The great thing about root vegetables is that they do great with an extended simmer. So you don’t need to do much pan cooking with them too get them ready. For the most part, if you’re going with a trinity, mirepois kind of base, they’ll soften and develop their sugars easy once liquids are in.

So, my general rule is that they go in right before garlic, but after any mushrooms. Celery would go in with them, if that’s what the recipe calls for. If your trinity includes peppers, it’s the same thing.

Bolognese needs a nice simmer, so it’s very forgiving of those early ingredients.

Aight folks, let’s break this down.

As someone already left a chef jean pierre onyo image saying they are always number first, let’s talk about why.

It comes down to taste, mainly. Texture is second.

Onions contain a lot of great sugars that need time to show up, and some more pungent flavors that need time to break down.

They also start out crisp, which is not usually desirable in the kind of applications this is about. If you’re sauteing onions and mushrooms and wonder about the order, you aren’t making a salad, right? It’s a sauce, part of a soup or stew, something like that.

You want the onions to soften up, and go past the point where they can be a little tough. A tangent on that: when you’re prepping onion and remove the skin, also remove the first layer. It is more fibrous, and stays tough-ish even when heavily caramelized.

There are cases where onion can actually go in at the same time as other ingredients, like making stock, or even when being used as part of one of the culinary trinities. But, they will still have a sweeter, more complex flavor if you give them a little extra time on their own first.

Mushrooms, the other part of this meme also benefit from being an early ingredient. As you cook them, they give up their water. This intensifies their flavor, obviously, and it makes the end result more controlled. But, past maybe a few minutes, they don’t need more cooking. You can cook them for a long periods as long as you control your heat source and don’t burn them, but it isn’t going to bring much to the table once you’ve got a little extra brown on them.

So making them number the first does nothing beneficial in almost any case, but does make it harder to monitor the color and progression of the onions.

Again, there are exceptions. And, if you prefer your onions more pungent rather than as a layer of flavor that supports the rest of the dish, you aren’t obligated to follow the principle. I tend to prefer just doing a second batch to put in towards the end, if that’s my goal though.

As a rule of thumb, you start with fats. If you’re rendering something, like bacon, that’s first. But be it oil, butter, or something like lard, that fat isn’t just for flavor, it helps the cooking process as well as being a lubricant.

Onion will come second. There’s no real use case for onions being in a pan with heat without a fat.

If mushrooms are being used, they’ll be third because they need time to release water and develop flavor. Add them in when the onion is just going translucent. They also absorb some of what’s in the pan before them, so you’ll get all that onion sweetness and depth into them, amplifying their earthiness.

From there, it tends to be garlic, if garlic is used (and if you aren’t a vampire, you should be using it), but it can be whatever it is the recipe calls for.

With garlic though, you really want it to be the thing you add right before any stock, water, cream, or other liquids. This is for stovetop applications mind you, and it assumes the garlic isn’t whole as a flavoring agent that can be removed. You put the garlic in, and move it around, until you just start to smell it in the air. That’s what the whole “until fragrant” means.

As soon as you smell the garlic coming off the pot or pan, you add your liquid, and all those volatile compounds stay in your food insist of burning off.

If you like less present garlic, you can go past that point as long as you keep the heat low, because you don’t want the garlic to brown much at all, barely golden. It’s hard to visually track garlic in a pan full of onions and mushrooms, unless the heat is low enough to catch it. You start getting brown garlic, it turns both bitter and unpleasantly firm. But, I gotta be real, if you’re not wanting that garlic pop, why add it at all? You don’t have to. Almost all ingredients can be optional unless you’re baking (and even there, there’s wiggle room). Garlic cooked past fragrant in a stovetop application doesn’t bring anything that the onion doesn’t.

Now, if you roast the garlic, that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish. It’s also amazing. It just needs to be added towards the end of whatever you’re cooking, so that the flavors roasting it brings don’t get diluted.

Again, there are exceptions to almost any food rules. We’re talking general purpose stuff here.

Jean pierre! And that mantra is truth

Sorry to inform you that I’m cooler ;)

They can fuck right off.

Why? Because they don’t need to know shit about you, me, or the cookie monster as long as we follow the rules.

If I wanted some random stranger to know about me for their own purposes, I’d sign up for Facebook.

Even a voluntary survey is defeating the purpose of avoiding corporate forums. Why are they gathering the data? What are they going to do with it? How can we be assured they’re destroying the data even if we are okay with their goal? Nah. It’s a step in the wrong direction for lemmy as a whole.

When you say we, I think you should probably replace it with democrats.

Because that’s true. If you’re going to stay part of the system that led to this, there’s nothing you can do

But, you know, maybe find other options.

Like others have said elsewhere, it wasn’t a bug, per se. More that someone fucked up and the tools they use to mass ban subreddits weren’t used correctly.

Which, I ain’t up on that stuff, but it makes sense.

Because it’s lemmy, not some corporate bullshit.

They might want it, but they don’t need it

I dunno, I think an increase in mutual oral activity would help most jobs

Nah, that idea can bugger right off.

Lemmy doesn’t need a “corpus of data”. Researchers can either request that people contribute, or they can bugger right off and scrape like anyone else.

Admins don’t need demographic data at all.

Fwiw, you’re right.

Pain in the testicles gets referred to the abdomen because the nerves involved lead up there. It’s kinda like how you can slam your hand in a door, and it’ll also hurt at your shoulder where the nerves connect there

Little bits of referred pain like that happen all the time.

Yup, that’s exactly why it does it@

Look, if you don’t include florescent black, why even bother?

Wellll, new smells are hard.

Since I stopped smoking, I’ve remembered one of the reasons I smoked, that being an annoyingly sensitive sniffer. Not professional grade like the noses at perfume companies, but enough to detect a cigarette being smoked outside on the other side of the house.

I find the best way to describe unusual things to my family is to break it down first.

Most smells are built up of multiple chemicals, like tobacco smoke having tar, nicotine, formaldehyde, etc. When you pick the smell apart in your head, you can usually identity and exclude those that you already know, leaving the rest as something you can analyze. For example, the benzene, toluene, and cresol contribute to the woody scent underneath the bigger smells like formaldehyde. Which, formaldehyde is the one that damps the sense of smell most, but it has its own distinct smell.

So, when you sniff your new place, you can, as you did here, exclude some things, like mold because you’d recognize that itchy, wet, almost earthy/petrichor blend.

Remodels of old buildings run high to solvents and adhesives. So does printing, though printing is even more wide open. I think you’d recognize the common offgassing stuff like formaldehyde (it really creeps into a lot of things), or polyurethane glues.

So, the first thing I’d sniff for is a hint of acrid, almost burny layer. If that’s there, then you’re likely running into something like an acid that was used in printing, and can ventilate accordingly while seeing if there’s anything else you need to do.

If there’s something fruity to it, or something like nail polish remover, you’re probably dealing with ketones, which is a class of chemicals used in printing and can be found in some construction materials.

If it’s similarly “itchy” the way acidic residue can be, and it comes with a bit of ammonia underneath or alongside, you’d be looking at lye, or a similar substance. That’s not unusual in bathrooms in general, so you may have smelled it before and not know what it was. When lye reacts with the usual clogging offenders you get that acrid bit. If you run into it with an ammonia note, then you’re likely dealing with something where it was reacting with chemicals outside of a regular toilet situation, which would point back to something industrial.

Inks, or at least the ones I’ve smelled, tend to have a metallic tang to them, usually combined with a solvent of some kind or another.

Wallpaper, at least the kinds you find in apartments here in the US, tend to have a plasticky smell, even when there’s not much plastic involved because of how it’s made and the adhesive. So that’s a possibility.

All of which is just the stuff that’s similar enough to remind me of cigarette smoke as opposed to cigar or pipe tobacco. A lot of the time, when our brain pulls up a comparison like that, where it’s like smokers’ breath but not, that’s because there’s a chemical in common, often multiple. It just won’t be the exact ratios, or all of the component chemicals.

If I had to guess, I’d point to cleaning or construction chemicals mixing before you moved in, maybe weeks before, and having had time to interact. Bleach can do that, btw. End up smelling like old cigarettes when it gets diluted and soaks into something. Any new chemical is going to react a little, and instead of that dirty foot in pool water thing that is starts with, you can run into those musty compounds instead. I’m not saying it is bleach, just that it’s likely to be something akin to that, where a solvent or other chemical is blending with other stuff and throwing it off.

Maybe an enzymatic cleaner? The stuff I use on our chicken gear gets that funky breath smell when it sits. Saliva enzymes and proteins + smoke is what generates that actual stale breath, so a similar mix could be involved.

I mean, that’s a shower thought for sure.

Kinda vague, but I get what you’re saying. I think I do, anyway.

It isn’t just true on the obvious level either, where a nova at the wrong/right time and place could wipe us out.

You don’t have to go all woowoo either, though anyone into that is free too. Small changes in the universe at large can have ripples all over, though that kind of change seems to be pretty rare at the current age of everything.

But, the kind of small changes, like minor collisions of rocks have their own smaller ripples. It might take centuries or millennia to get rolling, but that’s essentially the theory behind planetary formation, little things bouncing around until they turn into big things.

I’m saying that this is the end goal the right wing, particularly the general Republican party and the Christian right in particular have been working towards since Nixon. The southern strategy, combined with the oligarchs dominating the party.

Democrats have never had a good plan to oppose that, and still don’t.

Even if Kamala had won, which was never likely, it would have been someone, at some point in the next fifty years because the first Trump term stacked the supreme court, and the party pushed hard to put decisive cases up.

There’s no way the halfassed efforts that democrats have been using my entire lifetime would have prevented an eventual lock on Congress and the presidency.

Mind you, I’m fairly convinced that had kamala won, there was a plan in the works for an outright attack. Not a genuine right wing revolution scale attack, but a disruptive series of attacks on the power grid and infrastructure to sow chaos and strengthen the militarization of the police even more, get people used to marshal law, etc. But that’s impossible to prove, and unsourceable.

In a roundabout way, any democrat winning would have had exactly as much effect on their long term plans. They’ve been working at this, laying multiple options down so that as soon as opportunity rose, they could strike in one way or another.

Voting can’t fix that. Voting democrat can’t fix that for sure. There is no viable alternative party to oppose it, and there’s no time to build one, despite the feeble bullshit being tried to rebuild the democrat establishment. You can’t take a party that gives lip service to the populace, but works to maintain the status quo of corporate interests on average, and turn it into a serious engine of change.

We’re past the point of waiting four years and hoping. We were past that when Biden eked out a win. But nobody took that respite to even try and shift things.

Yup, new or used.

They are, as people have already noted, different smells between new books and old ones. And there’s changes the the smell of new books.

But I think you’re onto something with it being a chicken/egg thing. How much of enjoying the smell is tied up in enjoying the books and reading vs the smell itself being pleasant.

Personally, I think the smell itself is pleasant in general, but gets amplified into a very pleasant smell by love of books. Going to book stores isn’t as common as it used to be. My kid had never been to one at all until a few years ago, and loved the smell right off. Commented on it before we went in the entryway. That happened with other kids of the more recent generations too. That makes me lean towards the smell itself being nice, until someone does some experiments that say otherwise.

It applies to old books too. As someone mentioned, the lignin breaks down into that almost vanilla scent, which combines with that slightly musty, dusty smell to make something delightful that tickles the nose. I have a few thousand books here at the house, with about half of that in one room, and it has that distinct library/used book shop smell to it. Not as strong as a place just filled with books, but it’s there.

To me, I find it hard to decide whether walking past a bakery or a bookstore is better.

You know, a lot of comments are bringing up voting like there was any chance of votes preventing this. A lifetime of gerrymandering, court stacking, propaganda, and general fuckery led to this, and the only question was when the religious right wing and oligarchs made their move

Voting? That’s not shit.

What matters is real change brought by real people.

The people that didn’t vote? That wasn’t all protest non participation. Voter turnout has always been low because the average person just does not care.

Which means they won’t care if the people that do care tear down the currently successful right wing revolution with a counter revolution. All you have to do is keep just enough comfort during transition, and nobody will lift a finger from that group. They will not give a flying fuck at all.

Frankly, even if they did care, they’re also the segment least able to do a damn thing about any of it. They lack the will, the training, and the functional personal motivation to do anything but hunker down and wait, even if their comfort level does drop to the bottom.

I can’t say that’s good or bad, but it is what it is.

It’s up to the people that care to make changes. Right now, the right seems to care a fuck ton more than anyone else, so they’re pulling it off.

Sorry, but you are hereby ejected from the southern naming convention panel.

As all right thinking individuals know, a critter is any non human that moves under its own power or surprises us by being alive but looking like it shouldn’t be because it doesn’t move under its own power, like yankees and coral.

A varmint is a critter you don’t want in your garden, on your farm, and may be shot on sight, like coyote, raccoons, or yankees.

Edit: you may also substitute the following corollary to the definition of critter: any living thing which Ellie May Clampett would be likely to adopt.

Nah, it was mostly rote. But, I was reading pretty early, and my family did use a looser form of phonics with all of us. When it was a read-along, they’d point out words that didn’t fit normal phonic rules, and explain a little. Read-alongs were super frequent for us. Daily, for most of my childhood, though I kinda “graduated” into doing the reading somewhere around 3rd grade for the second wave of cousins on one side of the family.

My mom’s family runs high to dedicated readers, so it was always a thing where someone was reading something out loud to share a passage or whatever, even when it wasn’t one of the adults reading to the kids as a group. And all our parents were super into reading to us individually too.

In kindergarten, it was straight into it, no phonics involved at all. But it was still mostly group based reading. First grade, it was individual work, with vocabulary, reading, and writing as parts of the language arts section of class. No phonics, and really no sounding things out at all. My first grade teacher was sweet as all get out, but did not play around with lessons.