Traditional versions also contain ~50% butter by total pre-cooking weight. (Hello heart-health my old friend…)
Dunno about your area, but there’s some pretty awesome frozen puff pastry sold in thin-ish sheets at most stores around here. It bakes up quick and almost magically multi-layered, and I would not for a million years be able to tell it from scratch puff pastry from une belle boulangerie.
This is a myth. You actually don’t.
No, I think that’s what OP’s question is all about-- more than ever, many/most people DO need to stay informed to a baseline extent. That’s because laws, policy and legal interpretation are changing hard and fast in the USA for example, and citizens who aren’t informed can be critically blindsided. That may result in their jobs suddenly vanishing for no good reason, discrimination being ratcheted up against them, their rights suddenly eroding (as we saw in the wake of Roe vs. Wade being revoked), and/or they’re now facing deportation or being held in a facility ‘just because.’ Or for example, many people depend on Medicare, Medicaid, the ACA and/or SSI to stay afloat, and those are all going to be cut down, evidently. So certainly, you’d want to be as prepared as possible for stuff like the above, while still retaining a healthy mindset.
Or for example, if you were in Great Britain and weren’t paying attention to the Brexit background, you may have been part of (and directly affected by), the voting disaster enabling the plan to go through.
Gonna take a detour here and mention the time that I tried to make tofu from scratch, starting with making soy milk from dried beans that I’d ordered just for the task:
The soy milk turned out surprisingly well, with the help of a semi-automated device, but I realised on the spot that most commercial soy milk has a tonne of sugar added to it, and I didn’t want to go down that route. In fact, it just about turned me off of soy milk permanently.
Anyway, I moved on to the tofu-making stage, and realised that both coagulants I tested (lemon juice and nigari powder) imparted a huge, unwanted taste to the tofu, on top of neither being all that great at coagulating the soy milk. In the end, I think I could have improved on this cooking disaster, but my motivation was gone at that point, and I wanted to move on.
There’s also the fact that no matter what a versatile food tofu is, it’s also a significantly processed one, and I wanted to move in the opposite direction. That said, I understand that fresh-made tofu in Japan and other places can be incredibly tasty, almost worth wolfing down straight with no cooking or spices.
Sort of like a deluxe, Peruvian version of Scottish cottage pie, no?
And… gotta love those thinly-sliced red onions (and for me, habanero slices) soaked in lime juice in the fridge, overnight. I used to use them as a topping on all kinds of meals before my stomach finally gave out, lol.