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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • I cook dinner virtually every night, but probably my (and my family’s) favorite is Lemon Chicken Picatta.

    I cut chicken breasts into pieces about nugget sized, then season w/ salt & pepper. Toss them in flour to coat, then pan-fry them in vegetable oil. Basically, home-made chicken nuggets (my wife says they’re very similar to Chik-Fil-A nuggets).

    When the chicken is done, I use the same pan, which now has a bunch of fond from the meat. Sautee some minced garlic, then add a bunch of chicken broth and thinly sliced lemons. Sautee that for a bit while scraping everything off the bottom of the pan. Add lemon juice and capers. Cook a bit longer. Take off the heat and add butter and parsley. Then pour the sauce over the chicken.

    I usually serve it over pearl couscous with a side of air-fried broccoli.

    For mother’s day, I cooked a piece of fish in some of the sauce. I don’t particularly like fish, but my wife said it was delicious.



  • Nah. Since my mouth doesn’t register the spicy, I don’t get the flavor of the sauce drowned out by the overwhelming spiciness. So I feel like I get a better sense for the flavor of the sauce than most people do. And I can assure you, if they advertise themselves as being absurdly spicy, they taste like straight vinegar. And not good vinegar, just a bland white vinegar.




  • It really depends on the dish and what you want out of the hot sauce.

    My general, everyday preference is Cholula or Crystal. Both those have a distinctly hispanic/tex-mex flavor profile. For east and southeast Asian cuisine, I prefer Sriracha. If I really want the hot sauce to be the focus of the dish, I tend to prefer Marie Sharp’s, especially the carrot or grapefruit varieties.


  • I have an interesting biological quirk where my mouth doesn’t register capsacin, the chemical that makes thing spicy/hot. It’s been a thing my entire life. I can and have just chomped down on habanero and ghost peppers with no immediate problems (I don’t tend to notice how spicy food is until it’s on the way out).

    Those super hot sauces you describe don’t even taste like pepper most of the time. More often than not, they just taste like vinegar. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and there’s a hint of liquid smoke, but most of the time it’s just vinegar and capsacin.


  • Only when I’m slow roasting something that take hours. I got a bluetooth meat thermometer as a gift a little while back and it’s really convenient. There’s an app that goes with it. I just set what type of meat it is and insert the thermometer and let it cook. The app tells me when the food is ready.

    But that’s only for large pieces of meat that take a long time. For anything on the stovetop or grill, or any smaller pieces of meat in the over/airfryer I just do it by feel. I’ve been cooking long enough that I can tell when a piece of meat is ready just by pushing on it to feel the firmness. And I have a pretty intuitive sense for how long something takes to cook.




  • Not a movie, but a TV show. Revolution.

    A sci-fi post-apocalypse show where the premise is that all of a sudden all technology (specifically anything that uses electricity) just stops working and nobody knows why. The show takes place 15 years into the apocalypse. The US has Balkanized into various regional states (although you don’t learn this until later). Some regions have devolved into chaos while others have basically reverted to a steam-punk type of society. Since all modern ships use electricity, they’ve begun to revive large ships from the age of sail. The remnants of the US military at Guantanamo Bay eventually return to the mainland and try to reestablish a much more explicitly authoritarian control over the US. You eventually learn that what caused the global blackout was the creation of a self-replication nanotech which rapidly spread across the planet and shut off all electricity.

    Great premise, but it got too much into the soap-opera CW-style of writing and didn’t last more than 2 seasons.





  • First thing to ask is what state you live/work in? Is it a right-to-work state? If so, then they can fire you or choose to not promote you for no (reported) reason at all, which very likely means you have no legal recourse. If they were to come out and directly say in documented way that they will fire or not promote you if you don’t use this app, that might be different. You’d need to talk to a lawyer who is familiar with laws in your state. But you’d also need documented evidence of this, which means emails sent stating this, or a recording (keep in mind if your state has 2-party consent laws) of a higher-up saying it.

    If you’re in one of the 27 Right to Work States, though, there’s likely very little you can do about it short of finding a different job.