If you follow my Instagram feed, it will come as no surprise that I grill fairly often and usually our dinners involve some grilled vegetables. It’s a pretty simple task, but I’ll share a few tips that I’ve learned about the process.
- Buy a good grill basket. You can do it other ways but this makes it really simple.
- Spray the basket with non-stick spray every time before you use it and cleanup will be a lot easier. I didn’t learn this soon enough and my basket has a bunch of stuff burned on that I’ll never get off. Yum, extra flavor.
- Coat the veggies in olive oil first, but don’t use too much. The vegetables will get quite soft just from grilling so the oil is just for flavoring and to help the salt and other seasonings stick.
- Denser vegetables like potatoes and carrots take quite a bit longer than soft ones like zucchini and mushrooms. If you’re going to mix and match soft and hard vegetables, start the hard ones first and then throw the soft ones in about halfway through. I generally figure that potatoes take 30-40 minutes and zucchini takes 15-20 minutes. If you have the basket extra full, that time might be longer.
- Keep your slices a standard thickness so that they will cook similarly.
Your options are boundless. Experiment! Some of our favorites are red and gold potatoes, whole mushrooms, zucchini, bell peppers, onion and carrots.
Exponential Growth
Humans have a bias toward thinking that progress happens linearly meaning that in the next 80 years, we’ll see roughly the same amount of progress that we did in the previous 80 years. If that’s true, I can’t even begin to imagine what the world will look like when I’m heading for assisted living.
The truth is even more remarkable though. Instead of progressing linearly, technology is advancing exponentially. This means that not only is technology advancing, the rate of advancement is also increasing. We will advance more this year than last year and so on.
It’s hard to think about this or observe it while you’re in it, but if you look back in history, it’s a little more obvious. It took us thousands of years to go from horses to cars, but the cars from just 50 years ago are relics compared to what we have now. Similarly, computers were huge and bulky for the first decades of their existence, but now they are getting small, faster and more powerful every year.
The amount of data that we collect is rapidly increasing too. At a recent Big Data conference, one of the speakers estimated that 90% of all the data that the world has was generated in the last two years. By 2016 the total amount of data will double every two months and by 2020, it could be doubling every SECOND. Even if those numbers are a bit off, it helps to show what exponential growth looks like.
With all that in mind, how will I ever keep up with technology as I grow older? Grandparents have a hard enough time now. With the exponential growth of technology, is it hopeless for us who think we are sort of in touch now? Probably, but maybe we’ll be able to abstract technology away from the user in such a way that the user doesn’t have to understand much about how it works to get value out of it.
I’m not a futurist and I struggle to bring this post to a reasonable conclusion. I don’t have any magic answers but this stuff has been on my mind a lot lately, especially when I see Elijah interacting with any technology. He’s going to look back on these times as the technological stone age, and it’s awesome to think about what the future world will look like.