Hobbies - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By Demosthenes
#13977476
I have several things that occupy my IRL time. I'll list three:

Building with wood (like, as in structures)
Cooking
Shooting.

What other sorts of hobbies do you people enjoy?
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By Notorious B.i.G.
#13977494
I really enjoy cooking.
I go through phases of types of cooking. I've recently finished a love affair with South East Asian food. Mainly Thai, Malay, Nyonya and Indonesian. Didn’t have a go at Vietnam, and Filipino cooking.
Now I think I’m swinging into provincial Spanish. I don’t really like the idea of tapas (or more to the point the Western version, you don’t go to a restaurant to sit down at a table and eat Tapas!). But I love fresh Spanish produce; pimiento (powder), Jamon, proper Spanish Sherry (Xeres), Iberian pig (black) Chorizo, fennel, pork etc.
So on a Saturday I love to make a nice slow cooked (or time consuming) meal of some verity and along the way immerse myself in the experience a bit, have a glass of Xeres, or Aperol and eat the day away.

Not really a hobby but seeing we’re in the boring household forum. I quite like ironing.
By TruePolitics
#13977508
I have tons.

Running
Playing video games
Singing
Playing guitar
Playing piano
Trolling youtube
Watching and enjoying youtube videos
Star Trek
Partying
Masturbating
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By Goldberk
#13977564
Hassling people in the street with political leaflets.
Cooking, mainly far eastern or eastern Mediterranean.
Films.
Reading, fiction and non fiction.
computer games, mostly the god variety.
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By Jackal
#13977834
Reading
Pipe smoking
Cigar smoking
Weight lifting
Wine
Going to various food and wine events
Long walks with my dog
Cooking
Going to the beach
Tennis
Soccer

Notorious B.i.G. wrote:Now I think I’m swinging into provincial Spanish. I don’t really like the idea of tapas (or more to the point the Western version, you don’t go to a restaurant to sit down at a table and eat Tapas!). But I love fresh Spanish produce; pimiento (powder), Jamon, proper Spanish Sherry (Xeres), Iberian pig (black) Chorizo, fennel, pork etc.
So on a Saturday I love to make a nice slow cooked (or time consuming) meal of some verity and along the way immerse myself in the experience a bit, have a glass of Xeres, or Aperol and eat the day away.

Due to cultural factors, I have this multiple times a week. Delicious.
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By Demosthenes
#13978010
I can't say I'm nearly as cultured in my cooking. I actually love quite a lot of Mexican/Latin American foods, which I guess are just dirty colonial sustenance. I can say I've cooked some Asian dishes, but really they are just Americanized-bastard dishes.

For those of you who are at least a little serious about your hobbies, do you have pics? Raptor mentions pipe smoking, do you have a pic of your pipe? Is it something special? Or just something to smoke from?

Some of the things you guys are listing aren't really hobbies, they are either sports, past times, or simply activities.

For something to be a hobby you have to spend time and money on it. Take my interest in building with wood, for example. In the last few months I've probably spent around $1500 on materials (some of that being for various tools). I have built an outhouse, the floor of a pavilion (still have to finish the roof), and an outdoor stair and landing set-up from our patio to our pool. (The idiot that built the house left this unfinished so you had to walk through the grass to get to the pool :roll: )

I accept Goldberk's hassling people in the streets simply because I'm pretty sure he's doing it the right way, and that seems hobbish enough for me!

B.I.G.ie wins the cooking hobby so far. Very impressive.
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By Jackal
#13978048
Demosthenes wrote:Some of the things you guys are listing aren't really hobbies, they are either sports, past times, or simply activities.

Isn't that essentially what a hobby is? Merriam-Webster defines it as "a pursuit outside one's regular occupation engaged in especially for relaxation". Not sure if one needs to put money into it being a hobby. For example, "writing" can be considered a hobby and the capital needed to write is perhaps a few dollars. Time is another thing.

I usually define a hobby as anything you put extensive time into for enjoyment on a regular (or even semi-regular basis). Of course, there are certain things that fall into that category that I would not consider hobbies, like sitting down on Sundays to watch American football I am not sure I would consider it a "hobby". Then again, I tend to not really judge people's hobbies so I really would not care if someone considered it one.

Demosthenes wrote:For those of you who are at least a little serious about your hobbies, do you have pics? Raptor mentions pipe smoking, do you have a pic of your pipe? Is it something special? Or just something to smoke from?

Unfortunately, I do not have a pic of any of my pipes. I have three, though. One is the basic corn cob (and my first) and another is one that I purchased for around $20. The nicest one I have is a Peterson Killarney pipe that was around $70 when I purchased it. However, I only pipe smoke at home (about once a week) since in public it would probably seem pretentious. Cigars, however, are common in public down here so there I smoke those far more often. :smokin:
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By Notorious B.i.G.
#13978329
Raptor wrote:Due to cultural factors, I have this multiple times a week. Delicious.

Are you Spanish Raptor? Either way jealous!
I think I’d like to retire to Portugal and live on a small farm with enough room to grow my own produce.



Demosthenes wrote:I can't say I'm nearly as cultured in my cooking. I actually love quite a lot of Mexican/Latin American foods, which I guess are just dirty colonial sustenance. I can say I've cooked some Asian dishes, but really they are just Americanized-bastard dishes.

I find the Western-bastard dishes problem massive in Australia. Thank god there are finally some authentic restaurants opening up here. Good thing about your own cooking is you can find authentic (enough) recipes. And the more involved you are, the more authentic you can make it taste. Such as, instead of using a pre-made curry sauce you put over the top, I like to roast and grind my own spice, make my own curry pastes etc. Makes such a huge difference, and really only adds maybe what 20 minutes at the most to the cooking process?

I’m in two minds about things like stir fry sauces and quick cooking. It’s great that people are being encouraged to cook quick, easy, somewhat tasty and healthy meals instead of takeout. But I despise the idea of making it so lazy that you’re encouraged to use packet rice, or stir fry sauce, instead of taking the time to make it yourself which makes the meal tastier and healthier (in so far as the produce is freshers, less preservatives and you can change out something if it’s too fatty etc).

The bastard dish is a real problem for Latin American/Mexican foods. It’s all tex mex here in Australian and it’s hard to find traditional recipes and then in Metric values too. I really want good Mexican!

Demosthenes wrote:For those of you who are at least a little serious about your hobbies, do you have pics?

I do take some pics. I did try doing a food blog for while, but I don't have the commitment and I think people who take photos of meals at restaurants (you didn’t cook it!) and who have food blogs are Grade A wankers. So I stopped. I don’t mind if you take pictures of your own food and blog it, but still...
Also I can’t post pics on here due to internet filter restrictions.

Demosthenes wrote:Some of the things you guys are listing aren't really hobbies, they are either sports, past times, or simply activities.

For something to be a hobby you have to spend time and money on it.

I agree, it's like saying sitting down is a hobby.
I’ve spent a lot of money on getting new things for my kitchen. A Kitchen Aid, Food Processor. Next on my list is my own meat mincer and/or a pressure cooker. When I have money to buy/build my own house I want to design my own kitchen. Have a larder room where I can store my preserves and drippings and what not.
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By Tainari88
#13978369
I have various hobbies Demosthenes:

I love dancing a lot. Mainly Latin dancing of all sorts. I have danced since I was a toddler. I studied ballet for about ten years. And the truth is I would have loved to have been a professional dancer. But it wasn't in the cards for me. Too many moves my family made. You need stability for that.

I love cooking. I studied it and take classes all the time to hone my skills. I compete in cooking all the time. Or when I have the time available. Since the baby I have not been able to compete much.

I collect dolls. I love dolls. I collect Madame Alexander dolls, Mel Odom Gene dolls, Ginny dolls, international dolls especially Cuban dolls. I love beautiful little Cuban dolls with their turbans and earrings, and polka dot dresses. I have at least ten Cuban dolls.

I collect music in a very serious fashion. I have about one thousand cd's. All of them very varied. But the biggest genre by far is salsa/popular/romantic/latin american music. My Cuban CD section is extensive. I have an enormous love for Raptor's background heritage of music. Lol. Raptor is not Spanish. He is Cuban American with probably Spanish background. Love for Cuban music runs really deep in my family. So I know all the greats like Machito, Arsenio Rodriguez, Celia, Buena Vista Social Club, Afro Cuban All Stars, Xavier Cugat, Olga Guillot, Blanca Rosa Gil, Los Soneros de Matanzas, Los Zafiros, and hundreds more. I also know the more modern artists like Irakere, Los Van Van, Los Blues, Albita Rodriguez, and the Jazz greats from Cuba like Israel "Cachao" Lopez, Arturo Sandoval, and the list goes on for miles. I know them all and their songs and musical history. I love the wonderful albums of Ibrahim Ferrer and Compay Segundo who are both deceased. So many Cubans who are great musically speaking. In Cuba there are 15,000 registered musicians who are truly great musicians. The informal ones who are not registered are equally great. I love that music with all my heart. I also like La Nueva Trova musicians like Amaury Perez, Pablo Milanes and others. Silvio Rodriguez' songs I love, but his voice is kind of non attractive. But his songs are lovely and big hits in many countries in the Spanish speaking Caribbean and in Latin America. The Miami Cuban crowd have produced good artists as well, such as Willie Chirino and others.

I like to play board games and trivial pursuit and jeopardy on the TV and in computer games.

I also love to learn as a hobby someday scuba diving.

Oh, how could I forget? I read enormous amounts of fiction and non fiction. In three languages. I try to read at least a novel every two weeks.

And I love to collect charm bracelets. I love charm bracelets and if I don't wear one I feel kind of 'naked' without it.
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By Jackal
#13978397
Notorious B.i.G. wrote:Are you Spanish Raptor?

Yes and on both sides, although I was born here in the United States. Most of my grandparents were born in Cuba to Spanish parents and remained "Spaniards" through schooling, social clubs, etc and most of them moved to Spain in 1960 when Castro took power before eventually making it to the States. I have only one grandmother that claims to be more Cuban than Spanish ( :lol: ). Cuban food is a lot like Spanish food, naturally, though it seems to me to be a lot simpler. My family is from Northern Spain (the Basque Country and Asturias to be specific) so we eat more potatoes than rice (I don't really eat carbs anymore anyways so I usually just don't serve myself them). Of course, we do eat some of the more common Spanish rice-based dishes like paella and arroz con pollo. Remember, the key to success is all in the sofrito.

Speaking of paella, what protein do you put in it? In Spain, the ingredients vary from province to province, city to city, and even village to village but there are the basic tenants of it being a "surf and turf" dish. Paella is served in my family once every two weeks and the proteins we use are: chicken, mussels, langostinos, chorizo, lobster, and diced ham. About couple times a year you may find the chicken replaced with rabbit or goat and the langostinos often get replaced by shrimp.

Tainairi, you would have loved to have been in Miami a few weeks ago. There is a little indoor festival (if that's what you want to call it) called Cuba Nostalgia that has, among other things, many different CDs of Cuban music both old and new. There would have been a ton of good stuff to add to your collection.

I am attempting to pick up model building and painting of World War 2 model tanks and such but I fear I don't have the artistic ability to paint them. :hmm:
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By Notorious B.i.G.
#13978416
Raptor wrote:Speaking of paella, what protein do you put in it? In Spain, the ingredients vary from province to province, city to city, and even village to village but there are the basic tenants of it being a "surf and turf" dish. Paella is served in my family once every two weeks and the proteins we use are: chicken, mussels, langostinos, chorizo, lobster, and diced ham. About couple times a year you may find the chicken replaced with rabbit or goat and the langostinos often get replaced by shrimp.


Paelle once every two weeks! Swap lives for a couple of weeks? :p

You’re exactly right about ingredients changing from province to province et. al. That's what I love about provincial Spanish cooking. You use whats best and fresh in your region.
In Australia, we are quite obsessed with sea food (we like to pretend that only we are, but so many other cultures are!). So Paella is usually sea food here, so (if I’m not mistaken) more Mediterranean style of say Valencia. Mussels, prawns, squid (baby octopus). I’m a big chicken person myself, so I like to use chicken, chorizo and diced Jamon (mainly the fatty parts so they render down for flavour and creaminess).

My family is from Northern Spain

My favourite part. I’m going to plan a tour from Corunna to San Sebastian sometime in the not too distant future.


Every now and then I decide to take up building WWII model aeroplanes. Get about 2/3 of the way through then get bored. I’ve got about 5 almost completed models floating around somewhere.
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By Tainari88
#13978425
Aha, I still think you are more Cuban than Spanish. For me Spanish is someone like KlassWar. He is from Valencia, born and raised. You were born in Miami then?

I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. When my father died in 1999...I got curious about our roots in Puerto Rico---so I went to the ancestry research area in my local central library. It has a great section on doing family research and it took a while but I was able to find a lot of registries through the Catholic and Protestant churches, and the census takers. I did not know the Spanish crown had census takers since the late 1600's taking down names and of people who lived in established towns on the island. Through that documentation I found out I came from a long line of really poor peasant people. With a few snobby hacendados here and there. Interesting but the most extensive group was my maternal grandmother's parents. A Puerto Rican guy who was of pure blond blue eyed Spanish blood but poor as can be...and he married my great grandmother who was half Indian Taina and half African. They had something like 21 kids together. Lol. But it was interesting that on my father's side it was almost all Spanish origin people. Though they worked for landed Black African Puerto Ricans who were a lot wealthier than they were. If you study the history of your family you inevitably wind up learning the history of a nation.

I found out some ancestor of mine arrived in Puerto Rico in the 1600's due to being condemned to slave labor on a finca in the Cordillera Central for the offense of stealing bread from the local bakery. Almost all of them were from Southern Spain. Andalucia, Cadiz, Malaga, Sevilla.

A lot from the Canary Islands too. My African ancestry comes from Western Africa. Specifically Nigeria. According to my maternal Grandmother she said her great granny still spoke Yoruba before she was buried. I am a typical New World mixture of peoples.

I would have loved to be in the indoor festival. I probably would have spent more than I should have. I did a music thread about all the Cuban music on PoFo and I think Demosthenes participated a long time ago. Maybe some time again soon another one?

About the Paella? It is one of the dishes I did in competition and $500 dollars for. I love it. The signature paella of Spain is Paella Valenciana. And it is quite plain. Just escargot and saffron and a sofrito. Now? It is very varied. I do a Puerto Rican version with longaniza and huey azul. Caribbean blue crab and shrimp, chicken etc. The trick is the rice and the saffron. Don't dry out the rice and it should be medium grain in my opinion and be careful with the broth. It is a very labor intensive dish. But well worth it.

:)
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By KlassWar
#13978510
Reading.
Writing.
Strength training and martial arts.
Playing videogames. Coding.
Hardcore Punk, Sludge Metal, Grindcore.
Weed. Sex. Booze. Drugs.

Notorious B.i.G. wrote:Now I think I’m swinging into provincial Spanish. I don’t really like the idea of tapas (or more to the point the Western version, you don’t go to a restaurant to sit down at a table and eat Tapas!).


Matter of fact, people do just that on a regular basis. What's wrong with tapas anyway?
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By Jackal
#13978633
Tainari88 wrote:Aha, I still think you are more Cuban than Spanish. For me Spanish is someone like KlassWar. He is from Valencia, born and raised. You were born in Miami then?

Yup, born and raised in Miami. My family, on both sides, was in Cuba for less than a generation (aside from one grandmother who's grandparents immigrated to Cuba from the Canary Islands) before they left.

Notorious B.i.G. wrote:You’re exactly right about ingredients changing from province to province et. al. That's what I love about provincial Spanish cooking. You use whats best and fresh in your region.
In Australia, we are quite obsessed with sea food (we like to pretend that only we are, but so many other cultures are!). So Paella is usually sea food here, so (if I’m not mistaken) more Mediterranean style of say Valencia. Mussels, prawns, squid (baby octopus). I’m a big chicken person myself, so I like to use chicken, chorizo and diced Jamon (mainly the fatty parts so they render down for flavour and creaminess).

My grandfather always said, in his thick Spanish accent (replacing "c" and "z" sounds with "th" as in gracias = grathias, almost everyone in my family here in the USA speaks this way at least to a small degree), that paella without meat was just arroz con mariscos!

I also forgot a very important ingredient - codfish (bakalao).

Notorious B.i.G. wrote:My favourite part. I’m going to plan a tour from Corunna to San Sebastian sometime in the not too distant future.

Beautiful. I suggest you follow El Camino de Santiago for a little bit. San Sebastianians (or Donostianos as my grandparents call them since Donostia = San Sebastian in Basque) are rivals of my family, which are from Bilbao and Pamplona. Be sure to visit Tapia de Casariego, Asturias too. I have always loved visiting my cousins and uncles and aunts there as it is a beautiful seaside town.

Coruña brings back memories of how funny I thought Galicians were when I visited. They speak an odd mix of Portuguese and Spanish.

I suppose traveling, indulging in local culture, could be considered a hobby.
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By Tainari88
#13978654
KlassWar wrote:Reading.
Writing.
Strength training and martial arts.
Playing videogames. Coding.
Hardcore Punk, Sludge Metal, Grindcore.
Weed. Sex. Booze. Drugs.



Matter of fact, people do just that on a regular basis. What's wrong with tapas anyway?



I think your list of hobbies is quite interesting. What is 'coding' though? And do you like eating tapas. You know I have never eaten tapas in my life. Not once. I have no idea why I have not tried it yet. Maybe if I visit Spain I will try tapas.
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By KlassWar
#13978675
Tainari88 wrote:I think your list of hobbies is quite interesting. What is 'coding' though? And do you like eating tapas. You know I have never eaten tapas in my life. Not once. I have no idea why I have not tried it yet. Maybe if I visit Spain I will try tapas.


Everyone in Spain likes tapas. :p

Who doesn't like some snacks when havin' a few cold ones? Thing is, unlike most snacks, with a few tapas you've basically got lunch/dinner covered. ;)
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By Tainari88
#13978714
KlassWar, I don't drink any alcoholic beverages. I tried to finish a beer in Mexico once on the beach on a hot day, and I could not even do that. I try to finish half a glass of red wine with dinner and I fail to finish the wine. I guess I am not into alcohol in general. Good thing I am not.

I saw a food program on TV about some great tapas bars and restaurants in Spain but some of those places were expensive as can be. I also heard that the best restaurant in the world according to a bunch of world hopping food critics is in Spain. "El Bulli" it is called run by a Spanish chef of enormous creativity by the name of Andreas or Andres Aria. I saw a documentary on Aria and his restaurant. Those people work like master painters, or artists or sculptors or something big...except with food. It seems like even France or Italy can't compete with Spanish creativity with food. Interesting in the extreme I found the documentary. Of course I could never afford going to "El Bulli" in my lifetime....but still it is fun to see.

Never had real Spanish ham either. Manchego cheese I have had. Fig preserves with that too. Love it. You know KlassWar I have been seeing a lot of Valencia, Spain and out of all the Spanish cities I love what I see in Valencia A LOT. It is not as expensive as Barcelona or Madrid. And the people are much friendlier in my opinion. But the jobs are scarce in Spain. A lot of Spaniards are leaving to find employment anywhere they can find it. The unemployment is really, really bad in Spain.
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