Part of my process of writing up Sunday Serial is looking at my photo library for things that caught my fancy. I realized that I had a nice long weekend and break and took some pictures I’d enjoy sharing. Nothing outside of my normal life, but as I’ve been reflecting lately, my notion of a good weekend or a nice night hasn’t changed a lot over the course of my life. Errands, dinners out, some fun things here and there: that’s a life. And in the end,

We Had Some Drinks

Summer finds us glugging Aperol Spritzes during the long weekends; we returned to form over the break. The challenge of a spritz, if you consider it such, is opening a full 750 ml bottle of Prosecco and wasting about half of it. That happens to us a lot, but not this weekend.

We Cooked Some Food

It was Thanksgiving, and we hosted again this year (just my parents). As usual, I smoked our free grocery store turkey. It came out pretty good; I over salted some areas during the dry brine, and used a coarser salt than I normally would. I did grind it up in a mortar and pestle, but I could have done a better job. The turkey also cooked a fair bit quicker than I expected; I had a little trouble getting the temp in the smoker to come up to 325, but the bird cooked in about the three hours I expected. I will probe more extensively next time with the thermometer.

The thing about cooking the turkey this way is that it’s using the Weber Smokey Mountain smoker in a way that it was not designed to operate. With some small variations, the smoker is designed to hold heat in the neighborhood of 225 degrees Fahrenheit; you can adjust the airflow to increase or decrease this, but getting much above 250 is a challenge. You can accomplish this by leaving the water pan empty but in place in the smoker. This allows more heat transfer to the lid of the smoker, which is around where your bird is sitting.

Rhonda made an excellent stuffing that included roasting some turkey wings as part of the base; a mirepoix went into the pan with the roasting wings as an early step. The end result was an excellent stuffing with rich vegetable flavor. Aaron lucked out by having the wings for lunch.

And of course: apps! Charcuterie, as everyone is calling it these days.

Out and About

We squeezed in a trip to Bellview on Friday, having the usual: a platter and some wine. We got a bottle of rosé and a growler of Demeter, as usual, and the “That’s My Holiday Jam” platter, which has two types of cheese, some salami, pretzel chips, kettle corn, nuts, and some chocolate-covered berries. Always so good.

Friday night was sushi at our usual joint, the newly renamed Ikura in Vineland. I’m pretty consistent here: an app, usually gyoza, and I have some of Rhonda’s Kani Kappa salad, and then I get one roll and three kids of sashimi. I track what I order on my phone so that I can see what I got last time, but it’s partly to help me remember what I want. Sushi is fun (and more challenging) than ordering dinner in the form of an app and an entrée because, if you’re not choosing a pre-set dish, you are selecting a la carte from the menu. Because the pieces are small, you have to keep track of what you’re ordering.

Birthday Dinners

We always celebrate family birthdays by going out to dinner; this year we went to the Greenview for my birthday on Saturday, and the four of us nipped out Wednesday for my actual birthday to the Maplewood. It’s nice having some decent places close by for dinner. I wrote up Greenview already, but Maplewood was characteristically great, with weird pacing but good food.

Egg Bites

Vacation is fun because it’s a change from the normal grind. One thing I do on the weekends is make breakfast for the week. I have been making hard-boiled eggs this year, whereas I had always been making sous vide egg bites. We had some sausage left over from breakfast on Friday, so Rhonda suggested that I make some egg bites. I made six of them for her; I made hard boiled for myself. I hope they came out good; I didn’t have any sour cream or cottage cheese to use (the latter of which is my preferred mixer).

A Little Shopping

We stay away from retail establishments during the holiday; there’s the internet, or course, and today’s Cyber Monday. We did have a few errands to run, and yesterday checkout of Barbera’s for holiday gifts (candy and chocolate); Rhonda grabbed a frozen ice cream taco and some ice cream sandwiches for the boys. They have a cinnamon bun flavor that wouldn’t normally excite me, but it looks sooooo good. Rhonda and I usually get a couple of scoops (they sell Richman’s Ice Cream) in a waffle bowl.

In lieu of brick and mortar shopping, I did avail myself of some software deals. I have been using Raycast for a while now, but I’ve been terribly curious about some of the pro features. I do wish there was a membership tier that didn’t include AI; I don’t think I want to use Raycast’s AI chat app. It looks like a dark version of ChatGPT’s client and won’t likely integrate with Siri. I have tried out the notes (very cool, but not on iPad or the Phone, and no handwriting, so that’s not a sale for me), turned on sync, and started messing around with things.

I guess I’m most excited about Raycast, because it’s to my mind an expensive subscription and the discount really helps push the cost into consideration territory, and it’s also got a deep feature set. One of the things that I’m most interested in seeing is the degree to which I can stop using Launchbar; I’ve been control-spacebarring to get around my Mac for a couple of decades now, and some of the muscle memory is deep: Google searches, clipboard history, and running apps are all things I use Launchbar for. I might need to consider swapping my keyboard shortcuts so that control-space gets me into Raycast instead of Launchbar.

Another thing I’ve been enjoying is figuring out some of the specifics of how Raycast works. For example, you can specify “favorites” from among all of the different elements of the app. I know that using Raycast to resize Finder and app windows will be a major use case for me, so I pinned one of my favorite Window Management settings to be a favorite. I likewise added the root level of my Para folder in Documents, and even tried a document as an example. You can even point Raycast to Shortcuts and favorite them if an app you’re looking for a plugin for doesn’t have one, but supports Shortcuts (currently OmniFocus for me).

I also got licenses for Keyboard Maestro (just an update for me), CleanShot X, and KeyCue. So in that regard, CleanShot is the only new app to me, but I’m excited to lean into Raycast and Keyboard Maestro more than I have in the past.