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What's cooking

My trusted rice cooker that I bought in Indonesia in 2015 finally broke down earlier this year. It was a Toshiba, made in Japan. I didn’t like any of the other rice cookers available here. I just never heard of a ‘western’ brand making a decent rice cooker. So instead I decided to get an Instant Pot. This is kinda like a pressure cooker, and it also cooks rice.

I was happy that it cooks rice nicely, and even does brown rice well. I’ve now used it to make curries and soups. But what got me excited was when I found a recipe where you can make Pastrami.

I’ve made Pastrami before, the long way. This is where you brine the brisket with pickling spices for 10 days. Then you smoke it for three hours, before finally baking whilst also steaming it in the oven for 2 hours. Maybe the long version is better in that there aren’t many additives in it (from the corned silverside/brisket). But when you can enjoy warm slices of pastrami on your sourdough (or on top of warm rice that you cooked in the Instant Pot after the Pastrami) in less than 3 hours then that is a plus in my kitchen.

Here's a shorts video (60 seconds or less):

What's feeding my mind

Last Saturday we had Matthew Dicks as a guest speaker on Part Time youTuber Academy (PTYA). I read his book Storyworthy earlier in the year. Not surprisingly he’s an amazing storyteller. If you like storytelling, I can highly recommend The Moth podcast (available on most platforms you get your podcasts from). Check out some of the stories from Matthew Dicks himself. In the PTYA session he told the story of the magical spoon. I swear it brought tears to many of us hanging on to his words.

The main takeaway from Storyworthy is Homework for Life. This is the homework he assigns to you for LIFE. He’s a primary school teacher after all. Every night, take five minutes to write down three things that stood out for you from that day. You don’t need a lot of detail. Just enough to remind you of that day. Just enough that you can then build a story out of it.

He says that when you tell stories, people trust you and you build a community. This resonated with me, especially after being in Write of Passage, the writing course I was on last month. In Write of Passage, we wrote drafts and shared it for feedback. We then revised it after feedback to then post on our websites. While there are some who wrote about finance, NFTs or crypto, I found that the ones I gravitated towards were the ones who wrote out of their life experience or perspectives. I felt that some of us shared a piece of ourselves through our writing. This made us a tighter community.

What's on my plate

Why?

I wrote an essay where I breakdown curiosity into three steps:

1. Consume information thoughtfully
2. Chew the cud
3. Express

#shorts

It’s been a busy week for PTYA homework. Last week’s homework was Quick and Dirty: shoot, edit and upload a #shorts (a video of up to 60 seconds). We were even invited to post more than one this week if we were feeling frisky. I shot and posted mine that same night.

I saw a few questions in the Building a Second Brain sessions of people asking how to save highlights from physical books. So I decided to plan, shoot, script and record the audio, edit and upload a video of how I do this using Readwise. I didn’t have an external microphone, so I resorted to recording the audio on my iPhone using Voice Memos.

It had been a long day at work, and I was actually ready for an early night. And it showed, not the best audio. Lesson 1: Never do a video when tired. Lesson 2: Get a better microphone.

To make up for the crappy audio, I borrowed a RØDE microphone from work and did another #shorts. Which is the Instant Pot Pastrami video in the What’s Cooking section above.

See you next week :)

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Did you like this new format? My WOP friend Luca Sartoni mentioned it to me.