Just discovered a much easier way to grind my coffee in the morning and felt dumb because it was so obvious, figure there’s some good stories out there about this type of thing out there
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Preparing as much as possible in the evening, really:
- breakfast: oats in the fridge
- clothes: picking clothes and putting them on the chair
- backpack: taking out the old lunch container and other things that I don’t need tomorrow
- shaving and showering
Only quick wash with a washcloth, getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing teeth and go
When trying to get the last bit of pasta sauce from a jar, don’t bother with a rubber spatula/pot licker.
Generally you need to add a bit of water to the pot at some point anyway, because some of that moisture is boiling off. So instead, after you pour most of the sauce into the pot, add that water up front by putting a little bit to the jar, closing the lid and shaking, and now add that to the pot.
I use a little bit of red wine for my pasta sauce. Works great.
Oh hell yeah! That’s classes it up a bunch!
wait. so you want our things and your not going to tell us the better way to grind coffee.
Not really applicable to most grinders so I left it out. My grinder is a manual one with three pieces, the top which has the grinder, the bottom jar it screws on to, along with a cap to screw on to the jar to preserve ground coffee when not in use. I store it with the cap on and the top separate. You load the beans into the top part, but the top doesn’t have a flat bottom so I would try and balance it and frequently spill the beans when loading it instead of just taking the cap off and screwing it on to the jar and then loading the beans…
I too will give no secrets without recompense.
Me method has been to buy the cheap maxwell house breakfast blend pre ground 😬 I guess I have poor taste and low standards … Hard to disappoint!
I mean I don’t even like cofee. my wife has practically cut it out so we just have her emergency cafeine hit supply on hand.
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You can pull out the dishwasher cutlery basket and take it to the cutley drawer, instead of taking them one by one.
Haha I just made this comment, it took me too many years to think of this
I pull out the cutlery basket, unload it directly from the counter by the silverware drawer. Then I go back and pull out the entire top rack and do the same, then the bottom.
I only have to walk back to the dishwasher 3 times.
Have your cutlery drawer next to the dishwasher and you don’t even need to
In a lot of dishwashers, the silverware goes in its own little detachable caddy. Instead of reaching over to the dishwasher to load and unload every fork and knife, just pick up the caddy and collect all the silverware, or take it directly to where its stored and unload it there.
Edit: someone beat me to it, haha
Also, if you sort your silverware before starting the dishwasher, unloading will be faster
I find the sorting works well enough that I don’t even bother with taking the basket out. Though my dishwasher and utensil drawer are just a pivot step away from each other, so ymmv.
I did this until I found out that spoons were spooning this way and some of them weren’t clean afterwards. So now it’s planned chaos again.
I moved that caddy to the top shelf of my dishwasher so I don’t have to keep bending over to fill/empty it. Fuck the po-lice!
You can turn honey into honey syrup by adding a tiiiiny amount of boiling water and stirring it (not in a plastic container!). It keeps a lot better without crystalizing, and you can put it in the fridge where the ants can’t get to it. If it crystalizes before you get to it, you can use the same trick to get it back.
My tip for pouring viscous things like honey or molasses is to go slooooow and rotate the bottle if you need to reduce the size of the pour. In this case, I add the boiling water to the bottle to get the residue then pour it into the glass container, much like the pasta trick on this thread.
Now I believe you owe us a coffee tip
now I believe you owe us a coffee tip
It’s not applicable to most grinders so I left it out. My grinder is a manual one with three pieces, the top which has the grinder, the bottom jar it screws on to, along with a cap to screw on to the jar to preserve ground coffee when not in use. I store it with the cap on and the top separate. You load the beans into the top part, but the top doesn’t have a flat bottom so I would try and balance it and frequently spill the beans when loading it instead of just taking the cap off and screwing it on to the jar and then loading the beans…
The dishwasher should be run when it’s convenient, not when it’s full.
I run the dishwasher so it’s finished at least an hour before I start dinner. So when I start cooking, 1. all the dishes are clean, and 2. the dishwasher is empty. This will save you so much effort if you can just learn to run the thing half full once in a while.
I used to feel that the dishwasher should be full for efficiency, environmental reasons, water bill, and such. Then, I added a water flow meter to my Home Assistant setup.
A full dishwasher cycle uses 4 gallons of water.
Four. Gallons.
Yeah, run that thing when you need it.
For comparison: that’s flushing the toilet about three times or showering for about two minutes.
There IS electricity, but… it’s also not much. I think I calculated a total cost of about a quarter for mine last year or so… so yeah, I don’t run it because of the ADHD, not because of the cost :)
I should calculate it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my water flow sensor uses more electricity in a year than the dishwasher. It’s very low-current, but it’s on 24/7.
Some of us live in places with drought issues.
For comparison, my daily shower, with a low-flow shower head, uses 12 to 13 gallons. Hand-washing a large item, like a cooking pot, can take several gallons.
Yep, these days washing dishes by hand almost always takes more water than using a dishwasher
I always hear that but I’m not convinced. If I don’t rinse my dishes till their pretty damn clean then they come out of the dishwasher dirty. Been like this on every dishwasher I have used, at my house, at my parents house, at my SO’s house when they got a brand new one, at my friends house I can go on I have a decent sample size. If you count all the rinsing and a wash cycle I highly doubt it’s less. Plus when I wash dishes by hand I usually have several to do, and use a warm container of soapy water for my sponge. Besides the quart or 2 tops in my dish bin, it uses the same amount of water to rinse the suds off if not less than is necessary to rinse dishes before they go in the machine due to the sponge scrubbing. Maybe all 5+ dishwashers ive used are just shit 🤷
Do you live somewhere with very hard water? That fucks up powder dishwashing detergent IME, but the enzyme-based works fine for me in hard water probably 98% of the time. It has trouble with caked on peanut butter, but I blame that on the angle it was put in usually. If you used enzyme based and don’t have hard water then 🤷♂️
My water quality fluctuates but usually around 55ppm, so not terribly hard. I do use some I believe enzyme based tablets for dishwasher and their ok but if it’s caked on from yesterday or anything more than a few thousandths thick it seems to struggle. No matter what peanut butter and the dishwasher don’t mix gotta wipe that butter knife off 🤣
This plus hand washing cooking stuff while cooking (when possible) make cleaning up after meals a lot less dreadful. Just having mixing bowels and other prep stuff out of the way makes it easier to wash wooden spoons and large items like mixing bowls that doesn’t go in the dishwasher reasonable after eating.
mixing bowels
Remind me never to eat at your house.
Never eat at my house 😉
Dishwasher at night or very early morning. The power costs are lower.
on your billing plan, maybe
I run mine before going to bed, so I’m not waiting on the heated drying to finish and I have fresh plates and untensils in the morning.
Saying no instead of trying to fix everyone’s problems. I’m bit handy at fixing a lot of things and I’m happy to teach people how to fix stuff but sadly most of them don’t want to learn and just see me as a tool.
Can you please fix me so that I can say “no”?
No 🙂
If you have a detachable faucet, you can stretch it over to fill your coffee machine directly.
…oh my god…
Years eh?
The cheap version without a fancy faucet is if your coffee machine is close enough to do that while turning on the faucet, the wire from the coffee machine can probably also reach over the sink, so you can hold the coffee machine under the regular faucet.
Instructions unclear. Operated coffee machine in bathtub. Died.
Yes sir! I do this every day!
No! My coffee pot is too far away!
For a long time, I thought, I had a pretty good technique for cutting bell peppers by cutting near the indents, so I could easily remove the white strips.
Then decided one day to look up how chefs do it. And yeah, my technique was garbage in comparison. 😅The technique that I now use, is to cut off the stem, so you can place it upside down onto the cutting board. And then slice downwards between two indents, so that you take out a whole wall.
Ideally, you just need three slices to take out the three walls and then you’re left with the stem, the seeds and the white strips, all still connected for ease of disposal.But even if you’ve got an ugly bell pepper or not the skills to do it in three cuts, it’s fine. After taking out that first wall, you can continue going around in a circle, just make sure to cut between the white strip and the wall, so that gets removed right away.
It’s just easily twice as fast as what I was doing before, and I’m much less likely to get seeds everywhere as well.
Tbh basically every vegetable has an ideal way to cut it up like this. Properly learning to dice onions changed my life
EDIT: Shout outs to Kenji Lopez Alt’s youtube channel for having a bunch of videos on proper, chef-like methods of cutting up various vegetables, that’s where I learned a bunch of them
I just looked this up and Gordon Ramsey’s video popped up. That looks crazy easy 😯 Thanks for the tip 😆
I suffered from back pain. Until one doc recommended one of those 20$ abs rollers. Like 20 reps take 3 minutes? Boom. No more back pain. Actually had to quit a more physical job because of this.
Exercising regularly and eating healthy and then experiencing the benefits of easier sleep and feeling happier is so frustrating.
The worst feeling came with the realisation that all those annoying gym junkie “you are what you eat”, “eat less, move more” douchebags are correct about everything. Now I’m responsible for my actions, goddammit.
The other week I didn’t get the fries with my normal chicken burger from the fast food place and didn’t get that awful heavy feeling in my stomach afterwards. Made me so angry.
The realization that how we feel is directly affected by the things we do and food we eat is super frustrating.
Mainly, because I want to eat like shit and do nothing and still feel good and it just doesn’t work.
On the flip side, as someone that’s dealt with long-term chronic depression, it’s nice to know that there are literal activities that can directly counter my shitty mood. Taking a walk, petting a dog, talking with a friend/loved one, sitting in sunshine, exercise, listen to music… etc. etc.
It’s kind of like half the pharmaceutical industry has sprung up because people would rather take a pill and feel a bit better, than engage in any sort of healthy eating/exercise to feel actually better.
Very true. For that matter, the “wellness” industry in general and a lot of popular wisdom about what ails us is mostly trivial, too.
The amount of weight given to the topic of whether artificial sweeteners are better or worse for your overall health than sugar compared to the time spent on talking about the dismally low percentage of the population who actually eat enough fruit and veg is the complete wrong way around!
Diet Coke is the least of your worries if you’re not getting any fibre, people! And if you are getting enough fibre, protein, and healthy fats, the right level of calories and all your recommended vegetables, then by all means drink all the Diet Coke you want! Which won’t be much because healthy diets leave you much more satiated and naturally energetic anyway.
The reason of course is that avoiding artificial sweeteners or some purported “toxin” is a quick and easy way to feel healthier and feel like you’re doing something without actually having to think about true overall health… Allegorically, everyone’s trying to build a pyramid from the top down.
A lot of good advice in the comments below, but one thing that has kept me mobile after breaking my back is stretching. Specifically, stretching your hamstrings, especially, if like me, you sit a lot. As we sit more, the hamstrings shorten and pull in the hips, which can cause back pain, it’s a cascading effect.
Every day, I spend at least 5-10 minutes stretching just my legs and focus on my hamstrings. It’s kept a lot of pain away or at least within tolerable levels.
Funny enough, I was never able to touch my toes until after I had 2 titanium rods installed in my back.
Do some lateral walks too. Trick is to push off the back leg.
Shaving in the shower
It is difficult to shave a face without a mirror, but I know many women do this, as legs don’t require a mirror.
I have a metal disk from a hard drive that I keep on a suction cup in my shower to use as a mirror. Works wonderfully.
just wanted to add that shaving in the shower at the end or doing it in the bath right after is great as the steam and such really gets your skin in the right condition to shave. I even do it without shaving cream or soap in the shower because you can just keep your skin real wet.
Well, I can see that in a bath, but I can’t fit in the bathtub. Not due to girth, but height. Loved baths as a kid. Just not an option now.
yeah i don’t know why I said bath there. I think I meant shower or bath or right after either and my brain got all running over itself when expressing it. The important part is all the steam and water just get the skin really ready. really the shower is the best because you can constantly rewet.
All good, I just figured your bathtubs were larger.
Hell, my kitchen sink could double as a urinal, if I were so gross.
I am considered tall. This isn’t a blessing. I would love to be about 5’10".
Yeah my height is actually one of the things im mostly happy about as far as general traits go. im just shy of 6 so I have like hit my head only a few times in my life and it was for pretty low stuff. Then like height is pretty important for a guy so its nice to be able to respond 6ft although my brother gets anoyed at that but im not gonna say 5 11 and change. I had a roomate and neighbor in the dorms in college and they were six three and man. You would think 3 inches would not make much of a difference but you could see how annoying it was. Heck my wife is tall for a woman and we are in a place where we would like to get the toilet and counters higher. I can’t imagine how bad this place would be for someone whose really tall.
I do have a mirror in the shower for that purpose. Whenever I use conditioner in my hair I rub some on my face as well and that works great to shave with
Agreed! When I condition my hair, I also condition my face. And I also have beard conditioner.
I figure a mirror in the shower would fog like crazy. I leave my bathroom door open when I am showering and expect to shave so the mirrors don’t fog up.
I have a plastic cup I keep in the shower to rinse my razor off in, I also use it to pour water on the mirror before I shave, once the mirror is heated up by the water it stops fogging.
a bit of conditioner spread on the mirror should prevent condensation
It’s kinda not really that hard. You can just feel where you still need to shave. I guess I’m biased, though, because I’m a redhead, so unless I’ve let it go a REALLY long time, my hairs are basically invisible anyway. (It doesn’t help that my eyes are terrible.) Even with a mirror, I need to feel to tell if they’re actually short enough. So the steam on my skin makes a bigger difference for my shave than having a mirror.
Oh man, my hair is a deep brown, almost black. It is so obvious if I miss a spot. And it is thick, like cutting a forest down.
I need a mirror and still have to do rub tests. Goddamn trees on my face.
I even went into a laser hair removal place and asked for a quote, and the lady was stunned. She didn’t know how to say it. Yeah, I can’t get away with not shaving and growing a beard sucks.
So I use beard conditioner and hair conditioner to soften it, then use shaving cream and grind on it until I can no longer hear the abrasions of the hair cutting down in my cranium.
And finally, I am ready for the meeting with the client. So I envy you.
Hell, man, I have to shave four hours ahead of time, because my skin is red from the operation. And I have an expensive razor set.
You are lucky.
Oof. Yeah, that sucks. If it’s any consolation, I can’t grow a decent looking beard to save my life. The front of my chin basically grows nothing, but my neck grows in thick, bushy curls. I look like a caricature of a basement-dweller. So I also need to stay fairly clean-shaven. But yeah, I guess that’s easier for me than I realized.
Brushing teeth in the shower too.
You can cook in the shower too!
Well what’s the easier way to grind coffee?
Not really applicable to most grinders so I left it out. My grinder is a manual one with three pieces, the top which has the grinder, the bottom jar it screws on to, along with a cap to screw on to the jar to preserve ground coffee when not in use. I store it with the cap on and the top separate. You load the beans into the top part, but the top doesn’t have a flat bottom so I would try and balance it and frequently spill the beans when loading it instead of just taking the cap off and screwing it on to the jar and then loading the beans…
I don’t think I’ve ever used the actual cap, I just keep it assembled. Also contains the coffee dust, for those of us not fancy enough for a four part grinder that has a bottom cap for the grindy bit
I know! Instant coffee!
Starbucks! The coffee practically grinds itself!
