Things you were shockingly old when you learned

Lol, jimbeaux

Joan Miró? Not a lady.

Dominique Leone? Not a lady.

Wait till you hear about Leslie Howard and Leslie Nielsen

Leslie Mann? Not a man.

(Leslie is always a man's name in the UK btw)

Leslie Ash might claim otherwise.

Curses!

I have wasted decades imperfectly frying bacon in a frying pan, it is so much easier to just put it in the oven

Yes, same. Started baking it 2-3 years ago and life is much easier. Also, the resulting bacon fat is cleaner and less burned, good for frying things later.

right? Realised that only about 2 years ago as well!

i'm gonna harsh your buzz a little bit on this one cos firing up an entire oven to cook some bacon for a few minutes seems incredibly wasteful

But what if it's many a bacon

if you guys ever want to try going back to the stovetop try starting with a cold skillet, medium-low heat, keep it moving, nothing should burn

this is me at the moment with eggs 👍🏽 and bacon 👎🏽
TCB, talk to me of induction cook tops (and maybe other cooking appliances)

I e-mailed a kitchen expert last week to ask what the best way to season a cast iron was, and he replied "fry two pounds of bacon"

My bf is veggie so I did not do that (but I imagine it would be spectacular)

I get equally good results in both the oven and on the stove. Up to 3 slices, I'll generally use stove, and I'll use the oven for a lot of bacon. One thing that helps a lot is that I always use thick cut bacon.

If you have a poorly ventilated kitchen the oven method is quite appealing. I’d rather my apartment smell like bacon for 12 hrs via the oven vs 48 hrs via the stove. I imagine the stove method makes crispier bacon though

Bake in the oven on parchment paper or a grid rack for crispness.

FGTI - cold-pressed flaxseed oil works really well to season cast iron. Rub all over to coat, wipe off excess with a paper towel, bake inverted in a 350 deg oven for 1 hour min then turn the oven off and let the pan cool in there overnight.

when I'm bakin' bacon it's 2 sheet pans' worth for several meals
shrugging takes effort and it's sunday, so
*plays dead*
xps

El-P appears prominently on The Veils album Total Depravity

Bacon cooked in an oven on parchment > bacon cooked in a skillet > buying already-cooked bacon

I don't think it's any more wasteful than using an oven to bake cookies or heat up a pizza; why would it be?

Well, a stove is not so suitable for the other things …

I guess because bacon is usually considered a side. presumably you are also cooking something else when you are making bacon

microwave for 20-30 seconds

boil it in an electric kettle, fuck it like

Fry it with lard.

ideal place for bacon is the grill aka broiler

EZ bake oven

"basic bike maintenance"

On a tangent, I've managed to avoid learning how to drive right up until my forties. It wasn't very useful in London, and now I'm fortunate enough to live within cycling distance of my workplace. But I'm reaching a point when I will probably need a car, so back in February I did my CBT. This is a day-long training course that teaches you how to ride a motorbike. At the end of it you can ride a 125cc motorbike for two years with L-plates. Which explains why there are so many Deliveroo drivers buzzing around with L-plates.

And so I am now the proud owner of a Peugeot Tweet, which does about 140mph and costs about five English pounds to fill up (the tank capacity is about a gallon). This gives me two years to learn about roundabouts and toughen myself up mentally for the inevitable time I crush a pram or something. And I now have a legitimate excuse to own a pair of leather trousers.

I remember the first time I went to Italy, I felt inadequate because I was surrounded by kids buzzing around on scooters. Crowds of them. When I was a kid I didn't buzz around on anything. This is a photo I took in Genoa last month, where even scooter drivers have trouble parking:
https://i.imgur.com/i7nNdAh.jpg

It's a massive culture shock. For a mixture of reasons - climate, the law, the distances involved - scooters and motorbikes are a tiny tiny minority thing in the UK. We all have cars instead. Cars upon cars, parked on the pavement and all over. And tiny stand-on electric scooters. Of which there were masses in Genoa, sitting unused on the pavement because everybody already has a scooter. The problem is that it takes a certain amount of money and commitment to learn to ride a motorbike, so why not learn to drive a car instead? I'm digressing here.

I grew up with a bicycle, and one thing I learned is that the brakes are different for motorbikes. On a bicycle the right and left handles control the front and back brakes. And that's true for an automatic scooter. But for a geared motorbike the left handgrip is actually the clutch! Not the brake at all. You control the brake with a foot pedal instead. And the gears go 1-neutral-2-3-4-5-6, which makes a certain amount of sense but feels weird. I also learned that motorcyclists are legally allowed to pull trailers, but only if they have a proper licence. And that my dreams of riding a motorcycle with a sidecar are likely to remain dreams because (a) the Ural is a 745cc motorbike (b) it costs £21! But there is still time to buzz around Morocco on a two-stroke.

The discussion of bacon reminds me that there is some debate as to whether you should spray cooking oil on the exhaust pipe. To season it, in the same way that you season a cast iron pan. It sounds like one of those things that might possibly work but wouldn't do any harm to try.

in that last scenario are you cooking the bacon rolled up inside the exhaust or laid in strips over it

it's hilarious that Linkin Park's founding bassist doesn't play on Hybrid Theory because he left the band for a year to focus on his other project, a ska punk band called Tasty Snax. might be one of the luckiest guys in rock because they let him rejoin after they sold millions.

— Al Shipley (@alshipley) March 19, 2023

Re: cast irons, I was shockingly old when I learned I didn’t actually need these cumbersome implements that are fussy as hell and don’t actually make the end product that much better.

(They are not any better than other cooking vessels, sorry yr in a cult)

i gotta dig out/reseason/start using my cast iron pans to try & up my iron intake, and they're convenient for recipes that go stove-to-oven, but yeah generally speaking fuck those pans. oooh i'm a fancy frying pan and i'm prone to rust and i don't like soap, oooh! like get over yourself cast iron, you're not all that.

and so heavy, god, and the handles will burn your skin off!! fkn cast iron!

that a sac fly doesn’t count as an at bat! what!!!?

dr seuss-ass declaration

Yeah it’s interesting that hitting a deep fly that advances a runner from 2nd to 3rd counts against the batter’s batting average but a fly that advances a runner from 3rd to home doesn’t. But I assume baseball people have thought these things over and maybe it all makes sense.

my initial read on that was that there's a species of, presumably, insect called a sac fly, & Tracer was astonished that they are not taxonomically grouped with bats. but desultory googling shows that crickets are involved somehow, and the baffling uk fauna gets bafflinger

wait there's baseball now, jesus

i have been looking at baseball statistics and watching baseball games and reading box scores for my entire life, not in a professional capacity, actually wait yes, for one summer in a professional capacity, but mainly as someone pretty knowledgable about baseball and how the plays are accounted for, and i just never knew that. it seems impossible but there it is

there’s a lot in baseball that could have sprung from the mind of dr seuss tbh

Lol!

I love my cast iron pan and it's perfect for dual hob/oven cooking stuff like variations of tortilla or cornbread. I season mine with plain old vegetable oil and won't fuck with any teflon shit. When I first got it I watched lots of seasoning guide vids on yt and learned that the Chinese had been doing this for over a thousand years.

I don't see what the big deal is about just washing them with a wire brush and hot water. At least they don't start bleeding toxic chemicals into your food if you scratch them, surely that is a major positive as well as the fact you only ever need to buy one.

chain mail scrubber ftw

https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/cast-iron-chainmail-scrubber

So Tracer, how do you think a sac fly should be scored? How about a sac bunt?

https://sacsplace.com/

I'm pretty skeptical of the idea of "situational thinking" which implies that batters can just sky 'em out to right field whenever they want to. so it all seems kinda arbitrary to me and I suspect it all just balances out in the end.

i do covet that chain mail scrubber. they feel and sound so ~~~slinky~~~

perhaps with time and familiarity i too will come to love cast iron, but idk, a nice stainless pan w/ wooden handle still feels like the ideal 2 me

and every time i see "sac" i think cyst :(