In our continuing return to normalcy, today we’ll be going to H-Mart for the first time in over two years. We’ve bought some stuff online in that time, but those options are limited.
I suppose one of us could have gone individually any time during the pandemic. But that’s not the point of an H-Mart run. The point is to make it a big family affair and spend like $500, and then you go, “Oh, shit, we better not do this for another six months.”
Anyway, we’re out of everything. It’ll be fun.
And more importantly, we cleared a hell of a lot of room out of the freezer. We had two different poultry carcasses and a five gallon bag of vegetable scraps in there for weeks on end. Every time we went to grab some ice, we had to move our stock ingredients out of the way. And naturally, every time you shifted that Tetris pile, you couldn’t close the door without reconfiguring it.
Now it’s all gone and we have jars of tasty stock instead. And the empty scrap bags. Which will refill gradually. Until I do all this shit again in like a month.
At least I can get my ice in peace for a little while.
We bought it last July during peak Pandemic. The original plan was to fill in the fast food sized hole in our hearts, as we hadn’t been anywhere to get french fries for months on end at that point.
And while we did make fries with it a few times and loved the results, I had feared it was gonna be one of those fad buys that would just take up space after we burned out on it. Lord knows we have too much shit in our kitchen already.
More than a year on, we do actually still use it at least a couple times a week. Just not really for fries. Unless I have the energy to chop and prep them. Which I don’t, on account of being alive.
Turns out the real selling point of the fryer is that it’s just a really efficient oven for short-turn heating. Like whenever the kids want chicken nuggets. The microwave makes them soggy, and the oven takes like 40 goddamn minutes including preheat time, and all that energy is just wasted because you’re not cooking anything else with all that heat.
So we just dump that shit in the air fryer and it’s done in half the time. It has a high power draw, but it does its job fast and then stops, so it uses less electricity overall.
All this time I let the marketing to my inner gourmand lead me, but really it was my inner cheapskate that wanted this relationship.
Most food that’s both tasty and nutritious winds up overpriced to hell and back. Usually because some dickhead added gold leaf and plated it on a Yield sign and called it artisanal.
Not beans though. You want something versatile and filling and you only got a few bucks? Beans ain’t been ruined yet, mother fucker.
They’re very convenient.
Yeah, that’s it, that’s the whole update. I know it’s a pedestrian opinion without even a pretense of depth. Don’t give a shit.
Don’t have any recipes to share today either, because they’re all the same goddamn thing. Meat and spices, maybe vegetables, who cares, just eat it. It’ll get the job done and the only reason to bitch about it is if you’ve got too much money.
Slow cookers are the working class of appliances.
Today Is Worth It Because... 