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Friday Fun Thread for January 12, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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You guys got any dinner plans for this weekend? I plan on making teriyaki chicken again, now that I made it once, with TWICE the amount of chicken.

Also do people around you know how to cook? I work at a gas station on weekends and I think there's a fair amount of people that just buy easy dinners and cook those most of the time. This is in rural Midwest America, though. I think most of the younger generation is getting worse at cooking.

The average Indian guy can't cook worth a damn. In all honesty, they don't need to, any place with a decent concentration of workers, be they blue or white collar, has an abundance of small stalls that serve everything from snacks to passable meals for cheap and cheerful prices. And they can always lean on their wives/mom, or if middle class, a visiting cook, if richer, a live-in one, and "tiffin" services that deliver meals to you at the workplace for lunch or dinner are popular, if you don't want to order from a restaurant.

Not that I don't know guys who can cook, but they range from being able to just about making a passable meal to being decent, and most of them were forced to learn it because they were living in dorms during college and couldn't tolerate the cafeteria slop or afford takeout.

I can't call myself a cook with a straight face, but I do know the absolute basics, and can probably serve something that doesn't cause food poisoning. I do intend to learn, especially if I have to live alone in the West. A median doctor's wage in the UK makes splurging on takeout, as I would prefer, fraught. I can get away with it today because I have no expenses worth the name and a respectable salary by Indian standards, but my girlfriend made it clear that she won't cook for me if I can't make some contribution to the process (well, when we were in the UK I did chop vegetables and made undercooked chicken noodles!), and it is entirely possible that due to the vagaries of mandatory rotational training we might not even be able to live together. Shame, because she's a great chef, though her attempts at biryani come out weird (still tasty, just not biryani), and the one time she made vegan biryani* for my vegan cousin and his British girlfriend, it literally brought her to tears from the spice, though she gobbled it down like a champ.

Well, I don't have particularly high standards, I'm happy with making myself spaghetti, bacon, steaks and so on indefinitely. Worst case I'll subsist off frozen pizza.

*An absolute abomination of a concept. If you think pineapple and sardines on pizza is abhorrent, you can't imagine my distaste for that travesty. It's worse than the South Indian predilection to put coconut in it.

As a man who has made biryani at home, I can't recommend an instant pot enough if you ever try it. It really helps.

Do you have a particular recipe to recommend? I have an Instant Pot and do appreciate a good biryani.