Secret Gamer Girl / SecretGamerGrrl / Googleshng / "Violet Hargrave" / Jacob Lawrence (Jake) Alley / Violet Cassandra Ocean - Delusional Zoe Quinn Stalker, Libelous Tweeter, Thirsty Gnome, Faux-Tranny Neckbeard Incel, Micropenis, "Known Troubled Person", Creator of "Massive vs the Masses", Self-Described "Noise Making Thing"; Lives in Niantic, CT

[AnOminous]

What is even the difference between, I guess, a casual Nazi and a "full-on Nazi?"

Jake has so many weird little Jake-isms.

 

[Kosher Dill]

What is even the difference between, I guess, a casual Nazi and a "full-on Nazi?"

Casual Nazis wear uniforms with swastika armbands and goose-step down the street on their days off from staffing concentration camps.
Full-on Nazis eat tendies and play a lot of PS4 games with disfavored content.

 

[Jaimas]

What a fucking creepy weirdo. I'm convinced he's spent every second of his three month or so independence naked and masturbating furiously.

I briefly had a pair of brain cells permanently devoted to that mental image.

With help from a knitting needle, they're gone now, but I can't ride a bike anymore.

 

[MyOtherNicknameIsAPun]

What is even the difference between, I guess, a casual Nazi and a "full-on Nazi?"

You become Nazi by disagreeing with Jake. The more you disagree the more full-on you get. So, not sharing his tastes in pop-culture makes you a Nazi. Calling his shit? Full-on Nazi.

 

[Positron]

Full-on Nazi = mom.
Regular Nazi = everyone else except Zoe.

 

[RadicalCentrist]

So Jake tweet-stormed the most autistic description of boiling water, perhaps ever.

Here it is in copy pasta form (we're talking 30+ tweets):

Spoiler: 2397 words on boiling water

OK. Another depressing day here. Let's have some positivity. Time for everyone to have some RANDOM UNSOLICITED TIPS ON COOKING FOR YOURSELF!

One of my dozens of back burner projects is I'd some day like to write a book on cooking specifically aimed at the sort of person who has absolutely never once even thought about making their own meals at home with absolutely zero assumptions. Like, start in on how to functionally use a stove and buy groceries and such, so let me dip into my notes on that because I figure at least a few people reading this really are coming from that as a starting point and in a sudden live field test. So! Let me randomly teach those people the real fundamental basics of oh... boiling stuff!

So OK! Boiling is like the most foolproof way of cooking things, because it's all about the scientific properties of water. It's a liquid, so at least at the sort of scale you're going to have in a pot on your stove, any point in a body of water is going to have the same temperature as any other point, and the boiling point of water, where it stops being a liquid sitting in a container and just dump all the ingredients in at the start and set a timer for when it's all done, there are very few ways to screw things up. There are still a couple though, so, again, no expectations tips here: First step to boiling anything is you want to take a pot of some sort over to the sink (pots are the big deep metal things that are kinda like a bowl and a cylinder had a bay), fill it up with cold water, move it to your stove, and crank that burner all the way up. If you're making something super bland like pasta or potatoes or something, maybe pour some salt into the palm of your hand (just enough that it's like, visibly piling up there, not just random scattered crystals) and toss that in. Then you leave that thing alone. Don't add anything else yet. The whole foolproof nature of boiling is all about that constant science-made temperature. Once you have a boiling pot of water, with bubbles roiling around and steam coming out and such, that's going to put a fixed amount of heat into whatever you toss in, but if you just throw stuff into cold water and then heat it up, it's going to be all inconsistent, because now how quick your burner heats up and how much water is in there and... basically the trick to cooking well is to just cut out as many variables as you can so you have a consistent baseline and can just tweak the few you have left next time if you don't like the results.

The next thing to worry about with boiling, and this, really, is kinda true for all kinds of cooking- the bigger something is, the trickier it is to cook evenly. Because again, liquids are easy, all the molecules bounce around all over for even temperatures. Solids need to jiggle that heat in from the outside to the inside, so like, the closer something is to being a big sphere or cube, the more you have to worry about the outside being really cooked and the inside still being raw. So... generally when you're boiling stuff, you chop it up first. If you've got some big long thing like a carrot or a squash you want to chop that into discs. If you're throwing in potatoes, like, cut'em in half, cut the halves in half, and then cut those quarters in half. That's generally enough. Maybe skip that or just cut'em in half with fingerling potatoes. And meat, similar deal. You don't generally want to throw any pieces in that are bigger than like... a AA battery or like, 1/4the size of a can of tuna or something.

Also, hey, just in general, when you're cutting stuff: Put the thing you're cutting on a cutting board, hold it steady by like a tip with your off-hand, maybe a fork (especially for meat), and carefully cut it one chop at a time. If you're getting at all near your fingers, just... stop. Through that big end piece of the carrot or whatever out. It's fine. Really.

And after you're done cutting stuff and transferring it to where it goes throw out any sort of leftover packaging, especially from meat, wash your knife, your cutting board, and your hands. Especially with chicken. Treat raw chicken like it's some kind of scary alien acid poison where you have to totally keep contained so nobody gets infected or touches the goo (and also never serve like, rare chicken). Also there's a hopefully obvious exception to that chop everything up rule for very liquid-y things. If you're boiling an egg, you boil the whole egg, and take the shell off after. Tomatoes are like, the most watery thing you still want to cut up.

So anyway, somewhere in this process, you have stuff to dump into water which is now really boiling. So the next concern is, hey, don't splash boiling water on yourself.

When doing anything even near a stove, you want to avoid any sort of really loose clothing like poet sleeves or something (really long sleeves in general, capes are right out) so nothing touches a heating element and catches you on fire but like... wear pants (or a long skirt), wear a shirt. Don't do the sexy apron thing. If a little boiling water splashes out and hits your clothed thigh, that's a bit warm. If it hits bare skin, that's really going to burn you. Keep pets away form the whole area too. And small children. Etc.

Also don't like, throw stuff into the pot. Just kinda drop everything in from a very low height. If you're chopping stuff, you can kinda slide it off the edge of the cutting board with a knife all gentle. If you're dumping in pasta from a box, hold like a bottom corner and tilt it in slowly. Also! Weird time to mention this, but here's the rough math on how much water you should have in the pot vs. how much food. If you're making any sort of like soup or sauce, the water is one of the ingredients, so, follow that recipe. Otherwise, you want at least as much water as it's going to take for the water level to be higher than the pile of stuff going in there. Halfway or a little over halfway for an empty pot is usually good. You never want to go right up to the lip though, because you're adding stuff, it's going to displace some water and boiling water overflowing from the pot is kinda Bad

Also! When you're making dry pasta or rice or any other dried thing like that that's going to be hydrating in the pot, remember it's going to basically double in volume after absorbing the water, and also consume that water. So like, 1 cup of rice+1 cup of water=2 cups of cooked rice and no water. If you're cooking just rice you actually kinda want that sort of a result, but mainly I'm mentioning this because if you're like, eyeballing how much pasta you're making as you're pouring it in, you need to remember you are actually going to end up with double.

And aside from that rice exception, you don't want to ever go and absorb all that water. Also, once you're done dumping stuff in your boiling water, it's usually good to take a spoon or a fork or something and kinda swirl it up a bit. Get the water really moving to make sure nothing just stuck to the bottom of the pan and it's all moving around. Some people say you need to come back and keep doing that now and then, but honestly you can generally do it once and by the time things would settle again, the water's back up to a real angry boil and doing that for you. So anyway, you boil everything for however long, and then depending what it was, either you have a pot of soup here, or a pot of something to drain. In the latter case, you should, hopefully have a colander. Big bowl full of holes and a couple legs. You stand that sucker up in an empty sink, shut the stove off, carefully take your pot by both handles and carefully move it over, and slowly dump it all into that colander. Then set the pot aside, back on the stove works, grab the colander, lift it up, shake it up and down a little, and tada.

You've got your boiled food, no longer soaking in water. you can either dump that back in the pot and add sauce or whatever, or dump it into some plates/bowls, or do what I do sometimes with like perogies and just let'em cool off and grab'em right out of there. When you can, you do want to rinse that colander off since starch and stuff makes them all sticky. And when you're done with a pot, wash that too. Real awkward to do it all after you eat and have dishes and such in the sink to deal with. Meanwhile for soup, generally you just turn the burner down once the recipe says it's done. Some stoves literally have a big "low" setting, otherwise like, stick it on 1 or 2. You can just kinda take a big serving spoon and ladle everything right from the pot on the stove into bowls. If you're a huge slob and just made a little saucepan full of instant ramen or mac'n'cheese or something and want to lazily eat it right out of the pot, I won't stop you, but you do want to take that pot off the burner first, and either have it on a cold burner or like a potholder or something. The metal is going to stay hot for a good long while. Anyway, that's basically it. It's nice if you have a full teapot handy to just put that on any still-hot burner you might have, either to make some tea while the stove's nice and hot, or just to keep that burner covered with something as it cools. Do always make sure you've double checked everything is turned off when you're done cooking. Wash stuff sooner than later. Oh and there's a thing people encourage people to do especially with like soup and chili and such where you stick a tasting spoon right in the pot while things are cooking to be sure all the seasoning is good. DON'T DO THAT! It's gross and unsanitary, it's a good way to get sick if you're doing something with meat in it, and it's a good way to burn yourself. If you really want to do that taste test thing, get to that point where you turn the stove down to low, get a regular freaking spoon in one hand, and a napkin in the other. Carefully grab a spoonful, hold it over the napkin, bring it away from the stove, blow on it a little because it's still freaking boiling, taste that, wipe up any mess you made, wash that spoon now.

You don't generally need to make corrections to seasoning ratios like ASAP. Soups stay a big liquidy mess and with heat on low they can honestly kinda live on the stove all day. You can come in way late, add extra spices or whatever, stir'em in a little, leave it simmering a bit longer, and it's fine. No reason for anything to ever be going into your mouth then back into the pot. Also don't be too afraid to ever tweak recipes. If something says to add onions and you hate onions, OK leave'em out. If something says to add lemon juice and you think limes are just inherently the better tasting real sour fruit, sub that in every time. Personally basically every time I see "salt" I just mentally substitute "adobo" because everything else in this little jar I think nicely compliments basically everything. And if you're a fan tossing a little shredded or powdered cheese onto like anything right after you put it on a plate/bowl so it just starts to melt a little just kinda classes up most things. Oh and something I was already going to say before my mentions lit up with it- The one thing that's even easier as a cooking method than boiling stuff is using a slow cooker/crockpot/instant pot (these are, I'm pretty sure, all different names for the same thing). You just throw everything in (although you generally want to just do this when there's some water or other very wet ingredient), put the lid on, hit the start button, and come back hours later, and bam, great food. It's kind of a boiling/steaming combo, at a low enough heat nothing is going to burn, and a long enough time that that whole large-solid-bits-don't-cook-evenly thing is a non-issue. I just throw whole freaking chicken breasts in that thing, screw it. The only real catch, especially if you're doing all this cooking for yourself because you're stuck at home, is it's like, minimum 4 hour cooking times, so you want to start your dinner when you're like, eating lunch or maybe even breakfast and then you have to smell something delicious all day long. The ideal use case for them if when you're actually going to be out all day and don't want to have to cook when you get home. Just, dump everything in, make sure you're not leaving it somewhere precarious turn it on, leave, go shopping, see a movie, whatever, come back that night, bam, food's ready and it's like perfect. Now all that said, wash your dishes as soon as you're done eating, seriously. Like sometimes yeah you still want everything to soak in hot water for a bit, but the less time you give food to get all dry and crusty and stuck to everything, the easier it is to just add a little soap, give things a rinse, and have that nice clean kitchen and eating area again.

 

[break these cuffs]

So Jake tweet-stormed the most autistic description of boiling water, perhaps ever. View attachment 1226446


Here it is in copy pasta form (we're talking 30+ tweets):

Spoiler: 2397 words on boiling water

OK. Another depressing day here. Let's have some positivity. Time for everyone to have some RANDOM UNSOLICITED TIPS ON COOKING FOR YOURSELF!

One of my dozens of back burner projects is I'd some day like to write a book on cooking specifically aimed at the sort of person who has absolutely never once even thought about making their own meals at home with absolutely zero assumptions. Like, start in on how to functionally use a stove and buy groceries and such, so let me dip into my notes on that because I figure at least a few people reading this really are coming from that as a starting point and in a sudden live field test. So! Let me randomly teach those people the real fundamental basics of oh... boiling stuff!

So OK! Boiling is like the most foolproof way of cooking things, because it's all about the scientific properties of water. It's a liquid, so at least at the sort of scale you're going to have in a pot on your stove, any point in a body of water is going to have the same temperature as any other point, and the boiling point of water, where it stops being a liquid sitting in a container and just dump all the ingredients in at the start and set a timer for when it's all done, there are very few ways to screw things up. There are still a couple though, so, again, no expectations tips here: First step to boiling anything is you want to take a pot of some sort over to the sink (pots are the big deep metal things that are kinda like a bowl and a cylinder had a bay), fill it up with cold water, move it to your stove, and crank that burner all the way up. If you're making something super bland like pasta or potatoes or something, maybe pour some salt into the palm of your hand (just enough that it's like, visibly piling up there, not just random scattered crystals) and toss that in. Then you leave that thing alone. Don't add anything else yet. The whole foolproof nature of boiling is all about that constant science-made temperature. Once you have a boiling pot of water, with bubbles roiling around and steam coming out and such, that's going to put a fixed amount of heat into whatever you toss in, but if you just throw stuff into cold water and then heat it up, it's going to be all inconsistent, because now how quick your burner heats up and how much water is in there and... basically the trick to cooking well is to just cut out as many variables as you can so you have a consistent baseline and can just tweak the few you have left next time if you don't like the results.

The next thing to worry about with boiling, and this, really, is kinda true for all kinds of cooking- the bigger something is, the trickier it is to cook evenly. Because again, liquids are easy, all the molecules bounce around all over for even temperatures. Solids need to jiggle that heat in from the outside to the inside, so like, the closer something is to being a big sphere or cube, the more you have to worry about the outside being really cooked and the inside still being raw. So... generally when you're boiling stuff, you chop it up first. If you've got some big long thing like a carrot or a squash you want to chop that into discs. If you're throwing in potatoes, like, cut'em in half, cut the halves in half, and then cut those quarters in half. That's generally enough. Maybe skip that or just cut'em in half with fingerling potatoes. And meat, similar deal. You don't generally want to throw any pieces in that are bigger than like... a AA battery or like, 1/4the size of a can of tuna or something.

Also, hey, just in general, when you're cutting stuff: Put the thing you're cutting on a cutting board, hold it steady by like a tip with your off-hand, maybe a fork (especially for meat), and carefully cut it one chop at a time. If you're getting at all near your fingers, just... stop. Through that big end piece of the carrot or whatever out. It's fine. Really.

And after you're done cutting stuff and transferring it to where it goes throw out any sort of leftover packaging, especially from meat, wash your knife, your cutting board, and your hands. Especially with chicken. Treat raw chicken like it's some kind of scary alien acid poison where you have to totally keep contained so nobody gets infected or touches the goo (and also never serve like, rare chicken). Also there's a hopefully obvious exception to that chop everything up rule for very liquid-y things. If you're boiling an egg, you boil the whole egg, and take the shell off after. Tomatoes are like, the most watery thing you still want to cut up.

So anyway, somewhere in this process, you have stuff to dump into water which is now really boiling. So the next concern is, hey, don't splash boiling water on yourself.

When doing anything even near a stove, you want to avoid any sort of really loose clothing like poet sleeves or something (really long sleeves in general, capes are right out) so nothing touches a heating element and catches you on fire but like... wear pants (or a long skirt), wear a shirt. Don't do the sexy apron thing. If a little boiling water splashes out and hits your clothed thigh, that's a bit warm. If it hits bare skin, that's really going to burn you. Keep pets away form the whole area too. And small children. Etc.

Also don't like, throw stuff into the pot. Just kinda drop everything in from a very low height. If you're chopping stuff, you can kinda slide it off the edge of the cutting board with a knife all gentle. If you're dumping in pasta from a box, hold like a bottom corner and tilt it in slowly. Also! Weird time to mention this, but here's the rough math on how much water you should have in the pot vs. how much food. If you're making any sort of like soup or sauce, the water is one of the ingredients, so, follow that recipe. Otherwise, you want at least as much water as it's going to take for the water level to be higher than the pile of stuff going in there. Halfway or a little over halfway for an empty pot is usually good. You never want to go right up to the lip though, because you're adding stuff, it's going to displace some water and boiling water overflowing from the pot is kinda Bad

Also! When you're making dry pasta or rice or any other dried thing like that that's going to be hydrating in the pot, remember it's going to basically double in volume after absorbing the water, and also consume that water. So like, 1 cup of rice+1 cup of water=2 cups of cooked rice and no water. If you're cooking just rice you actually kinda want that sort of a result, but mainly I'm mentioning this because if you're like, eyeballing how much pasta you're making as you're pouring it in, you need to remember you are actually going to end up with double.

And aside from that rice exception, you don't want to ever go and absorb all that water. Also, once you're done dumping stuff in your boiling water, it's usually good to take a spoon or a fork or something and kinda swirl it up a bit. Get the water really moving to make sure nothing just stuck to the bottom of the pan and it's all moving around. Some people say you need to come back and keep doing that now and then, but honestly you can generally do it once and by the time things would settle again, the water's back up to a real angry boil and doing that for you. So anyway, you boil everything for however long, and then depending what it was, either you have a pot of soup here, or a pot of something to drain. In the latter case, you should, hopefully have a colander. Big bowl full of holes and a couple legs. You stand that sucker up in an empty sink, shut the stove off, carefully take your pot by both handles and carefully move it over, and slowly dump it all into that colander. Then set the pot aside, back on the stove works, grab the colander, lift it up, shake it up and down a little, and tada.

You've got your boiled food, no longer soaking in water. you can either dump that back in the pot and add sauce or whatever, or dump it into some plates/bowls, or do what I do sometimes with like perogies and just let'em cool off and grab'em right out of there. When you can, you do want to rinse that colander off since starch and stuff makes them all sticky. And when you're done with a pot, wash that too. Real awkward to do it all after you eat and have dishes and such in the sink to deal with. Meanwhile for soup, generally you just turn the burner down once the recipe says it's done. Some stoves literally have a big "low" setting, otherwise like, stick it on 1 or 2. You can just kinda take a big serving spoon and ladle everything right from the pot on the stove into bowls. If you're a huge slob and just made a little saucepan full of instant ramen or mac'n'cheese or something and want to lazily eat it right out of the pot, I won't stop you, but you do want to take that pot off the burner first, and either have it on a cold burner or like a potholder or something. The metal is going to stay hot for a good long while. Anyway, that's basically it. It's nice if you have a full teapot handy to just put that on any still-hot burner you might have, either to make some tea while the stove's nice and hot, or just to keep that burner covered with something as it cools. Do always make sure you've double checked everything is turned off when you're done cooking. Wash stuff sooner than later. Oh and there's a thing people encourage people to do especially with like soup and chili and such where you stick a tasting spoon right in the pot while things are cooking to be sure all the seasoning is good. DON'T DO THAT! It's gross and unsanitary, it's a good way to get sick if you're doing something with meat in it, and it's a good way to burn yourself. If you really want to do that taste test thing, get to that point where you turn the stove down to low, get a regular freaking spoon in one hand, and a napkin in the other. Carefully grab a spoonful, hold it over the napkin, bring it away from the stove, blow on it a little because it's still freaking boiling, taste that, wipe up any mess you made, wash that spoon now.

You don't generally need to make corrections to seasoning ratios like ASAP. Soups stay a big liquidy mess and with heat on low they can honestly kinda live on the stove all day. You can come in way late, add extra spices or whatever, stir'em in a little, leave it simmering a bit longer, and it's fine. No reason for anything to ever be going into your mouth then back into the pot. Also don't be too afraid to ever tweak recipes. If something says to add onions and you hate onions, OK leave'em out. If something says to add lemon juice and you think limes are just inherently the better tasting real sour fruit, sub that in every time. Personally basically every time I see "salt" I just mentally substitute "adobo" because everything else in this little jar I think nicely compliments basically everything. And if you're a fan tossing a little shredded or powdered cheese onto like anything right after you put it on a plate/bowl so it just starts to melt a little just kinda classes up most things. Oh and something I was already going to say before my mentions lit up with it- The one thing that's even easier as a cooking method than boiling stuff is using a slow cooker/crockpot/instant pot (these are, I'm pretty sure, all different names for the same thing). You just throw everything in (although you generally want to just do this when there's some water or other very wet ingredient), put the lid on, hit the start button, and come back hours later, and bam, great food. It's kind of a boiling/steaming combo, at a low enough heat nothing is going to burn, and a long enough time that that whole large-solid-bits-don't-cook-evenly thing is a non-issue. I just throw whole freaking chicken breasts in that thing, screw it. The only real catch, especially if you're doing all this cooking for yourself because you're stuck at home, is it's like, minimum 4 hour cooking times, so you want to start your dinner when you're like, eating lunch or maybe even breakfast and then you have to smell something delicious all day long. The ideal use case for them if when you're actually going to be out all day and don't want to have to cook when you get home. Just, dump everything in, make sure you're not leaving it somewhere precarious turn it on, leave, go shopping, see a movie, whatever, come back that night, bam, food's ready and it's like perfect. Now all that said, wash your dishes as soon as you're done eating, seriously. Like sometimes yeah you still want everything to soak in hot water for a bit, but the less time you give food to get all dry and crusty and stuck to everything, the easier it is to just add a little soap, give things a rinse, and have that nice clean kitchen and eating area again.

Jake does realize that there are probably 15 different youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of views per video and half a dozen subreddits for people learning to cook. They're easily accessible for free and somewhere in there are at least a few people who know what they're talking about. That doesn't even touch the more old school cooking blogs and recipe sites that cover basic kitchen skills, mother sauces, etc. Before that there were wide range of cookbooks for beginners. His big brained idea, in the Current Year of our Lord 2020, is to write a book solely because he's made a soup stock for the first time in his nearly 40 years on this Earth and he likes vomiting out his streams of consciousness into written form?

Absolutely brilliant. I hope he writes the book, goes to a vanity publisher to get it printed, and ends up with a stack of books nobody wants to go with his stack of board games nobody wants.

 

[AnOminous]

Jake Scalfani, here we come!

 

[MyOtherNicknameIsAPun]

So Jake tweet-stormed the most autistic description of boiling water, perhaps ever.

I'm lost for words. This is a dadist work of art. It would be a great joke article about how recipes blogs post walls of text with pointless waffle in hopes of gaming search engines. But it's written as a serious advice. About boiling water. With a word count I don't often use to explain programming concepts.

On Twitter.

 

[Chan the Wizard]

Jake should stream himself cooking then. I bet many people would watch a buxom redhead that’s indistinguishable from a biological woman cook.

 

[AnOminous]

Jake should stream himself cooking then. I bet many people would watch a buxom redhead that’s indistinguishable from a biological woman cook.

Cooking With Jake. Jake on the Go.

 

[Neko GF]

So Jake tweet-stormed the most autistic description of boiling water, perhaps ever. View attachment 1226446


Here it is in copy pasta form (we're talking 30+ tweets):

Spoiler: 2397 words on boiling water

OK. Another depressing day here. Let's have some positivity. Time for everyone to have some RANDOM UNSOLICITED TIPS ON COOKING FOR YOURSELF!

One of my dozens of back burner projects is I'd some day like to write a book on cooking specifically aimed at the sort of person who has absolutely never once even thought about making their own meals at home with absolutely zero assumptions. Like, start in on how to functionally use a stove and buy groceries and such, so let me dip into my notes on that because I figure at least a few people reading this really are coming from that as a starting point and in a sudden live field test. So! Let me randomly teach those people the real fundamental basics of oh... boiling stuff!

So OK! Boiling is like the most foolproof way of cooking things, because it's all about the scientific properties of water. It's a liquid, so at least at the sort of scale you're going to have in a pot on your stove, any point in a body of water is going to have the same temperature as any other point, and the boiling point of water, where it stops being a liquid sitting in a container and just dump all the ingredients in at the start and set a timer for when it's all done, there are very few ways to screw things up. There are still a couple though, so, again, no expectations tips here: First step to boiling anything is you want to take a pot of some sort over to the sink (pots are the big deep metal things that are kinda like a bowl and a cylinder had a bay), fill it up with cold water, move it to your stove, and crank that burner all the way up. If you're making something super bland like pasta or potatoes or something, maybe pour some salt into the palm of your hand (just enough that it's like, visibly piling up there, not just random scattered crystals) and toss that in. Then you leave that thing alone. Don't add anything else yet. The whole foolproof nature of boiling is all about that constant science-made temperature. Once you have a boiling pot of water, with bubbles roiling around and steam coming out and such, that's going to put a fixed amount of heat into whatever you toss in, but if you just throw stuff into cold water and then heat it up, it's going to be all inconsistent, because now how quick your burner heats up and how much water is in there and... basically the trick to cooking well is to just cut out as many variables as you can so you have a consistent baseline and can just tweak the few you have left next time if you don't like the results.

The next thing to worry about with boiling, and this, really, is kinda true for all kinds of cooking- the bigger something is, the trickier it is to cook evenly. Because again, liquids are easy, all the molecules bounce around all over for even temperatures. Solids need to jiggle that heat in from the outside to the inside, so like, the closer something is to being a big sphere or cube, the more you have to worry about the outside being really cooked and the inside still being raw. So... generally when you're boiling stuff, you chop it up first. If you've got some big long thing like a carrot or a squash you want to chop that into discs. If you're throwing in potatoes, like, cut'em in half, cut the halves in half, and then cut those quarters in half. That's generally enough. Maybe skip that or just cut'em in half with fingerling potatoes. And meat, similar deal. You don't generally want to throw any pieces in that are bigger than like... a AA battery or like, 1/4the size of a can of tuna or something.

Also, hey, just in general, when you're cutting stuff: Put the thing you're cutting on a cutting board, hold it steady by like a tip with your off-hand, maybe a fork (especially for meat), and carefully cut it one chop at a time. If you're getting at all near your fingers, just... stop. Through that big end piece of the carrot or whatever out. It's fine. Really.

And after you're done cutting stuff and transferring it to where it goes throw out any sort of leftover packaging, especially from meat, wash your knife, your cutting board, and your hands. Especially with chicken. Treat raw chicken like it's some kind of scary alien acid poison where you have to totally keep contained so nobody gets infected or touches the goo (and also never serve like, rare chicken). Also there's a hopefully obvious exception to that chop everything up rule for very liquid-y things. If you're boiling an egg, you boil the whole egg, and take the shell off after. Tomatoes are like, the most watery thing you still want to cut up.

So anyway, somewhere in this process, you have stuff to dump into water which is now really boiling. So the next concern is, hey, don't splash boiling water on yourself.

When doing anything even near a stove, you want to avoid any sort of really loose clothing like poet sleeves or something (really long sleeves in general, capes are right out) so nothing touches a heating element and catches you on fire but like... wear pants (or a long skirt), wear a shirt. Don't do the sexy apron thing. If a little boiling water splashes out and hits your clothed thigh, that's a bit warm. If it hits bare skin, that's really going to burn you. Keep pets away form the whole area too. And small children. Etc.

Also don't like, throw stuff into the pot. Just kinda drop everything in from a very low height. If you're chopping stuff, you can kinda slide it off the edge of the cutting board with a knife all gentle. If you're dumping in pasta from a box, hold like a bottom corner and tilt it in slowly. Also! Weird time to mention this, but here's the rough math on how much water you should have in the pot vs. how much food. If you're making any sort of like soup or sauce, the water is one of the ingredients, so, follow that recipe. Otherwise, you want at least as much water as it's going to take for the water level to be higher than the pile of stuff going in there. Halfway or a little over halfway for an empty pot is usually good. You never want to go right up to the lip though, because you're adding stuff, it's going to displace some water and boiling water overflowing from the pot is kinda Bad

Also! When you're making dry pasta or rice or any other dried thing like that that's going to be hydrating in the pot, remember it's going to basically double in volume after absorbing the water, and also consume that water. So like, 1 cup of rice+1 cup of water=2 cups of cooked rice and no water. If you're cooking just rice you actually kinda want that sort of a result, but mainly I'm mentioning this because if you're like, eyeballing how much pasta you're making as you're pouring it in, you need to remember you are actually going to end up with double.

And aside from that rice exception, you don't want to ever go and absorb all that water. Also, once you're done dumping stuff in your boiling water, it's usually good to take a spoon or a fork or something and kinda swirl it up a bit. Get the water really moving to make sure nothing just stuck to the bottom of the pan and it's all moving around. Some people say you need to come back and keep doing that now and then, but honestly you can generally do it once and by the time things would settle again, the water's back up to a real angry boil and doing that for you. So anyway, you boil everything for however long, and then depending what it was, either you have a pot of soup here, or a pot of something to drain. In the latter case, you should, hopefully have a colander. Big bowl full of holes and a couple legs. You stand that sucker up in an empty sink, shut the stove off, carefully take your pot by both handles and carefully move it over, and slowly dump it all into that colander. Then set the pot aside, back on the stove works, grab the colander, lift it up, shake it up and down a little, and tada.

You've got your boiled food, no longer soaking in water. you can either dump that back in the pot and add sauce or whatever, or dump it into some plates/bowls, or do what I do sometimes with like perogies and just let'em cool off and grab'em right out of there. When you can, you do want to rinse that colander off since starch and stuff makes them all sticky. And when you're done with a pot, wash that too. Real awkward to do it all after you eat and have dishes and such in the sink to deal with. Meanwhile for soup, generally you just turn the burner down once the recipe says it's done. Some stoves literally have a big "low" setting, otherwise like, stick it on 1 or 2. You can just kinda take a big serving spoon and ladle everything right from the pot on the stove into bowls. If you're a huge slob and just made a little saucepan full of instant ramen or mac'n'cheese or something and want to lazily eat it right out of the pot, I won't stop you, but you do want to take that pot off the burner first, and either have it on a cold burner or like a potholder or something. The metal is going to stay hot for a good long while. Anyway, that's basically it. It's nice if you have a full teapot handy to just put that on any still-hot burner you might have, either to make some tea while the stove's nice and hot, or just to keep that burner covered with something as it cools. Do always make sure you've double checked everything is turned off when you're done cooking. Wash stuff sooner than later. Oh and there's a thing people encourage people to do especially with like soup and chili and such where you stick a tasting spoon right in the pot while things are cooking to be sure all the seasoning is good. DON'T DO THAT! It's gross and unsanitary, it's a good way to get sick if you're doing something with meat in it, and it's a good way to burn yourself. If you really want to do that taste test thing, get to that point where you turn the stove down to low, get a regular freaking spoon in one hand, and a napkin in the other. Carefully grab a spoonful, hold it over the napkin, bring it away from the stove, blow on it a little because it's still freaking boiling, taste that, wipe up any mess you made, wash that spoon now.

You don't generally need to make corrections to seasoning ratios like ASAP. Soups stay a big liquidy mess and with heat on low they can honestly kinda live on the stove all day. You can come in way late, add extra spices or whatever, stir'em in a little, leave it simmering a bit longer, and it's fine. No reason for anything to ever be going into your mouth then back into the pot. Also don't be too afraid to ever tweak recipes. If something says to add onions and you hate onions, OK leave'em out. If something says to add lemon juice and you think limes are just inherently the better tasting real sour fruit, sub that in every time. Personally basically every time I see "salt" I just mentally substitute "adobo" because everything else in this little jar I think nicely compliments basically everything. And if you're a fan tossing a little shredded or powdered cheese onto like anything right after you put it on a plate/bowl so it just starts to melt a little just kinda classes up most things. Oh and something I was already going to say before my mentions lit up with it- The one thing that's even easier as a cooking method than boiling stuff is using a slow cooker/crockpot/instant pot (these are, I'm pretty sure, all different names for the same thing). You just throw everything in (although you generally want to just do this when there's some water or other very wet ingredient), put the lid on, hit the start button, and come back hours later, and bam, great food. It's kind of a boiling/steaming combo, at a low enough heat nothing is going to burn, and a long enough time that that whole large-solid-bits-don't-cook-evenly thing is a non-issue. I just throw whole freaking chicken breasts in that thing, screw it. The only real catch, especially if you're doing all this cooking for yourself because you're stuck at home, is it's like, minimum 4 hour cooking times, so you want to start your dinner when you're like, eating lunch or maybe even breakfast and then you have to smell something delicious all day long. The ideal use case for them if when you're actually going to be out all day and don't want to have to cook when you get home. Just, dump everything in, make sure you're not leaving it somewhere precarious turn it on, leave, go shopping, see a movie, whatever, come back that night, bam, food's ready and it's like perfect. Now all that said, wash your dishes as soon as you're done eating, seriously. Like sometimes yeah you still want everything to soak in hot water for a bit, but the less time you give food to get all dry and crusty and stuck to everything, the easier it is to just add a little soap, give things a rinse, and have that nice clean kitchen and eating area again.

How does he do this? How does a man use near enough 2,400 words to describe boiling water? Does he actually expect anyone to read his incoherent rambling about a simple task?

 

[Kosher Dill]

(pots are the big deep metal things that are kinda like a bowl and a cylinder had a bay),

Where to begin? Does he seriously think there's anyone out there who doesn't know what a pot is... but has some anyway?
"Oh, you mean those metal hats with handles?"
The only people that could conceivably be in this situation are people just like him who got dumped out of decades-long NEETdom, but their mothers gave them some cooking supplies for the new apartment.

OK, so we've got this "pot", as they so call it, and managed to fill it with DHMO which we've raised to its phase transition temperature. I hope he was referring to the phase transition between liquid and gas at standard Earth sea-level atmospheric pressure, I need this spelled out for me. But is there anything else I should know about this seething brew?

If a little boiling water splashes out and hits your clothed thigh, that's a bit warm. If it hits bare skin, that's really going to burn you.

Yes, that's right, in case you've never seen boiling water before, you should know that it can burn you!
OK, got it. What's next?

Also don't like, throw stuff into the pot.

In case you've never seen water before at all, you should know that if you throw stuff into it, it will splash!

I wonder how much of this Jake had to figure out by trial and error.

EDIT:

One of my dozens of back burner projects is I'd some day like to write a book on cooking

Unfortunately we'll have to wait till volume 14 to find out what a back burner is.

 

[GleamingTheQ-Bert]

He's an idiot. One cup of rice requires two cups of water to cook. Resulting in two cups of cooked rice. Try cooking a cup of rice in a single cup of water, see what happens.

It's not additive. The rice is absorbing the water.

 

[UselessRubberKeyboard]

What's more, if you managed to read halfway through the impossible screed, any normal and sane person will be wondering why Jake talks about boiling meat in water, or bits of chopped tomato.

That's not how you cook meat. Or tomato.

 

[Kosher Dill]

That's not how you cook meat.

That's how you cook burgers, just ask Kengle.

 

[AnOminous]

How does he do this? How does a man use near enough 2,400 words to describe boiling water? Does he actually expect anyone to read his incoherent rambling about a simple task?

He's literally so mentally defective that he's never boiled water before in his life. To him, food is something your mom brings you in the form of tendies. He is completely unaware of how food ends up that way.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

I like the part about not cooking in poet sleeves and capes and sexy aprons. Haven't we seen Jake specifically talk about poet sleeve blouses before? There's no way most of this didn't come from his own trial and error.

I guarantee you that at some point this gnome was in his subsidized apartment wearing nothing but an apron, and tossed some some quarter-tuna-can size chunks of beef into a pot of already-boiling water only to splash himself and scream in ladylike pain.

Also, the biggest mystery of this whole thing is why he thinks you can only add things to the boiling water once it's already boiling. That's a good way to make meat extra disgustingly tough, even for boiled meat. Even pasta can be cooked from cold water, you just have to keep a bit more of an eye on the doneness level (Alton Brown pretty convincingly showed this IIRC). This idiot has been risking burns from waiting to put rice and veg into an already-boiling pot.

Does he do it with eggs, too?! He talks about eggs right before the plunking stuff into already-boiling water part. Does he wonder why other people's hard-boiled eggs aren't half-exploded from their shell?

This may be my favorite googleshng of all time, in large part because of the overall accessibility of the topic. It'd be hard to explain to normies why it is that Jake is so stupid when he's always talking about inside baseball Gamergate shit or stuff only blue checkmarks ever paid attention to. But this? A ten-page essay on cooking like you're an English peasant in 1300? This is gold. I might host an annual reading of it.

 

[BScCollateral]

How does he do this? How does a man use near enough 2,400 words to describe boiling water?

Powerlevel here: recently I've been writing fairly long reviews of obscure movies with screen captures and historical context, and sending them to my friends. And I've been worried I'm starting to crack up from the ongoing quarantine.

Now I feel better.

 

[Chan the Wizard]

I can’t wait until he gets to properly microwaving tendies unlike the wrong way his bitch TERF mom did.