First oh no why in this book

I’m reading _The No Recipe Coobook_, and it is _awesome_. It is everything I really wanted _Cooking at Home_ to be, but with really good cooking instead of fatty meaty trashy cooking, which is fine for when you are drunk, and also DC had some hangover food, also, fine for when you are hungover, but that is truly no way to live your life. _This_ cookbook comes from that place of Life Does Not Naturally Work Well For Me But I Will Make It Work that can also generate people whose eating life I call “Spreadsheet”, BUT she’s actually a really good cook. Except for this, in the risotto section. I want to be clear: I don’t make risotto, because it leans very heavily into butter and related milk products, and the safe-for-me versions I’ve had at restaurants over the years … were really not great. So, why. Altho, reading her description, I’m like, wait, I think I could make that work! Distinctly different from things like Hollandaise sauce, which I’m super clear on, no, that will never work properly so don’t bother; runny egg yolks is really the best you are going to do there.

Anyway. In the risotto section, under variations, she talks about including chicken thighs. Yay! But remember, the last cookbook nearly got DNF’d for abuse of chicken thighs. She is walking right up to the edge with this one:

“I cut the fat off my thigh fillets, which is tedious, time-consuming and not a job I enjoy.”

NO NO NO NO NO WTF. OK. Risotto is a dish that involves … butter. Honestly, if you are putting chicken thighs (or, worse, adding precut, cooked earlier and removed chicken breast meeat and then putting it back in right before finishing) into a risotto, you _really don’t need to remove the fat_.

Holy Moly.

She’s so great otherwise, and this is easy to miss the math on, that I’m unconcerned about continuing.

ETA: I don’t have arborio, but we do have CalRose or something very similar. I was thinking I’d use that, but checking online to make sure people had had good experiences doing that. As I was reading, I realized, hey, I have an unopened 5 lb bag of Thai sticky rice I bought for … reasons that didn’t ever happen. If we’re looking for low amylose rice, that really ought to do it. So, yeah. Will have to give the cheese thing some thought.

Strain on relationships

I’m fine! This isn’t about me. At all. Seriously.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-13/how-to-talk-with-family-about-money-tips-for-discussing-inflation

I mention this, because … Well, let’s look at some quotes!

Most of the article is about family dynamics, but the last couple paragraphs are about socializing with friends. This is a _completely straight faced article_ about how inflation might lead to a damaged friendship as a result of disagreements about whether one can afford to go shopping, go out, go to restaurants together.

“It’s the responsibility of both parties — a friend who may be pinched by inflation less, and one who may be more — to clarify if inflation has changed their financial comfort levels, according to VerWys. Shopping trips, nights out, and restaurants that may have once felt affordable to both sides of the friendship may no longer. Asking about affordability, and respecting the answer, is increasingly important.

“Friendships are never built on money, but they can fall apart because of money,” VerWys said. “If somebody’s truly a good friend of yours, they don't want to put you in an uncomfortable position.””

_Literally_ a chunk of people are _still_ not eating indoors, and we are already to Bloomberg pieces about navigating the toll of inflation on friendships because of different sensitivities to inflation.

We’re definitely in the roaring twenties. Just not sure what precisely that roar means, much less what caused it, or what I should do in response to it.

This is _not_ a slam on people who are eating at restaurants indoors with people they don’t live with and going out to music shows, etc. We do! Also, this is _not_ a slam on people who won’t do some or all of those things. I have friends who are in that situation! Just. I would have thought that the skillset that let us still have friends after the last couple of years would be useful in a money context as well? I’m clearly delusional and retain a greater degree of optimism than I realized.

Grain

I buy grain. I do know that this is a little weird. I own a flour mill (my second) and I use it every single day that I am at home. Sometimes more than once. So, I buy grin to put in the flour mill. I buy soft white from Amazon; the supplier is in the Palouse and tracks the crap out of their grain and process it themselves. I buy soft red (the same as goes into Lily flour, like for Southern biscuits) and Turkey red (a hard red) from Brian Severson Farms, usually from their website (I think my original order with them might have been via Amazon). Recently, I ran low on flaked oatmeal, which I use more or less exclusively for crisp topping these days (so it is almost immortal but does occasionally need to be replenished), and rather than buy Quaker Oats again, I thought hey! Let’s see what the Good Stuff is like! While I was there, I ordered some other things. Anyway.

“With the war going on, many new customers are buying grains for long term storage. The moisture of our grains are ideal for milling and appropriate for short term storage (1 year) If you are planning on storing our grains for years or decades they probably should be dried a bit more to prevent mold from developing over time. Please contact us if you are unsure about this aspect of our grains.”

That’s a new paragraph, vs my last order placed in 2021. I’m not surprised — I had been wondering if I was going to be up against supply issues, but wasn’t hugely concerned about it because buying whole grain is pretty weird, and most people are just not up for that. You have to adapt recipes and so forth. Still, it was interesting to see it.