SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Now that Oxford Dictionary has added the verb 'MacGyver' to the official lexicon, we pay homage to the almighty hack.
With each new update to the online version of the Oxford Dictionary, one can practically hear the laments of pedantic grammarians far and wide. This week, among a few dozen new words, we got “awesomesauce” (having nothing to do with sauce at all) and “mkay” (as in, OK … mkay). Oh how the mighty have fallen.
...
In the age of all things DIY, MacGyver has become the patron saint of the hack. And if there’s one thing we love here at TreeHugger, it’s a good hack. A clever use of materials allows old things to live longer, creates new uses for things that may be obsolete, and can basically become a super sustainable way to obviate the need to purchase more and more and more new stuff. Long live the hack! So with that in mind, here’s a round-up of some of our best MacGyver moments.
What follows is a long list of hacks. Some are contrived, some are clever but too niche, some might be useful. Anybody have any to add to the list? Mine is poking string into the can of bacon & chicken grease in the kitchen to make a quick tallow lamp. Works well.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:09PM
My experience with candles is they buy them for each other and you can't burn them because burning them destroys them and what if great auntie WTF came to visit from Nebraska next summer and noticed her commemorative pope votive candle from christmas of 2006 is gone, she might think I threw it out and then it'll be all family drama that I threw out her candle but not cousin Jennies pink candle with the love quotation from 2007 and you know those two sides of the family don't get along, at least on the womens side, so they'll think I'm taking sides. Meanwhile I'm thinking, I need some wax for this wood saw and buying my own candle is starting to sound appealing... This also applies to "practical" gifts like bath towels (seriously, I need to towel off my manly butt with your sister's idea of a cute kitten theme bath towel, and your sister thinks kittens are cute and she's in her 40s now? I swear if I get a whisker stuck up there... and it all goes downhill from there). Then there is the OMG I can't believe you used that towel to change the oil in your car, my aunt flora gave us that towel as a housewarming gift before she died, what would she say, and I'm like, we moved here back in '00 so zombie flora would probably say either "brainz" or "WTF do you still have that old thing for", that's what she'd say.
A good hack is a "hold my beer and watch this" moment that doesn't end up involving fire trucks or ambulances. Its hard to see how a candle could fit that criteria.
You know what else food grease is good for? Cooking. Take that bacon grease and fry some eggs in it, or fry a lean meat like chicken or a very lean steak in the pan, that tastes freaking awesome. Also any time you use fat you can use filtered bacon grease, just a couple drops in whipped cream is a cool experience although mixing it is non-trivial (because at cream temps the bacon grease is a solid, so there's this "tempering" process that has nothing to do with metallurgy but is the same basic idea as egg based sauces...). Oh and mix some bacon grease with peanut butter (you'll need to refrigerate it now unless you like rancid bacon grease flavor peanut butter, of course). Oh and potatoes are useless empty carbs, BUT when I eat useless empty carbs, I eat them fried in bacon grease, yum... I sometimes wonder how much bacon grease I threw out in the trash when I was a young dumb new cook. That stuff is freaking gold now that I know what to do with it. Some say that stir fries should use a neutral boring tasteless oil, I would say they have really bland tasting vegetables. I'm gonna start saving it in ice cube trays if I ever build up an excess of it, which is probably impossible. And now I am getting hungry. And thats some kinda hack-ish bacon grease ideas, at least compared to burning it.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Monday August 31 2015, @04:38PM
What kind of coffee do you drink, and how much?
But yeah, I reuse my oil once or twice, too, when cooking. It does add flavor and reduces the amount of stuff I have to jar and dispose of.
(and when cooking low fat meats, all the fat you can reuse is flavor you might not have been able to get with the meat... Don't buy a pink blob for flavor, because its in the marbling or that tasty fatty stuff being cut off.)
And yeah refrigeration storage of mixed oils is key to preventing a terrible mistake...not doing so is part of a recipe for disaster!
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Monday August 31 2015, @05:01PM
My experience with candles is they buy them for each other and you can't burn them because burning them destroys them and what if great auntie WTF came to visit from...
How quaint. My experience with candles is that you burn them because WTF, the power is out. Again. Reminds me of a joke circa 2000: Q: What did Zimbabweans use before candles were invented? A: Electricity.
You could say the joke's on us.