PBJ Cake

This is a very simple dessert to make. First, make two pieces of wheat toast. Cover one with a sturdy helping of peanut butter and the other with a sturdy helping of strawberry jelly. Put them together on a plate to create a sandwich. Then completely cover the entire thing with whipped cream (the good kind). Eat with a fork and knife.
 
Crunchy Xmas Salsa

This salsa is red, green, and white, the colors of Christmas, but you can eat it anytime of year. I’ll let you. However, you will first need to gather a sweet onion, two green bell peppers, two red bell peppers, and 2-5 vine-ripened tomatoes. After cutting into pieces smaller than a fingernail, mix them in a large bowl and add just a bit of salt and vinegar to start bringing out the juices.

Next, cut very small (blend if you have to) two habanero peppers and several cloves of garlic. Gloves are recommended unless you don’t have any nerve endings in your hands. The soft, pale part of the pepper where the seeds attach is full of fire. Add a teaspoon of fresh ground cumin seeds. Then add this mixture to the bowl and stir until evenly spread.

The salsa should be left in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours before taste-testing to allow the juices to mix. Every twelve hours after that, it needs to be mixed and taste-tested again. I find that sometimes it needs a little more salt or vinegar or that the habaneros I bought were from a mild batch. This can be remedied by adding more.

Note: Taste-testing means taking small amounts for tasting; it does not mean to eat up half your salsa before your guests arrive. I had to learn that the hard way.

The salsa is best 2-3 days old. It can be eaten with corn chips, added to burgers, or eaten plain with a big spoon. It should be crunchy and juicy. The juice at the bottom can be sipped afterwards.
 
PB Ramen

Note: I’ve only ever made this with all-natural Teddy-brand peanut butter, so I can’t guarantee results with non-stir brands.

Start boiling Ramen noodles in a pan on the stove. Find a gravy shaker and shake some gravy in it. A screw lid jar will work just as well. Ingredients include a third-cup milk, a teaspoon of flour, two heaping teaspoons of peanut butter, and a heavy splash of soy sauce. If desired, cinnamon, ginger, and red pepper flakes can be added in any combination. If not desired, then I’ll put them in and you can go home.

Basically, after your noodles are soft and before you have run out of water, pour the gravy over. If you have done it right, clumping should not be a problem, but if clumps do begin to form, they can be somewhat reduced by rapidly stirring. Boil off the excess water and serve. It goes great with chicken and nuts.
 
BBQ Ramen

While I have never liked barbecue sauce on any other kind of noodle, it goes very well with Ramen. In a pan on the stove, I boil my noodles with a chicken flavor packet. Just before they run out of water, I turn off the heat and mix in barbecue sauce and cheddar chunks. Depending on my mood, I may also add black pepper or garlic powder.
 
Buffalo Nut Chicken

First, thaw some fully-cooked chicken tenders (the kind with the crispy breading). Next, add them to a large frying pan and cut into bite-sized pieces. Heat with butter until some brown begins to appear. Next, add a handful of mixed nuts and stir for a minute on high. Then immediately transfer food to plate and drizzle Buffalo sauce over it. Enjoy or die trying.
 
Buffalo Coleslaw Crackers

Sometimes one just wants some nachos, but they don’t have any tortilla chips, salsa, or grated cheese. That’s okay!

On a large plate, spread saltine crackers and cover with coleslaw (cabbage, carrots, vinegar, mayo). Place cheddar slices on top. Microwave until cheese melts. Then drizzle Buffalo sauce over the top. You now have nachos (if you squint).
 
Hot Pickle Chicken Sub

What goes better with chicken than hot pickles? I can’t think of anything. To make this sub, fry shredded chicken and mix with as much black pepper as you can stand. After it is fully cooked, chop up dill pickle spears, mix them in, and immediately melt provolone cheese slices over it. Using your spatulas, shovel the whole thing into a submarine roll and eat. It is best served with French fries and ice-cold Mountain Dew. Salt can be added to taste (please don’t put it in the soda).

​Are things getting worse or better? The numbers seem to indicate dramatic improvements worldwide in standard of living, life expectancy, economic freedom, environmental and resource management, crime rates, literacy, and much more. Things have been getting measurably better since the late 1700s. Much of this improvement only happened in the last twenty years.

Those at HumanProgress.org paint the picture better than I can. They provide graphs and link to optimistic news articles from all over. Poverty and disease are being eliminated. New discoveries and technologies are made all the time. They make you feel good. It’s a perspective that is often lacking, but necessary. For our mental health, we must temper our pessimism with optimism (and vice versa).

Sometimes things can seem to get worse because of our hardwired sensitivity to danger, because we tend to become acclimated to improvements, because good news tends to be incremental and slow, and most of all because of the media we consume, but numbers don’t lie.

I do wonder, though, about the details. The way things are interlinked, it often doesn’t matter how well everything else is going if one important piece of the puzzle breaks. Sometimes, this is the piece you never thought to measure. Also, good things can cause bad things and the relationships are complex. Also, I know that data crunchers have been caught lying before.

Rationally, I can see many ways that things could go wrong, and many reasons to think going wrong is likely (based on understanding of fundamental processes), but empirically, I see that my scariest predictions are almost always wrong and things tend to work out in the end. Somewhere in the complexity of many things happening at once, good happens.

I also know that bad things can be harnessed to create good, so that even when bad happens, it isn’t really bad. It’s complicated.