Yellow label tea, only it's red

 

What the L?

This morning I opened up a new box of Lipton tea, only to be confronted by tea bags that now sport a white L reversed on a red background. It's actually fairly nice looking, and I give them no notes about typography choice. But really, why?

This move was apparently made nearly a year ago, and I've certainly bought the multi-sleeve pack of tea at least once in that time but this is the first time we've encountered it, which probably says something about local store stocking....

At the time it was announced, Food Business News reported that the rebrand was a move to “refresh the image of the brand and keep relevant with consumers.” I'm sure there were focus groups involved that told them so. 

Like most repackaging moves companies make, I fail to see how this will make them more relevant with consumers. (Oh, my tea has a snazzy L on it so I feel more hip while drinking it??) At least they didn't make themselves unrecognizable on the shelves, as many brands do when they tread down that path. But the part that puzzles me in this case is the box still retains its trademarked (literally) Yellow Label black tea verbiage when the label side that's most visible is in fact, no longer yellow. (If you flip it over, there is a residual yellow label of a sort.) It's a choice, but one that's kind of a head-scratcher.

The box notes that Lipton Yellow Label tea is iconic. I would concur. It's the basic tea many of us grew up with, and while I certainly have developed near addiction levels of devotion to some Harney's products, Lipton still wins points for what it is: a reliable, basic black tea that's comparatively value priced as tea aisle offerings go. 

But when I googled to learn more about this brand shift, it hit me why they went with the red. Much better favicon than that yellow:

Three newish tech features I really wish had happened sooner

Closing one of the tabs in split view is as simple as hitting the X next to it in the top tab window.

One of the tradeoffs of leaving work is no longer having a captive audience to share my delight in new tech features that crop up. Admittedly, I just as often had to share updates about the status of the latest bug, but I also got to spread good news when one of our software providers implemented a feature that could make our work lives better. Hence the reason you're seeing me dispense tech advice into the ether, because I just have to share it somewhere. 

Chrome's new split screen feature

Why, oh why, couldn't this feature have existed while I was working? So many programs I worked with were web-based, and having a super slick way to have two browser windows open side by side without any need to manually manipulate the window widths would have been a total game-changer. Just hold down the shift key before clicking on the second tab you want to add to a split view and then right-click to pick "Add to new split view." If you right-click on one of the combined tabs again under "arrange split view" you'll see options to rearrange the order of the tabs, close one of the open tabs or just restore them to separate tabs. (Or you can right-click on any tab to select that feature and then navigate to add a different tab in split view.) It may not have been available when I could have made the best use of it, but I've still made great use of this new capability, starting with having my Christmas shopping Google spreadsheet open next to a website for shopping. You can also drag and drop a window into a split view, which I learned from this post.

Windows 11 glyphs palette

Another feature I totally would have killed for at work, but one that's still super handy for things like inserting fractions in a blog post. I've used the Windows-V clipboard history feature to pin the fractions, but now can use Windows-V to get at an extensive Symbols panel and history as well as clipboard history, and it remembers your most recently inserted, so I'm finding that just as handy as the clipboard history since I don't need to cull the history to keep the fractions at the top.

Split view in Slack

Also just too late for most of my work life: Slack's new split view. It lets you see two conversations, two channels or two canvases side by side. Just click on a channel (or DM or canvas), Control-click on another channel and then right click on the first channel top pick open in split view. For canvases and lists, the option is under the three-dot menu at the upper right.

Windows+Shift+Minus for an em dash

This one isn't super new, apparently, but it was new to me when I ran across it. This was a development in keyboard shortcuts that I missed when it first happened, probably because I wasn't on Windows 11 at the time. Sure, some people think the em dash is like the mark of the AI devil, but you won't convince the style committee of that one. I worked in a program that had stomped all over any other existing em dash shortcut except for the Alt 0151, so that would have been super helpful. 

Three winter salads, plus a whine about a Gmail setting

Roasted squash salad with bacon and pumpkin seeds

A trio of salads: Kale cobb salad, radicchio salad with blue cheese dressing, roasted squash salad with bacon

All of these salads were brought to you by winter: They combine sturdy ingredients into robust salads while we wait out the season where lettuce won't grow with grace. So instead, think kale, and its obliging partner, bacon. Radicchio and roasted squash. Greens with roasted squash AND bacon.

One of the salads was also brought to you by a combination of irritation and opportunity. Dave flagged a Huffington Post article alerting that there was an automatic opt-in for Gmail users that could allow Google access to your messages and attachments to train AI models. Ish. It shared instructions for the two places to turn off smart features that allow this harvesting, and since that seemed like something I don't want in place, I dutifully turned it off.

And then found out, of course, just what all is joined at the hip in smart features. I could possibly live with out grammar check or autospelling, but everything all in one email inbox? Ugh. Plus, they only let you tailor your inbox notifications if you enable smart features. Double ugh. That leaves you with the option of either opting out of most promotional email (gasp, how will I find out when Harney's and Penzey's have a sale when I need to stock up??) or risk missing an actually vital email amid all the crud. 

So, for now, I've caved and am on a mission to kill down my overall inbox before I try again, opting out as I go. To say that I've never been an inbox-zero person for anything other than the equivalent in Slack is putting it mildly. My promotions box had ballooned to more than 17,000. I've now got that down below 2,500, but I'm loath to just kill out everything without looking through, because hello, recipes! Like the recipe for radicchio salad with blue cheese, below. Sure, I got the magazine in October, but it apparently didn't trigger my interest until I saw it promoted in my Gmail and remembered that I have both radicchio and gorgonzola in my frig that need using.

So I'm wading through the rest of the messages, and really irritated by one trend that can't be over soon enough: Promotional emails designed to trade on shame, guilt, anxiety and other malaise. I'm looking at you, Martha Stewart minions. Amid the potentially useful how-tos like how to make sour cream or reuse old sheets are these stink bombs: 

9 hosting habits that guests secretly despise

12 sneaky reasons your home never feels completely clean

The 6 worst front door colors for curb appeal

7 home decor mistakes you should avoid

6 outdated garden trends

She's not alone in the negative phrasing, by any means. A quick search for "never" in my promotions box unearthed a trove of headlines destined for inbox trash. Colors to never paint your bathroom, etc. A cleaning step you always miss. "Wrong" is another big offender, along with "mistake," as in "You're making scrambled eggs wrong," instead of "how to make terrific scrambled eggs."

Along with umbrage. I have taken delight in killing out these joy zappers. I would paint my bathroom one of the never-do colors, but I've forgotten what they were already, because you should be able to paint your bathroom whatever color makes you happy.

But I did get at least one decent recipe out of the inbox before deleting it. Only 2,500 to go, and then it's off to zapping NextDoor rants.

Roasted squash salad with bacon and pumpkin seeds

Adapted from Cooking Light. I can't find the original recipe to link to but I believe it was in the October 2005 issue. If you’re looking to restore its lightness, go for cooking spray instead of olive oil, 1 slice of bacon instead of 3 and half the amount of dressing.  Serves 6 as a side course or 4 as a main dish.

Ingredients

4 cups cubed and peeled butternut squash (1-inch cubes), half of a medium squash

2 teaspoons olive oil

3 tablespoons sherry vinegar

1½ teaspoon Dijon mustard

3 slices of bacon

1 medium shallot, minced

10 cups mixed salad greens, about 10 ounces

Toasted pumpkin seeds for garnish

Method

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss squash with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Place on a rimmed baking sheet and roast for 30 minutes or until tender, stirring once half way through cooking time. 

Combine vinegar, mustard and a sprinkling of salt and pepper in a large bowl. 

Cook bacon until crisp. Remove from pan and chop into pieces when cool enough to handle. In bacon fat, cook shallots until just tender. Add shallots and some of the bacon fat to vinegar mixture in bowl and combine. Add greens to bowl and toss to mix. 

Place mixed greens on plates. Top each plate with bacon and pumpkin seeds. 

Rating: A nice tasty main course for lunch along with a bowl of soup. The bacon fat helps temper the sharp tang of the vinegar and mustard and the squash mellows things out. A fairly fast fix and reasonably pantry friendly, so I might pull this one out again.

Kale cobb salad

Adapted from Rachael Ray Magazine July/August 2015

Note: The original recipe specified turkey, but I no longer see cooked turkey breasts in stores the way I used to, so I opted for chicken. Depending on the size of your bacon, you may find like I did that three slices of bacon would overwhelm the salad. If your bacon is the thin spindly type, opt for three slices, but if it’s Midwestern farmers market-cut bacon, two is plenty. Serves 2 amply as a main dish salad.

Ingredients
 ¼ cup olive oil
 ¼ cup chopped shallots
 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
 2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
 1 bunch kale, stems removed and leaves roughly chopped (Dinosaur kale works well here)
 2-3 slices bacon, cooked and roughly chopped (see note)
 2 ounces cooked turkey or chicken breast, chopped
 2 hard-cooked eggs, chopped
 1 avocado, chopped
 2 tablespoons crumbled blue cheese (I used Deer Creek’s Blue Jay since I had part of a wedge to use up)

Method
Combine olive oil, shallots, vinegar and mustard in a small bowl. Add salt and pepper to taste.  In a large bowl, combine kale leaves and all but about a tablespoon or so of the dressing. Massage in dressing to mix well and soften kale.

Put dressed kale on two plates. Top each with half the chopped bacon, turkey, eggs, avocado and blue cheese. Drizzle top with remaining dressing. Season top with cracked pepper.

Rating: Dave really liked it, possibly because it's a very sturdy salad. It didn't blow me away, but it is a good sort of salad for using up bits of things.

Radicchio salad with blue cheese dressing

From Bon Appetit, October 2025

Note: If you can’t find blanched hazelnuts, the recipe suggests walnuts, pecans or almonds can also work. If you can only find raw hazelnuts and want to blanch them, heat a quart of water in a large saucepan. Bring to a boil and add 1 tablespoon of baking soda per cup of hazelnuts. Once the fizz dies down, add raw hazelnuts and boil for 4 minutes. Then drain the hazelnuts and plunge into ice water. At this point, the skins will largely slip right off. But while it’s easy, it’s still time-consuming, because it’s amazing how many individual hazelnuts are in a half cup, so I highly recommend this as a do-ahead step, Is it absolutely necessary to remove the skins? Technically, no, they are edible. But once you try toasting them you’ll find out that the skins are then sort of half on half off and the loose skins aren’t generally the texture you’re looking for in most recipes. There are some recipes that call for skin-on, but I’d advise following whatever the recipe suggests for blanched vs. raw.

The recipe also suggests you can use a mix of the standard reddish-purple radicchio we tend to see in stores locally with the less commonly seen castelfranco radicchio, a very pretty burgundy-dappled green leaf variety, which I might have to try from seed, because gosh, that’s lovely.

Ingredients

4 ounces blue cheese (I used Gorgonzola)
½ cup olive oil
¼ cup sherry vinegar
1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon maple syrup
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground pepper
½ cup blanched whole hazelnuts
½ medium butternut squash, peeled, seeds removed and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon rosemary leaves, lightly chopped
¼ teaspoon salt
1 medium head radicchio, separated into leaves
1 medium head endive, leaves separated and torn if large
1 small shallot, thinly sliced, divided

Method

Combine blue cheese, olive oil, vinegar, syrup, Dijon mustard and ½ teaspoon kosher salt and pepper in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. (it will be thick-ish.) This can be made up to a couple of days ahead; it stays emulsified.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees and toast blanched hazelnuts (see note) on a rimmed baking sheet for 8 to 10 minutes until nuts pick up a slight color, shaking once as it bakes.  Set aside to cool.

Leave oven at 400 degrees. Toss squash cubes with 2 tablespoons olive oil, rosemary and ¼ teaspoon salt. Arrange in a single layer on rimmed baking sheet and bake for 25 to 30 minutes until the cubes are tender and pick up a bit of color.

Combine radicchio, endive and a pinch of salt and generous grind of pepper in a large bowl. Add squash and about half each of the dressing, the hazelnuts and the shallot slices, tossing to combine well and coat leaves with dressing. Add more dressing if needed. Mound onto plates or a platter, then garnish with remaining hazelnuts and shallots. You can pass the remaining dressing on the side if you like or save for another use.

Rating: I would describe this recipe as better as a sum of its parts than any individual component. The blue cheese dressing is very unlike your standard white stuff out of a bottle. Unlike some dressings that you would marry, drench anything with or engage in other obsessive behavior, on its own it's interesting but not one you would write home about. It makes copious leftovers, and my first thought was what the heck am I going to use that for? But after trying the salad, I would say it works. The main impressions of the salad are crunchiness and really nice residual flavor.  It's a good choice paired with an otherwise mild meal, like roasted pork tenderloin and brown rice. Not the lookiest of salads, and some of the flavors might be a little assertive for less adventuresome eaters, so I don't know that I'd trot this one out for company as is.

Leftover note: I opted for cutting down the fresh ingredients to make a more consumable portion, since I figured the mixed salad wouldn't really keep well. That meant I also had some roasted squash with rosemary leftover to use to make a pizza topping with goat cheese and bacon. As for that dressing, it takes sturdy greens like kale and shaved Brussels sprouts to stand up to it. It doesn't really lend itself to being repurposed as a dip or spread.

Braised chicken with marinated artichoke hearts and olives

 

I come from the land of potlucks, so when I saw a new release entitled "Potluck," naturally I wanted to check it out. Turns out there are different definitions of potluck out there.

Braised chicken thighs with marinated artichoke hearts

Adapted from “Potluck,” from the Food & Wine test kitchen

Ingredients

8 chicken thighs, skin-on, bone-in

1 tablespoon olive oil

2 (7.5-ounce) jars marinated artichoke hearts, including ¼ cup brine from the jars

1 cup Castelvetrano olives

1 head of garlic, separated but not peeled

1 lemon, thinly sliced

6 thyme sprigs

1 cup chicken broth

½ cup dry sherry

1 tablespoon fish sauce

1 teaspoon salt

Method

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper. Heat oil in a large skillet and sear thighs, skin-side down. You’ll probably want to do this in batches to get each piece browned and crisp. Transfer skin side up to a large baking dish. 

Scatter olives, garlic cloves, thyme springs and lemon slices among the chicken pieces.

Drain fat from the skillet. Heat broth, sherry, artichoke heart brine and fish sauce to boiling. Add 1 teaspoon salt and pour mixture over chicken. 

Cover baking dish with foil and bake for 1 hour. Uncover, raise heat to 400 and roast for another 15 minutes to recrisp the skin. (Note: if I was to make this again, I would pour off most of the liquid into a skillet after the hour of baking and reduce it on the stovetop over high heat while the chicken browns in the oven. That would make an actual sauce and give the chicken a better shot at browning.)

Rating: I think this dish is one extra step (outlined above) away from being quite good. As it is, it's fine enough, but the chicken would have a much better shot at being truly crispy if it wasn't swimming in excess liquid, and that tasty liquid would be much more useful as a concentrated sauce. So I'm willing to give it another shot.

But. (A pause, for Rant Mode On.) The idea that this is a potluck dish is quite an odd one. Unless you modify it, there's way too much liquid to transport well, and it's a non-starter unless you're talking about an evening supper club type scenario where your friends don't live too far away and don't spend too much time gabbing/appetizer noshing/cocktail swilling before dinner. I've got an insulated carrier with a sleeve for a hot pack insert, but I can't imagine crispy skin is going to stay crispy under tin foil in the carrier for too long. And that much liquid will have inevitably sloshed inside the carrier making a hot mess that doesn't meet presentation standards and will be annoying to clean.

That doesn't mean it isn't a reasonable low-effort dinner party dish, since you can get it started well before guests arrive. The subtitle of the book is "Food and Drinks to Share with Friends and Family," and so long as the family comes to your house, it would work just fine. 

Aside from two short generalized paragraphs in the back of the book that don't really offer much wisdom, you're on your own for transport guidance.(In fairness to the book's editors, they probably aren't thinking of how to transport a dish when it's say, 9 below F. You know, just to pick a random number like today.)

Some of the recipes look like they'd work just fine as potluck fodder, like the appetizers and salads. And many of the main dishes are reasonable candidates for the church basement potluck scenario that applies to a dwindling number of people. Just don't expect many main dish options that address the standard potluck we are confronted with in the Midwest, the dreaded workplace potluck, where the criteria involve a dish that can be transported awkwardly via public transit, crammed it into an overcrowded office frig and then presented artistically over the noon hour with no oven available for reheating. So as long as you adjust your expectations of what this book offers, it has some reasonably tasty looking recipes that would work well at home. And maybe we just need to get invited to a different kind of potluck where these dishes could work. (Rant Mode Off.)

Winter blunder land

Make it stop.

Signed, Minnesota

Fancy pants pantries

Why do staged pantries have at least three of everything? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way. I realize that people selling you storage items fill them with multiples of something so it looks neater. Like I have room for six bottles of Perrier in a wicker basket on my shelf at all times. 

What set me off is one of the latest promo e-mails from a mega organized container living colossus, urging me to Shop This Perfect Pantry Space. The Perfect Pantry Space has room for multiples of everything, all in neat baskets spaced just-so apart. Note that those baskets are placed apart, as in there are actual gaps on shelves. On purpose. As if anyone has enough room for gaps between anything on a shelf and doesn’t stack things higher and deeper, wedged in as much as humanly possible.

In Perfect Pantry World, anything that comes in a nice, rectangular stackable box is transferred to a set of see-through storage containers so you can see that you’ve got fancy spiral pasta, because otherwise how would you know by looking at the box labeled fancy spiral pasta? Apparently you also transfer your Oreos to transparent storage in which you have neatly stacked them. And even though you can see them, you somehow still have Oreos.

Many of those clear storage devices are round. Because round is always an efficient use of a rectangular space, right? But that’s OK, because they’re spaced apart just-so anyway.

Apparently in Perfect Pantry World, we also label our food, because flour and sugar in clear canisters are evidently not recognizable otherwise.

What I really want of course, is a real pantry, not a corner rotary unit where objects like to self-eject off into the least accessible crannies. I grew up with walk-in pantries, and have been coping badly ever since. Well, what I really, really want is a butler's pantry. And what I really, really, really want is the butler's pantry at Glensheen, which should please even the most fastidious of butlers.

In the meantime, the pantry paraphernalia at the big box store is 15 percent off. But at this point, I know that buying more stuff to put other stuff in doesn't solve the ultimate problem: I buy too much stuff for my space, which doesn't match my ambitions. Rant mode off.

A tidy home? I'll drink to that

Boulevardier, from Jennifer McCartney's "Cocktails for Drinkers": Mix 1 part each bourbon, sweet vermouth and Campari. Serve over ice with an orange twist.

It’s all about the booze. That’s one possible take-away from Jennifer McCartney’s: "The Joy of Leaving Your Sh*t All Over the Place.” My sister passed along this hilarious slender book that’s the antidote to Marie Kondo’s KonMari way.

The KonMari method, for those who have been blissfully living without exposure to it, is outlined in Kondo’s “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying: A Simple, Effective Way to Banish Clutter Forever” which has been dwelling on the bestseller lists for eons. I read her book last year in one of my January fits of self-improvement/introspection/general funk. It contains a few kernels of useful information. If it had been confined to a 10-page pamphlet instead of 300-plus relentlessly repetitive pages, it would have been a fine enough thing.

Here’s my summary, so you don’t have to read it:

Kondo urges purging/then organizing your possessions in a rip-the-bandage-off approach as the key to finally gaining control without backsliding. None of this 15-minutes-a-day approach in her book. Most of us would need to take at least a week off and therapy to accomplish/recover from this, but I’m guessing it works better in small Japanese dwellings.

Your are to tackle your purge/organization by category, bringing all possessions of like kind together, regardless of where they were housed, so you can evaluate a category of items in its entirety and store all like items together. Start with clothes as the easiest target; move on to books, then CDs and DVDs, then paperwork, then mementos.

She tells you to evaluate each item to see if it sparks joy. If not, out it goes, after having been properly thanked for its service. (This, interestingly, is the opposite of most decluttering advice, which cautions you not to touch your possessions unnecessarily lest it increase your attachment.)

It’s not bad advice for how about to go about a purge, and I was finally able to hang up some clothes in a closet after one bout of KonMari fever. But I’m unlikely to fold my shirts so they can be stored in drawers vertically, take out the contents of my purse daily or get rid of books I haven’t read in a year, suggesting you could just buy the book again (!) if you wanted to read it later. She totally lost me with that last one.

McCartney’s tome, on the other hand, will no doubt be taken as comedic hyperbole, not actual advice, but it’s a highly therapeutic read in a my-cheeks-hurt kind of way. One takeaway: Enjoy your damn life and step over the mess on the way to get a drink to calm down and not be so uptight about it.

I fall somewhere in between the two extremes. I’ve got enough OCD that I suffer from “surface tension” when things aren’t put in their proper place, or worse yet, lack a proper place. But I like stuff. And not just the stuff that sparks joy, like my few bits of Cottura pottery, but stuff that’s simply useful. I won’t say that my giant coffee maker sparks joy, but sometimes you need one, even if it isn’t every year.

Besides, stuff is part of your backstory; it tells you a lot about how you got to be where you are. We got that coffee maker for what turned into a giant baby shower with an out-of-control guest list for a lovely co-worker. I’m pretty sure that kid is old enough to vote now, and that coffee maker has stayed bought, coming out for a friend’s post-wedding brunch and other events that result in trips down memory lane.

But I can’t just leave things lying around like a carefully staged Ralph Lauren commercial, where whips and leather-bound tomes are artfully piled. For one thing, my piles aren’t artful, and for another thing, that kind of delightful chaos only works if the backdrop is Highclere Castle and you’ve got some Turners hanging on your walls. It does not give you an excuse to leave your bedding carefully rumpled (I’m looking at you, pricey Airbnb rental photos.)

My version of a January purge definitely hit a middle ground between the KonMari-McCartney approaches. I did an inventory of what’s in my freezer space, removed several random bits of bread and made a favorite strata. Low and behold there was finally room to store the horseradish vodka (a recent Christmas gift from friends) in its best home: the freezer, where it’s ready for pairing with appetizers like these. So, yes, McCartney is right; it’s all about the booze. And if you read too much of Kondo’s prose, you’re going to need it.

Oh, and that drink? Very tasty, at least if you adore Campari.