Ask Lemmy

Making tofu from scratch. Also sourdough.

I love cooking in all forms, and there are a lot of things I happily do from scratch. I love baking bread, making my own oat milk, mixing up my own seitan from vital wheat gluten, and a whole bunch of other things.

But making tofu was something I tried a bunch of times and have ultimately given up on. It is extremely time consuming, very difficult to get right, and makes a worse product than what I can buy at the store. It isn't even cheaper to do, as the cost of the soybeans and the cost of the premade tofu are about the same. I may make it on occasion if I plan on serving it on its own as a dish with soy sauce, but that is about it.

With sourdough, I found it easy to get into, but my husband and I both prefer our baked goods to be not sour, and we both have pretty sensitive tastebuds in that regard. It is easier for me to just use instant yeast whenever I need it and make something we both prefer to eat.

Taught myself how to snake spit. But now it sometimes happens on its own so I really wish I hadn’t trained my mouth so well.

Let me think -

Mostly software training at work for systems they immediately abandoned.

My interior design skills languish for lack of money.

Most of the other stuff I can do gets some use I think.

Functions and derivatives, from late high school to college. They were extremely tedious, and I had to learn tens of formulas I don't use very often.

Driving. Never used it.

English sheep counting, a base-20 number system. Often called Yan Tan Tethera. Lincolnshire is the best version.

Ventriloquism. I dont use it at all anymore. Learned it because i thought it would be fun and one could make some jokes with it but nah

As an old time computer nerd I have uncountable examples of deprecated knowledge. There is no use in knowing how to use the reserved upper memory in autoexec.bat and config.sys, nor how to use Napster or Kazaa.

But all these skills do shape your brain and way of thinking.

Assembly language taught me to be precise and think before typing. Flash taught me that nothing lasts forever, as big as it might seem.

Eventually, all this adds up and creates a profile that is very demanded in my career.

That said, my mom taught me to thread a needle without looking. And I can't sew, so that's that.

I got a bunch of software certs for when I was first job hunting and now they either no longer exist or have been so changed that the certs don't matter.