One of the most remarkable features of our social media age is the “life hack.” Users of all sorts of platforms have developed and demonstrated ways to make more complex tasks easier.
For example, I bet more people would make their own pasta if they could discover an easy way to do so. Fortunately, one TikTok user has some to the rescue!
User @foodsfuns3 shows the revolutionary pasta-making method of making your own pasta by taking boxed pasta, pulverizing it into a powder in the blender, adding an egg, rolling it out, and cutting it into larger strips.
Life-changing, amirite?
@foodsfuns3♬ original sound – foods fun 🤩
If you decided not to watch the video, the woman actually crows, “We’re making fresh pasta from pasta!” As she’s doing this totally unnecessary and, frankly, dumb life hack, some guy in the background — presumably filming with his phone — ooohs and aaahs over the “fresh pasta.”
Here’s what I observed from this video. First and foremost, the “fresh pasta” looks nasty. I’m talking legitimately disgusting. Secondly, at one point, she says, “It’s time to make the sauce.” “Making” the sauce consists of pouring a jar of Newman’s Own into a pan on the stove and adding more oregano to it. I suppose that counts as homemade sauce as much as that nasty mess counts as “fresh pasta.”
But what really gets me is that she sprinkles something on her rolling pin as she rolls that nasty mess out onto the counter. Did you catch what she sprinkled? She puts actual pasta flour on the rolling pin to roll out her frankenpasta. In other words, she could have made legitimately fresh pasta instead of reconstituting boxed spaghetti and calling it “fresh pasta.”
(Somewhat) Related: And Then They Came for Our Cake…
It reminds me of the peanut butter slices “life hack” from back in 2017. Food Network personality Bev Weidner came up with the genius idea of spreading your peanut butter onto wax paper, putting more wax paper on top, freezing it, and cutting it into squares to, ummm, save time?
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Not only does she demonstrate this “life hack” in the most annoying way, but it’s also a dumb idea. Who has room to go to all that trouble and store peanut butter slices in the freezer when it’s simple enough to pull the peanut butter jar off the shelf and spread it onto the bread?
Snarky commenters — my kind of people — pointed out how ridiculous this idea was. One wrote, “Love this…since having kids I had to quit my job due to the amount of time I needed to spread peanut butter each day…maybe now I can go back to work part-time!”
One commenter explained how overcomplicated the idea was, writing, “Because nothing is easier than spreading peanut butter on waxed paper, rolling it flat with a rolling pin, freezing it overnight, then cutting the frozen sheets of peanut butter into bread sized squares and using them to make your honey and peanut butter sandwiches…..”
Another one found a way to improve on the “life hack”: “I made this recipe, it was great. I cut out a few steps though and just spread the peanut butter DIRECTLY ON THE BREAD. Life changing!”
The “fresh pasta” stunt also calls to mind Sandra Lee, the Food Network star and one-time shack-up companion of Andrew Cuomo when he was governor of New York, and her show Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee.
I leave you with her disgusting-looking and borderline-racist Kwanzaa* cake:
Enjoy these “life hacks.” What would we do without them?
*Yeah, I know Kwanzaa is a made-up holiday, and “cultural appropriation” is a claim that’s made far too often, but I think we can all agree that this is disrespectful to black people.
