ramblings...!

Can you believe someone wrote this?

Actual Engineering

Making my own cookies

I’m writing this in my kitchen, on a Saturday night. Didn’t do much in terms of work today, I’ll save that for tomorrow

I recently discovered the magical wonders of minimum wage, and that instead of buying cookies for approx. $1.3 each, I could make them at home for $2.5 instead! It sure isn’t the most cost-efficient way to make them, but it is really fun and helps take the edge of eating ground beef for past 8 months ;-;

Some recipes I enjoyed:

  • No butter chocolate chip cookies: This is what I’m doing right now, because I think I’ve been using too much butter in my baking. I reduced the amount of oil by a bit and put it in the fridge for 10 minutes before placing on a tray
  • Cinnamon Rolls: Simple and sensible recipe for the dough, I would put more filling than they recommend
  • Apple crumble recipe: I would put as many apples as you could spare, I put in three and it made me wish for more.
  • Garlic chicken I put cumin and ginger in the sauce. Don’t put a whole garlic clove that was dumb.

The workstation

I also moved into a new house this year, somewhere with an actual kitchen and a usable oven. Roommates are cool too, lucked out with that one.

Speaking of workstation: I’m also writing this in org-mode and thus the biggest paragraph in this page has to be about my writing setup. I’ve always used Emacs for general text editing and I am a firm believer of Emacs supremacy. I’m still discovering LSP/Projectile/org-mode keybindings here and there, some of them aren’t showing up in the M-x menu.

org-mode with the Leuven theme is such a wondrous experience that I am considering switching over from my markdown python script combo and just use the org-mode exporter instead. Some post-processing and asset copying would make it perfect.

One complaint is how org-publish works. It really insists on it’s own alist config and I’m not quite sure how to shove in my pre-existing template with that. Right now I have a completion function that pastes the :body-only output into an HTML file. Definitely something for another weekend, as I’ve spent enough time as-is reading the documentation

Other than baking

I also took up actual cooking this year, so I haven’t been eating only ground beef like a prisoner. My best dinner creation was garlic chicken and I’m especially proud of how I saved it too.

The recipe used heavy cream, but I only had milk around. The recipe also says to cook the chicken separate from the sauce, but I wasn’t paying attention and tried to cook the chicken in the milk. The milk instantly started dehydrating and I had to quickly turn off the heat and take out the chicken into a separate pan. I added some more water after the chicken was done, and

In general, I sure am proud of my kitchen, and hopefully it continues into the future.

After baking

I also went for a night walk around the national park. Can’t wait to buy my own car later, exciting times ahead.

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