I had that happen too. Couldn’t find something with DDG. Hopped over to Google and was shocked at how completely unusable it was.

Madness. Rice two days in a row?

Not an issue unless you have unusually thin chips.

A vegan senior citizen friend ended up with a bunch of free turkeys one holiday. He handed them off to me. I turned three of them into canned turkey meat and bone stock. I gave one away. If you think canned chicken is bad then just imagine how dry canned turkey is. It always needs to be paired with something moist like refried beans or Shakshuka to make it edible. But free protein is free protein.

Most of the cost here was the cheese and chips.

Normally I melt the cheese directly on the chips. I only did a small amount of that here. I typically don’t go with cheese sauce but because I was doing a meat and beans topping instead of straight meat. Beans always make things soggy.

I always heat them up in the oven on a baking sheet.

I’m only going to focus on one part because it shows the disconnect between you and I.

If you have a working printer, toner, paper…

Who said anything about a printer? I said hard copy. Not printout. Write it down. Carve it into rock or shape it in clay. 3000 cycles and you keep limiting yourself. That 200 pounds of copper wire could be pounded flat and marked with a sharp tool to create a long lasting hard copy. So many options for a hard copy and you defaulted to the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.

90% of people would die within the first three months because they don’t know how to cook and we have a three day supply rule in stores relying on just-in-time delivery.

If you make it past the first 90 you probably have seeds in the ground to get you to the next 90. We don’t just inherit the environment, we shape it. We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors

But let’s get back to the topic. 3000 charge cycles, your number, is a lot. All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information. You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.

But thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.

The average hunter gatherer only worked for about 3-6 hours a day. They had more free time than we do.

That broth is why it costs sooo much. I’ve made it from scratch. But it’s not as good. Probably because I never add enough salt.

Point is that 3000 cycles is more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.

That’s… a lot of cycles. That’s almost a decade. Plenty of time to build an electric generator from scratch by traveling on foot to a copper mine and smelting the wire yourself. Unless you manage to pull an alternator from a car that can’t find gasoline and save yourself the trip. From that you could make a gravity battery or any number of other options.

The average laptop is 65W. So the 40 amp solar battery station I built with a 100w panel could run a laptop 7 hours a day without any issues at all. Plenty of time to get actionable information out of it.

The Amish are not self-sufficient. They are self-reliant. And it takes a minimum of 50 families for them to have a functioning community. What you’re describing is more of a frontiersman.

I completely understand. In this case I only had exactly 8 oz of pasta and needed something extra since this was going to be our only meal for the day.

The red sauce is the gravy. The “scoops” are chunks of pork.

Italian gravy is a touchy subject amongst Italian Americans. But generally we are looking at a slow cooked tomato sauce with a lot of pork in it.

This is my family’s recipe. When I’m canning it I use a very modified version of this.

• Tomato Gravy
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 large onion diced
• 2 pounds pork neck bones
• 2 (6 oz) cans tomato paste
• 6 (6 oz) cans of water
• 28 oz tomato sauce
• sugar or honey to adjust flavor if it’s bitter

• heat large stock pot to medium high
• add olive oil
• add onions
• add pork neck bones
• stir mixture occasionally until pork and onions are browned
• move pork to the edges of pot so there is a pork free zone in the center
• add the tomato paste to the pork free zone
• do not stir for two minutes (you want some of the paste to caramelize)
• add the water and stir it all together
• add the tomato sauce
• start stirring so that you don’t burn the sauce to the bottom of the pot
• bring it to a boil
• keep stirring
• bring it down to a simmer
• simmer for 2-3 or 6 hours. or “until the pork falls of the bone and the onions disappear”
• remove all the meat and bones from the sauce and place on a cutting board
• separate the bones and fatty bits
• discard bones and fatty bits
• return the meat to the pot
• bring it back to a simmer
• simmer 5+ minutes
• taste it and if it is too bitter add sugar or honey needed to tone down bitterness and cause the whole thing to become an ode to umami ! be careful when eating. Some bone bits may still be in there.

When I see the picture I keep seeing crab legs crusted in seasoning.

Exactly right. One pound of dough cut into 8 slices and two heels. So each of us get one small and one large sandwich.

I have never lost a bet that depends on my fellow Americans being disappointed because they failed to understand something.