Every day, I fry potatoes for dinner. However, since moving to my current location, finding good potatoes to fry has been a struggle for the past month. It’s a big deal for me because potatoes are my favorite food and I’ve gone without fried potatoes for a whole month.
Opting for frozen potatoes is not an option I want to consider. So, what can I do? I settled for potatoes that turned out brown and tasteless instead of crispy. Then, I approached this as a problem, as I usually do when faced with a challenge. Here’s how my thought process unfolded:
Recognizing the problem’s importance: Top Priority
Impact: Easy to cook, considering my busy schedule and limited time
Objective: Enjoy delicious fries and increase my happiness
Research: Instead of relying on the internet, I decided to engage my own brain to come up with a solution. I often follow this approach for problems that don’t require a team effort or when working with products, simply for my own experimentation and mental stimulation.
What to do? Stay determined
How? Believe that there is always a way
When? Trust that the solution will reveal itself
Did I find a solution? Yes!
Approach/Way of Thinking:
-Frozen fries are always crispy but contain many chemicals.
-Potato chips are also crispy.
-There must be a reliable source for the potatoes used in chips. But what if there isn’t?
-If not, frozen fries likely use chemicals. However, potato chips are fried or baked and still turn out crispy. Hmm…
-But if you examine fried or baked potato chips, they have that brown color that affects the taste. Ah, they use a lot of salt to mask the undesirable flavor.
-However, using excessive salt is not desirable. Hmm…
-Alright, frozen fries are crispy. Let’s try freezing my own fries.
-I proceeded to cut a potato into the regular slices and placed them in the freezer.
-The next day: I took the frozen fries and cooked them in a pan with sunflower oil.
Results: Better, but still not as expected.
-Brain: What do I do now? Hmm…
So, if freezing them produced better results, why not try a different approach?
Me: What do you mean, brain?
Brain: You mentioned that potato chips are thin and always taste good due to the added salt, but we don’t want to use excessive salt.
Brain: So, why not try freezing potatoes but, before freezing them, cut them into thin slices like fried or baked chips?
Me: Pondering… Previously, I cut my potato slices into regular sizes, so they were quite thick, requiring more cooking time. Additionally, the brown color would spread heavily as they cooked, resulting in an undesirable taste. However, if I slice them thinly, they will cook faster. If they cook faster, I can remove them before they start turning brown.
Did it work? Yes, like magic! Finally, I can transform subpar potatoes into well-cooked, crispy, and delicious fried potatoes. The trick is to cut them very thin, freeze them, and after freezing, cook them and remove them before they even start to brown.
I assure you they will be perfectly cooked, crispy, and delightful.
I could have easily searched on Google, used ChatGPT, or watched YouTube videos for answers. However, doing so would have put my brain in a reliant mode, limiting the thinking process.
Our brains contain more information than we can imagine, and they hold accurate and personalized data. We just need to find the right approach to engage our brains and tap into their incredible capabilities.
Imagine the amounts of data, images, things that happen around you when you go out, travel, eat, meet friends, walk… What you see is what you focus on, but your eyes and brain they save everything, and everything your eyes spot and your brain recognize and unrecognized is saved.
But how do you access that, if you don’t ask your brain to help you, and instead opt on using technology, technology is great and it should keep advancing, and we should use it. But there a thin line that separates between making our brains reliant or unlocking its full capabilities and potential.
“The more you stop being reliant, the more you and your brain will push each other forward and the longer term you will find yourself having a much more powerful brain, reliance is important but discovering, training, exploring and feeding our brains, are far much more important, because your brain is the most advanced humans ever had, and so far exceeds AI and can always do. Just don’t shrink it, train it, develop it, use it as much as you can and it will take you farther than you think.”
Bon Appetit
