31–40 of 180 posts
Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."
I'd rather cook myself now where I can actually taste flavors and feel good, rather than just having the primal "mmm good food" button bashed in my lizard brain and feeling like garbage afterwards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating in restaurants is terrible for your health. Here's a study that finds a 49% increase in all-cause mortality risk for those who frequently eat meals prepared away from home. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33775622/ I have stopped eating out completely as I always feel gross and tired after a restaurant meal vs energized after home-cooked food. I think it's mostly due to cheap oils in quantities you would never…
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and th…
Not true. Pull out that blowtorch.
> your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods
Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine.
> restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store
This might be true, but from what I have seen most of the restaurants are barely even reaching SysCo/USFoods level of quality ingredients. Your local grocery store is probably just fine until you are a very good cook. At that point, you might have to start looking at more niche grocery stores.
And, if you get better than that, well, you're likely sufficiently obsessive that you will find a way.
> You start getting into fine dining or a Michelin experience with teams of people preparing the food and it's an entirely different level of impossibility to make at home.
It's more sheer technique and attention to fussy detail than teams of people. A patissier is simply WAY better than you are at making desserts, for example. They know all the tricks; they will also have all the necessary equipment.
However, yeah, Michelin restaurants are definitely next level.
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…
You know, running a business kind of like that guy who writes about inside Apple news very rarely but effectively (what’s his name, Gruber? Daring Fireball?)
The business doesn’t actually have to make money in the first few years, as long as you are making bona-fide attempts to grow it. No one requires you to watch every movie or eat every burrito. But who is the government to say you’re not trying to run a business as a food or movie critic?
Much of your personal lifestyle could then be deducted as a business expense on your schedule C, being “necessary and ordinary” for your various LLCs. Perhaps even your travel expenses if you are a travel blogger staying at hotels etc.
But maybe it’s not a joke. Any lawyers or accountants on HN see any problems with this? Again, I’m talking about doing the minimum to make this an actual business — it may become profitable through the monetization but even if it isn’t, that’s 30% additional you’re saving on what would otherwise be your personal entertainment expenses!
The main issue I see is that if your LLC has debts that it defaults on, a court might see you as “commingling” personal funds with the business, even if you keep the accounts separate, and pierce the corporate veil. But, this is a separate issue of limiting liability for debts, which your LLC doesn’t have to even take on. Even if that were the case, from a tax point of view the question is only whether the expenses are necessary for the business, and ordinary, both of which they are.
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…
> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are certain foods that you can not reasonably make at home or are just extremely fussy and a huge waste of time to make at home. You won't achieve wok hei on your stove, your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods, restaurants in your area will get priority from suppliers over what you find in the grocery store and even most farmers markets, and th…
> You won't achieve wok hei on your stove Not true. Pull out that blowtorch. > your oven will not be ablr to achieve the high temperatures required for the best versions of certain foods Get a steel or aluminum plate for your oven. The conductivity can make up for a lot of the heat differential. Yeah, a true Neapolitan at 900F is out of reach, but almost everything else is just fine. > restaurants in your area will g…
Go look for the folks that hack off the safety latch on their self-cleaning ovens. It's kind of nuts.
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…
I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc. You kn…
Great article. If you ask a real chef, "What do home chefs do wrong the most?" They will often say, "Not enough butter, not enough salt."
This is why eating out is so bad if you're on a diet. Too much oil and fat, sugar, salt, fat, and other stuff
Right when FiveThirtyEight launched, they did a brilliant piece of content strategy in that one of their very first pieces was a quest to find the best burrito in America [1]. Anna Maria Barry-Jester self reportedly "traveled more than 20,000 miles around the United States and eaten 84 burritos in two rounds (to say nothing of the dozens of extracurricular burritos I polished off)." I was glued to the series as it pl…
I used to joke that if you go to the movies or restaurants etc. you could open pass-through tax LLCs (which are “disregarded entities” at the IRS) and write those off as a business expense, as long as you had a website as a food or movie critic / reviewer, and even had a way to subscribe for some paid memberships (eg Patreon) and also advertising with affiliate sales (eg Amazon) for recipes, movie rentals etc. You kn…
That's not how it works. You can maybe deduct the price of your movie ticket and mileage to drive to the theater. Anything beyond that and the IRS will be up your ass in an instant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Part of what made it so enthralling to read was this grand act of human perversity that a single woman would endure This is part of why I enjoy watching a couple of RuneScape YouTubers. The sheer time commitments they put in for seemingly minor gains is like gore but for amputating off their own time effort & energy and throwing it into a bottomless maw.
Can you suggest a couple of channels? I've never played RuneScape but those videos sound right up my alley.
Very entertaining to watch and explains things so even non players can understand the sheer absurdity of some of the attempts.