20220130

Spent much of today watching Chinese cooking videos to learn about what sort of varieties are out there as well as pick up some techniques for things to try. I’ve been meaning to learn more recipes for a while so it felt like a useful binge of time. I ended up making this recipe from Kenji Lopez-Alt. It turned out very well! I was very impressed with the flavour and the trick Kenji mentioned to draw the water out of the eggplant by immersing them in salt water worked marvelously. I would love to make this in the future, but I need a system for dealing with deep frying. I’m very excited to get a wok of my own now as stir fries are great for vegetarian cooking (which I almost solely do).

Daily Listening Just relistening to some of the House from the past week mainly, not to much listening in general.

Daily Reading Finished The Lathe of Heaven. Don’t think I really understood too much of what it was trying to say other than the overarching story of how you can’t wish for good things without accepting the negative consequences. I think there’s some deeper metaphor relating to dreams that was hinted at, but I just never got.

Read a bunch of Freedom’s Forge. I’m at the point where America is starting to get more involved in the war by supplying the allies with engines/tanks/planes/arms/etc in ways that circumvent various peacetime laws. There was a fair amount of concern about having a military industrial complex, but it seemed they believed such actions were necessary to prevent the Nazi’s from winning overall (which I think given the Holocaust, among other atrocities, was a good idea). I’m speculating, but perhaps a lot of these wartime changes enabled the snowball of military industrial complex that was never properly reigned in. Hopefully the books talks more about this later!