Music: "Down in the Country" by Israel Nash System: Thinkpad X230 (running Bunsen Labs linux) Location: Home (the mountains) --- I do not do Christina's 5 questions too often. But maybe I should start doing so. I enjoy reading everyone else's responses, so it seems nice to contribute. Additionally, I am playing around with adding metadata to the top of this post to see if it is something I might want to do more in the future. --- 1. Has a self-help book helped you? I'm not sure exactly what a self-help book is. In my head I associate them as being about changing your mental state or habbits, rather than--for example--learning how to do a task. I have not read much of the former, so I guess my answer is no. I have read a lot of the later, and have learned to do the things I have read about. 2a. How many times a month do you cook dinner? I generally prepare three meals a day for my family. We eat out when traveling, or maybe once a week for dinner. We do not have many vegan options for dining out where we live, so most food is from home, or from friends (we trade off cooking meals with some friends up here in the mountains, but only do so once a month or so). 2b. Do you plan meals, or look in the refrigerator? Breakfast is either cereal, a bagel, or some form of "hot breakfast" (oats, various grains, poridge sort of stuff). On rare occasions I will make either waffles or pancakes, but not too often. To make lunches easier we have normalized on a sandwich and a side for every lunch. The side, lately, is a homemade macaroni salad with chickpeas, carrots, green peas, onion, spices, etc. The sandwich is rye bread, vegan mayo, vegan deli slices, vegan cheese, bavarian sweet/spicy mustard, greek olives, and red onion. My child usually opts for a peanut butter sandwich on rye. Sometimes with banana on it. Dinner can vary from a quick meal: burger from a frozen patty of some form, to more involved recipes: masoor dal with chapati, chili, burritos, etc. I tend to decide earlier in the day if I am going to do something like that, and then make the time for it. There is also a middle route: I may pre-make a big batch of seitan, have a bunch of veggies prepped, etc. and then stir fry things and serve over rice. If I do that, I plan the prep stuff on a Sunday and then make stuff throughout the week with the prepped items. I am making a big batch of rice and beans right now as I type this. It will go into buritos or be served as a side for a few meals this week. 3. Where do you get your recipes? I tend to cook a lot from pantry staples. I know lots of ways to combine the things we have. So I can often throw things together. I went to a small culinary school program when I was in my twenties. Doing so gave me a lot of confidence to be able to just use what I have and know that it will at least be edible, if not amazing. Sometimes my partner sends me a recipe. I then tend to modify it to use fewer ingredients and have more sensible cooking. Recipes, particularly from cookbooks, tend to be way more complicated than they need to be. Other times, I will look around online for how other people make something. I'll look at 2-5 recipes for a thing. Then I combine them into something workable for me and for what I have on hand. I tend to not do grocery runs for specific recipes and instead use what we have (which can vary from week to week, but has a number of solid/dependable staple items). I often convert recipes to work with an instant pot, which I find really easy to use and produce good results with. If I search for recipes online, I almost never search for vegan recipes, prefering to convert non-vegan recipes to vegan ones. I really like the youtube channel "Hebbar's Kitchen". They do udupi cuisine (mostly), which is delicious and either vegan or easily made vegan. Their videos do not have any talking and only briefly show measurements and ingredients. Giving you a basic framework for how the thing is made, but leaves it to you and your instincts to get it done (especially if you are going to convert to instant pot or the like). 4. What are your great thrift store finds? My partner is very worried about bedbugs, so we do not thrift shop too often. When I was younger I grew up on thrift store purchases. I loved finding old computer parts, jazz records, and books by Ray Bradbury at the time. 5. What would make, or has made, you more patriotic? If the country had the sense to admit that you cannot really represent so much space and so many people. If the country split up into many smaller countries that were truly independent. If the country found a way to abandon democracy (see: "might makes right" or "majority rule") in favor of consensus decision making practices (something that is very difficult at the scales most modern governments work at, but would be doable with smaller governing areas). I don't see any of that happening. Governments, accross the board, are a giant tire fire that just keeps burning and will take everything, the planet included, with it.