19th May 2020
Typed some stuff on several occasions before this but somehow the browser loaded on the edit page except it was blank, and Blogger saved it.
Oh well.
Focused on my arms since they were surprisingly disappointing after a month of frequent workouts with the weights.
For the last three sessions, I did five sets of different pushups and pullups, at a pace I could handle, ie 8 reps, in the order of military pushups with wide-grip pullups, standard pushups with normal pullups, staggered with staggered, staggered with staggered again but different arms, and wide-arm pushups with close-grip pullups.
I almost died on the first and second time, as in the last reps of the last two sets of pushups were so hard I went up very very slowly with a lot of shaking. The third day, it felt ok and I am considering adding one more rep the next time, maybe for all except the staggered ones.
20th May 2020
Tried doing 9 pushups and 8 pullups per set today. Was as hard as the first session.
This is good.
A basic home design factor is how temperature is regulated within.
Before air-conditioning and electric fans, they used longer ledges, a central empty space and even water in said space if you were wealthy. As seen in shophouses here still preserved today, you could also use windows with adjustable wooden louvres and vents above the doors and windows.
From my experience in the army, a large roof with only pillars make a huge difference in temperature with minimal impact on the breeze. If I could design my own home, I'd include very long ledges everywhere -shaded spaces really cool down the air a lot.
Or have a home dug into a hill and let the earth be the temperature regulator.
Got my phone back today, which was nice. Still, starting a phone after a factory reset is no fun. Got to download everything, update them and log in to each app so that I won't need to rush the process the next time I need to use one of them in a hurry.
Good thing the CB is still going on so I have the time.
Looks like I won't be opening till phase 2, which is after phase 1 which will last "a few weeks". I'm guessing it is going to be another month. At least I can move my office.
24th May 2020
It's awesome how much progress can be made in pushups when you do it to the point where you can only do the last one very very slowly and with a lot of shaking, then rest a few minutes and do it again.
Now I can do 9 pushups in every set with only the first set ending like that, and I can do about 6 of 4 of the sets in one breath.
Not sure how much progress has been made for pullups because it's hard to gauge when doing it assisted with a leg. Still, 6 military pushups in one breath is probably one of my personal records.
Been looking at various Chinese herbal soup ingredients ever since I started using a pre-packed one from a shop. It had various herbs that I recognized and it turned out great, so I feel more confidence in making my own concoctions based on this experience and my childhood memories since my late father used have this requirement for every dinner that my mother had to make a soup and it must be cloudy.
Kinda explains why I never really got used to clear soups and broths - to me they're for noodles and rice.
After some online shopping and getting turned off by the delivery fees, I have a list and will visit the nearby Chinese pharmacy soon.
Also discovered today that the reason de-shelled prawns are much cheaper than those with shells on at the wholesaler I visited is that they contain more of the alkaline solution, which makes their texture more appealing but knowing how fresh prawns are supposed to feel much softer than that, it slightly turns me off.
This is my first time getting those.
Anyway, so this means that restaurant cooks would find these easier to work with since it's pretty much standard practice to soak meats and prawns in a baking soda solution for a bit before cooking.
Also, they are tiny. Like shrimps.
25th May 2020
Getting close to June. Oh dear.
Some games are more fun watched than played, eg lots of single-player RPGs on the PS4. Just watched a playthrough of A Plague Tale: Innocence and I'd have missed a lot of details if I had to focus on the gameplay which is exciting on its own. Just something I noticed when I used to play more RPGs. Not all games are like that, eg Fallout 3/NV where much of the interesting details are in text or visual form.
I don't know why everything about my work turns me off. It makes no sense, it's like my fear of butterflies and moths that I used to have. I'm aware that it makes no sense, but it's there anyway.
It's like, I've had tons of ideas but when it came to executing any of them, I just don't want to do it, like it repels me. Funny thing is, it's not that I dislike working (that's what I used to believe) because my short stint as an assistant surveyor proved that I'm ok with work itself, it's just work that has to do with my business that I illogically dislike.
So... why?
Anyway this is part of why I like to disrupt my routines - it lets me learn about myself through observing my reaction to new things. Well, I like it to a certain extent, changes are undeniably stressful and require to be cut into small portions.
I thought it was obvious that prices on the food delivery services would be a little higher but I was surprised that though there was a news article a few months (or was it weeks?) ago that Grab takes a 30% commission from all the food deliveries on top of the delivery charge (though the way Grab explained how the money is split is quite acceptable to me), people are still taken aback by how the prices can get as high as twice the takeaway prices, to the point where I found two articles about it since last week.
I mean, yeah, of course there will be stuff like that given the way the F&B industry is struggling right now, but there are still plenty of options with much decent price differences. In fact, there is minimal difference for the prices of restaurant chains and fast food chains, though their prices have always been a little high to me anyway. Like Texas Chicken, at best I can get their chicken at under $4 per piece. In comparison, I can easily get fishball noodles at under $4 per bowl on Grab too.
The higher prices is why I always try to get vouchers from other online shopping sites for these deliveries, and unless I have a specific craving, I'd always go for something on promotion that doesn't include carbs, like soups and mala xiang guo. Now that I'm doing more soups, and much better ones, I'm starting to cut down on food deliveries in recent weeks. Still not doing anything that requires a pan though, so food deliveries for those are still necessary, albeit once or twice a week at most.
Right now the best deals are at Foodpanda, with the gimmicky Pandabox promotion that pops up when you open the app and gives you 15 minutes to choose a restaurant from a very short list, then your food from that restaurant. You can't undo the choice of restaurant, and if you exit, it won't reappear for what I estimate to be half an hour. The upside is that it gives you a $10 discount for min spend of $30, which is the best discount among food delivery services right now. Perfect for people who can accept a wide range of food.
Anyway, I guess people who are picky with food are going to have a hard time swallowing the prices now. Moral of the story? If I have kids someday, I must read up on how to raise them as people who can eat anything. It really makes life a lot easier.
26th May 2020
I
have been noticing WhyQ's promotions recently so I went to their website
to check out the menus. WhyQ seems to be primarily about promoting
hawker food which tends to be very affordable, and at the same time, they charge a delivery fee on a per-meal basis, plus a small order fee if the
total order is under a specific amount. The result is that they are
pushing cheap food to people with large budgets, ie corporate customers.
But contrary to that, they are also trying to attract us regular people
with their promotion codes. Their system does not make sense. For
example, if I want some char siew pau, they charge a delivery fee per bun (S$1.50 for a nearby hawker centre about 10mins walk from my home), plus a small order fee because I did not order 10 at one go. Who
eats 10 buns at one go? In order for their fee system to make sense to me,
I have to order expensive items in small quantities, a strange concept
if they are really about hawker food.
They could make all merchants offer large set meals, like family-size, and that would make their system more logical, but despite their existence for at least a year, they're still like this. Weird.
27th May 2020
One thing nobody seems to mention is cash as a vector of the virus. That's one advantage China might have given how little cash is used in the cities.
30th May 2020
Did cook some stuff, because the ingredients were there, like sweet potato soup with carrots and jujube.
So I learnt that raw asafoetida is the smell of Little India. Kinda flowery, very strong. 100% not what I would expect from a plant resin. No idea why it's called the Devil's Dung because it doesn't stink to me. Maybe it's like durian.
After frying into its brittle form that can be used for cooking, its aroma profile completely changes into something altogether different. Not only does it not smell particularly strong, it is more like that of cooked onions or garlic, like something kinda meaty (or umami?) but definitely vegetable-based.
This could be fun. What if I dissolve it in water and boil the prawns for my prawn mayo?
And it's so cheap. From some random Malaysian store (they tend to have relatively ripoff prices on Shopee where I found it at), it's going at S$1 for a 30g piece, which can make many dishes since you only need a little bit each time. Imagine what it's like in Malaysia, or India. I bet their prices are calculated in cents (SGD) in India.
I read that in India, some cooks simply slap a piece on the underside of the cover of a pot of cooking stew/soup/etc, and the condensed steam that flows down to the side of the cover would mix with the asafoetida, aka hing, and down into the food. That's how little you need.
31st May 2020
The FF7 Remake seems to be really good value for money. At US$60, it may not be the remake of the entire original FF7, but the gameplay is always exciting and interesting, relatively minimal grinding unlike old JRPGs. and it is as long as a good RPG should be for that price. I'm watching a playthrough of the game, probably 2/3 of it so far (skipping most of the combat), and if I haven't seen all the spoilers (I've forgotten most of the story by now), I might consider buying it.
The stuff covered in the initial 2/3 of the game may not have been half the original game (since there were a lot of grinding and secrets and side-quests back then) but they really fleshed out everything, like how much screen time Jessie,Wedge and Biggs have, and how the civilians try to defend Shinra (creating another dimension to the world).
The game's re-imagined of course, but the original plot hasn't changed, just the details.
Tried to raise the number of pushups per set to 10. Made it there the first two sets, couldn't get back up at the 8th of the third set, couldn't do more than five by the fourth set. It's like, I think I can, but I have doubts, so my arms didn't obey.
1st June 2020
Mouse starting to turn single left clicks into double clicks. Could finally be time to change. What a durable thing, it's been with me since my previous desktop, and this desktop has been around for over 3 years now, so this mouse has probably been used for 6-7 years.
Oh well, there are another 4 mice waiting to be used, though I don't expect them to last as long as this Logitech one. This came with the keyboard, and the keyboard is what I'm typing this with.
My office can reopen tomorrow, but none of my clients can so it doesn't mean anything to me, other than that I can start moving.
3rd June 2020
Surviving Mars is pretty fun. Intense management, so I take breaks or play in short duration.
Initially I thought it was a simple resource-management game, something I've always played over the years, but no, this is just the top layer, and underlying this is another layer that is the colonies with people in them.
So in my very first game after the tutorial, I took it slow and set up all the necessary resource gathering and storage, spread out nicely to buffer against damage by natural disasters like meteor showers.
Then when the first colonists arrived, things got complicated. First, you can choose a dozen from a large pool of candidates, and you gauge them by their specializations (food, mining, manufacturing, etc) and traits (workaholics, alcoholics, athletes, gamblers, etc), and if you really have the luxury to pick from huge pool, their age and genders. I avoid alcoholics and gamblers just so that the colonies' domes can be built without a bar and casino, both huge buildings over thrice the size of most of the other buildings.
Once you have the necessities and the luxuries set up, you've got to try to ensure that someone is working in the buildings you want running, eg diners/grocers need to be opened or people will starve, though if you make everyone work only morning shifts, then these places can just open in the afternoon shift when others get off from work, though the guy working in the place for that single shift will never get to visit the shop when it's open. That's a tactic to deal with a manpower shortage, which can happen pretty often at first.
As more domes are built, more of everything else is needed, and things get really complicated. Fortunately the game gave me a shuttle hub that deploys flying shuttles to transport stuff over the entire map, but it was not enough, and extra shuttles were expensive to build.
Eventually I had to stop. It was my first game, so this was expected.
In my second game, things went much more smoothly since I knew what to focus on in the early game, eg no need for officers, huge focus on botanists followed by engineers and geologists. There's no such thing as too much food, oxygen and water.
I miss the shuttles though; they were epic.
5th June 2020
129th year of the second game, still going strong. 5 basic domes now, and being forced to expand because I took the scientific research too lightly.
For the first century, resource deposits seriously seemed to last forever, but they don't. Only after that first 100 years they started to dry up, and I had to reach new deposits before my entire colony ran out of any specific resource.
But that required research. To begin, I'd need to be able to build drone hubs because the maintenance of everything requires drones. After that, it felt important that my power, water and oxygen grids were all connected, and these cables and pipes needed drone hubs to cover them, and that meant a lot of electronics to be manufactured, and that meant I needed upgrades to my factories and the ability to build these factories in the first place.
I don't like to rely on imports from Earth, especially since in this game, the price of electronics doubled to 200M dollars per unit within the first century due to a random event.
To do that, not only did I have to research the ability to build the factory, it was also necessary to get the upgrades and the Martian university to train engineers to maximize each factory's output.
In order to make life a little easier, bigger domes were needed. Multiple basic domes could do the trick but they were expensive to maintain and tricky to handle after a while. 1-2 medium domes seemed easier to handle, and a random event also gave me a mega triangle dome, a dome that is considered small for the mega-size dome, but gigantic compared to the basic domes that dominate my colony.
Not only is this about the need for further deposits, but my population is also going up fast while space in my domes are running out. This is also why bigger domes are better - I could build entire domes of apartments but colonists always prefer to work in the same dome they live in.
7th June 2020
One of the biggest supermarket orders I've ever made is arriving today is coming and hopefully I am ready.
Needed fruits and vegetables, so at this point I intend to freeze some of them, eg make sweet potato, carrot and baby yam soup (hopefully it works), and freeze it. Would seriously prefer not to freeze raw vegetables because I've had bad experiences with it - the vegetables turned soft as the freezing water in the cells expand and burst through the cell walls.
Switching to tomato paste was part of the effort to find vegetables that could stay edible longer, though this raises the sodium content and narrows the number of ways the tomatoes could be used.
Too bad they ran out of those South African candy apples, that stuff was pretty awesome - they were small so they were easy to eat, and they were as sweet as their name imply.
Let's see how it goes. Some meat have just been removed from the freezer to be thawed so that I could make a cabbage soup right away when the delivery arrives. The reason for trying to cook all the vegetables asap (other than the carrots and onions, got to leave some for other things) is to conserve space in the vegetable compartment for the fruits. This time, I ordered quite a few types of fruits because I wanted things that are easier to eat, but bananas never seem worth the money at the supermarkets, so the most affordable options were the Australian mandarin oranges at S$6 for 900g, South African persimmons at S$5 for 900g, and Thai longans at $5 for 850g.
The other thing I needed was dishwashing detergent because the previous 5L bottle finally ran out after maybe 3 years.
The main reason for the size of the purchase was really because of the promotion codes. There were almost none since all grocers are raking in huge money these days now that everyone is cooking at home more often. The best I could find was SAFRA's code for $15 off $160, not even 10%, and that's far better than NTUC Income's 5% off minimum $100. On top of that, a number of the items were on sale themselves so with the code, the order was effectively at 16% off. It may be true that these numbers are tiny but it has never sat right with me to pay full price for these purchases, and though I'm spending more, the entire purchase has been planned to minimize waste and maximize the amount of whole food (as compared to processed food) in my diet. Can't do organic though, since it's a really grey area there and I simply can't justify paying at least twice or thrice the price for everything.
Just got notified that the tomato paste and mustard have run out. Oh man I was looking forward to some having some mustard in my ham sandwiches, and making some beef bolognese in the future.
On the bright side, neither of them were on sale, so removing them while keeping the discount code on just pushed the net discount percentage up to 17%. Yeah, just a slight difference.
I'm giving up on the second game of Surviving Mars. It was only at 155% difficulty IIRC and probably salvageable but it's too intense. A lot of stuff in my domes need to be re-arranged and sacrificed, and it's just not worth the effort. I was prepared for this anyway.
08th June 2020
Two matches in a day whom, as far as I can tell from their profiles, are out of my league. Kinda unusual.
But of course, as these apps usually go, matches don't really mean much, just feels nice.
Accidentally ordered an second packet of cucumbers. Was wondering why there was a packet of organic cucumbers that cost just under twice as much as regular ones.
Now I'm wondering how I'm going to eat them all before they petrify in my fridge without using oil. I mean, you only need a tiny bit for cucumber sandwiches, my original intention for them, and I can't eat that much bread that would take 6 small cucumbers.
Maybe... I shall pickle them, or slice them up and drizzle with honey.
On a side note, it kinda sucks that half the vegetables in the delivery were... not particularly fresh. They're all perfectly fine, but for example, the onions' top layers have gone soft and covered in black stains, while the cucumbers already have little pits on the surface. Fortunately the oranges, persimmons and longans were in perfect condition.
09th June 2020
I think the last tenant at my new office just doesn't want to repaint the unit before leaving. That might suck if they do it after I start bring my stocks over.
10th June 2020
Apparently it's because they couldn't find the workers for it, just like how I can't bring my stuff over right away. If it's simply moving stuff, it's much easier, but I need people who can dissemble industrial storage racks, take them on a 5-min drive in a lorry, and re-assemble them.
Finally got the projector set up in my bed by screen-mirroring from my old Xperia XZ. It works but the projected show is laggy while it's not my phone. Either the projector is laggy or my phone is, and the latter is much likelier since it's bloody slow even in its normal use.
So once in a while the movie would be a bit scratchy and laggy just like streams without buffer on an inconsistent connection.
Didn't use my Huawei though it's faster because for some reason, Netflix shows would have a black screen with perfectly ok audio.
I think I'll stick with this till I get a new phone next year. It's really awesome to be able to watch movies while lying on my back in bed.
Got a fidget cube for S$0.70, now I'm clicking the heck of out of it.
11 June 2020
Raw cucumber really isn't appealing to me. Tried it for dinner. No, the rest of them are going to be pickled along with some carrots.
Might try the northeastern Chinese style of boiling them in soy sauce and sugar after marinating them in salt and pressing them with something heavy, but without the final step of making chilli oil and covering the cucumbers with it.
My thermometers with hygrometers finally arrived, 2 analogue and 1 electronic. Now I understand what's going on in my room after I turn off the aircon in the morning.
It gets warm quickly and but stays comfortable for half a day with the fan, so my deduction was that the room stays cool because of the cooled furniture but with the air stagnant, the air surrounding me gets warm, so I need the fan for circulation.
Turns out it may not be entirely right.
My thermometer showed me that the temperature shoots up rapidly after I hit the power button on the aircon remote. Within 15 minutes, it went up by half a degree, and within half an hour, a whole degree.
Strange that it began at 25 degrees when I had set my aircon to 26, so I'll think of something later. Maybe set it to 27.
Anyway, within 2 hours, it got back to 30 degrees, just like the rest of my home.
However, it is still very comfortable in my room 2 hours after the aircon was switched off. The difference is solely the humidity - it is 72% outside and 66% here (50-something % when I woke up just now).
Proven by proper measuring devices, a 5% drop in humidity makes a significant difference in comfort, and a 20% drop makes a room very comfortable without the need for air-conditioning, just a fan would do.
It does not cost significantly less to run a de-humidifier than an air-con though, just that the former is a smaller machine.
It is now 67% humidity and I am considering raising the fan speed.
Yep it really helps.
This little bit of knowledge doesn't help save money in my current situation but it has been interesting.
So the aircon is more of a dehumidifier than a cooler. Within half an hour, the humidity has gone from 72% to 58%. It feels so much cooler but in fact the temperature is only a single degree lower.
I'm actually quite surprised.
12th June 2020
So current game was set to a random storyline, and with that and other settings, the difficulty seemed tolerable at 205%.
Of all the storylines, the random option turned out to be one of the 3 hard difficulty ones among the 9 (excluding the option for no story).
Yeah I was unprepared. It ended up becoming something of a castle defence game where enemy rovers would randomly arrive and randomly fire missiles at my stuff. At first the randomness made it seem ok because their choice of targets was usually stupid, but at some point they aimed my drone hubs and since my hubs were placed for maximum coverage of land area, they were not in range of each other, so when one goes down, I'm quite screwed. Also because the RC drone commander was one of the first targets - all my vehicles were their first targets, the only sign of intelligence there.
Missile turrets were allowed to be researched a little before the attack but since they didn't attack immediately, I decided to let the current research topic to finish before going for the turrets.
It's weird that they had to be researched and built in the first place anyway. If we were to start a Martian colony, even if it's a private venture, and it gets attacked by an Earth private company, nobody would expect the colonists to have to design and build their own weapons. Heck, someone would attack the company on Earth first!
The end kinda sucked because I was preparing to build a wonder, the Geoscape, an insanely large dome with the best comfort levels, and it had already been placed on a spot with 3 Research bonuses so all research within would have been boosted by 50%. Those residents would have been the happiest Martian scientists ever!
Anyway, story aside, one lesson learnt - always keep some space within drone hub range near the domes for extra domes so that I can expand living space into new domes connected by passages without having to invest in another hub.
14th June 2020
So after observing the thermometers and hygrometers regularly for the last few days, here are my observations:
- 30 degrees can be warm or cool.
- 30 degrees with 86% humidity can still be comfortable (accurate as of time of writing).
- humidity exceeding 80% can indicate potential rain or simply cloudy weather.
- my dehumidifier in my storeroom works but only a little - humidity in that room is usually only 5-10% lower than outside.
- my room is usually more humid than the rest of my home because of my bathroom.
- my room can strangely be more humid than the rest of my home for half a day even when my bathroom is dry
The last point is something I am unable to understand.
15th June 2020
Just realize the Lock & Lock glass container could also be used to make lasagna.
Hmmmmmmmmm...
Encountered an Indonesian girl via Tinder who got along pretty well with me. Except she wants to be a housewife running an online business. The housewife part alone would have been an immediate deal breaker, but the online business portion saved it.
Of course I have doubts but then I have doubts for everything, and in this day and age, it makes absolutely no sense to disregard the viability of an online business for making a living. Heck, I would do it too if it actually can make a comparable level of money my current business makes.
Tbh I have something in mind, but like I mentioned earlier, something just turns me off and I have serious difficulty overcoming this barrier.
Ten pushups, five sets. There now. The first set of ten pushups, usually army pushups, don't even need a break.
But also am quite sure that I cannot do a chinup because I can't pull myself up from the relaxed rest position hanging from the bar. Something in my left shoulder, the one that had an operation to replace the ligament.
My shoulder cannot transit from the hanging position to the bending position without something moving in my shoulder, not while my body weight is hanging on both shoulders.
I think the bone of my upper arm is slightly out of the socket when I am hanging on the bar with my body weight pulling on my shoulders, because the artificial ligament is not as tight as the original one.
With my legs to slightly support myself while doing it, there is a slight pop during this transition, every single time, which is IMHO a bad sign, a sign that says I should not do it anymore.
No wonder the SAF excuses anyone who has gone through that surgery from chinups. I can only do it if I can use my shoulder's muscular strength to keep pulling my body up so that I don't simply hang using my ligaments, but that's going to take a very long time to train. It will be my next training method to replace chinups - no point training chinup if the arms cannot even start one - by hanging on the bar using my arms' muscular strength, assisted by my legs. Basically, I have to hang on without relaxing my shoulders. Let's see if that will work.
Frankly I don't get why we are supposed to be upset about foreigners who become PR to get better and subsidized education and housing, and make good money here before returning to their home countries with all the money.
No country that does this expects everyone to stay and take root, just a portion of them. Even if they leave, they often do that only after years or even decades of hard work at lower salaries, often in jobs that locals would prefer to avoid.
I'd say it's a fair trade, and I'm glad it's become a win-win for both sides.
18th June 2020
Started to brush tung oil on the regular camphor wood slice and one of the two red camphor slices two days ago, because the regular camphor was starting to grow algae on the side while that slice of red camphor had some kind of brown bugs in the central hole.
So far only the cypress slice and two slices of ebony are holding up well in the local climate, and they look lovely on their own, tbh.
Anyway the red camphor was gorgeous with the initial thick cover of oil, but looked a lot more dull as the oil got absorbed into the wood. It will need to be varnished to look that beautiful again.
Frankly speaking, that regular camphor wood looks just like pine, and I have no idea how to differentiate between the two kinds of wood.
Right now it's just one side of each of those two slices of wood, after a month it will be the other side. The rims have also mostly been coated.
As for the purpose of these wood slices, probably just serving platters or some kind of stand for my souvenirs. Just playing with tung oil because I need it for my mate cup, and they come in 500ml bottles.
Also noticed it is legit because there was too much oil initially (as planned, to maximize absorption), and a little dripped off the regular camphor into the cardboard below last night. This afternoon when I tried to brush some up to be reused on the wood, it was considerably more gooey than the rest of the oil, with the consistency of some kind of paste. So, it does polymerize and therefore this is going to work.
My only concern is whether the oil is clean, which is why as a serving platter, I will avoid letting it be in direct contact with food.
The Indonesian girl is going to be just a friend. We click pretty well but not in that sense.
Stanley's Admiral's Mug is amazing, even if it's from China. It is hard to tip as advertised, and it really does keep my cold water cold for hours. This is the mug that shall replace most of my other mugs. Still need a ceramic one for sweet drinks - I'm not using this mug for anything with sugar or dairy.
19th June 2020
The new training hurts my elbow joints. This means my weight hurts my joints.
I'm going to stop the chinup training for the rest of the week, then space it out even more next week. How much it's spaced out depends on how soon my right elbow joint recovers since it hurts more.
As for pushups, still stuck at 50. Tried to do a sixth set after a break, but collapsed to the floor on the first rep.
So the fried asafoetida is not easily soluble in a mix of hot oil and water, so my attempt at using it like garlic ended with little pieces of it in my food. Asafoetida tastes like durian, probably because it's so strong.
Once diluted in water, it indeed is like both onion and garlic. I had to cooked a little piece of it in water till it's all dissolved and reduced, then add it to my dish. Dissolving it in boiling water like that took probably fifteen minutes.
Since asafoetida probably lasts far longer than fresh garlic and definitely onions, I am going to maintain a small amount of it at all times in my kitchen - it's joining my kitchen staples from now on.
I can either keep fried pieces of it in airtight containers like I currently do, or dissolve it and keep the solution in airtight containers. The solution might not last long, but then again my fridge is magical.
Also it dehydrates everything, so never mind.
