Gluten (Seitan) is an Underappreciated Cheap and Tasty Plant Protein

With the cost of living pressures affecting many, a cheap protein source that is underappreciated is gluten, which for many seems to cause fear and anxiety. However, gluten is safe for most people unless they have celiac disease.

Most people know about gluten from bread, but pure gluten has been used for a long time as part of Chinese cuisine. Chinese Buddhist monks "invented" gluten (also known as kao fu or seitan) back in the 6th century CE as part of the Tang dynasty. The gluten was obtained by the "wash method" which involved mixing wheat flour with water and then continuously kneading it to remove the carbs, leaving behind virtually pure protein. If you do not have time to knead flour, it's much faster to buy gluten from the store. I purchased mine from a local Asian store for AUD 2.50 (USD 1.68) for 300 grams.

Some argue that gluten is an incomplete protein because it has low levels of lysine. However, this is not a concern because you can simply eat other protein sources that are high in lysine such as soy or beans. In my opinion, calling gluten incomplete is unfair because practically all food is incomplete in some way e.g. "complete proteins" such as soy or eggs have low levels of vitamin C, but this does not mean they are inferior. It just means that if you eat soy or eggs you should also eat something else to get vitamin C such as oranges. The same logic applies to gluten. 

Gluten is remarkably simple to prepare. You can prepare them e.g. in an air fryer if you are in a rush, but one way I like to prepare gluten is by pan frying them. Firstly you should cut the gluten into smaller blocks. I recommend using a cast-iron pan to avoid PFAS contamination concerns in non-stick pans. Add avocado oil into the pan and then fry the gluten chunks in the oil You will notice that it turns a golden brown colour.

A block of gluten fried in avocado oil

The golden brown colour of gluten signifies it is ready. Once it is golden brown, I usually stop frying as one of the advantages of gluten is that it doesn't matter if it is undercooked, that is, there are no pathogen risks with undercooked gluten. It is better to undercook gluten rather than overcook it.

Taste is subjective, but gluten has a chewy texture that I like, but on its own gluten is tasteless, so in this case I added rice seasoning to add flavour.

Gluten with rice seasoning

Can a Man be Attractive Living with Parents? (Plus Tech Lead Videos)

I am in my mid-thirties and live with my mother. I feel it is not the best way to seduce women but I save so much money especially since I earn a six-figure salary and spend almost nothing, especially now during the COVID-19 pandemic when many people are working from home.

In a previous post, I spoke about a YouTuber named "The Tech Lead" who provides many seemingly good arguments for living with parents. I have provided more videos from the Tech Lead further below.

Having watched these videos, I feel they back up my need to believe that what I am doing is right, and they definitely make me feel less insecure about living with parents. I contribute a small amount to the family (about $300 per month) and enjoy having my meals cooked, my ironing done, etc. I have unsuccessfully dated some women in the past who have asked me if I expect a future girlfriend or wife to cook and do domestic duties for me, and I tell them I don't want that. I am happy to split responsibilities equally. I just have a very generous mother who almost forces me to not do any domestic duties. I do admit I have grown very attached to this relaxed lifestyle, which makes it harder for me to move out.

In the video below, Tech Lead is in his apartment and announces he is going to move back in with his parents.

Tech Lead below talks about the benefits of living with parents, but this is an older video when he was married, had a family, and moved into a new place. In the video, the gives many reasons why it is better to live with parents (mostly due to the money saved) but then at the end of the video he gives a non-satisfactory reason why he has moved out (some vague explanation about doing things at the right time).

In the video below, Tech Lead talks about his worst money mistakes. There is a theme because a lot of money is wasted by trying to impress women by moving out into an apartment or buying diamonds and jewellery. The key is to not care about what others think of you. This helps to save money.

Impressing Others

I have been reading The Simple Dollar, and one blog post there is called Ten Big Mistakes #5: Worrying What Others Think of You.

The author is a frugal man who keeps a blog to teach others how to be frugal with money. He certainly has not been a saint for all his life. When he was younger he was a big spender. He spent money on luxury cars, fancy clothes, up-scale restaurants, and so forth.

Even though the author claims that you should not care what others think of you, I personally find that it's difficult to not care at all what others think of you. I try hard not to let other people's opinions of me matter, but I find that it does matter. This is especially the case with, say, the clothes I wear. I have a lot of old clothes in my wardrobe. In fact, I approximate that about 95 per cent of the clothes in my wardrobe is out-of-fashion. I find that I cannot wear really old clothes in public. It would be like wearing pajamas in public. People would stare at me and I would feel self-conscious.

The author says, "Spend money on what you value, not what other people value. I buy automobiles based on reliability and gas mileage and safety, not how they look in our driveway or whether the neighbor will be impressed." I would agree. I purchased a fairly cheap car about four years ago. However, because I am a male I am glad I purchased a sedan and not a small girls car like a Nissan Micra or a Ford Ka. It would be terribly embarrassing if I drove one of those. I think conforming to gender stereotypes makes people feel more comfortable, and this definitely applies to me. I have admitted this to my friends, but some of them tell me that I should just do what I please, e.g. if I wanted to wear a dress then I should just do it and not be worried. I quickly showed them that they too were influenced by fear of what others thought because I dared them to wear a dress in public or to come to work with blue hair. Many people seem to like to think they are immune from the opinions of others, but when you really test them it seems as if they are just acting rebellious to impress you.

Budget Your Savings, Not Your Spending

There are many personal finance tips out there, and one that seems to be popular is that you should keep track of where every penny goes. I have tried this (read Spending Rate Falling). For about a month I kept track of every cent I spent. I kept it using a spreadsheet in Google and produced nice looking graphs.

The result is that I figured out that I spend about $600 per month. That is very nice to know, but did I really need to track where all my cents went?

Keeping track of my spending was difficult. It's not practical to carry around a notebook everywhere you go, so in order to track my spending I used my mobile phone camera to take pictures of things I purchased. If there was no price tag I could take a picture of, I made a voice recording in my mobile phone. In the voice recording I detailed when I purchased the item, what the item is, how much it costs, etc. About once a week or more I went through my mobile phone and entered all this data into the Google spreadsheet. It was a lot of work!

I have now stopped tracking my spending. The reason why is because it is so tedious. It is good to be able to figure out how much you spend, but there is an easier way to do this. Quite simply, you follow this formula:

Savings or Investments = Income - Spending

In other words, how much you save or invest is equal to how much money you get in the form of income subtract how much you spend. If we rearrange this formula, we get the following:

Spending = Income - Savings or Investments

In other words, in order to figure out how much you spend, take your income and then subtract your investments or savings. This is much easier because your income (I'm talking about take-home pay here, which is how much actually goes into your bank account every fortnight) is usually fixed and it's easy to figure out what your income is. Investments or savings is also easy to figure out for me because I usually buy shares in increments of thousands of dollars. That is, I buy shares thousands of dollars at a time. Therefore, when I invest I do it not very regularly and it's easy and simple to keep track of.

I spend money on a lot of small things, for example, coffee, mints, and restaurant meals. When I buy non-investment goods, I tend to buy cheap things very frequently. However, when I buy investments, I tend to buy expensive things infrequently. It therefore made sense to ignore spending and focus instead on savings.

Getting Tired of Sandwiches

I am so tired of bringing sandwiches to work. The problem is that when I eat the sandwiches at lunch, most of the components of the sandwich has already deteriorated. E.g. the salad is dry, the bread has become soggy, and the ham smells. The alternative is to eat at restaurants. The problem with this is that it often costs quite a lot to eat out and I feel guilty not saving money.

What I need is a simple-to-prepare lunch that is tasty and healthy. I am thinking of bringing to work sandwiches with Vegemite on them. I have heard that Vegemite has too much salt in it. However, the New Vegemite contains less salt and apparently it tastes better.

Sex and Sloth: The Two Greatest Threats to Survival

Earlier I wrote about my new Casio watch that I purchased from Ebay for around $30. Someone commented on that post and said something like, "Good luck pulling chicks with that watch." I deleted the comment because it wasn't productive, but for a while I thought about what he said and I am going to talk about it now.

I believe that all humans are born with debt. Every human needs food and water to live. We need a certain amount of kilojoules of energy, a certain amount of protein, vitamins, minerals, etc. When we are hungry, it is as if your body is sending you a bill that you must pay off with food. I call this food debt.

I believe that debt is bad since it restricts freedom and happiness. Therefore, it is essential that I pay off this debt. One way I can pay off this debt is to buy income-producing assets like shares, property, and bonds. The more income-producing assets I buy, the greater my passive income is. As my passive income increases, it may one day increase to a level where I can completely cover my food debt.

In order to buy income-producing assets, I must save cash. I must not buy luxury goods like expensive watches or expensive cars. If I do buy these goods, I therefore save less, buy fewer income-producing assets, produce lower passive income, and thus increase my probability of death.

I understand that some or many females may be attracted by a man's signals of high reproductive fitness, such as an expensive car or an expensive house. I also understand that it is within the nature of humans to mate and propagate their genes. However, for the sake of survival it is necessary that I suppress this instinct. If I give in to the sex instinct, it means I put more resources into attracting a mate. If I do this, it steals resources from other endeavors in life, such as paying off food debt, which is essential to increase the probability of survival. Thus I have proven logically that sex kills.

Another threat to survival is sloth or laziness. Humans have a tendency to do what is pleasurable in the short-term to the detriment of the long term. For example, you may binge on sugar or alcohol, unaware that too much sugar can make you fat or alcohol, even in moderation, increases the risk of mouth cancer by 75 per cent.

Sex and sloth then are the two biggest threats to survival that I have identified, and I make a conscious effort to suppress these instincts for the sake of my own survival.

Frugal Tip: Forget the Garden

If a factory worker tells you he is trying to save money for retirement, and all of a sudden you see him driving a Ferrari, what would you think? If you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a sports car when you only need to spend $10,000 for a second-hand Camry, you can forget about early retirement. Depending on the cost of this sports car, they can probably forget retirement completely.

What if this worker told you that instead of buying a Ferrari F430 he is instead going to be frugal by buying something cheaper, and then the next day you see that he's traded in the Ferrari for a BMW M5? So instead of spending $250,000 for a car he spends $125,000, and he thinks he is saving money!

Since the M5 is cheaper than the F430, your factor worker friend is saving money, but he could do much better. My point is that simply buying something cheaper doesn't mean you're frugal.

The moral of that story leads me to the main point of this post. I have been reading on the Get Rich Slowly Blog about the January Update to the blogger's Garden Project. The guy tracks the costs of the seeds he uses for gardening. Country Taste seeds cost $2.75, Italian Sweet seed costs $3.75, and so on. While all this may seem cheap, it is the classic Latte Factor problem. According to David Bach, "The Latte Factor® is based on the simple idea that all you need to do to finish rich is to look at the small things you spend your money on every day and see whether you could redirect that spending to yourself. Putting aside as little as a few dollars a day for your future rather than spending it on little purchases such as lattes, fancy coffees, bottled water, fast food, cigarettes, magazines and so on, can really make a difference between accumulating wealth and living paycheck to paycheck."

Paying $1.25 for seeds may be better than paying $10.00 for seeds, but it is not better than paying nothing. This is analogous of the obvious idea that buying a $100,000 yacht is better than buying a $1 billion yacht, but it is not better than paying nothing.

If you are serious about saving money, the best thing to do is to simply forget the garden. Just let it die.

Of course, if you love your garden or love gardening too much or if you are eating from your garden, that's a different story. Growing plants may also be good for the environment.