Today is the special day which celebrates the birth of arguably the greatest nation on Planet Earth. Sure, the United States has its flaws, but there's a good reason why people from all over the world dream of living in America.
I'm happy enough where I am right now, but am nonetheless a big fan of Western culture. American companies have given us so many of the things we can no longer live without: smartphones, personal computers, fast food, canned soft drinks, just to name a few.
Thanks to the internet and websites like YouTube, both of which are also American in origin, people like me can now experience life in other countries from the comfort of our homes. I love watching YouTube videos very much and spend around an hour on the activity before sleeping each night.
Cooking Videos
I am an unabashed cooking-video addict. Pictures of food and drink excite me, and I'm always curious to learn how a big bunch of diverse ingredients can be brought together to form a dish which looks and tastes good.
Pasta is my favourite type of food so I watch lots of videos about Italian cuisine. However, I do enjoy variety so I'll watch any other kind of cooking video I may encounter too. This has made me a bit of an "armchair general" when it comes to food. I can talk about it as if I'm an expert when I have in fact not touched a single stovetop in my entire life.
Anyway, I wanted to share this wonderful channel on YouTube that I like very much. Okay, I don't like it very much. I absolutely adore it! It's my favourite channel on YouTube.
Its name is Mobile Home Gourmet. The creator is an old man who lives in a trailer van in California. He is retired so he made this channel to give himself something to occupy the time.
I like his videos because he explains things very clearly and shows every single step including basic stuff like chopping an onion. He teaches how to do those simple tasks safely and efficiently. Measurements are given in both imperial and metric units too, so don't worry about reaching for your calculator.
He even makes most of his food from scratch. When he says he's making pasta, he whips out flour, semolina, eggs and salt, and proceeds to mix up and knead a dough before rolling it through his hand-cranked pasta machine (see video below). The pesto he uses refers to the one he made by beating up some basil leaves, toasted nuts and garlic in a ziploc bag and then running it through a food processor with some extra virgin olive oil and grated cheese. His chicken stock is boiled from the leftovers after he has manually filleted off all the meat from a whole chicken.
The concept of TV dinners is also given a makeover. He has what he calls "minute meals". Basically, he spends a day or two working really hard in the kitchen, cooking up massive amounts of meat, soups and vegetables, and then packing them away in small vacuum-sealed plastic bags for storage in the freezer. He doesn't need to cook for months afterward. All he has to do is take out some of the frozen food and reheat it in the microwave. Not only does this do-it-yourself method save money, it also allows you to control exactly what goes into the food. Health nuts rejoice!
Here's a primer on Minute Meals. It's the first in a ten-part series of video lessons to show you how to assemble your own Minute Meals.
Mobile Home Gourmet covers cuisines from all over the world and a wide range of culinary techniques. I credit this channel for making me hugely knowledgeable about cooking. Do check it out! There's also a free cookbook that you can download from the website: http://www.white-trash-cooking.com/.
Marlon Bundo
Some people love him, some people loathe him.
His name is Donald Trump.
But this isn't a political commentary, and neither is it about the man himself.
It's about Mike Pence, his vice-president. Or rather, Mike Pence's pet rabbit Marlon Bundo.
My family has two rabbits and I have a bit of an embarrassing story to tell. When we got our first rabbit last year, some unsavoury thoughts polluted my mind. They revolved around the topic of eating the little guy. I'd heard that people do eat rabbits so I was wondering how rabbits are cooked. A quick Google and YouTube search later and my obsession with Mobile Home Gourmet was blossoming.
I'm over that phase now. It would hardly be worthy of me to be on one hand lobbying for animal rights while on the other plotting to put my own pets on the dinner table would it?
Nowadays I find that I'm quite the keyboard warrior. I get into online spats with people who in my opinion are idiots. There was once I was even accused of being a member of the fabled Internet Brigade (people who are paid to spread pro-establishment views and attack anti-establishment ones on social media). This happened after I corrected a misconception that the government had declared us to be self-sufficient in water supply. This is not true. We are aiming to achieve self-sufficiency by 2060, just before the treaty with Malaysia expires.
Recently, I fought with some Americans in the comments section of an Instagram post by the official @marlonbundo account. The Pence family acquired a new dog and cat and stuck the poor rabbit into a tiny cage while getting the animals familiarised with one another. When I say tiny, I mean hamster-sized tiny, and with no access to hay, which is essential for a rabbit to remain healthy.
Here in land-scarce Singapore, we live in high-rise apartments, each no bigger than a shoebox. Yet as responsible pet owners, we give each of our rabbits a dedicated one square metre fenced area to live in, festooned with hideouts and piles of Timothy hay imported from... you guessed it... America. This is the commonly accepted best practice according to animal welfare groups like Bunny Wonderland.
It's inexcusable for the Pences, who have a big suite in the United States Naval Observatory all to themselves, not to provide such basic care for Marlon Bundo. When I saw a few kind souls pointing out the bad living conditions the rabbit was being subjected to, I joined in to lend my support. Unfortunately, a large majority of the other followers of the Instagram page refused to acknowledge that the rabbit was not being treated well.
The standard of rabbit care in America seems to be quite low overall, compared with what we're used to here. They are quite ignorant, and often let their rabbits live out in the garden, don't give them hay, bring them to generalist veterinarians instead of exotic pet specialists, etc. And when they're faced with the facts, they get defensive and say things like, "I never gave my bunny hay but he lived to a ripe old age."
That argument demonstrates the small sample size fallacy. Have you ever heard someone say stuff like "My grandfather smoked 100 cigarettes a day and never had a day off work due to ill health!" (Tan, 2015) when debating that smoking isn't as harmful as it's made out to be? The problem with such a claim is that though it might be true for that particular person, the effect can't be generalised across the population. In other words, "Your grandfather is commendable for having lungs made of iron, but if everyone were to behave the way he did, people would start dropping like flies."
I suppose, as with everything else in life, there's the good and the bad. But hey, the good, Mobile Home Gourmet, is so damn good it outweighs everything bad!
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