Blanching is the process of excluding light from a plant, for aesthetic or culinary reasons.
It used to be that celery would grow deep green stalks unless it was blanched by ‘earthing up’ (mounding soil around) the stalks, or tying an opaque sleeve around them - this caused the stalks to turn chlorotic (pale and yellowish) and this would result in a less bitter flavour.
Modern celery varieties are typically ‘self-blanching’ and do not require this treatment, however they never stay quite as pale as a traditionally blanched plant.
My wife does pretty much all of the preparation of any vegetables with a tiny Victorinox paring knife. They are superb knives and I used to really like them but I am much more comfortable with my big Sabatier.
I think she just doesn’t feel safe with the big knife. Her method seems to work fine for her.
Yeah, whatever floats your boat. Still makes me want to take over though. As I said height may be an issue. I can get over the onion (or whatever), my wife is a good foot shorter than I am.
My Wife bought me a nice set of Henckels for Christmas a few years back. Nice knives. Will last the rest of our lives, and a few more I think.
Oddly, my dad bought me a set of knives that year as well. They where “As seen on TV!” type knives.
My wife managed to run interference on that one. I opened her gift to me (us) later.
I feel safe with all the slicing and dicing knives, even the giant knife i use to cut a pizza in half. (Inherited from my dad.) The only one i don’t feel completely safe with is the meat cleaver, because i imagine i might miss and cleave my fingers. I just prefer a smaller knife for various small tasks.
Also, i associate that pale color with an old or unhealthy vegetable. I didn’t realize people attempted to do that to celery on purpose. I usually select crisp, bright green stalks of celery. I find fresh celery to be sweet, not bitter. It’s actually pale celery that i associate with bitterness and other off flavors. (I’m sure it’s been bred to be less bitter, as well.)
The older varieties were probably a lot more bitter unless blanched.
There are a few other vegetables that are similarly treated - sea kale and endives. I think it was probably done with other vegetables too, before sweeter varieties were developed.
Related to blanching is forcing - where the developing buds of a plant are kept in darkness in order to make them produce sweeter and more tender veg - it’s commonly done with chicory and rhubarb.
Boob armor- unrealistic, and quite dangerous- blows instead of being deflected off would be deflected into the center . The Armor they used for Queen Elizabeth 1 in the film was excellent. One art for D&D had a hole right in the middle to show a little boobage for fan service. sigh.
(Nothing wrong with a little cheesecake if there is also beefcake)
Swords carried in a sheath on the back- great way to cut off your ear- or worse. In the East swords were sometimes carried like that - out of any possible combat situation.
Well, yeah. I’ll have a paring knife out, but the chefs knife does most of the work, but isn’t right for everything. Or I’ll use my pocket knife to open something.
I used to do quite a bit of outdoor cooking over a campfire. So, I improvise.
Here’s one. I often select text to edit it or copy and paste it somewhere. But it seems like when I’m highlighting the text, I accidently include an extra word at the front of the selection. But if I highlight starting at the rear, the cursor “resists” including the first letter of the first word of the selection and I have to keep carefully pushing the cursor further than I want to get that letter. Usually, I end up overflowing onto the previous word again.
In MS Outlook, which we use at work, if someone pastes in a screenshot it almost always comes across scaled down to the point that it is not legible.
So, naturally, I look for “Zoom”. That takes a bit to find. And when I find it and start zooming in, the text zooms but the image stays the same size.
Who at Microsoft thought that was a good default behavior for “zoom”?
It’s not that the image is a crappy lo-res postage stamp. I can (and do) copy and paste into an image editor, then I see the whole thing in its crisp sharp glory.
We have bi-monthly meetings. I’m always working from home. The rest of the team is hybrid work/home.
This is actually kind of important though. Some meetings, the rest of the group of 4 gather in a conference room and use one laptops microphone to talk, and the one laptops speakers to listen.
For god sakes, you all have laptops and desktop computers. Stop using the ONE mic on a laptop, get some freaking headphones with a mic so people can hear you. You’re freaking computer professionals, this might cost $50. And you could get work to buy them for you.
Hell, I’ll buy them for you. Just stop. With all the online Teams and Zoom meetings it drives me nuts.
Way back in the dark ages when I was in college, I was a waitress. When I approached a table with people chatting (which was most of the time), I typically waited a second or two for them to pause before I said something; or I’d say “Excuse me” if I was in a hurry and needed to interrupt.
Nobody does that anymore. Every single time I am dining out and a waiter or waitress approaches, they just start talking over us. Nobody waits a second or two, nobody says “excuse me”, they just interrupt and speak over you. It’s extremely rude. I’m not expecting anyone to stand in silence for minutes while I recite all of Hamlet’s soliloquy, but if you could let me finish my sentence before you talk over me, that would be nice.
And don’t get me started on the “I’ll be taking care of you…” crap.
Some online stores seem to have a problem with zooming. You click on the product image to take a closer look and it flies out into a sort of popup that is smaller than when the product image was just embedded in the page.
The problem is that when you’re in a conference room with someone, your voice reaches their ears directly in a fraction of a second…and then again through the headphones about a second later because of the audio lag through Teams.
What’s needed is a proper conference room microphone that’s designed to pick up everybody around the table.
Good point, but they do this even when they are all at home. Get a decent setup, you can afford it.
And, yeah they do have access to a conference room mic. But they don’t use it.
When COVID struck, I saw the writing on the wall. I bought on my dime an entire new computer system for home. I set up Starlink (had to buy more climbing equipment for that). I bought another computer that I could remote into work so I could remote in from two different places. I rented office space in Denver 100 miles away from me for when I was in Denver taking care of my mother.
What they could do is just get some headphones with a mic, and meet from their OFFICES. There is no need for them to go to a conference room. It’s stupid. Oh they may need a camera, that’s nothing, I would buy that too.
These three use one laptop connected to Teams. So one camera, one mic. And they are all on their own work laptops in the meeting. They move the one laptop that is connected to Teams around to point the camera.
When i was working, i had co-workers who sometimes used a headset and sometimes used the microphone built into their work-issued laptop. The laptop mike always sounded better and clearer.
In movies or tv, when someone (usually a parent) tells another to “go to bed” when they are already in bed. The phrase you’re looking for is “go to sleep”, dumbass.
