Things you were shockingly old when you learned

My day is now complete.

But the problem is, how much pasta do you put in the boiling water? I have ended up using my kitchen scale to measure out about 3 oz or so of dry pasta per person before I cook it

I've served many great meals using this measure. The problem is I end up having a lot of bits of different pasta shapes that are left over to deal with

I just toss in handfuls until it seems about right.

I have never got this right and always end up cooking too much pasta through fear of not having enough. I will try the pasta spoon method tonight.

Dan S, I thnk the hole in the spoon is for one serving uncooked...

Conch is pronounced conk?! Only learned this last month thanks to an episode of naked and afraid

Knew that for a long time but often backslide.

its Andy's guitar riff but without Sting's song attached no one would have heard it. so they both deserve the Puff Daddy money

Cook too much pasta, refrigerate excess, warm in a pan with butter for breakfast or lunch the next day

Conch is pronounced conk?! Only learned this last month thanks to an episode of naked and afraid

Not in the UK is isn't.

Spaghetti thing, yeah you pass the still dried spaghetti strands through grouped to measure the serving. Remember reading this.

Does that give the standard according to the packet measure of 75g? Because that's 0.6x too small for for spaghetti as a main course imo - I use 125g pp and I don't have a huge appetite. Maybe 75g works for a smaller pasta course or alongside buckets of salad and garlic bread.

I realized yesterday that I had no idea how you decaffeinate coffee so I googled it.
Turns out you just soak the beans before roasting them, usually with some chemical added. It was discovered after a shipment of coffee got wet with seawater. Life's easy.

For spaghetti I just remember a portion is approx. 100 grams, 125 if you're very hungry. That's easy to estimate from a 500g packet. Some even have the measurements for dummies.

Turquoise comes from the French for Turkish.

all this time i've been trying to squish the cooked spaghetti through that hole in the spoon

Turquoise comes from the French for Turkish.

I love stuff like this. The prevalence of Arabic words in Spanish, for example, is a fascinating leftover from occupation.

Dan S, I thnk the hole in the spoon is for one serving uncooked...

― m0stly clean (Slowsquatch), Monday, May 1, 2023

ok I get it, I don't have that kind of pasta spoon/fork with a hole in it. It sounds ingenious but it also sounds like it only works for spaghetti and similar shapes. If that's only kind of pasta you're serving, I guess that's fine.

I try not to have too many utensils in my kitchen. One of my main older learning experiences is ... my kitchen scale was inexpensive and has been useful in so many ways, in my case especially for baking sourdough bread, but also for weighing out dried pasta and other ingredients in so many recipes

Idk why I’ve only noticed this the last few years but I think there might be quite a few words where I put the emphasis on the wrong syllable? Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s just pronounced differently in the US compared to where I grew up (NZ).

Eg I very recently figured out that I might be saying massage and decor incorrectly: I say MASSage and DEcor.

This seems like a weird blind spot to not notice common words being pronounced very differently by everyone around you.

Also, pasta serving sizes are a joke to me. A pound size bag of pasta is NOT 8 servings. Maybe I’m just a pig but it’s more like 4 servings max (and quite often only 3).

xp i think that is just non-NA english way of saying it, most (many?) americans will know what you are saying and get why you sound a bit different

I was wondering if pasta serving sizes had changed a lot over the years and if the measuring hole on a traditional spoon was larger than i a diet conscious era. Or how long the spoon hole had been a feature.
Just been listening to Maintenance Phase recently so am aware of that whole diet conscious era being relatively new as in several decades whereas pasta is a foodstuff with a much longer tradition.

(xp) Exactly, though I've never heard "decor" pronounced any other way.

day-CORE obv

just think about the way you pronounce “singapore” over a gin and tonic in the raffles

cardi-b is a rapper (from the crossword thread)

had heard the name before, obv, but figured on z-list celeb from one of those talent shows

lol, I learn many contemporary pop culture factoids at a shockingly old age thanks to the NYT crossword

Many words, massage being one of them, I stress the first syllable when used as a noun, and the second when used as a verb. Record, permit, progress.

I was wondering if pasta serving sizes had changed a lot over the years and if the measuring hole on a traditional spoon was larger than i a diet conscious era. Or how long the spoon hole had been a feature.
....
― Stevo, Wednesday, May 3, 2023 3:29 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Welp, I just learned what the hole in the spoon is for.

i now know what it's not for, and have some personal reflection to embark on and some apologizing to do to people whose dinners I've attended

xpost to Alba:

Something interesting you might not have realized: a number of words in English are nouns when you stress the first syllable but verbs when you stress the second.

"Your CONduct is better when you conDUCT yourself appropriately.”

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) April 27, 2023

oh that is cool

xxp lol

That reminds me of a little saying that the late great Martin Skidmore was fond of, for remembering when to use "s" and when to use "c" in certain words... He suggested one could "devise a device" for remembering it...

Sooo wait.

Commonwealth differences in spelling with the US has been done to death, but I gotta ask. Does that mean Martin would've said you'd have to have a license to licence?

I seriously thought the c for s thing was just a difference in spelling between the two regions, not that one was used for the verb and one was used for the noun.

Lol this mnemonic may have literally only worked for that pair of words

you need advice? i can advise.

The mnemonic I’ve heard for this is “you can c a noun but you can’t c a verb”

Kind of nonsense because you can see a verb but still

Practise/practice is another one

in theory it's the same for uk licenc/se but US usage has muddied the waters (and the fact that they're pronounced the same).

C-Murder
S-Murder

Buddy Guy's Stone Crazy! is one of my favorite albums. Today I learned that a whole second album, Junior Wells' Pleading the Blues, was recorded at the same session, just adding Junior Wells on vocals and harmonica.

I was just told that Cinco de Mayo is not celebrated in Mexico itself, but only in the US.

Although maybe the guy meant Mexico Mexico, el DF, Mexico City itself.

Hmm, seems to be true.

I think it commemorates a relatively minor victory in some battle for independence, and I've always assumed it was selected in the US for celebrating because of its calendar position - not much else going on in early May.

Cinco de Mayo = a "white people get drunker than usual and get in more fights and car accidents" holiday

- "So when is Mexico's Independence Day?"

- "El dieciséis de septiembre."

- "Hmmm. Did anything ever happen in 'marzo' or 'mayo'?"

Commemorates the Battle of Puebla when they beat the French and slowed up the Second French Intervention.

^this