Celtuce | Hacker News Reader

Celtuce

en.wikipedia.org

34 pointsbookofjoe19 comments

Had this not three days ago at a place in NYC called Chinese Tuxedo. It’s pretty good

Sounds tasty. I regularly go to a grocery store that has a lot of vegetables I'm unfamiliar with - might try it.

This is kinda dumb, but I realized in my 40’s you can cook almost any good quality vegetable the same way, and it tastes good

Most vegetable recipes look like a lot of ceremony, and it seems like they may be sensitive to mistakes

So instead I just cut any vegetable up, peeling anything that seems hard or stringy

Then toss in a high quality oil and salt (I use walnut oil, seems to make a difference)

And roast it from 350 to 400 for 25 to 45 minutes, turning it in the middle

Using your eyes and nose is enough to fine tune the temperature and time

This works for celtuce (make sure to peel it), lotus root, all kinds of leafy especially bitter greens, all kinds of potatoes, squash, and root vegetables, eg beets, celery root, parsnips, …

Lotus root is a real standout: it has a pleasant fragrance with just salt and oil. You don’t need any sauce

The main ones I stay away from are anything stringy, like celery, some asparagus

I’ve gotten very good reactions from people who are much better cooks than I

I keep a wiki page of the times and temperatures

I’ve tried different spices, but it doesn’t make it much better. The quality of the ingredient matters more than the recipe and cooking method — by a lot IMO

So many of these vegetables I get from the farmers market (eg amish), but also from the Chinese market

Some vegetables from Safeway and now Whole Foods are quite bad imo — they require elaborate cooking to make palatable

Probably the only thing I would tweak is adding some acid like lemon or vinegar to some, but empirically it works without

I have some great news for you... this also works for most meats

I do cook meats this way, but I’d say it’s only 50% to 80% the quality/flavor of what a good cook can do, say with a beef bourguinon or a bolognese

With the vegetables, I’d say it’s more like 80% to 120% the quality, based on the fact that it’s very possible to get better and fresher ingredients than even expensive restaurants. And also restaurants are biased towards meat, for commercial reasons.

I would never say that meat doesn’t benefit from spice and sauce, but I do feel that way about many vegetables - the flavor is the thing itself

I also think meat benefits from more time than vegetables, and there is more to manage with the fat and skin, etc.

But yes it does certainly work, just less foolproof and not necessarily optimal! i.e. most people can beat the generic parameterized algorithm for meat, but not sure about vegetables :-)

Looks really good

Someone explain to me why this is on the front page.

Wondering the same thing. It's a pretty standard, mundane household vegetable you can buy at most Asian supermarkets.

It’s new to me!

I don't know, "random" wikipedia articles often pop up on the front-page.

It's been speculated that some groups use random wikipedia articles to test-run their botting. I think a more charitable explanation is often that it's something or relates to something that's going viral on other media, and we get to experience the wash of that, turning up here.

The HN ranking is also very enigmatic. You sometimes get articles whose presence you can't fathom, but by the time you refresh it's disappeared entirely. It feels like the live front-page is built for reactivity, not for stability.

That's perhaps for the best given there's no "recent trending" type page for that.

Edit: This one was submitted 2 days ago, and randomly got front-paged today. It shows "2 hours ago" but mousing over shows the original meta-data of 2 days ago, so this returned via the second chance pool.

Genuinely worthy or a fat-finger I wonder?

Another way to detect the odd way HN handles articles it re-pushes to the front-page, the wikipedia submissions page, and the submitter submissions page show the original 2 days ago submission time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=wikipedia.org

and

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookofjoe

I vote up "random" articles if I've found them interesting and learned something new. Occasionally I'll post an article and I've had some great discussions over random things. After all, according to the guidelines:

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I think it's cool and weird that there is a hybrid celery/lettuce cultivar out there. I would never have found this otherwise.

While I love a wikipedia spelunk as much as the next person, hitting the random button rarely gets you truly interesting articles. You're more likely to get a random soccer player or an unremarkable neighborhood in India. None of which would end up on the front page.

Because people clicked the upvote button. It means people thought it was interesting.

I see these sorts of comments all the time and I have to say that I don't find they add much to the conversation.

> I see these sorts of comments all the time and I have to say that I don't find they add much to the conversation.

I think it's a valid question—sometimes things end up on the front page just because. And sometimes there's an actual reason that not everyone is aware of—maybe it was mentioned in a popular article, or in a movie, or a viral tweet, or whatever. And in those cases, someone will respond with "here's why people are interested in this right now."

Asking "why is this on the front page" doesn't always mean "this doesn't belong on the front page", it can mean "is there some context here I'm unaware of?"

That's fair. Although the replies to this comment I've read seem to have read it the same way as I have.

I won’t say the original poster meant in the sense that I’m talking. Just that, regardless of how it is meant, I often find it a question that gathers useful answers.

I clicked because from the name I thought it would be some new genetically engineered form of lettuce, one with perhaps the capability of destroying our ecosystem as we know it. I am now upvoting because it is funny.

I thought this would be about some novel communication device based or made out of vegetables.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com