A few months, my coworkers and I were chatting around the lunch table about the merits of various desserts. What’s the best ice cream flavor? Does bubble milk tea count as a dessert? When the conversation got serious, we drew up a March Madness-style bracket to find the winning dessert. The details of the bracket […]
Since we had our first child, I have taken far more photos than ever before. I’m glad to have digital cameras because many of the photos are terrible. Sometimes I just miss a funny moment, sometimes it’s blurry, or sometimes it looked better in the moment. These mistakes bother me, so I regularly go through […]
From 2022, my recommendations span games, viewing, cooking, and reading. Video Game: Super Mario Galaxy I didn’t grow up with any gaming consoles, so although I played many great PC gaming franchises, I never played the likes of Final Fantasy, Zelda, or GTA. Recently, I tried out Super Mario Odyssey, and I couldn’t put it […]
For a few years, I used Alex Vermeer’s 8,760 Hours to do my annual review. The process covered twelve life areas (like fitness, social, money, etc.) with mind mapping to detail a snapshot of life, what next year could be, and a summary of a few goals. It was thorough and consistently led to insights, […]
Recently, a coworker mentioned that growing up, he had blue ketchup. It didn’t taste different. It wasn’t some other type of tomato. Heinz just thought it would be fun to put blue food coloring into ketchup. Although it’s no longer available, this product wasn’t the end of Heinz’s innovations in ketchup. In fact, in our […]
By the time we moved out of our last place, I had come to terms with the electric stove. I just needed to set a five minute timer for my pans to pre-heat. So when I moved into our current place about a year ago, I was very excited to get a gas cooktop. However, […]
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the most time-consuming and best thing I did this year was parenting. I hope that continues to be true for many years. However, that doesn’t seem like something I should be generally recommending to everyone, so I still have the rest of this list. TV: Ted Lasso
At the beginning of 2021, I set the goal to bake 52 batches of cookies. Since then, I have gone through countless sticks of butter and bags of flour to bake over a thousand cookies. I have been asked many times what my favorite cookie was and what I learned from the experience. Now that […]
On the one hand, holiday baking makes my cookie goal quite seasonable. On the other hand, that means we already have too many sweets around to be baking even more cookies. I had to find a cookie that didn’t really seem like a cookie. A few weeks ago, the King Arthur blog posted tips for […]
When I made the Dorie’s Two-Bite One-Chip Cookies, I learned that not all cookies require leavening. However, that still left fat, sugar, and flour as other necessary ingredients in a cookie. Of course, I knew at the time that flourless cookies exist. I stand by the statement because although they are cookies with flour, the […]