Friday Hodgepodge

Four Wins

Whenever possible, I list three wins at the end of each day. Here are a few from a recent review of my diary.

1. Commenters on this week's short post on Treasure Island left an interesting discussion of fiction for children (or commonly thought to be for children) that can be enjoyed by adults.

Head on over there for several recommendations fitting that description, as well as related discussion.

2. Via Episode 84 of Alex Epstein's Human Flourishing Project, I learned about Cal Newport's excellent Deep Questions podcast series, which offers actionable advice on living an intellectual life in today's distracted world.

An unexpected highlight, as one can see from the episode list/RSS feed, is that the program notes for many episodes list start times for specific topics. This makes it very easy to review a topic, or to locate any advice you might be interested in when you don't have the time to listen to an entire episode.

In fact, now that I think of it, it's a great way for the newcomer to see what's on offer ahead of time. I may use it to put together a personalized clinic since I am new to the series and have noticed several things I want his take on.

This is the next best thing to there being a repository of transcripts, which remain hard and time-consuming to do.

I was looking for a photo of chicken curry, but found this image too pretty to pass up. (Image by Jed Owen, via Unsplash, license.)

3. I've started making this quick and easy Thai chicken curry recipe my own. I am modifying it with two goals in mind: (1) toning down the spice enough for my wife, while still having enough of a kick to be interesting, and (2) using canned, pre-cooked chunk chicken so this can be a always-on-hand/emergency meal.

I thought that the first iteration was okay, but my wife didn't like it.

First, reserving jalapenos fried separately for myself left it too bland for her, so she's letting me try adding them next time, in hopes that individual pieces are tolerable. Otherwise, I'll use some other widely-available, but less-hot pepper.

Second, the pre-cooked chicken did not have the right flavor profile: Barring a very creative way to quickly make that more flavorful, I'll probably just have to use frozen tenderloins per the original recipe.

It has potential, so if I can get it up to my wife's standards, you'll see it here.

4. Thanks to my mother mailing some bulbs to me, I now have a pot of hurricane lilies on my back porch. I haven't had any of those since I left Houston over a decade ago. Here are photos I took of those plants in bloom the year after we had to evacuated for Hurricane Rita.

-- CAV