I made chicken and dumplings last night; just a very basic kind of soupy quick chicken stew sort of thing, but then topped it with my standard buttermilk biscuit dough that had fresh-picked scallions (from the garden!  Outdoors!  It's spring!!) and cracked pepper mixed into them.  Baked it all up until the biscuits…

Dude, that sounds insanely good.  So… ::does the math:: … it was even better than insanely good?  I gotta try this!

Seriously!  What the hell?  I've been gadding about the internet, waiting for 1:00.  Then I come back to AVC and find out I'm 45 minutes late??  This is unacceptable!

This isn't limited to just metal and songs with Cookie Monster vocals, but "meow" is my word of choice to sing along with any song I don't know the lyrics to.  For me it stemmed from having a cat someone once described as "musical", but it seems that "meow" is actually a fairly common choice… you're the third other…

God, it seems like it's been a billion years since I listened to Green, and I'm reading along here, nodding to the other comments and thinking, "Yeah, I remember loving that song…" but holy shit, "Hair Shirt".  That was my favorite.

Bieber really brings out the best in him.  When I saw this story on Yahoo last night my first thought was, "I can't wait to read the Newswire about this."

Same here.  I absolutely loved the first four books, found the fifth one to be a slog, and never even bothered reading the last two.  I refuse the movies, completely.  They've just always seemed extraneous, since the books were so cinematic on their own.

Well, I'm making them this weekend, so you're invited.  I'll warn the rest of my household not to be disturbed by your, um, unique looks.

I accidentally ended up with a bag of the accelerant-laced charcoals last summer (you know, the ones where the bag instructs you just to light all four corners and it'll just go from there); they were SO gross.  It's impressive how much flavor they end up imparting to your food.

@avclub-6a2ec3076bb494e5c64eb1a422d9fe3d:disqus It's all about being like A Man, or, in my case, defying the patriarchy.  Every time I grill I feel like it's conveying a message to my neighbors, "Yeah, I'm a chick.  And a grilling bad-ass.  Suck it, jealous bitches."  (Um, not that there's any animosity toward my…

It's all about the two-zone fire. I don't have a very light touch when I build a fire, so I go with a half volcano/half no fire at all set-up.  Then do the chops a few minutes on each of their sides over the volcanic heat to get your sear on and your gorgeous grill marks, then move them off to the indirect-heat…

I can't talk you out of the Weber classic; that's what I use and I love it.  Back in the day I lived in a house that had a grill hooked up to the gas line, so the entire process of grilling was just to flip the gas connection on and then light the fire.  I might as well have been cooking on the stove.  [/charcoal snob]

Let's see… it all started with "how do you pronounce 'Disqus'?", and then we moved on to…

@avclub-1982161d0fe636d1caabd47a2ac23e12:disqus I'm quite fond of Tuthilltown Spirits' Hudson Manhattan Rye Whiskey.  Not surprisingly, it makes a fantastic Manhattan.

Okay, that one made me laugh out loud.  Thank goodness I don't share my cubicle with anyone.

A friend of mine has one that involves a child approaching Jesus on the cross at Golgotha and asking him if there was anything he could do for him.  And Jesus is all, "Could you help me get these nails out?"  So the kid goes and gets a ladder, and climbs up.  He struggles to take out the nail from Jesus's right hand,…

I had to look it up to get it right.  I have a terrible memory for jokes; left to my own devices this would have come out, "There was this octopus… trying to get pajamas off some bagpipes?  Wait, no, I think there was more to it…  Just trust me.  It's hilarious."

@avclub-d35d0af0d2a70c049bbedcb88e25ef28:disqus Oh my god, Indonesian food was my favorite thing about my trip to the Netherlands, by a mile.  My sister lived there for a few years, and she has very questionable taste in… just about everything.  So when I visited her, she was all psyched about how she was taking me…

@avclub-9a3fe1f228aea0bc3b5c0da332c3fb64:disqus My sister is my best friend.  We have all the same interests and perfectly compatible personalities, so we've lived together by choice pretty much since she got out of college.  We're classic, old-school spinster sisters and couldn't be happier.  (That said, we have an…

Now that it's summer in NJ, it's time to break out the smoker to make smoked lemonade cocktails: you smoke a bunch of lemons, make lemonade out of them, infuse some bourbon with lapsang souchong tea, and then make a sort of Arnold Palmer-inspired libation with the two elements.