Fortunately i was a professional cook for over a decade. UNfortunately the first post i made explaining it was suuuuper long. Let's see if i can do better
So you select any protein that you can cook in a frying pan -- chicken breasts, ground beef, pork chops, sausages, steak, chicken thighs, whatever. You also select one or two types of veggie (mushrooms or tubers also work, i just did this with potatoes and carrots for dinner tonight).
[i like cooking for vegetarians, but this is how i cook for myself when i'm low on spoons - perhaps i'll do another post for meatless meals]
You'll also need some kind of oil, and a sauce or two of your choice in a bottle. All cooking gear is a large frying pan with lid (i prefer non-stick) a spatula, a cutting board, and a knife.
You cut the veggies into bite size pieces, cut up enough for two meals. One kind of veggie is fine, or you can do mix two or three
Put frying pan on medium heat with a little oil. Tubers or mushrooms or go in the pan a few minutes before the protein. 2 portions of the protein goes in the pan, about 5 minutes with lid (don't worry you can still get a good sear on both sides)
Now flip your protein if it's flip-able and add normal veggies, put the lid back on another five-ish minutes.
Take your protein out and put it with one portion of the veggies in a microwave safe container. That's going to be your lunch tomorrow. Put the other portion of protein on a plate to rest (you have to let a cooked protein sit a couple minutes before you serve it or when you cut into it all the juices run out and it goes dry - the liquids thicken as it cools, preventing this drying out if you let it rest, the goal is to serve it very warm but not hot hot)
While it's resting, pour some sauce from your bottle in the pan with the rest of the veggies and turn up the heat. A single sauce/bottle is fine, i like to get fancy and mix a couple. Two examples of personal favorite mixes are 1: bbq sauce and a hot sauce like sriracha 2: roughly equal parts low sodium soy sauce and worcestershire (makes something similar to a teriyaki sauce) A swallow of wine is almost always a great option if you want to add that to your sauce too, just add it to the pan before the other sauces so the alcohol has time to burn off.
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The whole thing takes about 35 minutes even with washing the dishes, and that includes your lunch for the next day- just pour a different sauce on and stick it in the microwave for a couple minutes (or five minutes back in the frying pan) and you have a full healthy lunch with a different flavor
You can use this technique every single meal and it yields hundreds of combinations, from pork and potatoes bbq, to salmon and broccoli teriyaki, to chicken and zucchini in a soy glaze.
It will keep you down to less than an hour of kitchen time per day total for both lunch and dinner including all dish clean up, uses the least dishes, the least effort, requires the least technique, and is, depending on what you pick out, very affordable
here are a couple more examples from this month; i didn’t take pictures of the salmon i did recently, but you get the idea
it's not super fancy, but it is easy, affordable, quick, and any flavors you want. Hope this helps some folks
Happy Cooking!
Sometimes a girl can be a grandfather
It's a little crazy to watch the dungeon meshi fandom explode. As I say this, at the start of april 2024, there are 694 dungeon meshi fics on ao3 which looks like a modest number especially if you consider that the earliest fic in the tag is from 2017. But that's not taking into account that 544 of those 694 were posted 2024 and a whopping 299 were in march 2024 alone. And considering that the average lifetime of a fic from initial idea to writing and editing to publication is months we are actually at a very early point on the exponential curve, the real explosion is yet to come.
To illustrate my point, if you look a little more closely at the fics you'll realize the vast majority of them are oneshots, not multichaptered fics. Like. Much more compared to more established fandoms.
(If you want hard numbers for proof: the number of fics updated, not posted, in march 2024 was 326. That means that of all the fics updated in march ONLY 27 were fics posted earlier than march. And of the 299 posted, only 64 weren't oneshots. For all fics updated in march 72.1% were oneshots, 27.9% not. Compare that to a randomly chosen other fandom I'm in, Deltarune, where only 35.5% of the fics updated in march 2024 were oneshots, and 64.5% were not. The difference is staggering dunmeshi literally has twice as many oneshots comparetively)
And that's because oneshots are quicker to write, while a multichaptered fic takes much more planning. The longest fic in the dunmeshi fandom tag is currently only 67K words which is impressive but nothing compared to the behemoths you usually see occupying that spot. All those longfics? Those are still coming.
GET PRETENDO NETWORK !!!
Those ruinous Pokémon sure were something
Last November, we did an informal game jam for folks who wanted to write something for Writing Month, but would prefer to write fewer than fifty thousand words of it. You can find the complete list of participants for that event in this post here. There's also an off-Tumblr archive of entries whose authors gave permission for them to be preserved here, if any of those links turn out to be broken.
Last year's collaboration went over well enough that I thought we might dust it off again this year. To be clear, this is just for fun – it's not a curated jam, and nobody's judging winners or handing out prizes..
If you'd like to throw your hat in, just follow these steps:
Step 1: If you're unfamiliar with 200-word RPGs, read a bunch of last year's entries (linked above) or browse the 200 Word RPG Challege archives at https://200wordrpg.github.io/ to get your brain-meats properly configured.
Step 2: Write your own 200-word RPG. If you're not sure whether you have 200 words or not (and with RPGs it can genuinely be difficult to tell!), you can use the word counter at https://200wordrpg.github.io/wordcount to check.
Step 3: Reblog this post and append your 200-word RPG.
Step 4 (optional): Please indicate in your post whether you're okay with having your 200-word RPG archived off-site for posterity – if you don't say anything one way or the other, I'll assume the answer is "no".
(As before, as a courtesy to anyone who's creeping the notes, please restrict non-200-word-RPG commentary to replies and tags until November 2023 is over – let's make the actual games easy to find!)
the cosmic horror implications of timeloops are fascinating if you actually stop to think about it. because in order to trap someone in a situation like that you'd either have to reset all of time with each loop, which suggests a staggeringly horrifying scale of power and personal pettiness, or you'd have to isolate an area of effect to keep replaying like a broken record while the rest of time continues around it, posing potentially destructive consequences for the integrity of reality itself if people and things caught in the timeloop fail to show up in the present and effect change outside of it.
Two Friends Discuss Angels
There's a 45 minute explainer video on my Patreon if people want to learn more
I can’t help but think on the parallels between the “Good Ending” of Slay The Princess and the entire premise of 17776. A world in which nothing can change- and if happiness might be able to be found within it.
While obviously the views on how positive of a thing this is on the whole differ greatly between the two worlds, one still wonders if the world of 17776 might provide some sort of outlook as to the effects the “Good Ending” might have had on the greater world of Slay The Princess.
all demographics and time periods and geography taken fully into consideration, some people were just born to lose