1. We did hot pot for new years and that was tasty! It’s a nice special occasion meal.
2. Pottery! Picking up our glazed pieces and 40 more lbs of clay today lol.

Been using banana peels as a vegetable, shredding them into strips with a fork then simmering in broth. Kinda like a crunchy string bean texture after 20 minutes of cooking, no detectable banana flavor (for me at least). I’m on the lookout for more recipes if anyone else uses them.

As for hobbies, desperately waiting for spring to start gardening again. I miss all the cool bugs and being chased inside by carpenter bees 🐝 lol!

1. I made Focaccia for the first time recently and really loved it! I will make it again soon!

2. Not much time recently, but crosswords are my jam

1. last recipe we tried was a ‘marry me tofu’ and it went pretty well! This was the second time we had it and it was really delicious. We toned down the red pepper flakes for my wife and i personally didn’t care for the sundried tomatoes, but we liked it overall and will be making it again. My only ‘complaint’ about the recipe is they wait until the very end to tell you to serve it with something so that was a surprise and i was scrambling to heat up some stir fried veggies Lol.

2. Latest hobby is rowing so i can get in shape

For a new recipe I just recently found out how easy hummus is to make so it’s gotta be that.

So easy:

• 1 can chickpeas, drained except a healthy splash of the aquafaba
• 1/4 cup tahini
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• garlic

Toss it all in a food processor or blender and hit it til it’s the right consistency. Taste, adjust, blend, repeat. Add salt or spice or whatever you want.

This is the first weekly thread since I’ve become an admin here. Just wanted to briefly update everyone on things.

There is a veganhomecooks (veganhomecooks.com) Pixelfed instance. It is able to federate images here as posts by mentioning the lemmy community in the body. (i.e. appending @homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org to a pixelfed post caption will make a post on the !veganhomecooks@vegantheoryclub.org community).

Unfortunately, under normal circumstances, comments only federate from lemmy to Pixelfed and not the other way around. I have developed two scripts that I periodically run to resolve the veganhomecooks comments and index them here, but it is a somewhat manual process as the Pixelfed instance doesn’t allow scrapping (you need to be logged in to see the content). Rarely, this fails to work, so almost all the veganhomecooks comments can be seen here on vegantheoryclub. There is an issue with deletions not federating both sides, but it can be manually done if need be.

In my opinion, I think Pixelfed is not really fun to use as it lack even basic features like federating text only posts. I know it’s meant to be for visual media only, but if a mastodon user can follow you and comment on your pictures and federate their own to you then I don’t see the appeal of purposefully not receiving any of their other text posts. Mastodon feels like it can do much, if not all, of what Pixelfed can do, and more. Pleroma, Akkoma, and Misskey having even more functionality and interoperability than mastodon. I just wish it was a configuration option (that worked) to enable text only content, I really fail to see how it would undermine the experience of using Pixelfed or add much in the way of complexity to the project scope.

I’m curious if anyone else has any opinions about Pixelfed yet. I’ve only discovered text posts don’t federate after making an account and using it so my expectations may be out of scope, but I don’t see the appeal of this considering federation is a core part of why it’s used.

1. Bobotie (SA casserole) was a big hit at a family gathering.

2. Idk if trying to unfuck my arms is a hobby but the keyboard is coming along. One side nearly done, the other keycap set is printed but it still needs the microcontroller wired in.

Other than that learning gamedev in my free time.

1. my wife and i tried making tofu the other week and that was quite an adventure. we did create an edible product! it was actually tasting but there’s a lot of room for refining in that process.

2. working on my home’s landscaping. my family abides by solarpunk and permaculture principles conceptually, so we’re trying to put them into action in real life in a couple of different ways. i have lately been putting rain barrels in place to catch what scant rainfall we do receive where i live, and am planning to install drip irrigation lines off of those rain barrels to water a pollinator garden that will be on the burning hot west side of our house this summer. i have no idea if that will be enough to help anything survive, but that’s what i’m thinking about. also finishing the deep mulching of our front yard with woodchips and cardboard. this project has taken forever but is providing a better growth medium than the bare dirt clay soil we had before.