Ignorance is bliss they say. Is it really though?

I chanced upon a welsh YouTuber’s videos recently, where she’s living on £1 a day for meals. Not because she couldn’t afford more, she’s a YouTubers with almost 1 million subscribers, surely, she can afford more than £1 a day. She says she’s been doing this challenge to be more appreciative of what she has and to see first-hand how life is for many ppl who are less privileged. 

Now, I get why she’s doing this, and I’ve not got anything against her for that. But what threw me off guard was how she managed it. 

Let’s do the math here first. £1 a day for 7 days. What would do if you only had £1 a day for the whole week to feed yourself? Option 1: You buy a combination of groceries for £7 and cook several meals for the week. Option 2: Go to the grocery store every day and look for reduced item food or cheap canned food and survive with it. 

My common sense says buy food for £7 and cook several meals for the week. Saves time so you don’t have to think of what to eat every morning, saves petrol from unnecessary traveling to different grocery stores every day, reduces stress cos you know that you already have enough food, most importantly, you would still be eating somewhat healthy. 

This YouTuber chose the latter. Day 1 till day 3 she did this. She uploaded day 1’s video at the end of day 3. So when she started for video for day 4, she announced that she’s read the comments that indicated that she was cooking spaghetti wrong, gave tips that McDonald’s gives free ketchup, she can get free food by looking for coupons online, and that she can microwave her stale hard bread to make it soft. 

Who cares whether you break the spaghetti in half before boiling it, I do that too for convenience sake? Who’s to say what is right and wrong anymore now. What works for one wouldn’t necessarily work for another. Didn’t anyone suggest that she could have gone for option 1? Didn’t anyone think of it that way? Or didn’t she read all the comments? This bothered me for a bit, so I took it upon myself and read the comments. Nope. No one suggested this. Ok, let’s set that aside for now. 

She’s a YouTuber with almost 1 million followers. She’s been doing this for almost 7 years now if I’m not mistaken. She basically lives in the internet, hasn’t she heard of Google??? For the number of times that she complained about the hard bread, a simple 1 minute google search would have solved her misery. She was stating that she had to hunt for cheap food every day and cook every day, and that was tiring her out. Hasn’t she ever heard of meal preps? How can she have spent that much time on the internet and not heard about such things?

Is she being ignorant, or am I the one who’s ignorant? I had a similar thought when I came across another YouTuber some time ago who didn’t make much sense about something rather common, and I thought, how can he be so ignorant. I mean, I myself rely on Google and YouTube for almost everyday living. Don’t people who make a living out of these platforms learn things from it too? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to be more aware of their surroundings rather than just say whatever they want to say and allow themselves to be subjected to ridicules? 

Lately, there has been many open discussions about mental health, anxiety and depression that comes with putting yourself out there on the internet and opening your life for others to see, comment and condemn is a scary thing. If you are willing to do that, wouldn’t you want to be prepared and have your defences ready? It is one thing to be knowledgeable and share that with others and another to think that you are the know-it-all just because you’ve got a large number of followings. 

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now and still do not have an answer. Why would someone who works with the internet not use it to their benefit? 

New hobbies

Out of the blues, I decided I needed to pick up a new hobby. A small voice within me said my juggling clubs would come crashing down if I added one more to the current mix. However, my mind said, “You need to pick up something new”. 

When I was younger, the standard hobbies were reading, swimming, photography, travelling etc.  Been there, done that. In fact, reading, swimming and travelling is now a necessity, while photography has become a profession. 

Since I had been unsuccessful in figuring out an interesting new hobby for the last 2 weeks without consulting google, I randomly brought this topic up to my colleagues. They eagerly gave me some of their ideas; extreme sports, knitting, crocheting, painting, cooking, baking, blogging, you could cook/bake and blog about it. 

I had my reservations for each one of it. I’m not into extreme sports, and I’m not fond of knitting. Crocheting is very similar. Painting is a thought, but the potential mess doesn’t excite me very much. I dislike spending too much time in the kitchen, and I can’t handle any recipes with more than 5 ingredients, so cooking and baking doesn’t rank very highly with me. I already blog now, even if it’s once in a blue moon, it still counts doesn’t it. Hey, I’m not picky, I just want to make sure I pick something that I will actually follow through and not abandon ship. 

That evening, I started rethinking the options that were laid out before me. To be honest, despite having an opinion that spending too much time in the kitchen is not productive, I have indeed been doing just that for the last few years. I have slowly but surely embraced the need for me to do so. It hasn’t been very graceful, but it has happened. I now only spend about 2-3 hours on Sundays to cook for the whole week, and that’s me done with the kitchen for the rest of the week. I couldn’t have been happier with my new found plan. But what I failed to see till today is that I’ve been spending the better half of my Saturdays making a new dish for the last 3-4 months. 

How did I figure this out this weekend? I was making protein balls on Friday night after work because I was bored. This provoked my own curiosity. A quick look into my phone’s photo album proved my suspicion. Every Saturday that I have been at home where I didn’t have any guests or plans to go out, I’ve been spending hours trying to make a new dish. 

First, let me dish out a disclaimer; food is a food and cooking is cooking regardless of whether you use the hob or not, or whether your dish is sweet or spicy. Having said that, the ratio between desserts and main meals that I have tried is probably 8 out of the 10. I, for one, can eat desserts instead of meals, so according to my rules, desserts or not, food is food and cooking is cooking. I can’t help it when I have a major sweet tooth, and I naturally gravitate towards dessert recipes. 

As mentioned earlier, I cannot deal with anything that has more than 5 practical ingredients. Practical, according to my dictionary means available in the grocery store that I frequent. I’m not going to take the extra effort to go to another store to find it. Most of my experiments in the kitchen were rather straight forward, but not all of them were successfully identical to the images that were plastered all over the websites or YouTube videos at the end of the recipes.  

On one such auspicious day, I decided I was going to make mango mousse, what I got at the end of it was a mango lassi instead. Here’s what happened. The recipe called for only 3 ingredients; mangos, whipping cream, and condensed milk. As simple as that. I got all my ingredients in my local grocery store; frozen mangos (I’ve got this thing about seeing the seed of a mango fruit when you cut it – there’s a long childhood history behind this), single cream and light evaporated milk. In my defence, there wasn’t any whipping cream, and google told me double cream was a good alternative. I took it a notch further and decided to go with single cream to make it healthier and cut down the fat. There was also no condensed milk in this shop, so the same applied here, I got the light evaporated milk thinking of healthier options. To top the mismatched ingredients, I winged my measurements. What? It was only 3 simple ingredients, surely measurements were not that important. 

And that’s the story of how the mango mousse recipe became mango lassi instead.  This is just one tiny bit of my kitchen chronicles. 

Maybe I should start a series called Chumi’s Kitchen Chronicles soon. I feel like that’s a new hobby right there now.