DIY -- the good cook and the landfill

My community is changing its trash procedures. Up to now, the city has been subsidizing everybody's landfill fees. It can't keep doing that and still do civic things. So everybody is going to be charged a share of the landfill fees and with proof that they've paid, they get the same service as before.

This means that people using meal kits and other landfill-heavy practices are going to feel the impact. The rest of us, not so much. 

If you're a good cook, you don't contribute to messes like this. You may even be able to take advantage of a composting program in your region, as well as getting good nutrition and cutting down on grocery expenses.

Some mornings I have ramen for breakfast, using a "no-time" broth recipe that I found on-line. You can mix the seasonings up in advance and store on a shelf; other ingredients have to be kept in your fridge. You can add in veggies, which lets you use up things in your fridge that are about to go over, improving your nutrition while keeping things out of the landfill. Next to each ingredient, I show other things you can make using it, so that buying half-pound packages is a good use of your money. 

This takes about 15 minutes to make even if you don't store the mixed seasonings, because you put on the water and noodles, turn on the heat, and while the water comes to boiling, add the seasonings.

1 tablespoon garlic powder (BBQ sauce, soups, stews, chili, spaghetti sauce, most cuisines.)

1 tablespoon onion powder (BBQ sauce, soups, stews, chili, spaghetti sauce, most cuisines.)

1 tablespoon dried parsley (stuffing, soups, stews, spaghetti sauce, Provencal seasoning for chicken rub, "like the colonel" seasoning for chicken, including nuggets.)

1 tablespoon dried green onions or chives optional (Provencal seasoning for chicken rub, Chinese recipes.)

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon ground ginger (use 1 1/2 teaspoons if you want it spicier) (Chinese recipes, ginger snaps and other baked goods.)

1 teaspoon chili powder or 3/4 tsp cumin, large pinch cayenne and small pinch oregano or cilantro (India style recipes use cumin, especially garam masala seasoning)

1 teaspoon paprika (goulash, of course, KFC seasoning for chicken)

1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper (use 1/2 tsp for spicier) (Chinese recipes of course)

1 tablespoon of mix (about a quarter of a batch) per 1 ½ cups water plus

1/4 teaspoon sesame oil or chili oil

1 teaspoon soy sauce

½ teaspoon miso paste (miso soup)

bundle of dry ramen noodles (3 bundles per pack)

Finely chopped vegetables like cabbage, broccoli, carrot, kernels of sweet corn, bell peppers, bok choy leaf and any other leafy green. Use freeze-dried vegetables if you can’t get fresh.

Bring it all to a boil, turn the heat down five minutes, turn it off and let the noodles finish cooking.

The little quarter pound box of low-sodium miso paste that I bought will probably make 50 servings of ramen broth. I have a gallon jug of soy sauce because I use it so much. Unless you like your mouth to burn, use just a couple drops of chili oil and you'll have plenty for other recipes. (I left salt out of the dry seasonings because I use full-sodium soy sauce.)

The dry ramen noodles are available on websites like Weee which also sells the other ingredients, including the veggies. The noodles ought to be a staple in your kitchen. You throw away a little ring of paper that comes around each bundle of noodles, and after three servings, you throw away the wrapper. Instead of throwing away that whole bowl and the wrappings around the two kernels of corn which are all you get for veggies, every time you make a serving.

Yes you need a saucepan for the cooking; you can use it to cook single servings of almost anything you like including chili, mac n cheese, soup or stew of any kind, oatmeal (use the old-fashioned five minute type and you can also make cookies), hard or soft boiled eggs, kichri or fried rice or even a one-person frittata or tortilla espanola -- and for heating water for tea, coffee, yerba mate, and milk for making hot chocolate. 

Yes you need a bowl to serve the ramen in, and you can use it for all the other things you can cook in that saucepan (except the drinks, of course), as well as for cold cereal or servings of snacks like granola, dry roast nuts, trail mix, chips, dip for snacks.... 

As for washing up, that takes all of five minutes, most of which is waiting for the water to get hot.

I have lots of other cooking tips on my DIY page. They can save you money, give you better nutrition, keep you from putting PFAS in the landfill or water supply. And oh, yeah, we're finding out that cooking from scratch burns calories as well as letting you control the sugar, sodium, fat, and cut out the garbage in packaged foods. Without the stress involved in being an Iron Chef.

Why Fallacies are False -- the Turnkey Fallacy

This started from a Bluesky post but it's been going on for millennia or longer. Anytime somebody proposes a turnkey solution, you know that they are speaking out of ignorance or out of selfishness.

The oldest example I know of from personal experience probably goes back millennia, maybe even as far back as human speech. Ever watch the movie "What Women Want"?

This is a thirteen-year-old male attitude. There is supposed to be one thing a guy can do to get any woman he wants. Ladies, when you hear a guy say "What the hell do women want?", whether he says it to you or not, run. He wants a button he can push. He doesn't want a real relationship -- he doesn't know what a relationship is.

Demagogues feed into this thirteen-year-old mentality by offering simple solutions to complicated problems. So do dictators. That's why their earliest support comes from the ignorant, the mentally immature and from educated people whose training has been pipelined to make them ignorant of much of reality. I've talked about pipelining in this thread before. I know college professors who fall for urban legends and produce work that incorporates fallacies or, at best, can't fit into the big picture of a subject, because the writers are ignorant of everything their pipelined research cuts them off from.

Academics who fall for the turnkey fallacy include people in STEM who think human cultures can be run on math or logic, people in the liberal arts, and people who think of themselves as liberals but still think there's only one solution to everything.

Which gets me to the Bluesky post. It promoted morals as a counterweight to politics. It had several problems.

It clearly appealed to a "come to Jesus" attitude. Well, as we all know, the religious right wants a "come to Jesus" movement, only not only do they really mean Jesus, they mean the evangelical concept associated in the last decade with child sexual abuse, spousal abuse, ignorance, violence, and incompetence.

Second, it relied on a composition by a Christian minister. One of the things Christianity does is fail to understand the scripture it ostensibly takes as its basis. In Jewish scripture, the section known as Neviim, Prophets, survived the Babylonian Captivity for two reasons. One is that the prophecies included either came true immediately, or they came true on the schedule incorporated in the prophecies. That's a feature of Jewish law. If your prophecy doesn't come true on one of those schedules, you're a false prophet. 

The other reason is that everything included in those books relates to Jewish law. Samson had to be a nazir for life because there was no central shrine for him to go to, to offer his sacrifices and have his hair shorn. He lived after the Philistines destroyed the Shiloh sanctuary. David ruled that the widow's other son did not have to die because the people trying to convict him of murders did not qualify as witnesses. They were on-lookers but they did not perform hatraah, community policing to try and prevent the killing.

So appealing to Prophets as morals somehow above and beyond Jewish law is a misunderstanding of both the meaning and history of the material. Musar, which Proverbs refers to (in Writings), is not ethics that supersedes the law. It is an inner drive that keeps one faithful to the law.

Third, my legal studies classes defined politics as the way you get things done in an environment of people with differing goals, aims, desires and so on. That means it's perfectly normal to have politics going on in a religious organization. But it's only going to result in a "come to Jesus" moment in the sense that the organization agrees on what to do and how. There won't be some sudden epiphany -- another religious concept.

Put it together, and the reverend who wrote the article possibly found that the politics in his religious organization doesn't track with what he sees as moral. So he's demonizing politics and then extrapolating outside his organization.

And that gets into something else I've found out through experience. Organizations are mass phenomena, not individual phenomena. They are not designed to suit the wishes of every member. The culture of which they form part is the same way. Its laws are the same way. They carry out the general mores of the culture, which may clash with some subculture (I've talked about that before too) or individual. 

We're living in a time when one of the subcultures is so ignorant of how everything works that it is trying to make the entire culture live by its wishes. In other words, as I've said more than once, the thirteen-year-olds are trying to run the school.

And the school is letting them do it. It took a while, but some of the older kids are speaking out about this. And it exposes that they haven't taken the hard classes that would let them speak effectively. What's more, some of them were so comfortable at school up to now, they never developed the outside experience that would have given them a clue earlier. So they break away because nobody at the school listens to them, and they get on the outside and are shocked to find that the outsiders they ignored while they were fat dumb and happy, knew all along that this was going on.

I stopped joining organizations when I was in my teens. Either I got tired of being expected to espouse ideas I didn't agree with, or I found that the organizations didn't live up to their billing, or the organization shifted in ways I didn't agree with. 

There is no one solution to these situations because there is no one situation, plus you are an individual not a peg to put in a hole. Plus situations change. You must be ready to break away and work on your own. You must be ready for your situation to change so that you have to change what you do and how, and you must be ready for the same thing to happen to your allies. You must realize that your set of allies will change for reasons of their own -- and sometimes you will have to ditch them for reasons of your own. 

Write it Like a Fairy Tale -- postscript

I was just rereading something I wrote and realized there's one tip I didn't give you. I've used it, and it will help with your word count.

Avoid pluperfect tense. 

Oral narratives are straight-forward. They tell the tale from beginning to end. They do not have retrospectives. They have what I call sidebars, inset narratives. The Judah-Tamar story in Genesis is a sidebar in the Joseph saga; it gives us our second look at sexual behavior and sets us up for the hat trick in Egypt.

Immediately after it ends, there's a line telling us that Joseph has ended up in Egypt. In Biblical Hebrew, it uses a hufal perfect aspect, which indicates a completed action without a named agent. In Septuagint, it uses an "aorist" which, in my Greek thread, I call an imperfective, and again, it has no named agent. It is not a "pluperfect". The Vulgate uses ductus est which is a perfect passive; there is no separate pluperfect passive. So English translations that have a pluperfect in Genesis 39:1 don't have support for it in the usual source documents.

Biblical Hebrew narratives use perfective verbs to open and close episodes, as in Genesis 39:1 and the creation story, and to express one-time resultative actions. The idea of X happening before Y, once Y already starts happening, comes elsewhere in the context, not in the verb. Inside the story, BH uses what Dr. Cook calls a narrative past, which is really vav plus an imperfective verb. It ain't over until it's over, and the episode can end with a perfective verb or something like "and it is there to this very day", etc.

Fairy tales and other oral narratives treat the action, while it goes on, as not yet completed, the opposite of what a perfect verb means. All the more so, they are not going to use a pluperfect. Check out Grimm's tales (in German of course, see Internet Archive). 

Remember, you don't have to explain how things happen or how things happen to show up just in time for your action to take place. That may be one excuse for pluperfects in written literature, especially mysteries and thrillers, but you don't do that if you're writing it like a fairy tale. The other excuse for a pluperfect in a mystery is, of course, that once somebody commits the crime, you have to have retrospective discussions as you figure out who, why, and so on. 

In other fiction, that would be telling the story back to front. It's confusing.

Also, I suggest that you never have somebody use a pluperfect in speech. Just use a plain past tense. Not "I had already done that" but "I already did that." 

I rewrote a chapter in a fanfic novel a dozen times to get rid of the pluperfects in the first draft. The main character in that chapter was completely illiterate. The pluperfect is, if anything, a tense of written literature. If he couldn't write it, he couldn't use it. Rethink your uneducated or undereducated people and how they communicate. 

In another work I wrote "Nobody can possibly act out a pluperfect tense, acting is all about the present moment." After what I said about film as oral literature, it should be obvious to you that your Regency novel will not translate to film unless you rewrite it to get rid of pluperfect tenses.

While you think about this, brush up on your grammar so that you know the difference between the pluperfect ("I had gone to Birmingham that day") and the conditional ("Had I bought a ticket for Birmingham"). Remember, context is king.

Try not to use pluperfect tense. Edit to get rid of it, and watch your prose become less confusing and more immediate as your word count drops.