Tomorrow is the last day of Pizzamas 2025. Pizzamas is an annual, hard-to-explain, Nerdfighter fundraiser selling even-harder- to-explain, Pizza John merchandise to raise money for Partners in Heal…

If there’s one thing every Scooby-Doo episode teaches us, it’s that solving mysteries is a team skill. The gang doesn’t stumble onto answers by luck (well… except when Scooby and Shaggy fall into secret passages). They solve the case because they know how to spot the clues and put them together. Performance tuning in SQL Server works the same way. If you don’t know where to look—or how to interpret the trail of breadcrumbs—you’ll spend more time running from shadows than unmasking the real villain.

Here are some things about this blog. Wordpress.com informs me that I signed up for my Wordpress account fifteen years ago today. I didn't start this blog until a few weeks later when I began cooking my way through Damn Good Food. I probably created the account to comment on someone else's blog, but it's also likely that it took me a few weeks to figure out what I wanted to blog about.

Benedict #19: Mahnomin Autumn Benedict Mahnomin is the Ojibwe word for wild rice and I've been cooking with it for over a decade. I bought this wild rice as we were leaving MN and it is finally the right season to make some wild rice cakes with craisins and pecans1. I've been planning this one for a while now, but I still had to do some last-minute…

Enchanted Recipe #2: Remy's Soup Ratatouille is a film tribute to classic French cuisine and the art of cooking. Follow this recipe to reproduce the creamy, flavorful soup that Remy makes when he first meets Linguini. - Thibaud Villanova, Enchanted Recipes No Disney cookbook would be complete without featuring something from Pixar's Ratatouille. Villanova includes two recipes, this one for Remy's soup (called Linguini's Soup in the movie) and of course the eponymous gourmet version of Ratatouille that wins over the food critic, Anton Ego.

Enchanted Recipe #1: Little John's Spicy Stew "In Robin Hood Little John seems to be in charge of the cooking. He makes a steaming pot of delicious stew . . . that's a bit too spicy for Friar Tuck's delicate taste buds! Here is a recipe for a traditional English stew just like Robin Hood's sidekick would have made." - Thibaud Villanova, …

Weekday Carnivore Recipe #1: Panko-Crusted Roast Chicken Thighs With Mustard and Thyme I had a busy day at work today and didn't have time to make my planned menu for today. I looked around the kitchen and realized I had what I needed to make Jenny Rosenstrach'1s default quick dinner recipe, "chicken thighs slathered in mustard and panko." I had the chicken thighs, and I had the panko.

This month's cookbook is Disney Enchanted Recipes written by Thibaud Villanova, aka the Gastonogeek. He has made his living for the last decade and a half writing cookbooks for imaginary worlds, everything from star wars and Marvel superheroes to Ghibli and Dragonball. Given my interests I probably should have encountered Monsieur Villanova sooner, but alas he writes his cookbooks in French.

"It's important for me to convey to you that the transition from mostly-meat based cooking to mostly plant based cooking was not easy. It had been so thoroughly ingrained in my brain that a real meal was built around a piece of animal protein that in the beginning, there were many weeknights when I'd surrender to the tabula rasa that was my dinner brain and just slather a few…

Vegetarian Recipe #10: Glazed Maitake Mushrooms with Sweet Corn Polenta, bowls & salads Last week I threw out a poll to determine my last vegetarian recipe, it was a close poll with a tie between Maitake mushrooms with polenta and Barley Bowls with Chickpeas and Roasted Vegetables. I was developing a complex ranking system with ingredient analysis and flavor profiles I would use to determine how to break the tie, when Kira said, "I voted for the mushrooms." …

Vegetarian Recipe #7: Kale Salad with Almonds & Dried Cranberries Vegetarian Recipe #8: Mushroom-Leek Galette Vegetarian Recipe #9: Autumn Farrotto with Roasted Honeynut Squash and Crispy Sage Leaves / I spent all day yesterday at a tech conference, Boston SQL Saturday, so there was no cooking, Vegetarian or otherwise. Luckily I made three recipes from The Weekday Vegetarians on Friday when Eric and Melanie came over for dinner.

Vegetarian Recipe #6: Tofu Bánh Mì Style Soba Noodles, sandwiches and pies, The Weekday Vegetarians Something I have learned from cooking over 100 vegetarian recipes last year is that the ones with a meat substitute (like tofu) are usually pretty good. It helps if you haven't had any real meat for a while - it also helps if you fry the tofu.

Vegetarian Recipe #4: Coconut Curried Red Lentils, small plate night, The Weekday Vegetarians Vegetarian Recipe #5: Spicy Cauliflower Fritters with Pea Shoots, skillet mains, The Weekday Vegetarians With seven recipes left to cook and only seven days left in the month I decided we needed to actually be Weekday Vegetarians this week. On Monday we had the Veggie burgers…

A continuation of our weekend.

Between surveys, pictures, a "blog post in parts", and skipping a day I've managed to go most of a week without really writing anything. We had a very busy weekend. We ended both Saturday and Sunday feeling very tired, but we lived some life. Here is what we did yesterday (Saturday).

I spent some time looking through The Weekday Vegetarian today and planned out a few meals for next week, but I'm having a hard time getting excited about the recipes. I've cooked most of them before and so many of the recipes just feel like a side dish and not a complete meal. It's hard to change decades of eating meat centered menu's.

Part 1: A Break from Running Two Sundays ago I went for a 10 mile run. It is the first time I've run that far in more than two years. I thought I was increasing my distance gradually enough and maintaining during the week with shorter runs, but after my run last week my right knee was hurting. I'd had similar pain the week before on my long run, but it went away after a couple of days.

Vegetarian Recipe #3: Andy’s Spicy Diced Potatoes, The Weekday Vegetarians, Small Plate Night I knew when I started this month's cookbook I was going to lean on the weekday part more than the vegetarian part. I spent my usual grocery shopping day this week driving back from North Carolina. I thought I might run out today and get somethings, but instead I looked around the kitchen and found about 1 pound of red potatoes that could be used to make some spicy diced potatoes.

"Wow! You've put on some weight!" This was the greeting I got from my mother when she visited us last May. Ouch. What stung worse - she was right. At the time of that visit I weighed the most I ever have. Until I was in my 30's I pretty much ate whatever I liked and relied on my awesome metabolism to keep things in check.

I should probably wait until the year is over to write this post, but I thought of it today while looking at some of the blog stats and decided, why not? I am able to see how often each page or post on the blog has been accessed. There is a some percentage of false reads, but it is good enough data to make it interesting.

When I started blogging again this year I had high hopes of learning more about WordPress and maybe even coding my own theme. I have done some exploring and I understand how WordPress works under the hood a lot better than I did a a few months ago, but mostly what I have learned is that there is a lot of great resources out there and unless I really want to write my own themes and extensions I can probably find something I like that already exists.