exasperation

The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.

There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don't like some of their teammates or coaches.

I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.

I buy stuff from all sorts of places. I'm pretty serious about food and cooking, and I run through a pretty wide variety of cultures and regional variation in making my food. So for me, this is how I buy:

Fresh produce in season: street markets

Fresh produce out of season (greenhouse grown or shipped in from another latitude): Whole Foods

Mainstream American prepackaged foods: nearest big box corporate supermarket.

Day to day meat, dairy, and seafood (chicken, beef, pork, shrimp): Whole Foods

Specialty meat (aged stuff, unusual cuts): local specialty butcher, ethnic grocery stores

Specialty seafood (live seafood, less common items): specialty seafood shop

Fancy cheeses: cheese store in my neighborhood, occasionally Whole Foods

Various ethnic specialities (Kim chi, tortillas, paneer, certain types of Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese vegetables, Mexican/Indian spices) that are perishable: ethnic grocery stores

Unusual or imported prepackaged or shelf stable foods/spices: ethnic grocery stores, Amazon, other online stores depending on the item.

obversion

obsevation

I was hoping that by observing your comment these would collapse into the spelling "observation."

On which scale? Because that kinda matters.

The rate of sweat I produce, in terms of ml of sweat per minute.

Italy was never a great empire.

Modern Italy does argue that it is the proper successor to the Roman Empire, but if you do look at the history of the nations (and city states) that rose and fell between the split of the Roman Empire into West and East/Byzantine around 395, and the formation of a unified Italy in 1861, that's a bit of a stretch.

Yeah, it's funny either way, but would be even funnier if the answer had been correct.

Yeah, I don't have any real trouble with scrambling on a cast iron. Even if it does stick a bit, it's scrambled so it'll all come together in the end anyway.

Cast iron is pretty good at almost everything, but isn't the best at anything.

For searing meat at high temps, I've settled on stainless steel. It's easy to clean and maintain, and the typical 3-ply or 5-ply cladding has much better heat transfer characteristics than cast iron (which is a mediocre heat conductor masked by the fact that it's so heavy and thick that it takes on a lot of thermal mass to aid in searing). You don't have to worry about metal utensils or harsh scrubbers scratching the surface. And you don't have to worry about acidic ingredients messing with the surface, either.

For things that need nonstick characteristics, like eggs, I cycle through nonstick on a short replacement cycle (once every 2 or 3 years). I might get a carbon steel one day but I'm not in a hurry.

15 minutes and 30 minutes are a pretty long time to have to heat food up for.

When I'm reheating soup I generally pull it from the stove as soon as it simmers, so that's probably around 2 minutes above 95°C and like 5 minutes above 80°C.

Actually making the soup the first time, I may simmer for hours, but some of the vegetable/herb ingredients I'm adding with less than 10 minutes of simmer time, so that wouldn't be enough to destroy the toxin reliably.

You're getting the labels mixed up.

As a labeling requirement under U.S. law, anything labeled "American Cheese" must be pasteurized process cheese made from some combination of cheddar, colby, washed curd cheese, or granular cheese, which the law also defines pretty strictly. It must be made from these cheeses, heated and emulsified with an emulsifying salt (usually sodium citrate).

American cheese is allowed to have some optional ingredients and still be labeled American Cheese:

• Food safe acid (as long as pH stays above 5.3)
• Cream or milkfat, such that this added fat can account for up to 5% of the weight of the finished product.
• Water (but the total moisture content of the resulting product must still be within the other limits in the regulation)
• Salt
• Artificial coloring
• Spices or flavoring that do not simulate the flavors of cheeses
• Mold inhibitors from sorbate up to 0.2%, or from proprionate up to 0.3%
• Lechitin, if sold in slices

You can add milk, cream, buttermilk, whey, or certain other dairy products up to 49% of the finished product, but then you'd have to call it "Pasteurized American Process Cheese Food" instead of just American Cheese.

American cheese is made from almost entirely cheese ingredients. The individual slices being sold at the store, though, vary by brand on whether they're even trying to be American Cheese (or whether they're some kind of lesser "cheese food" or even lesser "cheese spread" or even lesser "cheese product")

Regular Kraft singles aren't American Cheese. Look at the label. They're "cheese product." Even the Deli Deluxe line has taken a hit in quality in recent years, even if they are labeled Cheese.

Go with other brands that actually put together a decent tasting American Cheese, and check the label to make sure it's made with 100% cheese instead of 51% cheese (or less).