The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I have one pound of beans left and the new box should be arriving soon.
I can saute my mirepoix without stressing about it. I still have terrible knife skills. I probably need to sharpen the knives.
My most recent batch was cranberry beans in the slow cooker with onions and garlic. So far I have mostly just been eating a bowl of them for dinner. It's been convenient to cook a batch over the weekend and not have to think about dinner for the week.
They are much better than grocery store dried beans. Probably not bougie prices better. I should do a head-to-head slow cooker comparison. The no soaking + faster cooking time could be the decisive vote.
Learning to sharpen a knife on a sharpening stone sounds much more difficult than it actually is, and totally worth doing. I touch mine up all the time and it does make cooking more joyful.
I'd say check out some youtube videos, and you probably should, but in my experience they all make it seem much more stressful and involved than it is when you're actually doing it.
Don't overthink it, I'd say. Get a whetstone, wet it, scrape knife over it in a common-sense way and angle, repeat for the other side, then go back and do a few more strokes on each side. I like to use the printer-paper cut test to verify that it's acceptably sharp, but mostly don't really bother any more.
Rinse and dry the knife before applying to food.
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The knives are 80% geometry. I have reground my knives to the smallest angle I could set on my sharpener and now they stay acceptably sharp longer.
While my wife and kid are away, I've also been cooking dinner for the whole week. The latest batch was turkey breast in a vaguely Georgian stew: carrots and green beans with sour plum sauce and walnuts. I probably should've used turkey thighs, but they were out of them, and ground walnuts provide enough richness anyway. I would use less carrots and more beans next time, though.
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