That… That makes so much sense actually
Design Commissions (2021).
meal ideas!
low energy ("do not ask me to do any prep work at all, so help me god")
- mozzerella cheese wrapped in pepperoni ("pizza tacos"!)
- hummus and pretzels or naan (putting the naan in the microwave for like 10 seconds...heavenly)
- canned chili (with shredded cheese and sour cream if you have it! boom done!)
- instant miso soup (warm and lovely!)
- cheese and cured meat, olives, canned fish, crackers, dried fruit, or whatever easy "charcuterie" type items you like
- alternate bites of apple and spoonfulls of peanut butter (mixing honey or chocolate chips to the peanut butter is my favorite)
- a "deconstructed sandwich": bites of lunch meat, pickles, cheese, cherry tomato, etc (I love roast beef and white cheddar for this)
- yogurt and granola or fruit
medium energy ("I'll boil water but don't ask me to chop shit")
- boiled eggs and fresh veggies (put a little salt on top of the eggs for pizzaz!)
- buttered noodles (take it up to level 10 and add roasted garlic; takes 30 mins in an oven, only one swoop of the knife required)
- baked potato with toppings (I like cheese, bacon, broccoli, green onion, and sour cream)
- quesadilla (add some canned beans, cilantro, or avocado!)
- pot roast (requires a lot of time but not a lot of actual work. I love it with peas!)
- cuban sandwich (bread, swiss, pickle, mustard, ham... my favorite thing to panini-ify by far)
- pan-fried tofu with scallion sauce (this sauce goes well with everything and tofu is no exception)
- pancakes or waffles! (I love mine with jam)
- ham, pickle, and cream cheese roll-ups
- fried eggs (with toast and lots of butter...so comforting)
- fruit smoothie (bananas, frozen strawberries, yogurt...or whatever!)
- I hate salad but could write essays on this copycat olive garden salad (throw it in a bowl! chopping required if you use onion)
- spaghetti (controversial maybe but angel hair > spaghetti noodles)
- pasta salad (olives broccoli fresh mozerella... those little mini pepperonis... yeah)
high energy ("I don't mind chopping some things up!")
- stuffed shells with spinach
- chicken and roasted garlic (oh my god.....one of my all time favorites)
- beef tacos (I like mine with cilantro and onion, and when I'm feeling especially high energy I love a tomatillo salsa)
- chicken alfredo
- tom kha gai (a thai soup and my absolute favorite! you just need access to galangal)
- lasagna! (freezes well and then boom! low energy meal for later)
- pad thai! (not as hard as you'd think, as long as you have access to tamarind paste!)
- potstickers! (this is a lovely group activity if you want to cook with housemates!)
- rice and beans
- bang bang shrimp (ogughfhgfuh I love it. you can also do bang bang tofu!)
- minestrone soup (so many nice veggies!)
- fried rice (put whatever you have on hand in there! broccoli, peas, carrot, and beef is my favorite combo)
- broccoli cheddar soup
- spring rolls and peanut sauce
- skewers (such as beef, onion, zucchini, bell pepper... you don't need a grill, oven works!)
- roasted turkey with garlic parmesean asparagus
- pork chop with mashed potatoes
other tips:
- whenever you think of a meal you'd like to make, take 3 seconds to google search it, take a screenshot of the image results, and put it in a "food ideas" folder. instant visual menu!
- if you're on instagram, there are a bajillion different recipe accounts that post videos! a few of my favorites: jipsoon_kitchen, eatwitzo, cordandthekitchen, chungeats, tiffy.cooks, two_plaid_aprons
This is all great!
I got this website from a nutritionist and it’s become my absolute favorite way to find new recipes. The search filter options are fantastic! Sorting by method really helps me because I think that’s what makes the biggest difference in how much energy you need.
And here are some other ideas for low/medium energy meals:
- Cottage cheese with crackers, fruits and/or veggies.
- Guacamole with veggies and/or tortilla chips
- Chickpeas/garbanzo beans with tzatziki. You could add rice, lettuce/spinach, and/or pita.
- Buffalo cauliflower with yogurt dip. You can roast or microwave the cauliflower, top it with hot sauce, and add bleu cheese or shredded cheddar on top.
laser-free diet.
y'all need to hear about gerb.
gerb was my high school physics teacher. (gerb is short for mr. gerber.) when we were learning about radiation and whatnot, and we touched on radiation poisoning, gerb decided to tell us a story.
when gerb was in high school, he worked in a supermarket. a cashier. there was this one little old lady, mrs. cassopolis, who was a regular. mrs. cassopolis firmly believed that the lasers used to scan her food items would give her radiation poisoning. they tried to explain that’s not a thing. but old cass wouldn’t hear a word of it.
the employees had to punch in every. last. grocery. item. MANUALLY.
and this woman would buy cartfulls of food every week, like any good grandma trying to feed her five children and eighteen grandchildren every time they come for a Sunday visit. so pretty soon, the employees figured out a strategy to get her on her way and get on with their lives.
one or more employees would distract old cass while the cashier would scan all the items he could as fast as humanly possible while she wasn’t paying attention.
now this supermarket had a rewards program for its most efficient workers. the computer would track how quickly the cashiers scanned items, and how many total they scanned in one day, that kind of thing. so one day, gerb’s boss came to him and said “uh,”
“you scanned three hundred items in six minutes last Tuesday during your shift”
and gerb says “i recall”
“that’s about four times faster than anything i’ve ever seen”
and gerb says “yea ok”
“jeremy what happened?”
and gerb says
“i had to save a little old woman from placebo radiation”
I just remembered one time in like sixth or seventh grade (we had the same teachers and class both years so hard to remember which) somehow we got into a debate of “who is better, boys or girls?” and instead of stepping in to stop it our teacher formalized it and egged us on by providing thoughtful prompts and counters to each side and by the end each group had built a barricade of desks on either side of the classroom and we were throwing balls of paper at each other and screaming about personal hygiene while our teacher just watched and enjoyed a Baby Ruth candy bar.
This was the same teacher that got the cops called on our school like three times and would reward us for being good by spraying our hands with rubbing alcohol and setting them on fire.
He was the best teacher I ever had.
STUFF MR ROBINSON DID THAT WAS VERY GOOD:
One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.
He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.
At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.
“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”
We, of course, promised.
“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”
-
(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)
-
At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.
Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.
(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)
Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.
One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.
-
One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.
-
One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.
-
Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.
-
They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.
-
We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.
One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.
And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.
She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.
She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?
It was an incredibly powerful day.
When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.
-
Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.
-
One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.
We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.
-
Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.
-
One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.
-
IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.
-
Plus like getting to set your hand on fire for good behavior is a way better reward than whatever dumb stickers or candies or whatever it is teachers usually use. “Behave and we will play with fire” is the BEST incentive.
Transcript:
Heyo! With pride month starting, here's a quick comic on pride Etiquette, a short guide / general tips on treating lgbt+ people, for the new, curious, and those who forgot!
1) Treat people's identities as the indisputable truth. Even if you don't think they fit the definition, even if you don't understand (the identity), even if you think they're lying, even if they're a bad person. It's not your job nor your business to tell people what to call themselves. Unless they ask for your opinion, only the individual can make that decision.
*There's very few times when an identity can actually be harmful. This includes predatory labels, labels that are bigoted by definition, or people identifying with culture-specific labels when they're not part of that culture. Otherwise, leave them be!
2) Respect and use people's pronouns, regardless of how you feel about them! If you don't know how they work, ask! If you accidentally misgender someone, correct yourself and move on! No need for lengthy or dramatic apologies. However, also make sure to ask when it's appropriate to use them! Someone may not be out to parents, certain friends, etc, and will ask you to purposefully misgender them for safety.
3) LGBT+ people are not responsible for someone else's anti-lgbt+ views! Strange, unbelievable or confusing identities do not cause bigots to be bigots- the lgbt+ community was made because we don't fit society's box, don't fall into the trap of forcing people into another one! If they're not actually hurting anyone, then leave them be!
4) You're not expected to learn every single lgbt+ term / identity. Nobody knows all of them, not even lgbt+ people, so don't worry about it! Simply learn and ask questions as you go!
5) If you're curious about someone's identity, ask if they're comfortable with questions first! There's no harm in educating yourself, but sometimes we get tired of being walking encyclopedias!
Thanks for reading, and happy Pride!!!
