Coffee Break: Leather Belt

67 Comments

1. I need hotel and restaurant recommendations for New York City! My mom and I are seeing Hamilton in November, and we’re looking for a hotel near the Richard Rogers Theatre, hopefully around $300/night. Restaurant recs are also welcome!

   Leslie Odom Jr. is coming back as Aaron Burr!

   1. Also looking for recommendations for other things to do while we’re there. thanks!

      1. Algonquin hotel
         Fraunces Tavern was great

   2. It’s been 3 1/2 years since I ate at Shukette and I still think about it all the time. I’ve honestly considered a trip to NYC just to eat there again.

   3. He is just the best Burr.

   4. The Westin and the InterContinental are both good and reliable.

2. what are your weirdest food combinations to eat together? for some reason mine is cold pasta dipped in hummus…

   1. Not super weird, but I live strawberry jam on a grilled cheese sandwich.

      1. Ok but this is kind of genius. I bet it’s delicious. I love fancy jam and cheese on a cheese plate.

      2. Grilled cheese dipped in dahl!

      3. Orange marmalade on buttered toast with a slice of cheese on top.
         Honey in lieu of marmalade is also delicious.

      4. Similar…freshly baked baguette with Brie and sliced pear. So good! Maybe a bit of fig jam in there too some days rather than the pear.

   2. Peanut butter and cheese sandwich

      Haven’t had one is ages, but it reminds me of my childhood!

   3. Plain lays potato chips dipped in ketchup.

      I know Canada has ketchup-flavored Lays! I wish we did.

      1. As a Canadian who loves her ketchup chips, plain chips dipped in ketchup is not the same thing at all! I can’t get past the idea of that texture combo to consider trying it.

         1. Seconding this as another ketchup chip loving Canadian. Wet ketchup on chips scares me too much to try

      2. I love this, too! And, yes, it has to be plain lays. I didn’t know anyone else did that!

         I also like cool ranch Doritos with cottage cheese (though other tortilla chips are OK).

   4. is chocolate and orange juice weird?

      1. I think so. I’m personally not a fan of chocolate and fruit.

      2. I just want it to be fancier, like dark chocolate gelato spiked with Grand Marnier.

         My standard blended yogurt smoothie is a mild plain yogurt, sweetener, dark cocoa powder, and either strawberries or raspberries. Now I kind of want to try it with orange.

      3. I love the Terry’s chocolate orange!
         I love a juicy orange slice dipped in chocolate!

         I used to love getting a really tart sour lemon sorbet and put a dark bitter chocolate gelato in the same cup. Together they tasted amazing!

   5. Probably umeboshi plum vinegar on air popped popcorn. I liked kimchi cheese nachos before it was cool, though I think that’s not anything special now that there are fusion places around. Maybe I didn’t know enough about Asian cuisine growing up in the midwest to use the ingredients in normal ways when they first started showing up in stores?

      This is practically identifying information, but if I make a hot vegetable beef soup, I like to cool it down with frozen green beans. The perfect combination is if the soup is still kind of hot and the green beans are still kind of frozen.

3. Wanted to come back with an update, I posted a few weeks ago about being a federal employee and feeling weird about taking the “Deferred Resignation Package” (DPR).

   I’m happy to announce that I’m 2 days into a non-fed role and it is such a weight off my shoulders to no longer be working for the current administration. I’m so grateful! Thank you for all the commentators who pushed me to let go of my guilt and take the payout offer.

   1. Huge congratulations and sorry you had to go through this!

   2. So so happy for you!

   3. Congratulations! I’m glad you were able to get out of your own way on this. Enjoy the mental health benefits of being free of a toxic workplace!

4. When you’re serving dinner, do you have rules about how you build a menu? Someone told me you’re supposed to have one hot and one cold side, which was news to me. I try to have at least 2 veg just to make a colorful plate, I find an all-white meal (like chicken and rice) to be less appetizing.

   1. You mean for guests or for myself? I try to balance protein/starch/veg but also flavors. I think a lot of home cooks don’t use enough acid, so I try to make sure to include that somewhere. When my husband and I are cooking for ourselves we only make sides about half the time.

   2. I try to have contrast of some sort. Rich + bitter or acidic, hot + cold, soft + crunchy.

   3. Oh dear, no. I don’t need arbitrary rules that make my life harder!

      1. +1.

   4. For my kids — this started when they were young and it’s just become habit. A protein, a veg, and a fruit. Sometimes there’s a starch, too.

      Otherwise, no. I try to make things veggie-forward. Some days I succeed, some days I don’t.

   5. When it’s up to me, I don’t do sides at all, only when cooking for guests. I prefer my meals to just be one dish with a mix of protein and plenty of vegetables, often a starch, and an acidic or spicy sauce. I don’t like mushy or rich/creamy things so I don’t bother with those.

   6. I can’t do an all white/brown plate. Even if it’s just parsley or some garnish, I need some contrast.

   7. If for guests, I aim to have something green (even if it’s just dried oregano flakes in the pizza sauce).

   8. Half the plate should be veg. And I try to fit as many colors in per week as possible.

5. The Women’s Health Initiative, guided by the NIH since 1991, is now being shut down by Trump’s Team.

   It is one of the most famous longitudinal studies in the world – for nearly 35 years following a group of over 140,000 women and monitoring their health, medical/health practices and outcomes. It has lead to thousands of discoveries, publications and guidelines for treatment of chronic disease in women, covering everything from cancer, to cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, dementia and aging, and more.

   It is the most important research and data set of women’s health in the world. And now the data collection and preservation will end.

   This is what an anti-DEI is doing. And it represents only a small fraction of the cuts ongoing at NIH, and hospitals/universities.

   1. I thought women were always medically treated as just smaller men? So dosing was based on that and no one knew how medicines worked with women who were pregnant, nursing, pre-menopausal vs post-menopausal, etc. Like adding chemicals to your body could not possibly be relevant to chemicals and body metabolism already going on within your body. But sure, science, just assume I’m a 200 pound man.

      1. It’s sad but I’ve gotten pretty decent advice on medications/dosages/therapeutic approaches from ChatGpt.

         1. Where do you think the information comes from that ChatGPT sucks up and spits back at you? From studies like WHI!

         2. Chat Gpt is not conducting studies, though. It’s a dark day for women’s health.

         3. OpenEvidence is actually designed for medical stuff (many caveats still apply).

         4. This is a face palm comment if I’ve ever seen one.

         5. Do you think ChatGPT is an informational or research site? It just gathers data….the kind provided by WHI!

         6. This response is like the tech equivalent of telling someone not to worry about softwood lumber tariffs driving up the cost of home building because they can always buy lumber at Home Depot.

            1. Or the people who think it’s fine to cut NOAA because they have a weather app on their phone.

         7. Things get even more exciting when you realize ChatGPT is so hellbent on giving you an answer – any answer – that it will flat out lie and make shit up just to please you. Definitely great when you are asking it for things like medical advice and dosing guidance!

   2. And my husband gets upset when I say that if I could go back and do one thing differently, it would be to not have gotten married 40 years ago which would have led to none of our 3 children being born nor several young granddaughters. I used to wonder how Iran’s society turned in a single generation against its women. I no longer wonder and am afraid for my granddaughters and their entire generation.

      1. Wow, that seems insanely hurtful to your husband. I get where you’re coming from, but I can see why he’s not handling it well. While I absolutely hate everything that’s happening right now, I also don’t think it’s going to be quite so easy to turn back the clock and pretend that women aren’t used to having the freedom to make decisions about their lives.

         1. Not that poster, but her Iran example is apt. Progress can be reversed EXTREMELY quickly. Trump’s increasing focus on shoring up birth rates is a warning sign.

         2. If I could go back in time I’d also not marry my husband. He’s not a bad guy but he’s a guy

            1. Secrets tangent: I would choose differently, too.

      2. You want the women in your family never to have been born? :(

         Life under patriarchy isn’t not worth living to me, though I realize not everyone will actually survive it.

      3. What a horrible thing to say to your husband.

         1. +1

   3. It’s a huge loss. The war on women never ended and new fronts are opening now.

   4. It’s so disheartening. So much damage can be done in such a short period of time and to what end? How does it help the MAGA cause if women are less healthy?

      It seems like cuts for the sake of making cuts at this point.

      1. Seems to me like the goal is to force women back into dependency on mediocre men. Sure, plenty of women still do this willingly, but not as many as 50+ years ago.

   5. This is so so incredibly terrible for women’s health care and the field of Ob gyn.

      I hope this democracy is strong enough to recover from Trump.

   6. What’s particularly troubling is that so many in this administration believe that women are inherently different from men in all ways. Yet research into women’s different bodies is being cut off. It’s such a clear example of not giving a fig about women’s well being.

6. I often wonder with celebrities / royals like Kate Middleton, what do they keep in their purses, especially when at fancy events (where they have their people there with them and a secure car at the ready)? A phone and lipstick and some tissues? But surely not the ID / credit card / random ephemera / Advil, sharpie, pen, business cards that clutter up my bag.

   1. I’m confused. You think “her people” are carrying her ID but not her lipstick?

      1. I think that’s the question. Her people can carry basically anything she could need, yet a purse is often in the picture. Is it empty? The queen famously used it for signaling to staff.

         1. ID? Money? House and car keys? Various swipe badges and lanyards to get into places. Reading glasses for menus and making sure you don’t undertip (good restaurants all have dim lighting)? Advil? A phone? All of these things that I carry seem n/a to some types of prominent people, except maybe tissues and a lipstick.

            IDK what famous men do — rely on pockets for phone / wallet?

   2. I don’t get the question. At any state dinner or high end gala like the Met, the attendees will have staff on site who carry advil/bandaids etc. Attendees would carry phone and/or ticket/id if applicable and maybe a lipstick.

      For more adventurous outdoorsy royal/state type events, they probably wouldn’t carry anything and their staff would hold it while absailing / canoeing/biking etc.

      For normal official type visits whether government or royal or celeb – usually they would have staff but might carry more in their purse. Accessories are used to signal as well. The Queen would change the hand she carried her purse in when she needed to wrap up speaking to someone and move on to the next guest. So staff could know to assist without offending the guest. I expect other officials have similar signals with their staffs.

   3. yeah, I always assume those purses are accessories mainly for show. They might have feminine hygiene items and a lipstick, but nothing that she wouldn’t need while alone in a bathroom. And the handler carries the purse after the photo ops, anyway.

   4. It’s usually a tiny bag so I assume not much beyond a phone.

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