I’ll certainly tip drivers for delivery, but I’m not sure I consider that carryout. I’ve notice a rash of sandwich joints in my area that, if you give them a credit card, make you sign and there’s a spot for a tip. That kind of bugs me—this isn’t a restaurant where carry-out might be taking a server away from their…

As much as I dislike his politics and worldview, I would have thought Delrahim would have been more legally principled. Even if there was a thin excuse for divestiture of that asset, the President’s very public feud with CNN strikes me as making that pure of a power play optically shitty from a judicial review POV.

I tried mashed potatoes in a Cuisinart in my younger days. It was actually quite a stunning result—it rendered boiled potatoes into their constituent basic elements, which are apparently dirty water and potato starch. Neither tastes good.

Number one with a bullet: that just because I’m working in a service job it doesn’t mean you’re better than me. You’re a guest in my establishment, act like it.

I just googled and found an article listing 10 FIRE blogs I needed to read. All written by men, almost all unmarried and without kids. All with very privileged backgrounds and education. I’m all in favor of saving for retirement, but this “movement” strikes me as an affectation of the elite.

I have this strange feeling that most of these FIRE types are single, and probably male. I also just can’t imagine having defined my “life” expenses in my 20s—at that point I had no interest in marriage or kids. Funny how things change. And if I’d stepped off the career path at that point, my life would probably be an…

• How strongly attached to turkey are you? Each Thanksgiving I wonder why I don’t cook turkey more often. So if there’s no turkey, it isn’t Thanksgiving in my book.

I promise you a shitty server and someone who quits after a day. The whole “walk a mile in my shoes” is a silly idea—by the time they start paying for meals, people have empathy or they don’t. Besides, in my experience assholes don’t tend to be self-reflective—that’s the essence of being a dick. I’m sure they would…

The notion that assholes can be forced to develop empathy is flawed ab initio.

The whole “everyone should do X to develop empathy” strikes me as misplaced. Shitty people who treat other people shitty aren’t going to be cured by having people treat them shitty too. Face it, the way that people treat servers is probably very well correlated with how they treat people generally.

I love pickled beets. But hate the part the next day when I forget, see the toilet bowl, and think I’m hemorrhaging.

Apparently I keep an insane amount of canned and jarred stuff in my pantry compared to everyone else... Everything from tomato products to calabrian chiles to cornichons to tahini to tomatillos to basque pippara to anchovies to capers to salsa to strange Chinese fermented pastes... My pantry looks like some strange…

I sort of do this. I cut apples up into a medium dice (1/2"), throw in a bit of cinnamon and sous vide at 185F for 40min. or so. The cubes stay cubes and don’t turn to mush. Really tasty in the morning on top of vanilla yogurt and some granola for crunch.

I’ve started sous viding my pie filling to address both the soupy issue and the crust gap—turns out (as Kenji has figured out) if you cook the apples first at about 185F, you set the pectins, which means they don’t turn into applesauce and don’t release a lot of moisture. Which cuts down on steam too. Plus, you get to…

Your service provider is at least subject to CPNI rules, so your provider isn’t selling your location data unless you’ve explicitly allowed them too—I’d be more worried about the 3rd party apps. Apple has been pretty reasonable on customer protections, so I probably trust them more than some random Joe’s app, which is…

Turns out neither my wife nor I give a damn about whether the other knows where we are 24/7 or not. Frankly, I don’t think either one of us really cares about where the other is 99.99% of the time, but FmF is really useful the other 0.01% of the time. She doesn’t have to bug me about whether I’ve left the office yet.…

I’ve got several of these from back in the day when they were labeled 10.8V (all the 12Vs really seem to be 10.8V, so they switched to labeling them 12V like everyone else). I love the things for light duty jobs. I’ve got a 1/2" corded hammer drill and the 18V Makita LiON drill and driver, and find myself reaching for…

I’ve got several of these from back in the day when they were labeled 10.8V (all the 12Vs really seem to be 10.8V,…

Funny, but the one author I know owns a second hand bookstore.

I know Butter Chicken may not be real historic Indian cuisine, but hell, it tastes great. And if you want to get yours to taste right, you’ll also need kasuri methi—I think they are fenugreek leaves, but you won’t get the right taste substituting the spice. Also, I seem to find Amchur (mango powder) called for in a…

“Battery acid: Grapefruit juice” — I remember old school grapefruit juice, not the new era “ruby” stuff that is as sweet as OJ. Really was battery acid. But you can’t find it anymore... Or at least I can’t. I had a couple drinks I used to make with it, but it has all been erased in favor of sickly sweet crap.