Those look great and also like they would be easy to convert to vegan (I certainly am not - cheese is one of the peak achievements of mankind IMO - but some of my family is, so always looking for stuff that won’t suck if vegan-ized)

Well, welcome! I’ve not found any salsa community but if you start one I will join, I am definitely a salsa snob, lol.

And yes this was a delicious drink.

Mayo and dill pickle relish (or chopped dill pickles and pickled jalapenos) is the best tartar sauce IMO.

Chipotle salsa - dump a can of chipotles en adobo into the food processor, press start, turn it off when they are smooth.

Black bean sauce. Dump a can of black beans in a pot with some of the chipotle salsa, heat them together, hit with immersion blender and then whisk in some sour cream.

If you have an abundance of basil (if you have a plant, you will have an abundance) pesto is easy.

Slightly more work but so easy and so good, sheet pan salsa, put tomatillos and fresh hot peppers on a sheet pan and broil them until soft and a little blackened, slide the whole mess into the food processor, season with salt, a little olive oil and vinegar and either cumin seeds or cilantro (you don’t need both), pulse until chopped up and combined.

I find vegan gravy so good for the amount of work too. Make a dark roux of oil and flour, mix soy sauce into water until it looks like diet coke for the broth, add it slowly into the hot roux while whisking, season with pepper, salt if needed, rosemary is good as are mushrooms, miso, but it’s plenty good on its own.

Well I tried it - my thinking was that the Cynar has a vegetal flavor, and I know it works well with mezcal.

I did like it better.

Tajin rim sounds great too.

I might well try this. My main problem with negroni is not the bitterness (Campari is great in fruity things - I often put some in a Paper Plane) but the super intense unalloyed sweetness, it just tastes like cough syrup to me.

Shredded a bunch of ginger into a pot, put about 1/2 liter of water, brought to a boil, turned off the heat and stirred in 250g white sugar and 250g brown sugar, let that sit until cool with the ginger in it then strained it out to make the syrup. Really as much ginger as you can stand to grate, I don’t think there can be too much.

What gorgeous foam!

Seaweed is the way to go. As others have noted, miso soup with kombucha is good, seaweed salad, maybe tofu wrapped in seaweed, nori snacks (I like the wasabi ones).

Think of the tentacles shape, too. Maybe make a dense shallow cake and cut it into tentacles shape before frosting it? I don’t think it all has to taste of the sea to be thematic.

Hi! I am a less structured person living with a much more organized/routine husband.

Habit > Routine as far as exercise. Or anything but it works best for exercise because if you can force yourself to do it for the 6 weeks it takes to become a habit, you feel so much better it is self sustaining. I have always, always found everything works better when I set aside time for exercise, or effortful physical work. And really, if you just wander during your unstructured time, out in the world, move your body not sit still, that will do a lot.

Generally I just wing it, have been cooking so long I can develop my own recipes for most things. But sometimes I do have to look for tips, and will read recipes for inspiration.

Food:

Bon Appetit

Recipe Tin Eats

Boy who Bakes

Perfect Loaf

Food and Wine

NYT Cooking

Cocktails:

Punch

Imbibe

Oh, and speaking of Charley we were lucky enough to have the Charley Crockett/Leon Bridges show come through, holy crap, I’d seen both of them live before but getting TWO great performers in one night, wow. And that intersection between county and R&B is such pleasant music.

I saw Joshua Ray Walker open for Marcus King and didn’t even like his show but looked him up and found his recorded work to be incredible, THEN he found out he had cancer and that was part of why the live show was weak, nothing to do with his music, and says he is recovering now, but I felt so uncharitable thinking the show sucked when he was dealing with something so awful.

But anyway - I do use streaming but like you find bands other ways, opening acts, radio, sometimes Brooklyn Vegan, that site posts about bands I’ve never heard of, I listen and find stuff I like (and a lot I don’t).

Yes but my commute is 10-15 minutes by bicycle, and my kids are all adults now.

I prioritize making time for sleep, exercise and sex in my day, and let everything else work around those. So some of my exercise comes from commuting but I do also do yoga about 4 hours a week and try to lift weights at least once.

When my kids were young, NO it is impossible to do alone. Even if you do have carpool help and aftercare and all, it’s hard. There were years I had to get up at 5 and run to get exercise and other years it was the gym at 22:00 after a night class. But I have always found that it works better if you make your priorities (exercise needs to be one of those) and make a commitment to do those.

I usually have had jobs that were more than the 40 hours, and am NOT a work hard play hard person at all. But if you have one of those 8 hour a day jobs and sleep for 7.5 hours and take half an hour on each end of that to get ready and (critically important) don’t have some hours long commute, there’s plenty of time in the day. I remember when I first got a job that ended at 1700 and having time to cook, feed everyone and go to yoga, or hustle to the 1730 Jazzercise class after work and then still have time to make supper after, instead of feeling so terribly rushed all the time.

Now my day is: wake up around 7, leave for work around 9 after a nice leisurely morning. Work 9:30 to 6:30 (18:30) ride home and get ready for yoga, go exercise and come home and make supper by 9 (21:00), eat and have a Pokemon go walk or read or listen to music, (I cook, my husband takes care of the dishes after) then get ready for bed and try to sleep 23-7, sometimes this is midnight to 7 but I do need a solid 7 hours, too much sleep is migraine trigger unfortunately but I sleep well and soundly for that 7 and wake up pretty naturally. It feels like a balanced life.

ETA: I forgot to add, we do the grocery shopping Friday evenings, at a complex that has restaurants and bars and a Ben & Jerry’s, go out for one drink or a restaurant meal then get groceries then go home, so we can treat it like a night out not just an errand. And most weekends are free of work, though we do each have busy seasons with 7 day weeks for a few weeks - during his busy season I do more of the cleaning and we get more takeout meals, during mine we get more takeout or he or the kids will cook. And we outsource the cleaning and have some essentials on auto-ship. I know that work and exercise aren’t the only things you have to do in a week! But we don’t do them on weekdays usually.

We have division of labor, particularly for big parties like Thanksgiving. I don’t want help with cooking but don’t want to have to clean up. That’s our general division of labor because I legitimately enjoy cooking, and people legitimately love eating what I cook; and husband says he would much rather clean up. His dad is a better cook than his mom, I don’t think it’s a sexist thing. So sure I have to do more cooking (started yesterday) but he does more too. The kids just do overflow mostly and while all of them are competent in some way in a kitchen, the distribution of good cooks is not a gender split among them.

The technology split is more gendered, all of the boys (including the one who started out a girl) are gamers and can build a computer, 3/4 of the girls are gamers and technically competent but only one is willing to fuck around with the hardware. One, my oldest, is not at all comfortable with technology, does not want to know how anything works. But she worked construction/home renovation and is good with saw and drill.

Yes, so much better than it should be. It’s fantastic for mixing (and so delicious on vanilla ice cream too) but husband likes it on a big ice cube, by itself.

Yes, exactly. It is still fruity from the lime, and Sambuca is very sweet (overwhelmingly so IMO) the full ounce of lime is fine to offset what ends up being a full ounce of sweetener.

The second part of that turned out to be more true for me. Older guys have more stamina (have trouble getting off) and I found out this is not a ‘two kinds of women’ thing. I can and do get off from the more indirect stimulation, it just never happened with my ex because he was quick (he did always take care of me first, not complaining) but now I am older this changed.

Ay yi yes I need a cup of coffee.

You have 10 daughters and one son?

OMG I had an enormous cat with very similar look who did exactly that to drink. His sister, though, knew that you had to get the water out of the glass to drink it, she would just tip it over with her paw, and drink from the resulting puddle.