I have to admit that this one puzzles me: Without a range hood, how do you get rid of smoke while you’re cooking? If we don’t turn ours on, our whole house fills with smoke if we’re grilling anything.
Children.
Well, if all you do is boil your food*, or nuke it.
*= referring to stereotypical pre-modern-age British cuisine
I haven’t bought trash bags in over a decade. Why spend money on something just to throw it away? However, my trash collection service is abandoning this county at the end of July. That means I’ll have to tote my trash to the county dumpsters, which requires bags. Bummer.
Pets. We’ve got a bunch, but I wouldn’t miss any of them if they were gone when I got home. Can understand why some people enjoy the company of animals, but I personally have no need for them.
How do you dispose of your trash now? Directly into the can with no bag?
Dry trash, yes. No bag. Wet garbage with stink potential, I use grocery bags. Then it all just gets dumped into the dumpster can out back. Trash guys come and empty the big dumpster thingy weekly. I’m single, so I rarely fill the dumpster. I’m also old enough to remember when nobody used trash bags.
Ooh, good one.
Things I’ve stopped using in the last few years:
[ul]
[li]Home Phone Service (I make all my calls on my cell or on Skype)[/li][li]A Watch (check time on cellphone)[/li][li]A newspaper (read all the news online)[/li][/ul]
Things I’m pretty sure I can get along without.
[ul]
[li]A smartphone (My list of desirable phone features pretty much starts and ends with good reception. I never understood why it isn’t #1 on everyone’s list.)[/li][li]A bathtub. I have a shower and use the bathtub less than once a year.[/li][li]Cable TV. The only reason I have cable is that my roommate pays for it.[/li][li]Oven. I use it about once a year for frozen pizza.[/li][/ul]
I keep a pay-as-you-go cel phone, just in case as I break down. But other than that, I have no use for one.
My rice does not. :mad: I’m actually a pretty good cook but I just can’t cook rice. No idea why but the rice cooker saves a lot of stress.
Sorry to hijack the thread, but: what kind of stove do you have? When I had a crappy gas stove, it was just about impossible to make decent rice, because one of the four burners didn’t work at all, and the other three had ‘hot spots’, a place on the ring of flame that burned a lot higher than the rest. If I turned the flame down low enough so the hot spot wouldn’t burn anything, the rest of the flame died completely. I couldn’t make a decent roux, either, for the same reason. Now that I have an electric range, I can turn it down to med/low or low, and that is where the heat really is!
[/hijack]
I can’t cook rice either. I have a great stove. I’m a great cook. Try my pie crust. Mr. Zojirushi makes the rice.
Fair enough.
Sometimes I have these little things called ‘thoughts’ and feel the need to share them. 
I’d venture to say that at least half the time, I’m wrong. :smack:
Yay!
We say that our lawn isn’t just grass, it’s an
ECOSYSTEM!
Another reason on top of what others have said is that if you eat rice with basically every single meal, it’s actually convenient to be able to start your rice ahead of time and leave it alone while you cook other stuff. The rice becomes something you don’t really have to “cook”.
If you prepare it on the stove, it’s one more thing taking up a burner that you have to pay attention to or else it will boil over and/or burn. A rice cooker can be left in the corner somewhere, you press a button and forget about it and after it’s done it stays warm, and people can walk over and help themselves throughout the meal.
More Rice Hijack!
The microwave is the best rice cooker in the world. One cup rice, two cups water, nuke 10 minutes, ping!
We did used to have a rice cooker. It came free with our car - long story ;). Never used it because I couldn’t be bothered cleaning the stupid-arsed thing.
See also: juicer, breadmaker. Not sure how common those gadgets are though.
My partner mused about GPSs and wondered if they would compromise the ability to read and understand maps, let alone take a bearing using “primitive” techniques like a compass or the sun/stars. Her point was brought home when we discovered that our friend’s nephew, who is 16, can’t shuffle a deck of cards. He’d only ever played card games on a computer and couldn’t shuffle a deck at a campsite.
I look forward to the days when everyone has lost all the simple skills due to technology. Then when I do something like flip a coin, it will seem like magic!
Firstly, I don’t think we grill much. OK, scratch that, I’m not even sure what you mean by grilling. Is it cooking in a thing like a frying pan called a grill pan? Because we don’t have one of those. Grilling in the oven doesn’t seem to produce smoke, and grilling on the braai (BBQ) is of course outside. The only time we get smoke in the kitchen is when I’m cooking steak because that needs to be done at a really high temperature. I cook things on the stove or in the oven or in a big electric frying pan. But the main reason, I think, is because we can open windows at will because of the climate. We don’t have double-glazing or any kind of insulation or heating or cooling, so if there is any smoke, out it goes.
P.S. I love rice too!
P.P.S. My thread made it to 2 pages! I’m so happy!! <— Newb.
Hot water, for the most part. I don’t use it for showering anymore unless it’s really cold out. Most everything has been mentioned already; and I live without most of the already given examples.
I don’t have a range hood; don’t think I’ve ever had one. We open a window and/or use a fan when Mig fries, which is rare. One thing I recently acquired was a dish washer. I’ve lived 40 years without one but now I don’t know why I never had one. My least favorite chore is dishwashing. I always figures it was trouble enough loading and unloading why bother. Well now I know. I trained my five year old to unload it so half my work is done!
I mostly do without appliances. Didn’t have a washer for years so I often tub washed our clothes and had them hanging all over the house to dry. It was just two of us back then though. I couldn’t imagine doing that with four of us in the house.
I don’t have a coffee maker or bean grinder or whatever else coffee drinkers get. I love my Folger’s instant. I don’t have a radio/cd/mp3/stereo, not even in the car. I listen on my computer so there’s no need.