You must have been eating rolled or, worse, coarsely ground oats if you got the texture of boogers. If you want a completely different experience that tastes great and has a nicer texture, try cut oats instead. They take longer to cook, but they’re MAGNIFICENT.

This is a problem with vegetarians and vegans in general: they try to pitch “meat substitutes” that are absolutely filthy-tasting with terrible mouthfeel. They show off the absolute worst side of the ingredients instead of selling the ingredients where they’re strong.

There are tofu dishes that shine (like mapo doufu): make those, don’t try to gaslight people into thinking that a tofu burger “tastes just like the real thing”. It doesn’t.

The key to tofu that tastes good, rather than being a carrier for whatever sauce or spices you’re using and nothing else, is freshness.

When I lived in Canada I hated tofu (to my mother’s eternal anger). It was tasteless crap and if I wanted the taste of the sauce or soup or whatever, I’d drink the sauce or soup or whatever without the tofu. Nowadays I get tofu that, if I time it right, is still hot from the process of making it. When it’s like that it has its own flavour that’s actually quite nice. (Which makes sense: it’s made from legumes which, you know, have flavour.)

Oh wow. Wait until I tell you how (proper) sausage is made, what part of the body the casing is generally made of, and what goes through that for animals’ whole lives… 🤣

Both. My father had dogs. I had cats. I got along with both; I just think cats are better for city life.

Selling pre-rotted eggs? 🤣

Well thanks! Next time I’m in a position to buy some I will.

Evaporation when covered in clay is slowed by quite a bit, but yeah, 25+ years will still lose you volume.

OK, so they’re consumed directly, not ground up or smashed into paste or something?

I’m not sure that’s a very good measure of fear, though.

If you showed me an average jump-scare-infused “horror” flick of the variety that gets tossed out by the film-making industry every five minutes or so, you’d see my blood pressure and heart rate spike each time, but five minutes after the end I’d likely not even be able to identify that film it was I’d watched.

On the other hand, The Thing (the John Carpenter version) keeps me feeling unsettled each time I think of it (and has the occasional starring role in my rare nightmares). During the movie, though? Maybe a blood pressure increase, and a slight increase in heart rate. But nothing compared to the jump-scare fodder.

The USA doesn’t have an administration any longer.

It has a regime.

Boiled peanuts are the second best way to make peanuts! (The best way is roasted in red clay.)

Buy a jar and go to town. (Equivalently, though I’ve just made every Brit and Aussie wish my death, go with Marmite.)

You don’t have to worry about wasting it. If you don’t like it, it’s very good wood filler as well. (Indeed for my purposes that’s its prime usage.)

Blood products (including blood sausage/black pudding, duck blood “tofu”, etc.) react very badly with my stomach. I like the taste fine, but I really hate tasting it, along with any other food I’m eating with it, twice (if you get my drift).

If you’re not eating black licorice (made from actual licorice root!) with double-“salt” (it’s not really salt…) are you really living!? Salmiakki forever!

I still have no idea what capers are used for. I see them in delicatessens all the time, but I don’t buy them because I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with them.

I was with you on the chocolate until the pop rocks. Wut.

Yeah, coriander is great if you’re not stuck with those genes.

I’m the polar opposite. Steak tartar makes me gag and the highest quality sushi I ever ate barely reached “meh”. (Normal sushi falls into the “let’s just slide this in the garbage bin when nobody is looking” camp.)

Sometimes I wonder what people are thinking.

Then I remember most people don’t think.

I mean there’s tea that you can buy that’s aged about 30 years. That stuff is horrifically expensive because the capital outlay with ZERO return on it is massive. (I drank a tea that was actually 99 years old once, back in about 2003. It cost roughly twenty bucks in 2003 money for a thimble-sized teacup’s worth. Yes, it was worth it.)

You can also get liquors that are aged 25+ years here. Again, it’s hugely expensive because of the outlay vs. return ratio.

And both of these only work by also selling younger versions: for the liquors 3 years and for teas anywhere from a year on up.

A hundred years? And yet you sell them for a price of about $1.5 for ten? (First search page on Taobao, randomly selected shop: https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?id=683692822495)