I highly recommend Good Eats with Alton Brown - it explains why you do each step in recipes, gives some options for variations, and there are some episodes dedicated primarily to basics (knife skills, keeping knives sharp, cooking with kids, safety, etc). You don’t have to make every recipe, but it’s interesting to watch even recipes you don’t think you’ll make. Keep watching until you find something good, then you have a video of doing it with explanations, plus his website and books have step by step instructions. Watching will show you how to do a lot of techniques for different things - doing them will help you remember them.

Some of my recommendations that I still make often:

Tomato sauce - easy to make (you prep your veggies, drain tomatoes, then basically just stir a pot occasionally and stir a pan in the oven, then combine and run it through your blender/food processor), it’s good on basically everything (pasta, eggs, pizza, base for soups, etc), and keeps in the freezer for at least a year. I like to add a lot of fresh basil to mine when it’s in season. https://altonbrown.com/recipes/pantry-friendly-tomato-sauce/

Baked Mac and cheese - tasty, creamy, flavorful, and easy. Cook your pasta, shred cheese, whisk a pot while adding stuff to it and letting it form your roux (sauce base), add all your cheese, add pasta, put in a dish, add a stirred together topping, and bake. The recipe itself tells you when to add stuff so it’s not a guess or anything, the episode is good too. (If you prefer stovetop Mac and cheese, equally easy and the same episode does that too, easy to find the recipe on the website as well) https://altonbrown.com/recipes/baked-macaroni-and-cheese/

Scrambled eggs - the episode is well worth watching at least once, and the eggs turn out super fluffy and tasty. (The harissa and herbs are optional, but recommended if you already have them or want to jazz it up) https://altonbrown.com/recipes/20-second-scrambled-eggs/

Just remember, especially if you’re new to cooking or trying to get better: it’s okay to make mistakes! Don’t get upset if you mess something up, figure out what you did wrong and try again later. If you mess up your meal for the night and can’t recover it, fall back on leftovers or takeout or frozen food, but don’t give up on cooking.

Also, if cooking for a special occasion - don’t make it for the first time for the event, make it at least once beforehand as practice and to make sure the recipe itself makes sense and is good

John wick suit + badly photoshopped glasses

https://codepo8.github.io/shakespeare-insult-generator/

I have a few hundred hours in terraria, but I’ve never really cared how my bases looked… Until I started playing again a few weeks ago. My normal world has each NPCs in living wood styled rooms with a painting each, but that was more because I was tired of digging. I’ll be making a permanent expert (or master) world and plan to make themed and nice rooms for each NPC since digging and materials won’t be an issue. My initial thoughts are a legit wizard tower for the wizard, a doomsday bunker for arms dealer and demo, living wood grove with active waterfall for dryad, fishing hut with pier for angler (going to actually do angler quests for the first time too), workshop for tinkerer steampunker cyborg and mechanic, and a cage surrounded by lava just above the underworld with the bare minimum metal furniture for the guide

It is - the bacteria and fungus grow extremely rapidly when it’s between refrigerator and cooking temperature, hence why you usually cook meat from refrigerator temp and don’t wait for it to get to room temp unless you need an excuse to get out of work for a very painful few days.

Defrosting meat in room temp or hot water gets the outer layers to room temp or warmer much faster than cold water, and the outer sections immediately begin to grow bacteria/fungus extremely fast because of it. Cold water will slow that growth down long enough for the middle to defrost, but you need to keep changing the water or the bacteria will just keep growing faster and faster.

Also, defrosting meat too fast or cooking it while frozen messes with the texture and flavor of it because the ice crystals haven’t had time to reintegrate into whatever is being cooked which is why you don’t cook stuff that is still frozen (not to mention it will cook extremely unevenly)

Cooking kills most bacteria - but not all, that’s how food poisoning still happens in cooked food (cross contamination too, but that’s a separate issue). You should never defrost meat at room temp, best way is in the fridge since it still keeps it at a temp that’s safe for a few days after being fully defrosted but it takes a day or two to fully defrost. To do it faster you can submerge it in cold water if you replace the water every couple of hours (or more often, depending on your room temp) until you cook it but that’s a last resort if you just need it defrosted in the same day

I label all of my notes like ‘YYYYMMDD_some_title_here’ so they automatically sort by when I made them when sorted by name, or YYYYMMDDHHmm if the note won’t be getting a title (such as daily notes or notes that I made too quickly to care about titling)

Good old overwatch

If the web integrity API goes live and I can’t use some sites because of it, it will be very nice to have a very clear filter on what websites are complete garbage for using it. Vivat librewolf + VPN!

Proxy doesn’t mean substituting for something you already own, it means something standing in place of or representing something else. In the case of mtg, people use proxy cards to stand in for cards that they don’t want to spend hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars on but want to play with casually

I just use qpwgraph so if audio isn’t playing, either it isn’t registering (source apps fault, doesn’t happen often though) or it’s going to the wrong place and I can quickly switch it around. Bonus points for being able to route music through your microphone to play it for teammates