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Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

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Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#851

An air fryer. It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids. It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop. The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.…

... and put them over rice that you made in your $130 rice cooker

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#852
post #431

An air fryer. It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids. It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop. The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.…

> Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. > The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes. Normal sized boneless chicken breasts should cook in a pan in about 10 minutes or less, and you really don't need to do anything other than flip them once. If air fryers are convincing people to cook their own fresh food I would say that's a good thing, but I'm still strug…

Air fryers definitely are very different than ovens or pan frying, it's hard to explain, but it's definitely more comparable to frying in that it crisps up food by removing the water from the outside of stuff quickly.

By this logic it's particularly good at cooking food that otherwise would be better fried, but outside of that it does vegetables like brussel sprouts or small filets of fish particularly well leaving the inside soft and the outside cooked.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#853

An air fryer. It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids. It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop. The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.…

What's a "basic Asian sauce"? I'm not trying to be critical, but am genuinely curious as someone who's lived more than half the years since 1997 in Taiwan without hearing that term before.

Not OP, but I am half Asian and worked in various Asian restaurants growing up in the US. When I read the term "basic Asian (brown) sauce" I'd assume some combination of soy sauce, brown sugar, oyster sauce, and chicken/beef broth. With options for garlic, ginger, sesame oil, and rice wine, plus whatever else to tailor towards the dish.

I'd wager that having spent so long in Taiwan you've probably never heard the term because there it would just be "sauce" :P (or less tongue-in-cheek, it's just something that is implicitly and silently understood and recognized rather than having some kind of formal name).

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#856

An air fryer. It’s really a badly marketed product. Its real utility isn’t that it uses less oil, but that it cooks incredibly fast. Essentially an oven on steroids. It’s made cooking so much easier. I usually toss some boneless chicken in with a light coating of soy sauce and cornflour. While the chicken cooks, I prep a basic Asian sauce on the stovetop. The chicken and the sauce are both done within 10-15 minutes.…

What's a "basic Asian sauce"? I'm not trying to be critical, but am genuinely curious as someone who's lived more than half the years since 1997 in Taiwan without hearing that term before.

No reply from OP, but I know or know of a few people who do something along these lines. There are a set of ingredients relatively common though clearly not universal across East Asia and I suspect OP is making a pastiche of those. If it were a language you'd call it a pidgin. But it's food so I dunno what you call it.

Though the phrase "White Man's Teriyaki sauce" is running around in my head and yes I get the irony of that.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#858

A bit more than $200- An Oura ring. Some quantitative insight around sleep, heart rate, heart rate variation, temperature, etc. SUPER interesting to see how things change when sick, drink alcohol, etc. Also- I confess to not minding the tone/language the product uses for coaching purposes. It is not an asshole. Relatedly, tracking food/calories/water consumption in the (free- no need to pay them) Noom app has been us…

I bought Oura a couple of years ago because it's a ring that runs Linux and gives you some insight into your life.

Well, it does run Linux, but the rest - not so much.

Did side by side tests with another sleep tracker and Oura was pulling its data seemingly out of its ass. Completely random stuff. After seeing that all other data it reported didn't instill much confidence either, nor did it correspond to what I was actually observing. So packed it up and stashed into a closet. It's still a cool gadget, but inaccurate to the point of being utterly useless.

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#859

A basic KVM switch [0]. Got tired of switching my mouse, keyboard and monitor cables between my work laptop and my desktop PC. This makes it a 1 button press. 0: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B08NVKHRRT/

Synergy/Mouse without borders not an option?

Re: Ask HN: What sub $200 product improved your 2022

#860

A few of my favorites: There's a set of string lights in my apartment that were left installed when I moved in. They look pretty nice and they provide decent illumination in an area that's difficult to light, but I virtually never used them because I needed to plug them into an outlet in order to turn them on. I finally bought a device that goes between the plug and outlet with a cord to a pushbutton switch. I now us…

I'll also recommend getting a bluetooth OBD2 scanner. There are a bunch of them available in the $12 to $20 range.

It seems absurd to go to mechanic to know what the "Check engine" problem is.

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