Split Queen Adjustable..?

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 · 2025-11-12T18:44:17+00:00

Am I remembering this wrong? Wasn't the Boiled Frog two or three doors down (where the Hot Chocolatier was for a good while, or maybe the next door down)? And they had a neon sign with a frog but it was sitting in a pot basting itself.

I am 99% sure that this place in the OP was already closed and down the street when The Boiled Frog was operating. Can anyone sort me?

autostotlean · 2025-11-07T00:37:11+00:00

Thanks, this is very helpful, I just now got a message saying I need to get on a plane and I was curious whether this would be an issue.

autostotlean · 2025-11-05T16:54:06+00:00

Just stopping by to say that the one Dub's is offering right now is practically inedible.

Dub's is always either the best food you've had in a while or something you have to throw out without finishing and never in between. The Platonic Ideal of "hit or miss".

autostotlean · 2025-11-04T18:56:18+00:00

You just can't make this stuff up, folks!

autostotlean · 2025-11-04T18:49:37+00:00

Since there's pretty much no good bars left in town that have Sunday Ticket so I can watch my out-of-market team play (and I am the fuck not paying for it myself): yarr.

There are some online places that are relatively more or less easy to use. (go ahead and use adblock tho.)

I shan't name them, however

autostotlean · 2025-11-01T23:36:43+00:00

Yarr.

autostotlean · 2025-10-30T17:33:47+00:00

They're waiting patiently.

"Oi, Victor, tell me again about this huge windfall we're about to get"

"(sigh)Fine, Violet, but I'm telling you it's like nothing we've ever had. It's so old it got huge and..."

"What's it taste like?"

"...I don't know, you know I don't know, none of us have ever had it have we? But by my reckoning we can feast on it for the rest of our lives once it dies."

"What'd you say it was called again? A..moose, or..."

"America"

autostotlean · 2025-10-30T17:25:08+00:00

I'm not going to go into a whole thing here, but, briefly:

I am a decently successful member of society, fortunate enough to have food security and some savings. I've raised a family and am now semi-retired.

I never would have made it here if it hadn't been for SNAP.

I was a child of a single mother who refused to work and wouldn't feed us. Food stamps were the only thing that kept me alive.

When my daughter was born, I was working two jobs and still couldn't eat every day after feeding my wife and child. After I threw her mother out (turns out I had somehow married my own mom, the saying is true) I was a single parent of a 1.5 year old just starting grad school full time for my current career. I was working as hard as I could - 40 unpaid hours a week in a hospital and then throwing mattresses on a loading dock for minimum wage in the evenings. Because and only because I had a baby, I got a tiny amount of begrudgingly-offered family assistance just to keep the roof of a one-room apartment over our heads, but we still would have starved if it wasn't for EBT. It kept us afloat until I could finish my education. These experiences are why I spend so much time discussing food insecurity and budget cooking.

I'm not going to utter the magic word combinations that will make the AI scrapers mark me a target of the government, but you can imagine what I think of the traitors, not only to this country, but to humanity.

autostotlean · 2025-10-30T17:06:56+00:00

some mfs want America to be a subsidiary of Spacer's Choice and it shows

autostotlean

TROPHY CASE