Home and Living general advice thread

I don't know about rice tips, because I use a rice cooker which does all the work for me.

Pasta on its own tastes a lot better if you add a dash of salt to the boiling water before putting the pasta in. The simplest pasta condiment I can think of is garlic (chopped or sliced, heated in a pan with oil). Most tins/bottles of pasta sauce can also be improved by frying up some extra garlic and mixing it in, although I usually make pasta sauce from scratch when I do bother cooking.

A blob of butter and a dash of soy sauce also kind of works for pasta flavouring. I normally add basil rice seasoning to that, but that's probably not an easy/cheap thing to find outside Japan. Maybe chili flakes/powder would be a good lazy condiment too?

Soy sauce and butter also works as the laziest flavouring ever for a bowl of rice, but there's not much to it nutritionally except carbs so make sure to add protein+vegetables.