All right, here’s another one for all the broke artists out there! It’s the beginning of a new year, and following the holidays, there’s a strong chance the wad of cash under your bed is looking thinner than it normally does this time of month. Time for some budget eating.
Stir-fries have always been one of my go-to cheap meals. I usually make a super-large batch in one go so I can have it at the ready for a number of meals and save food prep time. Vegetables and tofu are very budget-friendly — especially if you have a good produce shop nearby that undercuts the local supermarket. The priciest element you’ll have is most likely to be a store-bought sauce. So it’s even better if you can circumvent the bottled sauces entirely and come up with something just as tasty on your own.
I like a good peanut sauce as much as anyone. But for ages, I rarely reached for it to add to a stir-fry or noodle dish, for a pretty boring reason: I found peanut sauce to be annoying. It was annoying that the good stuff often cost more money at the grocery store than other sauce varieties, even from the same brand. It was annoying that the good, but cheaper, stuff seemed to be continually in and out of stock. It was annoying that the recipes I found frequently involved 30,000 steps and maybe a food processor and too many utensils to justify making it as often as I wanted to eat it. It was annoying that the quick and easy recipes often tasted like barely-dressed-up peanut butter.
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Hey, It's Brian LaRue 
On Staying Out of the Comments in 2023
I’m taking a few seconds right now to consider how my social media habits have changed over this past year. Of course they’ve changed, because the discourse on pretty much all of the major social platforms has been changing. You can adapt, or not.
Basically, the way I’ve adapted is by steering clear of other people’s threads unless I can bring something unique to the table. And the way I need to continue adapting is by not simply taking my two cents to forums where I appear slightly more anonymous. An interesting thought deserves to find its proper place, and finding that place often takes time. If it’s actually an idea that deserves its proper place, the wait is worth it.
One practice I’m really glad I leaned into this year is: Whenever I feel compelled to post anything on any social platform, I ask myself whether it stands to reason that someone else who has better knowledge of the subject has already said the same thing, more articulately and authoritatively. Usually I’ll presume someone else has. Sometimes I’ll Google an entire phrase that pops into my head and find someone else said the same thing years ago. I’m just not here to post timeline white noise bs that makes me look dumb.
I’m especially wary about adding to the white noise because so many people I used to interact with heavily on Facebook and Twitter have been scarce on the socials in 2022.
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