Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

“Why isn’t this Snickers bar only a nickle?”

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Thanks for reminding me that Van Jones needs to be slapped.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

I really should read my own blog.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

It’s a doggy dog world.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Food / Late Night Open Thread

Late Night Open Thread

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Favorite foods for the easter weekend?

For me- it’s a no brainer. Deviled eggs.

Also, we need some young blood up in these here parts. Let’s get a twenty something front pager. Honestly, we have so many resources here, it would be so nice if we could get a bunch of new readers commenters and help them find jobs and the like.

Reader Interactions

109Comments

  1. 1.

    Ishiyama

    Hot cross buns are a family tradition. This year I made them with homemade sourdough starter. And gave half of them away.

  2. 2.

    eclare

    Eggs Benedict.  Alas the restaurant my relatives and I are going to tomorrow has a “fancy” version with salmon instead of Canadian bacon and foccacia instead of English muffins.

    But it will be the first time I’ve seen some relatives since 2019, so all good.  Got my second booster a little over a week ago.

  4. 4.

    eclare

    @MagdaInBlack:  I think I’m going to order the shrimp and grits.  First time I’ve been out to eat in a restaurant since May of last year.  I’m excited!

  5. 5.

    Princess

    That would be nice but I don’t think 20 year olds read blogs. We’d need a BJ Reddit page or a podcast.

  7. 7.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Just dropping by to say I’m in Amsterdam this Easter morning. We’re taking a canal boat tour today, but the city is extremely busy with holiday travelers. We arrived yesterday morning around 6am and the rest of the day is an exhausted blur. Viking is spit testing us daily for covid. It’s hard to summon up the require amount of spit

  11. 11.

    JoyceH

    I had an excursion today! (Well,  yesterday by now.) Went to Red Lobster to meet with a friend who was in the area canvassing for Spanberger. We figured we’d have one indoor dining experience while our boosters were fresh and before the next wave picked up steam. Ultimate Feast, om nom – I brought home the baked potato and made a late meal of it.

  14. 14.

    JoyceH

    @eclare: Actually, I had two. Still, I was Good – I didn’t come home with a purse FULL of Red Lobster cheesy biscuits, like I always used to do!

  15. 15.

    Asparagus Aspersions

    I absolutely loved deviled eggs, but the ones I make never seem to be as good as the ones other people make. No matter how I tweak them, they never seem to rise above “fine”.

  16. 16.

    Ken

    There are a lot of creators on tiktok who are making interesting content who, I am sure, would love to write a column. Is balloon-juice ready for Gen Z wokeness? @Princess:

  17. 17.

    opiejeanne

    @Asparagus Aspersions: Our youngest is bringing the deviled eggs tomorrow. She made it her Thing when she was an older teen and she does them very nicely, although recently she’s been putting some really hot spices into them recently and I can’t handle them.

  19. 19.

    NotMax

    I don’t do Easter. Except it’s the only time of the year to buy bags of black jelly beans.
    Have never tasted a deviled egg. Part of the mysterious menu of WASP food.
    ;)

  20. 20.

    Geminid

    @JoyceH: Abigail Spanberger’s is not wasting any time organizing the new Virginia 7th CD. The Congresswoman has been getting around to meet her upcoming constituents. And in my corner of the new district, Team Spanberger and U. Va. Democrats plan to canvass Greene County next Sunday, April, 24. Among other things, they’ll be telling voters about the new broadband coverage that is coming to Greene thanks to the Infrastructure bill passed last November.

  21. 21.

    eclare

    @NotMax:   I never have either.  I know I don’t like hard boiled eggs, sometimes the white part shows up in tuna salad, so I’ve never bothered.

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    Can still remember (hazily) being twenty-something. Prefer my front pagers dry behind the ears, thank you.

  24. 24.

    Starfish

    Jesus rose from the dead because his neighbors in their late teens to early twenties would not stop with their garbage muscle car noises at 1 a.m. I will be so happy when these kids graduate, and their parents sell that stupid house.

  29. 29.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Palm Sunday in Greece (Orthodox calendar) and I’m neck-deep in work, because poor planning on someone else’s part became an emergency on my part. I’m not one for hard-boiled eggs, but the traditional Easter lamb has been nice in the past. Although Orthodox Easter’s more often been an excuse for me to visit loved ones back in the States, thanks to the bank holidays bracketing Easter Sunday.

    There’s a tradition here of fireworks. Loud ones. I went to the islands one Easter for the traditional islanders’ celebration, and I’m not sure but what some of the fireworks they set off at midnight on Easter Sunday were blasting charges pilfered from past roadworks. I’m talking window-rattling bangs, bordering on window-shattering.

    There are also some islands where they’ve got monasteries on two neighboring mountain tops, and the tradition involves each monastery shooting firework rockets at the other one. I don’t know if anyone’s been killed in the process.

    I’m just as happy to spend Orthodox Easter in a jurisdiction that doesn’t observe the Orthodox calendar.

  30. 30.

    BellyCat

    To complain about the media’s short attention span in a short attention span format hampers those who have short attention spans (or limited availability) from also contributing to the complaining.

    Cole, pick an asynchronous commenting mechanism that is tolerable for sustained discussion (longer than four hours in length before it’s dead), one that The Yout and people with jobs that are not online all day can meaningfully contribute to, and your wish will be granted. Not to replace B-J, but as a supplement or alternative.

    Dunno what’s best, but the suggestion of Reddit is possible, but it’s nothing more than a threaded forum — which you seem dead-set against, if memory serves.

  31. 31.

    NotMax

    @BellyCat

    Comments tapering off to nil not necessarily an indication that relative latecomers aren’t scanning them and/or the original post.

  33. 33.

    Baud

    Let’s get a twenty something front pager.

    Good luck. I heard they don’t want to work.

  36. 36.

    satby

    I communicate with fairly enlightened twenty and thirty somethings almost daily (and a greater majority who aren’t), and though I applaud the “fresh ideas” concept, the reality of how limited their worldview can be would drive all of us nuts. Plus that’s not an age where many have the leisure for writing, that’s why they do snapchat and tiktok. But if you could get David Hogg or Brian Taylor Cohen type, that would be good and challenging for both age groups. Or, how about any of these kids?

  38. 38.

    Lapassionara

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I enjoyed Amsterdam, but was only there for a few days, so I missed some key sites. I did see the Anne Frank house, which I highly recommend. Chilling, but definitely worth seeing. Enjoy your trip.

  39. 39.

    Baud

    @satby:

    Maybe the young FP doesn’t have to write about politics per se.  Could be someone who like to write about their life or their observations about society, rather than talk about Dems and Repubs or Manchin, or strategy, etc.

  42. 42.

    lowtechcyclist

    @BellyCat: ​
     

    Cole, pick an asynchronous commenting mechanism that is tolerable for sustained discussion (longer than four hours in length before it’s dead), one that The Yout and people with jobs that are not online all day can meaningfully contribute to, and your wish will be granted.

    Sounds like a message board! Have they become cool again? I thought they were even more dated than blogs!

  43. 43.

    satby

    @Baud: Could be someone who like to write about their life or their observations about society,

    I could pretty much guarantee that’s probably what many would write, because that’s their (perfectly age appropriate) focus in life.

  45. 45.

    Baud

    @satby:

    Oh sure.  But we’re talking about the 1 or 2 people that Cole would select as a front pager, not the norm.  I’m not sure what Cole’s criteria would be.

  47. 47.

    Ken

    Cole’s Easter message is completely in line with what all the churches are saying: “Where are all the young people? How can we attract them?”

  48. 48.

    sab

    @Baud: Just read your comment to spouse.  ” Thanks for betraying marital condidences online.”

    ETA : he laughed when he said that.

  49. 49.

    Raven

    @eclare: Cold, I’ve made it for Super Bowl parties (shaped like a football with boiled egg whites made into laces) but this will be sort of  an egg!

  52. 52.

    JPL

    @Raven: It sounds amazing.

    Hopefully I’m having grilled rack of lamb, if the rain arrives early though, it will be roasted rack of lamb.

  53. 53.

    satby

    @Baud: I’ve been agitating for a Latinx FP for a while, ex. the list I linked to.

    A life proceeds through stages (hopefully of growth) and the stage of early adulthood is still one of finding your place and voice while simultaneously trying to support yourself. As a parent, one of my duties included not saying “well, duh” when a youngling worked out some breakthrough thought that more experience gave them. I enjoy that age group too; but our too “lazy to Google” (in his own words)  friend Goku is kind of par.

  54. 54.

    eclare

    @JPL:   I am going out to eat in a restaurant for the first time since May of last year.  Some relatives I haven’t seen since 2019 will be there!

  55. 55.

    lowtechcyclist

    My family doesn’t really have a standard Easter meal. I will be fixing blueberry-banana pancakes later this morning, though, and they will be accompanied by bacon.

  56. 56.

    wetzel

    @Raven: That sounds like a lot of fun. Deboning a turkey is next level. You want a good workspace and good knives, like the best Henkel set. I don’t love anybody enough to debone a turkey!!!

    Here is a big discovery from this past year. For almost any baking or broiling job, the Ninja Foodi 10 in 1 Smart XL Air Fry Oven is miles past any but a chef’s oven.

    A wonderful piece of cooking technology

    We bought it after our toaster oven bit the dust. It was the only thing at BestBuy big enough, as big as our old Westinghouse toaster. Now we hardly ever use the oven. I have never had this kind of control.

  57. 57.

    Raven

    @eclare: The bigger the bird the easier it it. When I do Prudhomme’s boned stuffed squabs with spiced fig gravy it’s real tricky.

  58. 58.

    satby

    Happy Easter to those who celebrate. I came home Friday night to a chilly house, my thermostat said “low battery” but I was too tired to go back out to a store. Yesterday after working I stopped and bought batteries and put them in the thermostat, which promptly went dead. Put another set in, still nothing. Flipped the breaker for the furnace, nope. Overnight it went down to 26°, so it’s a cosy 56 ish in here now.  Why does important stuff always wait until a holiday to break?

    Edit: I have a space heater and an electric fireplace upstairs, so not a crisis.

  59. 59.

    Raven

    @wetzel: I use Sabatier carbon steel knives and a #2 Chinese carbon steel cleaver. The trickiest part is removing the skin in one piece. Again, easier with a big bird because the skin is thicker.

     

    ps  did you ever see my comments about living in Athens for 35 years?

  62. 62.

    PST

    Thinking back to my midwestern small-town 1950s boyhood, deviled eggs were highlights of church potluck dinners but not necessarily an Easter specialty. Among the Jell-O molds and uninspired fried chicken variants deviled eggs at least had a touch of spiciness. Boy, was our food bland. Any ethnic variety whatsoever would have kicked things up a notch in that little wide spot in the road.

  65. 65.

    JPL

    @eclare:  Last summer  I dined indoors, but since then outdoor dining for me.

    You’ll have lots to catch up on.   Enjoy!

  66. 66.

    wetzel

    @Raven:

    I did! Athens is such a great town. I get nostalgic for the old days, but it’s still really cool.

    How many times a week are you making the drive?

    I think I85 to exit 139 (state route 129) is the best drive. I can’t stand 78. It’s okay mid-day, but if it’s late afternoon, every single light catches you.

  67. 67.

    Raven

    @JPL: We’re having 10 folks over but we’ll eat on the sunporch and spread all over the house with the doors and winders open!

  68. 68.

    Raven

    @wetzel: Oh, I was at Tech in the late 90’s. I was at, what was then the Center for Rehab Technology, for a couple of years and got downsized. I ended up working for the BOR for 20 years here in the Classic City. The last 15 I worked from home building online courses so I rarely left Normaltown!

  69. 69.

    wetzel

    @Raven: It’s so much more than an air fryer. It roasts perfectly, even a small turkey. I think a Ninja 10-in-1 plus a cooktop is superior to a range except for entertaining, but then you have it for overflow then. Ninja has some good engineers. It does take up counter space. If you already have an excellent range, it doesn’t add much capability, but if you have a regular <$1000 range, it will remove some of the limitations in achieving a good result because the convection is on point.

  71. 71.

    JMG

    Roast boneless leg of lamb, new potatoes and asparagus for Easter dinner today. What can I say? My favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, too. More seriously, how can anyone dislike lamb? I know asparagus can be controversial, but it’s my favorite green vegetable.

  77. 77.

    Argiope

    @Raven: Jesus on a party tray, that looks complicated.  I would absolutely love to see a photo.  Maybe someday I’ll try something this brave and crazy.

  78. 78.

    Geminid

    @satby: I don’t know much about twenty -somethings. I bet there are some capable, aware thirty-somethings out there who would be up to the front pager task and might be willing. All it takes is one if they’re motivated.

    A person familiar with the clean energy transition and the broader issues related to global warming would be especially valuable. There is a lot going here, and a whole lot at stake. When the topic comes up on threads  people seem to want to talk about it.

    Tamara and others post about these matters some but the forum could use more. This might bring in more participation because there is a lot of interest this area, and it is not as contentious and fraught as the political arena.

    I hope that any young prospect reading the blog can see a basic respect and appreciation by the rest of us for the front pagers we have already. I don’t always express it myself, but I hold them all in high regard.

  80. 80.

    geg6

    We aren’t doing a family thing today, thankfully.  I got my second booster yesterday and am feeling a little tired and sore today.  That said, I’m going old school with ham, mashed sweet potatoes, haricots vert and baked pineapple.

    As a child, we always had deviled eggs at Easter because we all (6 kids!) hated hard boiled eggs but loved to dye them.  So my mom made deviled eggs, which all but one of us loved, in order to get rid of all the hard boiled eggs.

  83. 83.

    Geminid

    @Sandia Blanca: It would be great to have some posts by someone experienced at political organizing. I tried to volunteer a New Mexico Jackal a few weeks ago, but they made like the Roadrunner.

  84. 84.

    Starfish

    @BellyCat: Cole keeps all the comments forever. Having many comments means more storage space and needing to moderate better.

    @Geminid: I would like to see your vision of the future. It is interesting that Lula da Silva is making saving the rain forest part of the election in Brazil. Extinction Rebellion was out protesting the candidates in France’s general election in Paris yesterday.

  85. 85.

    Ohio Mom

    Being Jewish and being married to someone who can go a bit overboard in his religious observance, I obviously don’t have a favorite Easter food. I also don’t have a favorite Passover food.

    They are either just average foods that just happen to meet the requirements — such as fruit salads, scrambled eggs, roast chicken, etc. — or they are poor substitutes for real baked goods, looking at you, matzoh meal “bagels” which are essentially greasy, tasteless popovers. Even my favorite matzoh granola is no match for the original oat version.

    The idea of Passover has many layers; its roots not surprisingly are pagan farming and shepherding spring festivals, and who doesn’t like to celebrate a change in the weather?

    The entire Exodus story though can be problematic. Probably all made up, inspiring (freedom!) and ugly (indiscriminate killing) at the same time. So I suppose messy, just like life. I’m just done with it, really. The novelty has worn off for me after 67 times.

  86. 86.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s hard to summon up the require amount of spit

    Tear a pocket-size photo of TFG out of a newspaper or magazine & carry it with you – you’ll find spit where you didn’t know it lurked!

    (Soviet joke, early 1980s: USSR issued a new postage stamp featuring a mug shot of Brezhnev. Soon complaints came pouring in that the stamps weren’t sticking to the envelopes. A commission of scientists assigned to solve the problem reported that the stamps themselves worked perfectly – except the citizens were spitting on the wrong side. ;^D)

    (ETA: If you have a couple of hours free & can stomach another museum after the Rijksmuseum, the R. Vincent van Gogh and the Stedelijk, take a 20-minute tram ride to Haarlem [nice little town] and visit the Franz Hals Museum [presuming it’s still there – been a lonnnnng time]. Waaay underrated artist.)

  88. 88.

    Omnes Omnibus

    Why do you want to subject a 20-something to thousand of comments about how they will understand when they are older?

  90. 90.

    Betsy

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Be sure and ride a bike! It’s easy to rent them and then the city is yours!!

    Also, the Rembrandt’s Huis museum is just great.  It’s Rembrandt’s own house and studio, set up as if he lived there, painting and entertaining customers and other artists.

  91. 91.

    Ohio Mom

    @NotMax: Yeah, matzo brei is okay but if I am honest with myself, for me the appeal is nostalgia. I’d rather have challah or brioche French toast.

    And don’t get me started on macaroons. That is no cookie.

  92. 92.

    susanna

    @Raven: This recipe sounds delicious!  Let us know (might already have) how you liked it.  And thanks for recipe added.

  93. 93.

    wetzel

    @Raven: Isbell’s cover of Driver 8 is the best thing happening in music right now. We find each other, the lucky ones who got to see REM happen from the start. I used to be their soldier child. Lots of people love the later REM, Monster and all that, but for me it will always be Chronic Town, Murmur, Reckoning, Fables and then Life’s Rich Pageant.

    Stipe started combing his lyrics out more accessibly with Life’s Rich Pageant. It’s a young taste. I don’t know if I’d go for it now, but there was something amazing with his symbolisms in the early albums. ‘There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads react R E A C T’ The experience of making those albums must have been incredible for those fellows. I don’t think kids today really grok how much music used to matter up until the early nineties, maybe. It was saving the world. Atlanta music was great in the 80’s too with 688 and Metroplex.

  94. 94.

    wetzel

    I have sauce Bernaise syndrome for deviled eggs from family reunion. It’s classically conditioned. I can enjoy them, but the nausea response will be there like part of the bouquet.

    Deviled eggs at the family reunion are otherwise known as South Georgia roulette! There is an approximate 1 in 6 chance they’ve been sitting in the car through church!!!

  95. 95.

    NotMax

    @Ohio Mom

    Heh. I’d have a cabinet stuffed with macaroons (Streit’s or Manishewitz only, please) except they’re over $10 a canister here, when one can find them at all. Too dear for my wallet.

  96. 96.

    Geminid

    @Starfish: I hope Mr. Lula de Silva succeeds. Brazil really needs to change course on evironmental and other issues.

    I have reservations about Extinction Rebellion and similar groups. Not so much about their direct action tactics as their strategy of “Degrowth.” I’m not sure it is actually neccessary, and it might not be good for people living in the “Global South.”

    Also, I think that a degrowth strategy is not politically viable, and if we want a sustainable planet we have to have a sustainalble political strategy to get us there.

  97. 97.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @wetzel: I don’t think kids today really grok how much music used to matter up until the early nineties, maybe.

    What makes you think that kids today don’t think that music matters?  Your music might not matter to them and they may experience their music differently, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.  It just means that you aren’t a kid anymore.

  98. 98.

    wetzel

    @Omnes Omnibus: Sure, but I’m not flying blind. I only see how it is for my children growing and their friends in middle school, high school and college. I know what Little Five Points used to be like, musically, and what it’s like now. What Athens used to be like, and what it’s like now. How a club like the Masquerade is different. The Vortex. The attention is much more towards social media and video games than music. Streaming has changed things. You don’t have Bruce Hampton impetus, the Dionysian urgency anywhere that I can see, but maybe I’m just old, cold and at the end of my rope, like you say. What do I know?

  99. 99.

    Starfish

    @Geminid: Can you tell me about the degrowth strategy? That does not seem to be well-aligned with young people existing.

    I think that the Friday climate strikes to protest banks funding oil and gas have probably been worthwhile.

  100. 100.

    BellyCat

    @NotMax: True. I am frequently in that exact situation. Also true is the inability to meaningfully contribute to the dialogue if that is the case.

  101. 101.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @wetzel: Athens isn’t going to be what it was in the late ’70s and early ’80s.  Seattle isn’t going to be the place it was in the late ’80s and early ’90s.  The zeitgeist moves on.

  102. 102.

    wetzel

    @Omnes Omnibus: Sure. It does, but there is not a conservation principle governing artistic experience. Humanity could even go on day to day in many ways appearing the same without having artistic, philosophical or religious experience. I think there is a scientific, totalitarian unconscious which is getting in on all three.

    People have to cultivate culture. They have to want to play philosophy, religion or music for those things to exist fully, I think.

    The most exciting thing today to my mind is Pro Tools. If a person can at least play rhythm electric (Gretsch Streamliner or Telecaster Knock-off) and you know how a song is constructed you can produce full studio.

    You don’t have to have a fine voice. It’s better if you don’t have a good voice. That way you won’t be tempted to be a singer-songwriter, which is a mistake for almost everybody, even for somebody as great as Isbell. But you can make complete raw materials to give a Fivrr singer for the demo. You can full out produce radio music yourself these days if you know how to build a song.

  103. 103.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @wetzel: Well, I don’t have kids, but I have watched my nephew get as geeky about his rap music as an ’80s college radio DJ, I’ve seen my niece sing along to the 10 minute version of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” because it spoke to her first heartbreak, and I and I have seen the faces of the kids in the front rows of a Billie Eilish concert.  I am less concerned than you are.

  104. 104.

    wetzel

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’ll follow you on the sunny side. I’m agnostic about progress or its opposite. I’m happy to be convinced.

    For my part, I do not feel that society has provided nearly the soul nourishment for my children as it did for me when I was growing up just in the sheer volume of in person social interactions my peers and I experienced outside of adult planning or supervision and in the voluntary casual mentoring from older teens and adults.

    Childhood in college prep America lacks freedom these days, temporally, socially and spatially, compared to the past. There are complicated sociological determinants from mom’s working, economic concerns pressing more, fear of abduction, academics being incredibly more time consuming for kids nowadays, social media, much more aggressive policing, etc. Kid culture in the way it used to be spontaneous and self-assembling has largely been eradicated. We’re all on the grid and in the henhouse full time.

    It’s hard for them to be creative together in person when there is no architectural space set aside for that in public or private. Nobody facilitates the privacy of children or adolescents together in their world. It used to exist by default.

  105. 105.

    Geminid

    @Starfish: I could describe a degrowth strategy, but not as well as others. I think if you looked it up you would see it discussed and debated.

    Broadly, it is deindustrilazation. Proponents believe that we can never save the planet through the clean energy transition; everyone just has to make do with less resources. There is certainly a lot of excess consumption in the industrialized countries Extinction Rebellion operates in, and reductions may a good piece of the solution. And it’s obvious that the shift to renewable energy will take a lot of mining of silicon, rare earths, etc. to execute, and there are environmental tradeoffs there.

    But economic growth brought a lot of people out of poverty the last few decades, hundreds of millions in China alone. I am not sure the “left” side of the environmental movement gets that.

    Anyway, it’s a good model to debate.

  106. 106.

    wetzel

    @Geminid: Freedom is one of the correlative axioms which are self-evident within our sense of ourselves as having dignity. The freedom to develop the world around you by bringing it to hand upon itself. We create economic value. The freedom to call others to help, the power to cajole them. We are all under its yoke now, and even the Pharoah is not free, because we are now within a system of exploitation, of the earth and the people on it, driven by a form of scientific totalitarianism, consumer capitalism. Here we are! Cogs in the wheel. Everything reflects to a higher order of decision making, and so we are hoping for Elon Musk to prevail over Prince Salman in the battle for Twitter like Godzilla over Ghidorah. We can’t solve anything without winning ten elections in a row.

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