bacteria/yeast that the good stuff out competes it.

Trying to get jars sterile for fermenting peppers is pointless because the peppers themselves are host to a huge heterogeneous population of bacteria and yeast, and you aren’t operating under a laminar flow cabinet or something crazy like that.

Yeah, you want them clean and sanitized, but it’s really all about controlling the probabilities. Higher salt concentration helps, being really careful about keeping things submerged helps, using a good airlock and relatively small headspace helps, and rejecting any peppers that seem suspect helps. Also, resist the urge to open the jars a whole bunch of times. Every time you do, you let in oxygen.

Also, OP, buy some pH test paper. It’s nice to be able to double check that the pH is in the right range once you think it’s done.

And most importantly, fermenting takes fruit/vegetables/whatever, and turns sugars into lactic acid, reducing the pH and making it inhospitable to spoilage microbes.

That’s why cabbage spoils quickly, but sauerkraut lasts a very long time.

BinaryEye (for scanning qr codes)

Do you have a recommendation for generating QR codes? I basically want to be able to make qr codes that link to notes so I can see what’s in boxes without having to pull them out of hard to reach spots. I see a couple options on fdroid (QRshare and ShareAsQR), but I’m sure there are desktop applications, too.

Technically, dark brown sugar will be more acidic, and will therefore require more baking soda to balance it out, though I think that would have minor effects

Yeah, definitely. I would argue that “nutritious” should mean “can I live off of this?”. From that context, you need high calorie, balanced macros, and no glaringly missing micronutrients.

I wonder if anyone’s made the soup version of completefoods.co (which is like a DIY soylent-making site).

Depends on your definition of nutrition. 100 g of kale only has 28 calories, so if your definition of nutrition is “can I live off of this?” the answer is no. If it’s more of a “is this good for me?”, the answer would be yes.

You just need to temper the egg. Scramble in a separate bowl, and slowly drizzle in hot broth until you’ve added like 5x the volume of the egg yolks while whisking. After that, you can just pour into the pot. It’s how you do it for ice cream and other custards, too.

Great comment, and I’ll add that police, by the nature of their jobs, have to deal with a lot of things that people would (and should) find traumatic: grisly accidents, homicides, overdoses, etc. Obviously, EMTs have to deal with that kind of thing, too, but at least they usually have a partner they can talk to. Despite TV always doing the buddy cop thing, cops usually work alone.

Everyone knows it’s a problem, but the main solution has been absolutely shoveling money at grifters like Dave Grossman to give seminars and write books on “killology” (wish I was making that up). The guy’s highest level of schooling is a masters in education in counseling, but he disguises that to try to make you think he’s a proper psychologist or psychiatrist. Once you know his hypotheses, which are pulled out of thin air and unsupported by data, you see them absolutely everywhere steeped into the culture of cops and military in the US.

Newegg really went full Amazon in a bad way. Microcenter is also still good as far as I can tell.

I never understood audible. You pay $15 a month to be able to listen to 1 book per month?

Shout out to librivox, if you haven’t heard of it. It’s audiobooks recorded by volunteers reading public domain books. Obviously hit or miss on the quality of the reader, but it’s free, so you can’t complain.

Also, obviously, the humble local library and libby. (P.s., if you can get a few cards to different library systems, it’s really easy to get books).