I recently heard Michele Obama talking about wanting more slow boring days. For some reason it felt good to hear despite me ostensibly having very little in common with her.
But I have to be at work at 8 AM tomorrow. How do I find the time to take it slow?
That’s the real question, isn’t it? When our employers demand more of our time than we get to spend with our actual families, the take-it-slow life just isn’t a possibility. Unless you’re independently wealthy.
I’ve reached a point of just not giving a fuck. I’ve begun to wonder if that’s why I’m getting laid off but if so, then I deserve it but with an asterisk.
I worked 30-40 hours and delivered exceptional work. Quality of which was on par with my peers who easily work 50-60 hours a week. My boss works 80+ hours a week and I just keep asking myself “why give the company so much of your life and it doesn’t give a flying fuck about you?”
I’m sorry if you don’t see me hustling. I’m going to give you my everything, but within the timebox we’ve agreed to. Yes, I’ll agree to work the occasional overtime for incident management, etc. but I am for sure not going to work 50-60 hours a week regularly.
My life is worth more than the job and I am not going to waste it behind a screen moving numbers around for more time than I need to.
IMO “wealthy” is not the threshold one needs to achieve. They key to a sustainable life is a low “burn rate”. This is why generational properties were so important and why it is a tragedy that it is so rare amongst working people in the US (for many reasons). That plus public transportation and basic healthcare. The US is designed to turn people into economic slaves by removing the option to work less.
If rent/mortgage, basic healthcare, and car payments were not a requirement, would you be under such pressure to stay in a job that exploits you? That’s why many municipalities do not allow multi-family homes because they don’t want multiple generations partitioning the big house your grandparents left you in order to fit your parents, your sisters family and your family under one paid off roof. Public transportation? Ha! Get a job to pay for a car, to drive to work, to pay for the car. Basic healthcare? You better not lose that job unless you want to die of disease or drown in medical debt.
I still have a mortgage, but I don’t have car payments and my bills have been steady for years.
I have never been stable by any historically recent metric, yet I can easily survive on $750/mth usd living in the US. Sure, a depressed area, but I can make it work.
I’ve never been stable so I learned to live on very little, and make up for it where I can. I won’t ever have money for travel, but historically nobody did. We are spoiled as fuck to think international vacations are a baseline necessity to call life good.
It’s not easy in today’s world but it is totally doable, if you don’t give a fuck about keeping up with people around you, and focus on what makes your life good.
When someone leaves you a home for nothing when most of the people around you cannot afford one, that is ‘wealth’. If I did not have to worry about rent, healthcare and car payments, that would make me wealthy - because it is the wealthy who do not have these concerns to the same degree as the majority of the population. Generational wealth is also a great way to keep the ‘undesirables’ out of a community - and has been used so multiple times in the past. It’s one of the reasons why people from poor families statistically end up just as, or even more poor than their parents.
There are jobs.
Im a flight attendant and work 72 hrs a month, my husband is a professor and is in front of a class 60 hrs a month.
(My husband and I certainly both came from privileged backgrounds (say middle class ish) and both got degrees that although our parents didn’t pay for they gave us resources - either way I wouldnt say our lifestyle is unobtainable)
Having said all that…in general you’re correct. Our case is certainly an outlier. We can’t all be flight attendants
Edit: our parents aren’t dead yet, but when they do pop off they each have a house we will get a share of (to your point)
I want to learn more about these 48 hour chocolate chip cookies
Simple way, make your preferred dough and then stash it in the fridge for a few days. Even just a few hours can make a difference, gives time for flour to hydrate at the minimum, longer is better for flavour.
Applicable to almost any baked good too, bread/pizza benefits from long, slow ferments, get some complexity of flavour + can help with the dough’s structure. Sour dough kinda forces you into these long fermentation periods, I tend to use a preferment (like a biga or poolish) when I’ll use bakers yeast.
Also can be convenient if you’re busy, it’s quick to mix things together, let the dough do the hard work for you.
These are pretty amazing
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/supersized-super-soft-chocolate-chip-cookies-recipe
Most things by King Arthur flour are good! I like the Cornish pasty dough recipe they have!
If you ever get a chance, visit the King Arthur headquarters in Vermont. They have a calendar of baking workshops and training courses that are top-notch. The on-site bakery has breads, sandwiches, cakes, cookies, and even pizza dough.
I know! One day I will, but currently complete lack of money. Until then I will be happy knowing they’re employee owned and stuff.
Truth. I feel silly having brand loyalty to a flour brand, but I do. I think King Arthur puts out fresher, better flour, and I think their recipes and website are super solid. Legitimately a fan of a flour brand, lol.
Not silly! The flour is very exactly what it says, which is super helpful for certain very finicky foods! I know there’s a cookie I make sometimes that can get weird on some flours, it never ever fails to work on King Arthur! (I’m sure it would work on other brands though like I’ve heard good about Red Mill?)
I am one of those 15+ minutes coffee guys. It is my centering ritual.
Not me. I require an external factor to force a sense of urgency or I don’t do shit. When I was dating and had girls over all the time, house was spotless. Now that I’m married, not so much.
Always rocked out in primary school. Always got the same report to my parents, “Doesn’t do well in unstructured activities.” Add my chaotic good nature to that, yeah, I have to be forced to give a fuck.
As someone with ADHD, I feel this.
If there isn’t someone constantly pressuring me to get it done, I will never start it. The only way I know how to work is under constant pressure. I perform my best when scrambling at the last minute to get it done before it’s too late.
Some of these I agree with, but some just don’t apply or don’t sound like fun. I don’t even drink coffee or eat chocolate chip cookies. Reading is very difficult, I really need white text on a black screen with the brightness up, I can’t read out of a big fat book. But the things I do are all better when I take my time.
Hence why beta 1.7.3 minecraft is such a gem. It’s the last major version that understands that the game is meant to be played slowly.
Explain?
The next version added sprinting.
And hunger
That’s funny because I recently started playing a modpack through Prism Launcher and I only eat because it is tied to health regeneration. It’s a minor inconvenience and doesn’t add anything else. Even the various foods the modpack adds can be distilled to what provides the most benefit for the least work because it is a chore instead of a rewarding and engaging experience.
Alpha is even better because it doesn’t have beds, which low-key ruined the game…
Paul Virilio rolling over in his grave upon hearing this
I didn’t get a slow cooker until I was an adult, and it was a life changer. I love a recipe that consists of “ingredients, plus 6-8 hours.”
It’s nice to put ingredients into it, leave/sleep/something and come back to food!!! I love it. Mine died recently, I was very sad.
Wow these beans are amazing, what’s your secret?
I forgot about them
I love my Le Creuset dutch oven. It’s just like you said (ingredients + 6-8 hours) but I add a stovetop browning step at the beginning followed by a deglaze, then add the ingredients, lid on, and into the low oven until fork tender!
I’ve got a Staub Dutch oven and it’s my favourite kitchen piece I own, closely followed by my stainless steel skillet. Honestly if I lost all my pots and pans and had to start from scratch I’d buy those two right away and just coast for a while. Maybe a medium sauce pan for boiling stuff but that would be enough for a while. I do really enjoy cooking though so I’d eventually want to get all the stuff back, but I could survive and eat good food with just that.
Have you tried baking bread in your Dutch oven? I mostly use mine for braises and potroasts but it does work for bread too which is quite wild!
I never got much into baking, that’s more my wife’s thing. I might try bread in the Dutch oven, or see if my wife wants to give it a try. An ex-coworker has recently gotten really into baking sourdough bread in a Dutch oven and I’ve seen pictures, they look awesome. I prefer sourdough anyway so I might go for that one.
Yeah sourdough is the way to go if you really get into baking bread. It’s a lot more finicky and tricky to learn though, plus it’s a commitment to keep a starter going.
Shameless sloth propaganda
Upvote
48 hour cookies? The hell does it need to take that damn long?
the cookie wrapping part of melon pan? I make 3 batches worth of the cookie dough which has a sit in the fridge step, and make the buns over 2 or 3 days and take out the cookie dough as needed.
mostly sit in the fridge for a while
Mostly meh, but those long time cookies are amazing.
Just letting regular recipes sit in the fridge a few hours is a big shift in texture and taste that are beneficial to most palates. Obviously, preferences vary and there’s no single “best” anything food wise, but you can get significant changes in intensity and depth of flavor with the long recipes
Tell us your wisdom oh Baker of the Mountain. Do you just use the same recipe or is it modified somehow to benefit from the dwell time? Best type of cookie for this treatment? Teach me something new that’s not another reason to be depressed please.
Yeah, it can be done with any recipe usually. It does benefit when you start with more complex flavors to begin with, but even the most basic tollhouse recipe gets changed over time just by chilling.
Basically, it lets the flour fully hydrate, and the enzymes present break down sugars. You end up with layers of flavor as you eat each cookie.
There is an upper limit to how long a given recipe can go, but the “48 hour” label kinda dials in the sweet spot for most.
The absolute best cookie recipe I’ve seen that makes the best use of the method is Any version of Levain style cookies. That particular recipe is real forgiving, and they actually give a little info on what’s going on. I’ve had them stay in the fridge for a week a couple of times, and be just as good as on day 2 or 3. IIRC, they specify overnight for the rest period, but unless you’re getting started at dawn of the first day, you’ll want to give them at least 36 hours in the fridge.
The exception is recipes meant to be thin and crispy. They don’t benefit at all, and you end up losing some crispness by trying.
I’ve done pretty much every standard cookie type with the long rest, and with the possible exception of snickerdoodles, you’ll see some difference in outcome that most people enjoy. Peanut butter cookies do great with it. So do the reddit-famous murder cookies. Chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, I find I really notice more enjoyable flavors. Sugar cookies, and butter cookies, I’m on the fence with because you get a bit more chew, so the shift in complexity is kind of a side grade.
Just wanna say thanks for sharing this baking tip. It’s so interesting that chilling the dough can make such a difference. I gotta try it some day.
No worries :)
As a side note, serious eats did a whole test run of options for cookies. Don’t have the link handy, but they went through various factors like type of sweetener, leavening, etc and showed what changes each makes. It’s possible to tweak any given recipe to adjust for desired results once you get that internalized.
I’d much rather have chewy sugar cookies than crumbly mess cookies. Though I’ve never been that big of a fan, so maybe it’s still a less “ideal” sugar cookie.
Tbh, if I can’t get them right, I’d rather have chewy than that half-ass crumbly texture too.
Sugar cookies need to be crisp, crystalline, not crumbly. The problem is that it’s all about getting that sugar/fat ratio perfect with the flour, and that’s hard to pull off since flour hydration varies based on environmental factors.
They’re one of those super basic kind of baked good that is so hard to really nail that it could be a test. It’s like omelettes; you have to really have your techniques and knowledge nailed down tight to make them great, and they’re easy to screw up.
But damn, when they do come out perfect, and they almost dissolve on the tongue leaving behind that buttery goodness, it’s a bit of magic. Not my favorite cookies by a mile, but still.
Reminds me of those cooking anime when they’re describing a perfectly cooked meal… ugh I’m too hungry. lol Pretty sure I saw poached eggs and omelettes as tests in real cooking shows, too. I want to taste a perfect sugar cookie. They might not remain at the bottom of my cookie list if it’s as good as you describe.
I wish I could pretend to get them perfect every time, but I kinda cap out at 7/10. I’ve gotten to the point where the edges are always great, but nailing the centers isn’t as reliable.
My omelette game is amazing though! Been working on that since I was a kid. Don’t ask about the poached eggs though lol.
This recipe is pretty close to the one I use; I haven’t gotten around to digitizing some of my older recipes out of laziness.
One of the biggest factors in getting the centers crispy is the thickness factor though. After I’ve got them cut, I take a cocktail or highball glass, dip the bottom into sugar and gently flatten them a little more. Not enough the edges split, but just before they would.
If the flour is running a little more moist, I’ll decrease the amount of egg a touch by separating the yolk and decreasing it by half-ish. It’s one of those things that’s by feel though, I’ve yet to figure out a way to turn it into a precise measure because it’s all about his the flour feels before and during mixing. The difference is minor, but it seems to be the limiting factor in making sure the centers are crispy rather than crunchy or chewy.
Nah, I’m good
Too poor, I’m either working or dying
slowmaxxxing is a privilege
