The absolute easiest thing most people could do to immediately improve the taste of their cooking is start using MSG. No kidding.

It should be as basic to seasoning as salt or sugar, and that most of us don't use it based on old, debunked misinformation is quite ridiculous. We season food to our five tastes and keep basic seasonings to achieve that efficiently. Most kitchens will use:

Salt - salt
Sweet - sugar
Sour - vinegar
Bitter - pepper
Umami - stock, soybean/seafood sauces, MSG

Win or lose, this #auspol election is an existential threat to the Liberal party. The political calculus of sacrificing moderates to teals might seems like a handful of seats that they hope to win back with conservative candidates elsewhere, but it’s much more than that. The Liberals have already lost one generation of moderates in the era of Turnbull, Bishop, Pyne etc.

Add to that the likes of Berejiklian, Banks and soon possibly Zimmerman, Wilson, Sharma and even Frydenberg and what’s left?

While perhaps a joke, this is 100% true.

Processed food's advantage over many home cooks is it uses MSG (or its differently labelled but chemically identical substitutes) to improve taste.

If home cooks seasoned with MSG (which is natural) they'd eat less processed food.

https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1477559687264423941

The biggest ploy, however, was once "MSG is bad" became an ingrained belief in the West (despite ample evidence to the contrary), "No added MSG" became a processed food marketing point.

There's still plenty of MSG in there, but it's just added under another name.

Two things Chinese chefs do that can improve your cooking at home is (1) marinating meats with a pinch of bicarb before cooking, and (2) adding MSG to your food.

These are straight up game-changers and if French chefs did them we'd rightly call them geniuses. The pinch of bicarb creates an alkaline environment that inhibits the tightening of muscle fibres, which gives you more tender meat or seafood. It's actually a very old technique known as velveting where meat and seafood are "washed" with running water before frying.

Tonight’s dinner. Shared steak on mushroom sauce. Two things I always do when having steak:

1. Cook one good quality steak for the whole family, and
2. Serve it on top of the sauce. On 1, we don’t need to eat 300g of meat each, so serving a whole steak per person seems like overkill. 80-100g of good quality steak is totally enough, tastes better and is better for your health and the environment.

The reason we get frustrated with the digital world is because EVERY product or service is a bait and switch. It's not news that Facebook is a data harvesting/sales operation masquerading as a way to connect with friends, but that applies to literally everything online. A mobile game isn't a game. It's an advertising delivery platform. Your photo editing software isn't a way to edit photos, it's a subscription revenue platform. Your bikeshare app isn't a transport solution, it's a capital raising.

I don't always agree with Donald Trump's tone, but I do think that his massive incompetence leading to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths combined with constant and egregious lying is the right vision for America's future. Wow, when you write it out like that it really sounds kind of stupid.

It's both insane and hilarious that far-right poster girl Lauren Southern's ex-partner was a white supremacist who refused to eat tomato sauce because it had Asian origins 😂, and that she's now married with a child to an Asian Australian guy and living in Sydney. PS. I am the guy. She is... (Borat voice) *my wife*.

Harris was more believable, more skilled and overall presented a better case for her campaign, but I'd say Pence won simply because he didn't have to do as much. #VPDebate A political debate is not a contest of ideas. Pence's entire job was to lay out a case (credible or not) for re-electing Trump so that those who already want to vote for him can give themselves permission to do so. That's why he didn't bother with the questions. #VPDebate

Claire Saffitz has left @bonappetit. Strong move. It begs the question, if you were Dawn Davis what would you do to rebuild/salvage the brand? Tough gig.

I'm writing an article on how to cook things that people think are hard to master. What's something you can never seem to cook just right? OK, it seems you all got very excited so I'm going to do some quick replies to these suggestions in this thread 👇

Accidentally opened the drawer in my bathroom where I keep all of my kids' lost teeth in Ziploc bags and honestly parenting is creepy as hell. Just to clarify, the reason I have the teeth is that in Japanese culture you throw them onto the roof or under the house, but we also didn't want the kids to miss out on the Aussie tooth fairy part, but we haven't found a narrative to explain how the teeth come back for throwing.

It's been said a lot but Trump is the result of American decline, not the cause. A strong and stable democracy would never accept a leader who lies so obviously and destructively. But there's a willingness to accept a narrative of success, even if it's a lie. Bliss in ignorance. The complexity of the global response to COVID-19 is confusing, threatening and scary to many. That confusion and fear led a lot of narcissists to invent and "believe" their own narrative of lies as a way of finding emotional control. We call that conspiracy theory.

It is still absolutely insane that not a single streaming service in Australia has an option to search by language of audio or subtitles. One-fifth of Australians speak a language other than English at home. The new Mulan doesn't have Japanese subtitles (perhaps understandable), but the fact that it doesn't have Chinese subtitles is categorically nuts.

The AFL Grand Final should be played at the home ground of the team that finished higher on the ladder every single year. Follow up. If you're an advocate for keeping the GF at the MCG because it's the largest capacity stadium in Australia, if they built a larger stadium in Western Sydney would be OK with moving it there permanently?

SURELY the best way to manage the rights to use the Aboriginal flag is to establish an Indigenous not-for-profit to first acquire and then administer the licensing of the copyright/trademark. I mean, quite literally every option other than this is ridiculous.

As I said on #TheDrum last night, the disheartening thing about the @MediaDiverseAU report is not the numbers - those should be obvious to anyone who consumes TV, radio or print in Australia - but rather the defensiveness with which the report was received. That shows that networks still don’t see the obvious opportunity in diversity. At any network upfront they’ll tout “innovation” from start to finish but demonstrate one metric by which they're identical to their competitors and all of a sudden “innovation” isn’t so important.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more. Or close the wall up with our English dead. #AFLDogsCrows Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. #AFLDogsCrows

This is going to sound a little nuts but I quite seriously think that one thing our Federal government should be doing during this pandemic is laying the groundwork for a referendum to become an Australian republic. I'm not even a strong republican, but I think we all understand that it's inevitable at some point in the future, and despite all that's going on now is the perfect time.

I have reached a point watching football where I no longer experience any emotions. Just a constant numbness at the understanding that despite our best efforts, a void of nothingness is ultimately all that awaits us. All life is essentially meaningless. #AFLCrowsPies Why yes, the game is going well. Thank you for asking. #AFLCrowsPies

I quite firmly believe that at this stage of the pandemic managing personal stress and anxiety is equally as important as the public health measures needed to control the virus itself. AND THAT'S WHY I'M GOING TO DISNEYLAND!