Today I made garlic bread.

You add flour, water, salt, and most importantly, yeast. When baking bread, you have to let the dough rise.

No reasonable intervention will significantly increase the speed the dough rises for really good bread, possibly the best bread in the world.

Mini Hungarian language lesson: the secret dish.

"What's a dish universally known and eaten in your country but virtually unheard of outside it?" is a question that makes the rounds on Twitter every few months but I can't be bothered waiting for the next one.

It's "főzelék".

The word itself looks as simple as the dish: "főz" is "to cook" and "-elék" is a suffix roughly meaning "the result of", so "the result of cooking".

Thanks for nothing.

The official definition is "any kind of boiled or parboiled vegetable"; closer, but still a load of bollocks.

So here's mine: "főzelék is made of vegetables and it has a thick sauce".

What kind of vegetables?

Practically any: potato, cabbage, bean, pea, chickpea, spinach, squash, carrot, but usually only one veg at a time.

There is a mixed abomination called "finomfőzelék" but we don't talk about it.

Most of us have been scarred for life by school dinners featuring the pallid little harbingers of death suspended in a beige gel of doom.

In all honesty though, főzelék in general doesn't look very appetising: it has its roots in that old peasant staple of gruel and it has a serious image problem as a result.

Which is why, even in Hungary, you won't see many on restaurant menus, except in specialist outlets.

#Turkish traditional food 🇹🇷 😍⬇️

10 Manfaat Baking Soda untuk tanaman.

Ternyata selain untuk bahan pengembang roti. Baking soda juga bisa bermanfaat untuk tanaman.

Apa aja manfaatnya?

Lanjut....

1. Baking soda digunakan utk mengetes tingkat keasaman (Ph) tanah. Ambil sesendok tanah dr kebun dan basahi dengan air minum dan percikkan segenggam baking soda ke bagian tanah yang basah. Jika tanah mulai berbuih, artinya tingkat keasaman tanah kebun Anda lebih rendah dari 5.

2. Lenyapkan hama siput dari kebun dengan menaburkan baking soda. Siput akan mengering dan mati.

3.Jamur di tanaman juga bisa diusir dengan baking soda. Cukup campurkan 4 sendok makan baking soda ke dalam 1 galon air yang akan digunakan untuk menyiram tanaman. Lebih murah dan kandungan zat kimianya lebih rendah ketimbang pembasmi jamur yang lain.

4/ Untuk Anda yang suka membuat kompos dari sampah basah, masukkan baking soda ke dalam wadah kompos Anda untuk mengurangi baunya.

This lunch is 500 yen ($4.80) at Sukiya, a Japanese fast food restaurant which belongs to a category with about three big competitors.

I love the aesthetics of this category and they’re under remarked upon.

I think people underestimate QSRs in terms of social utility, but Sukiya et al describe themselves as mission-oriented enterprises. I believe this is largely sincere, and goes back to the 60s and 70s, when the clientele was primarily manual laborers who had migrated to work.

Japan was not a rich nation at the time, and day laborers in particular were both unlikely to be able to cook for themselves and unlikely to have much of a food budget, and so the chains sprung up offering an honest-to-goodness cooked meal delivered in under a minute for cheap.

This heritage continued over the years, even after Japan became a much more wealthy nation, and these chains function as social support and dignity for folks in diminished circumstances.

They also are a wee bit of a cartel, and I appreciate the aesthetics of the cartel:

Back when I was first in Japan, in the mid 2000s, there was an increase in the price of beef.

And the heads of the three chains got together, and decided that the price of the basic beef bowl needed to increase, but given the economic circumstances how could they hold the line.