Craving 'em red meat sauces but too busy? Behold, a ragù recipe so well optimized it can boil the blood of every pizzaliano within a 35-centimetro radius.^[1]

Ingredients

I like to think my sauce is somewhere between Bologna and Napoli even tho it sure ain't. Imma list in the order of importance what I usually use down here, but please adjust according to your local market and preference, to quote chef Jean-Pierre:

If you don't have/like it, don't use it.

1. 2 fist-sized onyi

2. 1 big carrot

3. A Gordon-Ramsey dash of cooking oil^[2]

4. 600 grammi of mince from any mammal^[3]

5. 3 tomatoes^[4]

6. Salt and pepper

7. Half a bottle of drinkable red wine^[5]

8. 'bout the same amount of stock

9. A few cloves of garlic

10. A couple of ribs of celery

11. Some thyme and basil, preferably fresh

12. Some chili

13. Paprika powder^[6]

These should produce about 2 litri of sauce or 4–6 servings,^[7] for which some hard cheese(s) and butter are also nice to have.

The following tools are also needed:

1. Bowls (for storing the ingredients)

2. Kitchen sink

3. Knife and cutting board

4. Fine grater (like for cheese or citrus jest)

5. Blender

6. Frying pan

7. Spatula or ladle

8. Sauce pan or pot

9. Slow cooker

Base Prepping

Peel, wash and finely dice the onyi and caramelize 'em in a pan with some oil under low heat. Stir sparingly, this process takes over half an hour and should start before anything else.^[8] A wee of salt would help draw out the moisture and accelerate the caramelization, which happens well above the water's boiling point.

In the meantime, wash the other vegetables, finely grate the carrot, peel and mince the garlic, and dice the celery. When all done, transfer all to the pan and continue frying until the onyi are soft and lightly browned.

Broth Prepping

While waiting for the base veggies to caramelize, reduce the wine in half in a sauce pan to get rid of the alcohol.

Blend the tomatoes with the stock (it's supposed to be a purée without the peel but ain't nobody got time for that) and the rest of the spices. Be conservative with the salt, you can always add more but it's much less easy to remove.

Meat Prepping

Move the vegetables into the slow cooker from the pan and use it^[9] to sear the minced meat under medium heat until the bottom side is golden brown (no need to stir). Parfry in multiple batches if necessary: if the pan is crowded it'd take much longer to reach the desired temperature for the Maillard reaction. Remember, water is the enemy, so leave it a way to retreat.^[10]

Cooking

Scoop the meat into the slow cooker and pour in the reduced wine. Gradually add the tomato smoothie while mixing until the liquids barely covers the solids (add more stock if necessary).

Turn the cooker on low and cook for 4–8 hours or until the meat is tender.

Serving

Serve with short pasta or rice. Grate in a generous amount of hard cheeses and drop in a smol slab of butter^[11] and mix well for extra creaminess. Butter is an emulsion, so turn off the stove before adding it to prevent the butterfat from separating.

Plate with fresh basil and thyme and even moar grated cheese if you have any left.

Reflection

The recipe is not that lazy to be handy, it nor differs from a normal ragù enough to be a rage bait, but I spent all that time typing it down so I decided to keep the original title for the clickbait values.

Thịt kho tàu, literally Chinese braised pork, is one of the most common Vietnamese dish, to be found anywhere from military camps^[1] to fancy restaurants, anytime from family diners to new year holidays. While originated from southeastern China, over the years it adopted local ingredients such as fish sauce and coconut flesh and probably does not taste the same.

Due to time constraints, home cooks usually relies on fattier cuts such as the belly to maintain the juiciness. The downside is that the excess fat can quickly tell the liver to tune down the appetite after a few meals.^[2] This put me in an awkward position, since I was conditioned to feel wrong about braising a serving size of anything (I was living alone when typing this).

Though, as said three sentences ago, leaner cuts can be as tender when cooked longer. This is where slow cookers come to the rescue: they maintain temperature between 80 and 100°C and after eight hours even the toughest cuts will just fall apart. The best part? No supervision needed. Water doesn't even boil at that temperature, so accidentally burning food is never a worry.

For the ease of maintenance, I'd recommend slow cookers whose pot and lid can be taken out for cleaning. The pot should also be relatively large (3L^[3] or more) if you want to make other vegetable-rich stews.

Ingredients

As a big fan of Chef Jean-Pierre, I eyeball the amount of pretty much all ingredients here. The amount of pork and eggs should be enough to at least fill the bottom of the pot. I prefer quail eggs for their bite size and leaner cuts of pork but with some intramuscular fat and tendons. Hocks, hams and shoulders are all good and cheap candidates. Leave the skin on, the gelatine helps thicken the sauce. I like equal amount of eggs and meat.

For seasoning, you'll need fish sauce, sugar, whole black pepper, and optionally shallot, garlic and hard coconut meat.

Preparation

Boil the eggs and peel them. Layer them in the pot. Peel and slice one or two cloves of garlic and sprinkle them in there. If you have coconut meat, julienne^[4] and throw it in as well.

Cut the pork into bite-size dice. Place the skin facing up or the side of the pot. You want (some of it) to be drier for texture variety. Peel a few cloves of shallot and embed them between the dice of pork.

Cooking

Pour a very thin layer of sugar on a sauce pan and heat it up at medium low to make some dark caramel (too low you'll just get liquid sugar and too high you'll burn it faster than the blue hedgehog). Soon as it's bubbling, carefully pour in some water. The amount should be able to almost cover the meat and eggs in the pot.

While waiting the caramel to dissolve, add fish sauce to taste, and throw in a generous number of peppercorns. Transfer the sauce to the pot, making sure the eggs are fully covered (they can be really chewy when dry: another reason to favor the quail ones).

Turn the slow cooker on low and cook for around eight hours. Tastes amazing either hot or cold, best served with boiled or pickled vegetables and any kind of starch, commonly rice or sweet potatoes but you can try bread, potatoes, or even short pasta if you're feeling adventurous.

The Germination

To understand my 2020, we have to travel back a few months, when it all started. No, not that thing beginning at the end of '19. I am talking about my 2020 experience, remember?

The story started in October 1810 in the not-so-little city of Munich, Germany. Alright, it sounds like I lied about the 2019 and my story part, but bear with me, it's all connected. Anyhow, some Bavarian couple got married and threw a big party. People like parties, so naturally they celebrated the anniversaries, year after year until it became a tradition known to in English as the Oktoberfest.

Over two centuries years later, on the wedding day of another Bavarian couple,^[1] DigitalOcean began to an annual PR campaign on the same month called Hacktoberfest. I know, to many of you maintaining projects on GitHub (and more recently GitLab.com), the name might not remind you of something festive, but it really opened a new chapter in my life.

Back to the future in 2019, it was my first year taking part in the event. The premise was that one would receive a t-shirt after having filed at least four GitHub Pull Requests™.^[2] Unlike plethora, this does not sound like it was a lot, yet more than I ever had done. Getting out of my comfort zone was the first baby step, opening various opportunities in the upcoming months and perhaps, years.

The Fruition

Probably what I benefited the most from participating in Hacktoberfest was learning to not be afraid of communicating with complete strangers maintaining the software I use. Stepping into 2020, I started to do a larger variety of stuff in Python, which made installing libraries happen on a regular basis. The international Internet connection from home at the time was unstable and usually downloads from the package warehouse was a few kBps and that definitely did not help. A few moments later, I found myself on PyPA's IRC channel discussing strategies to speed up pip downloading.

After several days of on-off conversations (mostly I was asking questions to fill in the blanks), a proposal was under draft: I was an undergrad sophomore and had been eyeing on Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for quite a while. Applying for pip wasn't the plan, but rather Octave, the first big project I have contributed code to.^[3] Now thinking about it, it was a better choice since I was more comfortable with pip's tech stack. The rest of the story was already noted down so I won't be retelling it here.

The Disease

When the world had been battling SARS-CoV-2 for a few months, Việt Nam was barely affected. By refusing inbound travelers and temporary switching to work/study-from-home, the number of cases and deaths was neglible and by the end of summer we were virtually back to normal. I hated that most organizations, my university included, straight up offered big techs our data without a second thought, and was thankful online learning did not last.

Like many others, I spent that summer rarely leaving the house. I was grateful of GSoC for keeping me busy and giving me the opportunity to socialize with new cool people. It was impossible for me to catch the virus, I thought. I was not wrong though, but I got something else: dengue fever. The fever wasn't too bad, I was high as a kite for half a week, but never critical. The aftermath, however, was much less pleasant.

For the next week, I was in a living hell because of a throat infection. I'd had sore throats before, quite regularly in fact, often at least once every few months, but they had been a mere inconvenience. Usually, all I'd gotta do had been to person up, swallow a few times and get on with my day. This was different. Everything hurt like a bitch. The slightest texture or flavor could cause minutes of pain. For the first time, I experience throat lozenges being the opposite of soothing.

For the entire week, I survived on undercooked scrambled eggs and mushy porridge. I had to take α-chymotrypsin^[4] before every meal and was practically microdosing it throughout the day to be able to drink water. You can't imagine how happy I was when I could finally eat rice again. While the infection was not directly caused by dengue (it only weakened my immune system), the trauma was enough to make me finally care about home mosquito eradication. Guess who learnt it the hard way!

The Profit

GSoC gave me in stipend 3000 USD, minus Payoneer fees and shitty currency exchange "tax". That was the largest sum I'd ever had in my hands. Because of the low cost of living in Việt Nam,^[5] I no longer completely financially dependent on my parents. I could pay my own school fees (scholarship would give back the money months after paying), hang out more with friends (we had zero-COVID for a while, remember?), tip free software projects and services I had (and have) been using for years.

More importantly, I could buy myself future e-waste. I got a Model M so that I no longer need to change keyboard every year, a lefty Ploopy to ease my traffic-accident-injured right wrist that's prolly never gonna fully heal, a new DAP to replace my dead walk man, my first phone and perhaps some other things. No worries, I'm still daily driving them today, they ain't ended up in the landfill (yet).

The Migrations

Admittedly, the first freedesktop.org smartphone caught my eye was actually the Librem 5, which I could afford neither the time nor the money for. I know, the terminology sounds ridiculous, but Linux would include Android and GNU'd exclude postmarketOS. Anyway, Purism, the company behind the Librems, has seriously invested in adaptive GUI and federated services. My first ActivityPub account was provided by Librem One.

It was not the first time I use a federated service. I've used email for as long as I can remember and begun to use Matrix intensively since I entered university. So what (were there to be) changed? At the time, my online presence^[6] was primarily inside surveillance capitalist walled gardens. I was mostly active(ly posting) on bird site socializing with people I acquainted during my GSoC and publishing my development/shitpost^[7] videos to YouTube.

Nothing on fedi really caught my eyes, until I got (hyped up for getting) my PinePhone. Its software landscape was incredibly fast moving back then. Most peripherals were barely working. Desktop programs were being ported for narrower screens using brand new convergent libraries. Many developers were contracted by Purism or sponsored by Pine64, a large fraction of whom are free software purists, rejecting spyware disguised as social media. Never before, hanging out in chat rooms^[8] and the Fediverse were the absolutely best ways to keep up with life-quality-changing updates.

Like with desktop-handheld convergence, I was impressed with Fediverse's interoperability between multiple media formats, from (micro)blogs to picture albums to videos. Imagine being able to share and comment on a YouTube directly from Twitter! Shortly, I registered for a PeerTube account and migrate all my videos there. The longer I stayed on fedi, the more cool stuff I found and the more satisfied I was. Fast forward over two years, I have deleted or permanently logged out of most; only quiddit^[9] is left.

One thing led to another, Martijn Braam's apps introduced me to SourceHut, which embraces email for federation and focuses on useful stuff like SSH for CI, instead of trying to be a social media or relicense the projects it hosts. I have moved most of the software I maintain from GitHub to sr.ht, but the network effect is too strong: I still have to stick around with the former to contribute to software I regularly use.

However, it's unlikely that most of those growing up with GitHub, especially inexperienced contributors, will be willing to adapt to a workflow revolving around mailing lists for such kind of forge to become mainstream again. On the bright side, I start to seeing more larger projects hosting their development platform, and I am watching forge federation with great interest.

The Moral

At this point, you probably wonder, what I am trying to tell from all these random rambling. Welp, nothing. My life is not like the movies, there ain't no plot, no meaning. The whole point of this log is to bridge the gap between /blog and /blog/2020/gsoc. 2020 was indeed positively life-changing for me, tho/so I can't expect most of y'all'll be able to relate. 2023 is already underway, and I hope we will all have a year we can look back to the same way I did in this post. Perchance.

At the time of writing, I am sharing a kitchen with around 40 people from all parts of the world. Very often, someone asks me to share a recipe from my cuisine, and I usually have to decline, blaming the lack of fresh ingredients,^[1] while I can only afford to shop for groceries weekly. While most Vietnamese dishes call for fresh meat (I can only buy refrigerated one), in certain case it doesn't really matter. One quick dish that could tolerate days-old meat is a soup of green leaf vegetables.

Back when I was still at home, a meal almost always consists of a soup. When we are about to finish a bowl of rice, we mix in the soup to wash all of the gelatinized starch (into our mouth). The soup could be anything from boiled vegetable broth to vine spinach and jute soup with crab juice. In that range of difficulty, I would rate the following recipe somewhere in the lower middle.

Ingredients

For a vegetable soup, of course you need a lot of veggie. As much as you can eat. I would recommend at least two handful per serving^[2] of any Brassica leafs, e.g. mustard greens, spoon cabbage or regular cabbage.^[3] The greener the plant the less starchy it is and the better it blends with the umami of the meat.

As for the animal product, minced or ground pork is a common choice. Minced chicken, fish or dried shrimp also works, but IMHO beef, lamb or goat could overpower the veggie. Meat is not the star of the show and should be used moderately, 50 grams^[4] would be generous. There is no vegan variation of this dish AFAICT, except for reducing to just water, leafs and seasoning, but even a child could cook that without a recipe.

In addition, a shallot is required for searing and fish sauce for seasoning. It is OK-ish to use onion in place of shallot;^[5] I am not a fan of using soy sauce in this dish though. Super salt (table salt and MSG 9:1 mix) is a better substitution in case you can't get your hands on the signature Vietnamese seasoning.

Last but not least, it would not be a soup without water. A cup should be enough to emerge the cooked veggie.

Preparation

First, wash and slice the vegetable and throw it in a colander to let the water rinse of. Next, chop the shallot thinly.

If you bought minced or ground meat, you are done preparing. Otherwise, it's mincing/grinding time, duh!

Cooking

Turn the stovetop to medium high and put on a stainless steel pan or pot. Doesn't have to stainless steel, anything smooth without a polymer coating would do. Pour in a touch of cooking oil (or a tiny spoon of lard) and start sautéing the shallot.

As soon as the pot is hot enough, immediately add the meat (don't wait for the shallot to turn golden brown, the slices are thin enough to be caramelized as the meat is seared). You don't need to stir since we don't need evenly cook it right now, but don't let it stick together. Use a spoon or a scraper to break it up and press it down for faster searing.

If you have fish sauce, pour it in after the meat finishes browning to develop even more flavor for a few seconds. Then, deglaze the pot using water and bring it to a boil. Throw the leafs into the pot and get the water boiling again. In case you use salt for seasoning, now is time to sprinkle it in the soup. Let it cook for another two or three minutes (radiant or thermal conductive coil could be switched off and maintain the heat for that duration) and it's ready to serve!

Where I'm from, hams are stupid expensive due to the lack of demand. This is unacceptable because I love hams!^[1] After years of not tasting even a single slice, I decided for myself to make some, and noting down what works and what doesn't.

Unlike other stuff you usually find on the interweb, the following recipe will not require any fancy equipment,^[2] chemical^[3] or quantities that (should) only appear in a math textbook. It will also try to be flexible, so that you can be free to experiment with whatever you feel like that day, while knowing for sure you'll still end up with something at least remotely resemble a piece of ham.

Brining

Making ham, like any other food, comprises of only two steps: preparing and cooking. Brining not only makes the meat salty^[4] but also enhances its tenderness by braking down the proteins.

The most important ingredients for this process are meat, salt and sugar. As for the meat, it's preferably from a pig's thigh, but anything with a similar texture will do. You do want a cut with parallel muscles to minimize the amount of silver skin and tendon though, plus it will have better presentation. As always, intramuscular fat is a delicious cherry on top, but not too crucial in this case. On the other hand, any kind of salt and sugar would do. Personally I use sea salt and brown sugar because they are the cheapest to be found locally, whilst they add some extra flavors and minerals.

Dry

Dry brining is only suitable for (family-)serving-size cuts of meat, somewhere from 200 to 500 grams. Anything larger would have troubles absorbing the seasoning. Otherwise, cover the meat in coarse salt and sugar and leave it in the fridge from a few hours to overnight, depending on its mass.

How much seasoning? Be generous, but you'd want to still be able to see the meat underneath. I don't think you can't overseason it, just remember to rinse off the remaining rub before cooking. As for the ratio, I like to twice as much salt as sugar, but I've seen people doing 1:1 or even 1:2.

Wet

The brine formula I'm about to describe is heavily influenced from Mike G's recipe, which is also uncured ham. First, pour enough water to submerge the meat in a pot (no, don't put the meat in the pot) and heat it up. If you have a fairly fitting container, the amount is close to the mass of the meat itself.

Then, add 5% salt, 3% sugar, and whatever spices can go well with your future ham. I usually use a few bay leaves, some thyme and crushed peppercorn, but any aromatic, fresh or dry, should work. You don't have to be exact with the amount of seasoning either: if you don't have a scale, measure with a spoon and be generous. Due to the lack of nitrate, the brining shouldn't occur for more than a few days and the more concentrated the solution, the faster the absorption.

Let the brine cool down, pour it in a container, drown the meat^[5] (use a weight if necessary) and put it in the fridge. A cut of a few hundred grams should take around 24 hours.

Cooking

After taking the meat out of the fridge and wash it lightly, wait around an hour for it to reach room temperature. If you don't have paper towel, place it on a rack or an elevated plane to dry off the surface.

Before cooking, I like to rub a few other extra spices on my meat. My favorite are smoked paprika (for the smoky flavor), garlic powder, freshly grounded black pepper and perhaps some nutmeg.

From here, it's similar to cooking a steak: you'd want it in an environment close to the target temperature, which is around 68°C, or 63°C if pork in your area is heavily regulated. The closer it is, the smaller the difference between the center and the outer layers may be, i.e. you'll less likely to overcook the latter. There are three ways^[6] to do this indoor: sous vide, pan-frying and oven-roasting. If you have a sous vide machine, I'd assume you wouldn't need my instructions, so I will focus on the other two methods.

Pan-frying

First, rub a touch of cooking oil^[7] all over your meat, then turn on the stove to the lowest-possible heat and place the pan and the meat on it. It should take 30 to 40 minutes to reach to desired temperature, depending on your stove. You can use your finger or a chopstick to poke on the meat: if it feels raw it's probably raw, if it's solid it's overcooked; you'd want it bouncy, right before it stops being so. Yes, it's a lot of trial and error and unnecessarily stressful, just get a thermometer, especially the one you can stick in for the entire process.

It is not compulsory to sear a ham, but I'm addicted to the Maillard reaction so Imma do it anyway. You can sear before or after cooking, I usually do the latter (reverse searing) because it seems to make more sense. Move the meat to a temporary plate and wipe the pan clean. Turn the stove up to medium-high and wait for it to get hot.

If your meat does not look like it can fit it a body building contest, coat it with little more oil, then drop it on the pan. Rotate it every 30 seconds until the whole surface area is golden brown, then transport it back to the plate for resting until you can comfortably touch it before slicing. Serve with yellow mustard.

Roasting

If you have an oven, place the meat on its rack and turn it down to lowest heat (mine is 100°C). In this method, a thermometer is also compulsory to monitor the meat inner temperature, which should take around 80 minutes to raise to the target one. I suggest bisecting the checking intervals, e.g. check after 40 minutes, then 20, and so on.

If you're worried about the wasted energy, you can cut some carrots, potatoes, tomatoes and/or onions (anything high in carbs, really) in half and throw them in the oven. After taking the meat out, turn the oven up to highest and you'll have some beautifully caramelized side dishes.

The oven I have at home is not powerful enough for searing the meat (quickly) so I usually turn to the pan instead.

Slow cooking (bonus)

This is a bonus because I could never make a ham out of it, but pulled pork. On the other hand, it's so tender that you won't be able to slice and needs much less attention. Since we won't sear the meat, it's a good idea to use a binding like mustard to stick even more rubbing spices on the surface.

After rubbing, touch the bottom of the slow cooker with a bit a oil to avoid sticking, drop the bay leafs from the brine on it and place the meat on top. Cook low from six to eight hours, then using forks or chopsticks separate the muscles from each other. You can serve immediately or let it cook a bit more after pulling.

Late April 2021, Việt Nam witnessed the beginning of the fourth wave of SARS-CoV-2 after a few months without any community case. Soon enough, students are told to not come to their schools' campus. This happens when I was an intern at USTH ICTLab, so I was advised to work remotely as well. I asked for this at the start of the internship but my supervisor was rather reluctant, since there was multiple interns working together and communication in person might be most effective. Working from home was beneficial to me in a few important ways:

1. I had a three-monitor setup at home and a more comfortable space.

2. I could have be more flexible working hours at home.

3. I did not have to bike back and forth to the lab (which is 4 km away) twice a day^[1], which could be exhausting in the hot summer.

Thanks to the last point, I also sweat a lot less and as I no longer had to maintain a public appearance, I decided to give #nopoo a try. I had been aware of such practice for quite a few years, but had never thought of actually implementing it until I saw Johnny Harris' vlog, which I can only describe as intriguing. TL;DW the journalist maintained that generally shampoos washed away his scalp's natural oil, and in combination with other hair products made the scalp itchy and unhealthy. His solution was to drop the use of all products completely and so far it had been working for him.^[2]

Well, my head was itchy sometimes (still itchy at the time of writing), alors, pour la patrie, les sciences et la gloire, let's do it!

Day One

I was going full no poo, no soap, no baking soda, no vinegar, just water, raw water. Everything was going as expected, my hair was not as fluffy as usual after washing, but it was easier to get in shape. I didn't really style my hair. Not as a fashion statement, I was (still am!) just rather lazy. Usually this wasn't an issue, unless when my hair was long, it tent to cover my forehead, ears and eyes, which was arguably an uncomfortable experience. Having the hair stay in place was indeed a blessing!

Day Two

My hair started to feel thicker and running hands through it no longer felt simulating. On the bright side it looked fabulous and did not itch.

Day Four

My hair and scalp began to feel greasy. I guess it was because I did not wash it thoroughly that day. With just water one would need to take more effort scrubbing the hair and especially the scalps to return them to a comfortable state. Plus my mentality got worse so my perceived experience could be exaggeratedly negative.

Day Five

I worked out and paid more attention to the hair washing process. It felt noticeably better.

Day Six

The brief revival of my mental health did not last very long:^[3] later that day I was completely autopiloting and accidentally poo'ed myself. It felt fluffy again but I was disappointed that things did not go as planned.

Day Seven

I decided to cut my hair. I had been doing so for a decade when I wrote this, but I got neither better nor faster at it, so it only happens twice or thrice a year. Of course I had to poo myself after to get rid of all the tiny pieces.

Day Eleven

Fast forward a few days it started to feel greasy again, but this time the hair was shorter so it was less of an issue. I began to apply saline to the hair after washing and somehow it helped a lot in improving the situation. Saline was also my solution for face acne in my teenage year (along with finger nails and pillowcase hygiene).

Day Fifteen

At this point the experience had become more stable. My scalp still itched occasionally but seemly less often than when I was poo'ing more regularly. The hair stayed in shape with merely any effort (I didn't even use a comb).

Overall, the difference is barely noticeable otherwise but I think I will be continuing holding my poo for another while, probably in long term. Do not let my experience speak for you, however, try it yourself if you are interested, but keep observing the effect objectively.