The price of eggs in particular I haven’t noticed. I have been vegan for ten years, so I am over here trying to give people tips on how and where to replace eggs with other, cheaper stuff. I do anlot of baking and cooking, so I have tried all the swaps the internet recommended and have a pretty good idea which ones work.

However, the price of food as a whole is going up as well, and I don’t expect it to stop anytime soon. I am hoping to set up a ‘victory garden’ to try to help. If anyone else is looking into this, I recommend looking for an official victory garden guide that would have been issued for your particular area. I found one that was written by an agricultural professor at the University of Ithaca in NY, for example, and it goes over what crops and food preservation methods will work in my area. It will give you important information about temp tolerances, which is about to be more important than ever.

I was lucky enough to hear him play this live in Hunter Mountain, NY a few years back. I saw him, Tom Petty (RIP) and Steve Miller Band, all in one weekend, and (imo), Frampton put on the best show. It was a daytime show, it was raining, and he kept playing.

When he got to Black Hole Sun, he opened with a very heartfelt message about looking after each other and ourselves and getting help when we need it. And then, as he started to play and led everyone in singing the lyrics, the clouds split for one shining moment, and we had rain and sunlight pouring down on the whole area surrounding the stage.

One of the most memorable concert moments I have ever experienced. Thank you for sharing this and reminding me of that amazing moment.

As someone who has suffered from night terrors and other disturbingly vivid dreams, I would recommend starting to do “wake checks”.

Set an alarm on your phone to go off every few hours at random times during the day. When the alarm goes off, do something that produces a reliable result, like turning a light on/off, turning on a faucet, checking the time on a clock, or pinching yourself. Make your checks as varied as possible, and do them in a different order from day to day, because you don’t want the results to become part of a pattern.

Once you are in the habit of doing that, start doing those checks any time something ‘out of the norm’ happens. What ‘out of the norm’ means is up to you, but essentially any time you think that something is weird or out of place, do a check. What you are doing is training yourself to check whether you are in reality or not.

Once you start doing that, you will probably continue that habit when you end up in a dream. However, these checks will not produce reliable results when you do them in a dream. Turning on the faucet won’t make it give water, the time will change drastically, lights won’t turn on when you flip the switch, etc. These are now your cues to see if you are awake or not. If one of these things ever DOES start to give reliable results in a dream, stop using it immediately and substitute a different one.

Once you have a way of determining if you are awake or not, you have a way to wake up. Most people wake up after realizing they are in a dream, and even if you don’t, realizing you are dreaming should result in a massive shift in what is happening in the dream.

One warning though: if you have night terrors where you end up paralyzed, you will want to have a contingency plan. My night terrors usually started in a situation where I was unable to move, and that is the main reason I struggled with them for over a decade. The only thing that helped there was meditation where I would focus on “feeling” my fingers and toes and how they moved, and then getting myself in the habit of using that meditation as an anxiety response. Doing that in a dream will usually end up waking me up because it forces my brain to focus and eventually move my body irl.

I am short with a somewhat femme figure, sparse but obvious facial hair, a flat chest, and a voice that sounds somewhere between a very gay man, a 13 year old boy, and an older woman. I am very visibly crossing many lines that people look for when trying to figure out how to address someone. Meaning, in a time when attacks on trans people and our rights are very quickly ramping up, I am in more danger of harassment and assault than I have been in the last few years.

As far as who is looking out for me: I am, that is part of my goal, but I also have a husband and a few friends who I can ask for help. However, I am in a slightly better position in life than most trans people in this country, since I live in a blue state that is (probably) unlikely to strip me of my rights. Hence my focus on helping others. There will probably be a lot of people coming here for medical treatment, and I want to make sure I help in any way I can.

As a visibly trans person: survive, and help as many other people survive as I can.

Having two dinners this year. My mother in law came over on Christmas Day, we had a Field Roast, garlic smashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, brandied cranberry sauce, and boozy nog, with plenty of cookies for dessert. It was a nice time, though a bit bittersweet as this is the first Christmas since my father in law passed.

This Sunday we are having friends over for another dinner, and I am making veggie pot pie, fondant potatoes, green beans in garlic butter, the rest of the cranberries, and ricotta cheesecake for dessert. It won’t be a huge crowd, just doing dinner and some board games, so looking forward to that.

Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%25s

Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

It drove me crazy too. It was actual macaroni when I was a kid, but then my mom decided bowties were fancier and started using those instead.

Yes! I make my own salad with fresh dill, onion and garlic powder, homemade mayo or olive oil, a bit of fresh basil, and baby spinach leaves to add some crunch. I just don’t call it pasta salad or macaroni salad because the name is forever associated with blandness to me lol.

My most hated was macaroni salad. Bowtie noodles with Miracle Whip, peas, shredded carrot, dill, and salt. Occasionally other items would make an appearance, but the main recipe was the most common.

It was so bland and mushy, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that it was made every few weeks during the summer, and in a quantity that meant I was eating it for lunch and dinner for almost a whole week every time it was made.

Either pumpkin pie or apple pie are my favorites!

Thanksgiving is for pies in my family, any other desserts wait until Christmas.

When recipes call for you to cook an item in a pan without first adding oil, they say to toast it to indicate that you are applying dry heat to it. For example, most Indian recipes call for toasting whole spices in a dry pan before grinding. That is also why you can toast marshmallows over an open flame.

It just irritates my mouth. May be oral allergy or just a reaction to the enzymes in the pineapple. It isn’t as bad as my reaction to wine and vinegar though, so I have to see more specialists to figure that out lol.

Not really? I actually get confused if people use mixed up idioms or other weird turns of phrase. It is really only this food item in particular.

I also like my ice cream to be soup lol! Pineapple on pizza is okay, but I can only have small amounts of pineapple. The rest are odd, but at least you know what you like!

No, we grew up in the same region of the same state and haven’t moved from there. Most of our friends are native to the region as well. I have no idea why I call it something different, it is the term I have used all my life. Even my sister calls it a ‘grilled cheese’!

According to my husband and all my friends, the weirdest thing about me is my name for a sandwich.

Apparently, everyone else calls it a ‘grilled cheese’. I have always called it by it’s proper name, a ‘toasted cheese’.

If you make it in a panini press, then it is a grilled cheese. But if you make a sandwich by buttering each side and toasting it in a pan on the stove until the cheese melts, then it is a toasted cheese. But every time I say ‘toasted cheese’, people look at me as though I have grown another head.

Yes, I even passed my driver’s test in a manual while needing to do a 3 point turn on a hill. I am almost 30, born and raised in the suburbs of New York.

I haven’t driven manual in years, ever since that car fell victim to black ice and a guard rail, but I have done recent test drives of manuals without stalling, so I guess it is something you never forget once you know how.

Cooking in general, and baking in particular. It is actual fun for me, and is actually stress relief as well, because it allows me creative freedom in a medium that I apparently have natural talent in. I make my own bread every week for sandwiches, bake snacks for my weekly board game meetup, volunteer to make birthday cakes for friends and family, and give out giant boxes of cookies every Christmas. I am always inventing and researching new recipes, converting recipes to accommodate various dietary needs, and trying to find ways to use ingredients I have lying around in a way that will ensure I don’t have food going to waste. There is nothing better to me than when I figure out what each recipe needs at each step and why, and watching it all come together.

I grew up learning to bake from my grandmother, and I inherited her passion and apparently her natural talent for it. I have a lot of recipes memorized, can eyeball teaspoon and tablespoon measures of ingredients with good accuracy, and can somehow get anywhere from 5-10% more out of any given recipe. If a cookie recipe makes 5 dozen I get 6 or 7, even if I am not skimping on size. If I make bread, it rises quicker and larger, even if it is cold. Making cake, I always have extra batter for a couple of cupcakes. It works out though, because I can taste test everything and throw any extra cookies in the freezer so that way I am better prepared for Christmas.

It is always amazing to see someone’s face light up when they get baked goods they love, especially if their diets mean they don’t often get to enjoy them. For example, several of my friends have Celiac, and seeing how happy they are to get things like butter cookies, crinkly-top brownies, or gingerbread is just amazing. It is an easy way to make people feel included and happy, and I get to have fun in the kitchen while doing it.