Love me some creme brulee. That’s a good recipe, one I’ve made myself. Another addition I’ve used besides espresso powder is white chocolate. It doesn’t have a strong flavor, but it adds to the smooth silkiness of the resulting custard. You can also do some simple mix-ins. Melt a bit of jam or jelly and drizzle over…

I know I’ve said this before, but sumac is really underappreciated here in the U.S. And it grows here natively, even! If you can get your hands on some, give it a try. It’s easy to love, very lemony and just a little earthy.

Sorry, but you’re wrong about that, at least where I live. The percentage of our county population of working age 16-65 is already more than 5% lower than the state overall, and it shrinks more every year. Several local elementary schools have closed and merged with others, because there aren’t enough students to keep…

Interesting note: Wendy’s is sometimes credited with creating the first “modern” drive-through in 1970, the three-stop order, pay, pickup setup that’s common today.

We have multiple ones in my town with closed lobbies, or lobbies that are only open for very limited hours. Just this week, the local Taco Bell lobby was closed, because there wasn’t enough staff to work it. The local Dairy Queen lobby has been open for lunch only for months. The population is aging here in rural…

I got a bit of a start over the weekend and harvested and dried herbs from the garden to use at Thanksgiving (and beyond). I’ve got thyme, rosemary, sage, and oregano, all chosen because they’re perennials and varieties that grow well here without needing much care. Last year I hung them in the basement to dry. This…

I have a fair amount of clover in my yard, but also sweet-scented flatsedge. Sedges are considered weeds by “lawn people,” but I’ve just let it go, and it makes a pretty good lawn of its own. After it takes over and fills in, it looks basically like grass. It’s native to where I live, and as a great additional…

Heh. That reminds me of once when my kids were little, and we caught a praying mantis and put it in a cage to study for a while. We put a grasshopper with it, which it stalked and ate. In the evening we put in a couple of field crickets. By morning the crickets were still there, but all that was left of the praying…

Along slightly different lines, my answer is any car...on a road course! Even a boring commuter car will be great fun to drive there, learning how to push it around the corners. Just one track day will teach you a lot about yourself and the car and make you a better driver.

I’m not sure how good the safety protocols were there in the 70's. They let me wander around pretty freely. :) Man, that lab was a fascinating place to be as a science-minded kid. I loved the rare days when there was no school and I got to spend the day with dad at work. He was a toxicologist, and he would usually put…

According to the internet, “Sustained heat for several hours at extremely high temperatures (900°F and above) will reliably destroy a prion.” So you just have to cook the brains until they’re really, really, really well-done. :) The company where I work has an oven to burn paint off metal parts before they’re…

Just wanted to mention that there is also mild giardiniera that is great on sandwiches, etc., if you don’t like the spicy stuff. I think it’s especially good in homemade shawarma.

I was a guy who ate oatmeal with lots of sugar and cinnamon and butter, but in an effort to eat better, for a while I’ve been having plain instant with one of these packs of nuts and dried fruit in it. I’ve finally gotten to the point where I actually like it this way. The nuts add some nice texture, and the fruit is…

For me it was always feeling like any mechanic I went to was cheating me. (They often were.) I determined to learn how to fix my own car. How hard could it be? :) Here I am 25 years later, having rebuilt several engines and done some track driving in my cars.

I was forced by a serious leak from the tub drain to do a bunch of work in our master bathroom. I wrote on the back of one of the pieces of drywall for the next unfortunate soul something like, “2020 - The Year of the Pandemic - God I hope I never have to replace this again.”

It’s sometimes unintuitive how things like work. I remember when I lived in Dallas, there was a side street I usually took to work, but there was a place where traffic would nearly always back up for a couple of long blocks. At some point, they put in a stop sign at a cross street about a mile before that area, and it…

So you do have questions, then?

There aren’t any Jewel-Osco stores in the lower 2/3 of the state. Very suspiciously missing from this list is Walmart! It’s by far the most popular grocery store around here, and I suspect in large swaths of the Midwest.

Possibly. I think generally that’s used for flooring with a plywood or other engineered wood core. What I used is kind of a hybrid: the top layer is a sealed real wood veneer, but the core is waterproof thermoplastic. Real happy with it, and it’s still looks great 2-1/2 years later.

There are a surprising number of such words. Does this article have your sanction, or would you sanction it? Do you cleave to these words, or would you cleave them from the language? Look up Janus words.