In the early 2000s, post-dotcom-crash I worked at small consultancy for the airlines industry that had a software wing. I think I made $11/hour slinging PHP code. They had sequestered the engineers, (half a dozen of us, all young) in the back of a large print shop (the consultancy specialized in manuals) and we had our own kitchen back there, so we sometimes cooked together.
One of my coworkers was married to a Laotian woman and as such married into a large Laotian community. One day we went to the Asian supermarket and we bought all the stuff to make green papaya salad and larb. He brought three specific things from home for this: a weird aluminum cauldron, a bamboo basket to put on it (to make sticky rice) and a repurposed instant coffee bottle full of the strangest looking sludge. It looked kind of like peering into a chewing tobacco spit bottle. This was a bottle of homemade padaek[1] and he said it was like liquid gold in the community he lived in. It was foul as hell to smell but we did a taste test of the papaya salad before and after mixing it in and sure enough it was so much better with the padaek. It was an eye opening experience and since then I've always had a fish sauce bottle in my fridge. I even use a little of it in things like spaghetti sauce.
Anyway if you have a chance to get your hands on a little homemade padaek, definitely do it. Would kill for some, myself. Also, share new foods with friends if they are open to it. I am very fond of that memory. I had never been exposed to those dishes before and even that small experience broadened my world in a simple, but meaningful way.
If people put anchovy in their bolognese, I can imagine fish sauce is a great and easy substitute. Never thought of that, but will try next time it's on the menu :)
I usually have a tube of anchovy paste in the fridge for whenever I make Caesar salad, but in the rare times that I don't I just use fish sauce in the dressing instead and it works surprisingly well.
Yeah, my wife is Cambodian and she buys the Lao stuff because she knows people who make it without chemicals.
The Cambodian version is Prahok and apparently it's usually raw and you aren't supposed to eat it raw, but I ate it raw (it was pink colored) for a couple days before someone told me. Prahok sounds gross but the stinky flavor is really reminiscent of cheese.
I had a nice Thai Omelet once in a restaurant and then looked up the recipe. Now I always add a bit of fiah sauce into my eggs, with chopped garlic and some soy sauce and a bit of water so it gets fluffy in the hot oil. Never thought fish in omelet would work but it's quite tasty!
When I was traveling to Raleigh NC semi-regularly I liked going to a really good Laotian restaurant there. One of my favorite places to eat (along with Beasley's for their fried chicken).
Sounds like what they call "bla ra" in Thailand (Northeastern Thailand has a lot of Laotian influence). Thick/chunky, unlike the more refined "fish sauce" - "nam bla".
Lived in a house for a while with neighbors making it - slow fermenting pots of fish. Not a pleasant olfactory experience.
Little piece of Tandy errata: They had their own subway line in downtown Fort Worth[1]. It was there before they built their headquarters, The Tandy Center, but they kept it running and it terminated in a parking lot that also had a little farmers market that my family used to sell watermelons at when I was a kid in the early 90s. If we sold all of the melons early we would take the train into the Tandy Center for the fun of it.
Bath Iron Works is hiring people on the spot right now. They are probably going to hire 3k people in the next year. I imagine this is happening at other shipyards around the country. Expect those ship numbers to be revised upwards.
Can you explain what you mean by germ control? Covid is primarily transmitted by sustained exposure to aerosols. Much of the disinfecting we are now doing now is essentially performative.
Much of the disinfecting we are now doing now is essentially performative.
Yes, a lot of the things we are doing are performative. Most people don't really know how to use masks effectively and a lot of how people interact with their masks makes things worse, not better.
I work really hard to just avoid being exposed to germs because of my situation. I try to not touch a lot of stuff in public and this is not the norm.
I hate it when people "helpfully" want to get me a cart. I can get it myself. Keep your hands off my cart.
I saw someone blow their nose under their mask just a few feet from me. I wish we would focus much more on messages like "Don't blow your nose in crowded public spaces" than on "Wear your mask." There have been so many incidents like that and I have been toying with the idea of starting an "incident report" file to talk about specific incidents and why this stuff makes me crazy.
I don't like people talking at me unnecessarily.
I don't like people laughing near me. That's almost as bad as people coughing at me.
I will shower as promptly as I can if someone does cough in my general direction or similar.
There's a whole lot of stuff I do to simply avoid germs without having to rely a lot on chemical disinfectants because I'm also chemically sensitive. And I am a lot healthier than I am supposed to be so I know this stuff works.
If anyone has ideas on how I can effectively start writing about this, I'm all ears. I don't know how to get, say, beta readers or some kind of early feedback. I know it's a touchy topic and feedback and some kind of traction would be enormously helpful in trying to write more about this. I can't seem to get that part, so it ends up being very incomplete, one-off comments on the internet, like this one.
There was a social component to reader that was very similar in ways to how people share news on Facebook. It was one of googles only solid social graphs. That they wasted that was a real misstep.
One of my coworkers was married to a Laotian woman and as such married into a large Laotian community. One day we went to the Asian supermarket and we bought all the stuff to make green papaya salad and larb. He brought three specific things from home for this: a weird aluminum cauldron, a bamboo basket to put on it (to make sticky rice) and a repurposed instant coffee bottle full of the strangest looking sludge. It looked kind of like peering into a chewing tobacco spit bottle. This was a bottle of homemade padaek[1] and he said it was like liquid gold in the community he lived in. It was foul as hell to smell but we did a taste test of the papaya salad before and after mixing it in and sure enough it was so much better with the padaek. It was an eye opening experience and since then I've always had a fish sauce bottle in my fridge. I even use a little of it in things like spaghetti sauce.
Anyway if you have a chance to get your hands on a little homemade padaek, definitely do it. Would kill for some, myself. Also, share new foods with friends if they are open to it. I am very fond of that memory. I had never been exposed to those dishes before and even that small experience broadened my world in a simple, but meaningful way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padaek
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