u/NegativeLogic

This sounds really good. Do you use unsweetened natural peanut butter, or the regular PB&J style stuff?

I love that game so much. I'm disappointed the sequel got cancelled.

We have. Powdered bay leaves are a reasonably common ingredient in Indian masala blends. It's much more potent but you can use it in soups etc as well.

The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse

A few places that usually have a Thanksgiving Dinner:

ARC at the Fairmont Waterfront
Notch8 at the Hotel Vancouver
Honey Salt
Bacchus
Seasons in the Park

This sounds dangerous. Ingredients like garlic are a key source of botulism, and while honey normally is too acidic for botulinum spores to germinate, that's not the case any longer when you have water from all the stuff you've added leaching out into the honey. I'm not sure where this concept comes from as a cough syrup but my strong recommendation is to rely on legitimate, safe, medicine to manage your cough and not run the risk of poisoning yourself horribly.

Clearly the 1967 one with David Niven, where Woody Allen plays his nephew.

As a consultant / strategist...he needs to hire someone like me to come in and sort out his processes and see if he needs a fractional second in command to manage operations on an ongoing basis.

Mode is useful for explaining how mathematical concepts can translate to non-math uses. It's the only one that can be applied to categorical data, like a survey of favourite colours. Which one is most popular? The mode.

It's also used for scenarios like "here is sales data for all the sifferent sizes of shoe sold in the shoe store - which size should we stock the most of?"

More niche application than the others, but it's not useless.

Yeah that's really not true at all with regard to Chinese and Thai food.

There's always the beef wellington for two at Elisa.

Mapo tofu

Tokyo Cult Recipes is very approachable Japanese recipes.

What about when broccoli becomes the sauce?

Just look up a recipe for goma-ae; it's really easy to make yourself.

I just want to thank you for today's left-field thought experiment of "What if Yukio Mishima wrote Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" which at the very least would be one hell of a read.

Probably an owl or maybe a lynx.

Basically anything by Gene Wolfe - but start with his short stories.

You should read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. It's about a group of astronauts who take over a world by setting themselves up as the Hindu pantheon.

Soak them. I actually just let them simmer / pressure cook with the base gravy ingredients so they're very soft before being pureed. Soaking and making them into a paste to incorporate in the gravy is more traditional.

It's written in the 1930's, but you might really enjoy News from Tartary. It's written by Peter Fleming, the older brother of Ian Fleming (who partially based James Bond off of Peter), and recounts his experiences on a basically-illegal trek from Peking /Beijing through Xinjiang to figure out what was actually happening there in the aftermath of the Kumul Rebellion.

Yeah the only rice I use my instant pot for is glutinous rice, where the pressure steaming is actually helpful.

So duo jiao is from Hunan province, and used pretty extensively. One of the most famous uses is for duo jiao yu (duo jiao fish) where it's very generously used to cover steamed fish fillets (or fish heads, traditionally). But it's used pretty generally as a condiment for steamed foods. It's also good with eggs - scrambled eggs with duo jiao and chives is really good.

Generally you can use it with stir fried meats to liven things up a little.

You may enjoy the ultimate baked potato science approach

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart