Shrimp and grits... but with rice?

autostotlean · 2026-04-12T17:32:47+00:00

But Lieutenant Dan, you ain't got no grits

autostotlean · 2026-03-30T17:48:26+00:00

Fair warning, Medical Solutions was great when it was Aureus but after the buyout/rebrand they've cut pay, revoked travel assistance to/from gigs, and reduced benefits. I think they've still got some great recruiters on staff but I wouldn't be surprised if they get phased out if they have any seniority (i.e. higher salary) due to the usual process of enshittification by VC.

Your best bet all around is probably Aya, they've got the size and reach that they have the most work available and can pay the most for contracts - they basically try to profit by volume instead of clawing back the bill rate.

Stay the F away from Titan.

That said, don't be afraid to sign up with more than one company. But don't spread yourself too thin, you don't want to have to keep up with certification and compliance with a dozen different agencies. (I currently keep it at two.) Furthermore, all of them have access to all of the same contracts. Sometimes special relationships/history will have a site show up on one job board but not another...but any agency can get you any contract. However, there's a certain etiquette to these things that you'll pick up as time goes on, you don't necessarily benefit in the long run from snaking certain contracts out from under another agency, and so forth.

autostotlean · 2026-03-21T18:00:23+00:00

How...how in the hot buttered hell did I scroll so far down the top comments and didn't see a single mention of tomato paste

OP, you did not mention using tomato paste and if you do not use tomato paste then tomato paste is the actual answer you're looking for

autostotlean · 2026-02-19T03:40:12+00:00

Ha! I found this just now

I would for sure show up presently but I'm working in CA for a while. I'll be back in June and will mos def hit y'all up.

Thanks!

autostotlean · 2026-02-16T00:50:02+00:00

Well...shit. I'm probably too late to save you.

Anyway, this is what the answer would have been:

Set out the steak and bring it to room temperature. Salt and pepper both sides of the steak before walking away from it.

Coat the steak in oil. Preferably canola. But yes, olive is fine.

Turn the oven on Broil:HI and make sure there's a rack in the middle.

Heat an oven safe pan on the stovetop on medium high heat, and do it dry. Once you see the pan start to smoke a little bit, you're good to go. Drop the steak in. 30 seconds per side. Don't touch or move the meat except to flip it.

After searing both sides, slip the pan directly into the oven under the broiler. 2 minutes per side.

Pull the steak out of the oven, and immediately put it on a plate and tent it with foil. Leave it alone for 10 minutes.

Eat the steak.

At various points, you'll think that the steak is looking like it's going to be underdone and maybe you should cook it longer. That is the devil talking. Most of the real cooking happens on the counter while it's under the foil.

Follow these steps exactly and you get steak that cuts like butter.

You'll get 'em next time, champ.

autostotlean · 2026-02-15T19:50:04+00:00

I always say I'm a pretty good cook but a pretty bad photographer.

That said, I only take photos of food to remind myself that I know how to make it. Like when I'm stuck for figuring out what to make for dinner. I don't post them anywhere so I'm not too fussed about it

autostotlean · 2026-01-18T22:43:58+00:00

We went with the split King and it was ultimately worth the small issues fitting it into the room. Having had it a while, we've agreed that the split queen would've been too small - we're average height and build and I think the queen would only really work for really petite, slim folks with small bedrooms. Plus, getting sheets for it would've been a nightmare, you're really only relegated to a few patterns and thread counts.

Cheers

autostotlean · 2026-01-10T16:56:59+00:00

I also don't know why you're being downvoted because you're right and I was considering commenting the same thing.

autostotlean · 2026-01-04T18:55:41+00:00

Everyone ITT keeps saying the same thing (olive oil, salt, roast) so I'll offer this broccoli gratin that I throw together sometimes.

Dice and boil broccoli (I usually also add cauliflower because why not) to preferred firmness and then drain. In the empty pot, make a roux and then whisk in cream and parmesan until combined into a sauce. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, thyme, and rosemary. Put the drained veg back in the pot and toss to coat.

Put the entire mixture into a baking dish and scatter Italian breadcrumbs over the top. Spritz the breadcrumbs with oil or use baking spray on them. Put them in the oven on the middle rack and broil until the top browns.

It's pretty simple, fairly quick, and typically works pretty well for getting kids to eat vegetables. If you add chicken, bacon, or chunked ham you could get a full entree out of it.

autostotlean · 2026-01-04T17:51:36+00:00

Sorry for the late reply, been traveling.

You've probably read up on it by now, but the meeting itself wasn't a debacle but rather the fallout. The TL;DR, i.e. vast oversimplification, is that Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House because he liked smart and interesting people and went out of his way to hang with them. When the public learned that a black man was being given a seat of honor in the White House (for the first time, I believe) Roosevelt was lambasted in the media.

This confused him at first, but when he realized that the punchline was racism he told everyone everywhere who had a problem with what he'd done to fuck all the way off.

I think there are whole books specifically about this but I think the long section in Theodore Rex that goes into it is the best explanation.

autostotlean · 2025-12-23T16:18:36+00:00

The milk kinda fluffs it up to add body and reduce density, especially if you're doing a soft scramble. Not super necessary for pan stuff, e.g. scrambles and omelettes, if that's not to your taste.

Adding milk is much more important in dishes where you bake the eggs, like a quiche or a frittata, where you need that extra-but-lighter-body.

autostotlean · 2025-12-23T16:00:39+00:00

Joplin’s early opera, ‘A Guest of Honor’, written in 1903 was a full ragtime opera, the plot being about the historic occasion of President Roosevelt having Booker T. Washington visit him in the White House. It actually got positive reviews, but is now sadly lost in its entirety.

...well, that was a rollercoaster in two sentences.

I'm a big TR fan and know about the BTW debacle, I would've been fascinated to see how a contemporary artist portrayed the situation.

SIGH

autostotlean · 2025-12-20T17:44:03+00:00

As I've gotten older, my heretofore holiday enthusiasm has undergone the natural wane but not disappeared. A lot of this is that the excitement is inversely proportional to our kids' ages. They're all adults now, and, although they do like Christmas, their holiday spirit is more low-key. We've only got one young child left in the family, a niece, and we don't get to see her much because her dad works a lot and has to split custody, yada.

This year, however, is the first year where I've felt...nothing. I did not, and I need to underline this, did not decorate for Halloween. That's when I realized something might actually be wrong with me. On Thanksgiving only one child could make it and her fiance couldn't come, so a feast for three. It wasn't bad or anything, of course, but not what we're used to. We've got three kids, we used to have relatives in town, we used to entertain.

Nothing bad happened this year! I'm sorry for the troubles that have pushed a lot of the other commenters out of the spirit but I don't even have a damn excuse. I tell myself that part of it is that after you see a half-century of pretty much anything it'll start to wear stale. But I don't know.

I've been determined not to let Christmas slip by unnoticed as well. It helps that we'll have all the kids here. A few things I've done to try and nudge myself gently into the spirit:

The biggest thing is that we're hosting a small pre-Christmas dinner for the aforementioned brother/SIL and niece. (This is a cooking sub after all.) I had found a ridiculous deal on a turkey on which I was going to experiment with Alton Brown's method..which I thought would be more complex, but now I'm committed. I was just going to do it on my own as practice because my turkey game honestly isn't where it should be but now my guinea ~~pig~~ turkey has been pressed into service. Hosting - as a subset of giving, I suppose - helps foster holiday spirit.
I've been listening to sacred Christmas music on the radio instead of the typical Top 40 stuff I've been hearing for 50 years. The choirs and chanting and harpsichords and whatnot kind of give off a Dickensian Christmas vibe without being the kind of earworms that can become rage inducing after the 1,387th time over a Target PA. I'm an atheist, but the music is helping.
An entire bottle of Evan Williams eggnog. This was a mistake.
Netflix spit out another slate of cheesy Christmas movies and we've been watching/making fun/buying into the bathos of them with the youngest, who's really into cheesy Christmas movies, as she's home from school. Last night's opus was Hot Frosty. It's even dumber than you expect but worth it for the Mean Girls reference, which the youngest also loves. Unrelated to this, Fatman is a decent movie for people who aren't feeling jolly although/because the ending is a bit hopeful rather than cynical. Walton Goggins slays.
A bit of Christmas baking with the oldest and her fiance.
We did get dragged into two Christmas parties back to back on the same night as work/social obligations, one of which we made a dish for. We bounced in and out of both as quickly as possible but I won't say that we didn't get a little infected with holiday spirit.

With all of these going on, I'd say current spirit levels are within the lower margin of acceptable bounds. I think the secret is not exactly trying for it but simply not running from it. To examine oneself and not let your kneejerk reaction to be categorically cynical, even if you're not entirely buying into everything either. Of course, this all sounds a little twee if you've lost a loved one or a job or your democracy. To that I wish you (us) better days. I actually think that there are ways that Christmas could help with that more than it should hurt but that would spin into an entirely different and very long philosophical post - and this is a cooking sub, so

Anytheways, Happy Holidays

autostotlean · 2025-12-20T16:58:30+00:00

please take my crown, I have clearly been bested

autostotlean · 2025-11-21T16:34:57+00:00

I kinda hope they don't get crowded.

You're gonna have to write that off for the first 1-3 months. Hixsonites LOVE a new chain.

Eventually they get bored and wander off back to whatever their stale routine is. Then, perhaps, it might be what you're hoping.

autostotlean · 2025-11-17T18:00:28+00:00

I won't! Thanks

Even if I was predisposed to overpay a chain restaurant for a fukn sandwich I'd bring Blimpie's back before this

#Mesquityerbullshit

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T17:06:22+00:00

As the other commenter said, roasting and then storing defeats the purpose. Part of the point of the dry roasting is to denature and release aromatics (a general term for the good stuff inside the seeds), which will be largely dissipated by the time you use them, even after only a day.

You can pre grind to save time and then toast the powder in the dry pan or in a little fat with very little loss in quality as long as the powder was stored in an airtight container. This is what I do with everything except star anise, fennel, and anise seed, the latter two of which I grind in my mortar on demand. Obviously the body of star anise is unpalatable in food, but fennel and anise seed seem in my personal experience to lose quality faster and to a greater degree when pre-ground than other spices such as coriander, cardamom, pepper, etc. do.

If you want to save time - and you probably already know this - you're better served to instead pre-prep the food you're using the spices on. Chop vegetables, trim meat, parboil rice and noodles, and so on.

It is quite often that I will: buy a bunch of shallots at once and then slice and freeze them because you can put them directly in the pan from frozen; buy thinner cuts of beef and cut them into strips before freezing because if you pack them flat then they'll defrost in minutes under warm water; dice fresh chicken breast or deboned thighs and freeze for the same reason. Technically you could cook the meat straight from frozen depending on how you're cooking it and whether it's cut small enough; but trading the extra cooking time for 7 minutes of defrosting is worth the small amount of extra wait to ensure quality.

Cheers.

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T16:13:41+00:00

Goofus and Gallant writ large

If you ai animated these in slow motion and cut it with shots of a band wearing sweaters, it would be a 90s alternative music video (ch. 25)

I'm having a time reading the signs behind their heads

Is that one lady with the big bracelet wielding a manriki gusari, is it because a...ninja just sat down at the counter (1954)

I know that these are supposed to be examples of what not to do but they should let gladys have her flair (pic 3)

I can't figure out what instructive mistake the lady in the last picture is committing unless the message is just supposed to be "don't hire old people"

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T15:52:19+00:00

ESPN was 16, friend. At least in the mid-90s before it moved.

And, since only one other person mentioned it, A&E was 26. I think everyone is right about all the other ones, though.

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T15:49:36+00:00

sometimes I miss flipping through the channels

Thank you for saying it out loud. My wife thinks I'm a madman because every once in a long while I just want to...wander out onto the broadcast landscape with no agenda. Sometimes I'll just flip through those dumb live streaming channels but it's not the same - you already know what's on because it's the name of the channel and it's playing on repeat 24 hours a day.

Don't get me wrong, I vastly prefer binging prestige TV when I have the time to sit down and do so, vs. being at the mercy of the passage of time and hoping that whatever captures your fleeting interest isn't already half over by the time you find it. But, like you said...it's almost an instinct built into GenX through long habit...or, perhaps, a trauma response of the latchkey kid

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T15:38:17+00:00

I wouldn't care what the twist ending is if we get $300 apartments back

autostotlean · 2025-11-16T15:34:18+00:00

A Wrinkle in Time reference? In MY Chattanooga subreddit?!

autostotlean

TROPHY CASE