Yeah, I don’t know if that tracks. Wingspan has sold more than 1.3 million copies (as of September 2021) which is way way way more than the average board game sells.

I’d far more believe that they couldn’t keep up with production than they were intentionally limiting supply.

Ooo, fantastic. I’ve been doing sugar extractions of lemon zest for a mead recently, and we tried drying and blitzing the zests after filtering.

For us the powder was nice (partly because it got a bit candied during the process) but fairly mild in taste. I think it could still absolutely be fun to use to sprinkle on desserts of drinks, for visuals if nothing else.

Our kettle actually partially died a few months ago, had a long debate about what we should replace it with before I realized the contacts on the base had just gotten bent out of place.

A buddy of mine printed the robot mittens for me, and even managed to track down a paint that nearly perfectly matches the color. I absolutely love them. How do you like the metal ones?

Nice! A surprising amount of overlap with out own coffee station!

From my understanding espresso beans do tend to be roasted darker to help increase extraction. I know that at least for my manual espresso press I need to use a significantly different recipe to get a nice shot out of light roasted beans.

Broadly though, I do think the cultural idea of espresso is that it’s a small, super intense cup of coffee which in turn implies it being very bitter as that’s the main coffee flavor people can imagine being intensified. Especially when you consider that a lot of people’s idea of espresso likely comes from pod machines which, in my experience, tend to make very bitter shots.

I was genuinely shocked the first time I had a shot of a espresso from an actual coffee shop and the predominant flavor was sour not bitter.

So, yeah, I do think it’s very common for people to associate espresso with dark and bitter coffee.> I said it sounds like you just haven’t had good espresso

Edit: FWIW, if you’re looking to actually talk to someone about all this, lines like, “I said it sounds like you just haven’t had good espresso,” is not a great way to engender a good conversation.

Pepcorn is actually and unironically very good.

That looks great! We actually don’t add any flavorings into the mix outside of the salt + sugar, we did originally but found out we really liked the very smokey without anything added. I should really go back and try out some different options to see what’s out there though.

We also usually smoke with “neighbor maple”. Which is to say anytime a storm comes through a branches fall out of the big maple tree in our neighbor’s lawn, we take it, chop it up, and smoke stuff with it.

Slicing is both the easiest and most annoying part of the process for me. A few years ago we managed to get a hold of a second hand commercial deli slicer. It works incredibly well, as you might imagine, but then I discovered why you usually don’t have commercial equipment in your home. I use it maybe once every couple months, and it takes about as long to clean the dang thing as it does to actually slice something on it. I’m sure it makes sense in an actual butcher or deli where you’re using it all day, but for me I do 15 minutes of slicing and then have 15 minutes of cleaning off pork fat. It sure does make nice even slices of bacon though.

They go in the freezer, and when we want to use a pack we just toss it into the fridge the day before.

The stars are because I ran out of the good plastic wrap (each has a layer of cling film then layer of freezer paper), and had to do the final two with the bad plastic wrap. I’m less confident about how air tight they are so they’re starred so we eat them first.

It’s fantastic, as simple as just chucking some garlic into a jar with honey. Wait long enough and you get a really nice almost balsamic-y garlicy liquid to drizzle on stuff (I love it on pizza). I’ve also done it with some chopped up habanero included to make it spicy.

Insert usual caveats about being careful with fermenting food at home and doing your own research, and there being a small risk of botulism.