I’m playing a little fast and loose with the definition of salad, but I’m just not comfortable calling pasta salads a “salad”. I have to draw the line somewhere.

It depends. Cold salads on cold days really don’t seem right. And an unimaginative pasta salad, with a sauce so strong it puckers your mouth, can really bring me down.

Sub the cheddar for cheese curds and add gravy and crispy fried onion 👌

Maybe when my Buddha’s hand stops smelling nice, I’ll use the zest to flavor scones or something

I suggest everlasting syllabub. It’s an old (like, 300 years or so) dessert that usually uses orange juice and quite a bit of lemon zest.

As an engineer, I have found that asking people who know how to do things that I don’t know how to do is a really fantastic way to not waste hours teaching myself how to do it.

I also distinctly remember learning how to use a manual can opener to open a can of cranberry sauce for a Sunday dinner. My grandfather narrated the entire thing like it was a horse race and it was a victory when I made it all the way around the lid. 

Right.  Usually “teachable moments” involve teaching.

Yeah, it’s so strange he seemed to think there were only two options: open the can for her or let her struggle, hungry for six hours.

Teaching her how to do something can simply mean, you know, just showing her how to use a can opener. It takes 10 seconds and is a great lesson. In fact, no joke, I remember when my own dad showed me how to open a can of diced tomatoes. Guess what, it worked, because afterwards I always could open cans and am now a…

A dipped combo sounds like the kind of food you gotta dress for.

Something about going to school in Texas, land where oil controls education. If you want to hate America, you should spend some time checking out how they feel about education down there. 

One interviewee said his company is “laying off workers and debating how aggressively it should pivot away from oil and gas toward renewable energy. If the company does move rapidly toward cleaner energy, he said, he is not sure if there will be a place in it for him. “How much are my skills going to transfer?”

Or, OR, find yourself a partner that is also a garlic-loving gremlin. Everyone wins.

Roast more than what you need. Then take the extras, lay them out flat on something and freeze. Once frozen, bag and keep in freezer. Now you have delicious flavor bombs to pop out and mince into things. They chop well when frozen, and then basically dissolve when they hit the heat.

Costco sells giant jugs of peeled garlic. You can fill the ramekin with garlic, add oil until it’s covered, then roast. You’ll have 20 times as much garlic, twice as much oil, and an infinite amount of flavor. You’ll be everyone’s hero when you’re serving it with goat cheese and toasted sourdough!

And you shouldn’t…