Gear Post 3: Judgement Gear

I’m sort of a gear nerd. I consider myself a minimalist, but I like the things I have to be very nice things. I’ve previously written about stuff I like here & here, mostly cooking and weight loss related, e.g. scales.

Santoku knife

I saw this in some YouTube video and thought I should check it out. For the longest time, I had 2 knives: a small paring knife for daily use, and a bigger chef’s knife. I only used the big chef’s knife to slice steak. Since I rarely make steak these days, it got used maybe once a month.

Santoku knives are apparently known in Japan to be pretty versatile, it means “knife with three uses.”

As described above I only had 2 uses for knives, but this covers them well. It’s heavy enough to slice a steak, yet nimble enough for everyday use like a smaller paring knife.

It would probably struggle if you tried cutting up a roast, but I don’t ever do roasts.

Plus, the one I got comes in this neat self-sharpening sheath.

On Amazon

Can opener

I don’t open a lot of cans. But when I do, I really, really want the dang can opener to work. I found that several can openers I got at the supermarket were very flimsy. Even if they didn’t outright break the first time I tried opening a can, they would do a very poor job, requiring me to reset and start over 4-5x for even a small can.

This one is heavy-duty and you could whack a zombie over the head with it and probably inflict critical damage.

It also opens pretty much any can in a single attempt. Like grandma’s used to.

Plus, it’s not even more expensive than most of the flimsy ones at the store.

On Amazon

Fat Free Marinara from Whole Foods

I started using this sauce on ex150, even before doing a month of rice & tomato sauce. It tastes just as good as my previous favorite, which was Rao’s. Now Rao’s is pretty pricey and presumably good quality, but it does contain olive oil, and 75% of the olive oil world market is contaminated with seed oils. Better safe than sorry.

And, of course, a fat-free sauce was mandatory for my low-fat rice experiment.

It’s also significantly cheaper than most high-quality pasta sauce at <$3 per jar.

Get at Whole Foods. They also have one that isn’t fat free and contains (alleged) olive oil, so pay attention to the label if you care about that aspect.

Rice cooker

I’m currently doing a 30 day rice diet experiment. Hence, I wanted a rice cooker.

Real rice lovers would probably get a Japanese Zojirushi cooker, but those are $200 and I wasn’t even sure I’d last the full 30 days. Plus, I thought it was unlikely I’d continue the rice much past 30 days. Hence, I opted for this much cheaper Hamilton Beach rice cooker for $50.

It works well. It cooks rice. You put rice & water in, plug it in, and then hit the “select mode” button once. It assumes you want to cook white rice, which has been correct 100% of the time so far for me.

Then you just wait until it beeps and you have rice. It even keeps the leftover rice warm for you, which is nice.

Teecino Snickerdoodle “coffee”

I got this idea from a Mormon. I think they’re not allowed to drink coffee.

It’s essentially just roasted herbs that sort of approximate coffee consistency, color, and maybe flavor (a bit).

For my low-fat, high-carb rice diet, I had to give up cream. And coffee without cream is disgusting. (Sue me.)

I’ll say I didn’t like any of the other flavors, only Snickerdoodle. The roasted chicory makes all of them sort of bitter, this one does the best job of masking that.

It’s fine, nothing to write home about. But if you’re looking to replace coffee for a bit, this does an OK job.

I got it at Whole Foods.

Egyptian Licorice tea

Another hot beverage for when you can’t have coffee with cream. I like this Egyptian Licorice flavor as a sort of “secondary booster.” Most herbal teas are extremely weak sauce compared to creamy coffee, both in terms of flavor and texture.

Adding this Egyptian Licorice to pretty much any other tea gives it some extra kick. It goes well with ginger teas or mint, for example.

I just put 1 bag of the other tea and 1 of this and let it steep 4-5 minutes. Since the licorice flavor sort of hits you with a few seconds delay, this seems to upgrade pretty much any other herbal tea quite a bit. Sort of like Vas Ort Flam/Corp Por if you catch my drift.

I didn’t particularly like most other Yogi brand teas, with the exception of their (lemon/orange/plain) ginger teas, which mix well with this one.

Get at Whole Foods or honestly most supermarkets.

Beurer red light/heat lamp

A while ago I got into the whole red light craze a bit. Originally, I bought a crazy high-powered red LED light.

I didn’t enjoy that one very much. The LED was so bright that even the red light bouncing off the walls was painful to the eyes. It was so bright that closing my eyes didn’t help, I had to wear a sleep mask.

Since LEDs don’t generate much heat, I also couldn’t really tell if the light was hitting me as intended, cause I could only operate it with a sleep mask on and so was “in the dark.”

Instead, I got this slightly more old-fashioned 300W ceramic heater. It gets extremely warm, which I like. The heat tells me exactly what body part I’m hitting. It also just feels good.

I suppose it also guarantees that I’m getting all the red/infra-red/near-infra-red wavelengths. LEDs are always designed to produce a specific profile, and you don’t really know if what the manufacturer says is right, or if that’s the one you want.

In addition, this comes with a nice 15 minute timer, after which it switches itself off. So you don’t have to manually manage the timing aspect, like I used to with the LED light. I can even use it and fall asleep, and it won’t stay on all night and set the house on fire.

Since it gets pretty hot, it comes with a built-in fan to cool itself. This fan stays on a while even after the light times out. If you’d be bothered by fan noise or are planning on using it in the same room as someone else trying to sleep, this could be an issue.

I keep this thing next to my nightstand, and when I feel like it in the evening or morning, I blast myself for 15 minutes.

Feels pretty cozy.

Get it on Amazon.

Hate my Instant Pot

This is my second Instant Pot. I threw out the first after not liking it, but then thought I might find a new use for it and got another one.

They’re just bad build quality. Mine fails to build pressure about 50-75% of the time, meaning I have to sit there and watch & micromanage it. If I don’t, I come back to the pot showing an error and my meal either completely burned or completely uncooked.

I could never actually use it for anything time/pressure sensitive, or let it run without supervision, because it fails & errors ON AVERAGE. That’s why I purchased a dedicated rice cooker for my 30 day rice diet, even though the Instant Pot can allegedly cook rice.

Yes, I’m doing everything right, the valves are just shit and don’t seal well. I even got replacement seals & everything. It came broken like this from the factory.

Something must be seriously wrong with it out of the box, but their support is so bad that it might as well not exist. (I haven’t ever even heard back from them.)

Pretty much the only thing I use it for is rendering tallow, because for that, it’s just a big pot. It’s an ok big pot. Not really great, but, well, I already had it.

People swear by these and maybe I’m just cursed; but I’ve yet to purchase one that works as advertised, and their support is total trash.

Honestly I should throw it away and buy a real pot; but I only render tallow 2-3x a year, so it’s not really worth it to buy another pot just for that.

Little Rice Diet Update

Day 28 of 30 today for the rice diet. My non-24 is still gone. After some of you suggested I try adding caffeine back to the carbs, I’ve done just that. Back up to about 1g caffeine a day in the form of energy drinks. Hasn’t made a difference, my wake times haven’t even shifted back. I wake up at 7:30-8am most days.

On the other hand, I also haven’t lost any appreciable amount of weight.

Full report next week.