Chili Recipe of the Gods

The best chili you will ever eat, stolen from Mount Olympus itself.

Grocery List

• 1 - 2 lb of a Boneless Beef Chuck cubed. (no g/b or cubed steak)
• 1 Large Container Beef Stock
• 1 large red onion
• 1 Yellow Onion
• 1 Stalk of Celery
• 1 Beer I like to use Blue Moon
• 1 pack of Thick Cut Bacon
• 1 Large Bag of Pinto Beans DRY (This is secret #1)
• 1 Small Bag Black Beans DRY ( Dry Beans all together are secret #1)
• 1 Large Garlic Clove
• 1 Red Bell pepper
• 2 Cans Stewed Tomatoes with Green Chili's
• Extra Virgin Olive Oil & Butter
• Small Can of Tomato Paste
• Cheddar Cheese and Oyster Crackers (Optional)

Spices

• Assorted Spices, Cumin, Chili Powder, Garlic Powder, Onion Powder, Paprika, Oregano, Salt, Pepper.

Fridge Staples

• Worcestershire Sauce
• Ketchup (Secret #2)
• Vinegar
• Hot Sauce/Tabasco
• Liquid Smoke

Preperation.

1. Soak dry beans overnight, If you don't soak overnight, Soak at least one hour prior to cooking.
2. Cover beans with water, Chop yellow onion in half, and chop celery 2 celery stalks in half. Add the halved onion's and celery to the water/dry bean mixture, Boil beans until almost soft and when the water level is low Add 1/2 of your beef stock/broth.
3. Continue boiling until fully cooked, You will have a soupy bean/beef/veg broth just covering the top of the beans. Remove the 2 onion halves and the celery stalks.
4. Dice your entire red onion, and red bell pepper, and mince your garlic.
5. Start a hot pan with EVOO and 1tbs butter. Add the bacon once partially cooked, Add diced chuck, cook until the outsides are seared, add The entire onion and red bell pepper, saute until translucent and sweet, add minced garlic and cook for 20-30 seconds more. This whole process shouldn't take more than 5 minutes.
6. Add the rest of the beef broth to the beans and your beer, Add the beef/bacon/onion/RBP/garlic mixture to the pot as well. Also add both cans of stewed tomatoes.
7. Add about 1tbs of each seasoning, except oregano, add 1tsp oregano. Be very liberal with the worcestershire, add lots. Add 2 tsp vinegar, 2 tsp hot sauce and 1tbs liquid smoke. And add several TBS of ketchup. It brings tons of flavor profile to the table. Also add a tbs or so of tomato paste if you like thicker chili. Simmer this for at least an hour stirring occasionally.
8. Serve with diced onions, Cheddar cheese and oyster crackers if you please.
9. Never make chili with canned beans!

Options: Add a tbs of mustard, add large carrots or other larger portion vegetable in the bean boiling process for additional veg broth flavor. Add more spices for your particular flavor profile. Add red pepper flake for heat. Add Fresh diced jalapenos in the sauteeing process.

How to Improve Your Singing

Singing well is a lot like playing an instrument: there's a tremendous amount of fine motor skill involved, and it's not necessarily intuitive. In fact, a lot of what singing is goes against your instincts.

For example, singing high notes. When people think high notes, they think "I really have to squeeze to make it up here!" Stylistically, some people do that (Christina Aguilera comes to mind), but, as fate would have it, it actually doesn't work that well, and they are just doing it for notes near the top of their chest range to add style. Every note that a singer like Christina belts is able to be easily hit by that same singer in head voice, and probably, if that person is a proficient singer, in a "mixed" voice, which is blend of the head register (which tends to be light and "hooty") and the chest voice (how you sound when you sing your comfortable notes).

The good news anyone can learn to sing better. Bad news, it's usually not easy, and it does take time. We often think of singers possessing a lot of talent. And many of them have talent, sure, but there's still a lot of hard work and practice that we never saw, especially for the pros.

The best way you can improve your voice is to find a vocal coach in your area who is well respected. Don't be nervous if you've never had lessons or anything like that. Most coaches have, in fact, heard much worse. They'll be able to identify your bad habits right away and set you down the right track immediately. The downside here is the cost: voice lessons can be expensive.

There are, however, some free resources on the Internet that can help:

Karyn O'Connor at SingWise offers some of the best articles about singing that I've ever read. She's very thorough and can give you an idea of the things that you're probably doing wrong.

Ian Castle the AussieVocalCoach offers a lot in terms of free videos with exercises and tips on both his YouTube channel and his webiste which might benefit you.

Eric Arceneaux also offers some pretty good beginning instruction via his YouTube channel, and he tells a story in one of his videos about how he was a terrible singer in high school (kicked-out-of-choir bad), and how he worked hard to learn to sing like he does today (although, he did take a lot of voice lessons, which, as I said, are definitely the best choice).

There are also a lot of for-pay singing programs that I won't link to, like Brett Manning's Singing Success and others like it. I can't vouch for them, as I have never tried them and am unfamiliar with their methods.

So, the bottom line is this: to sing high notes and have a good range, you need the following: good breath support, a stable larynx, a relaxed, open throat, good resonance in the right places (chest, mix, head), good vocal cord approximation (the cords need to come together correctly), and, above all, a good attitude.

Singing high is about freeing the voice and not straining (except for certain style bits which should be left to the experienced). All of this can be overwhelming to learn, but with a coach (best) or the right resources, you can almost certainly do it.

Reasons to Live

Here's the thing about life. On the one hand, none of it matters. Many philosophers come to this conclusion and cannot figure out why anyone should care either way.

Human beings will expand from Earth to the next galaxy and the next and then what? Our technology will increase without bounds. Life will constantly change for our species but, as a whole, we don't have a goal nor a well-defined purpose nor a mission statement for humanity. We are just trudging through the universe one day at a time.

This is why people war. They don't think things through. They crave purpose and meaning. They are incapable of projecting far enough into the future to do something useful. They are irrational, always, and they often cause more trouble than is needed.

You could look at all of that and decide you don't want to live in such a world. But, if you do that you neglect a key aspect of it all--being a human being is a highly unique experience. Really think about that: no one will ever have a brain like yours, or your quirks, or your combination of experiences.

Expand that--humans are different from you. Consider even more the unlikeliness that you would be here in the first place. We humans take life for granted because it is all around us, but, statistically speaking, you should not be here. Neither should I. We are that one in a billion sperm that made it into the highly elite University of Mommy's Egg. In our case, the penalty for not getting into that university was not sulking and licking wounds or retaking the entrance exams--it was death.

Right off the bat, many of the potential replacements for you never got the chance to come into existence and as such never got the privilege to truly experience being a human being. They never got the opportunity to develop a brain that is better than any supercomputer pound per pound. They never got the opportunity to reason. They were never able to use those hundreds of thousands of sensors we call rods and cones in conjunction with the world's best, all-natural, dynamically adjusting, camera lens (eyes) and the processing centers of our brain to interpret the energy given off by a sunset and translate it all into the beautiful image we know.

Think about that. When you SEE, you are translating waves of energy into colors. That's insane. When you HEAR, you are translating pressure waves into the audio you are perceiving. The other sperm never even got the opportunity to hear the most gorgeous note which is capable of sending chills down your spine.

Why is being a human so great? Because as a species, we are not only complex but are statistically anomalies. We go from hydrocarbon blueprints redundantly encoded in biological structures to sacks of meat to children who very quickly figure out for themselves how to take random sensory input like sight, sound, balance, etc. and make sense of it in real time.

We are self-aware and dynamically adjust to life's curve balls. Why should you want to live? Because you have eternity to be dead. That's a hell of a lot longer than the 70-100 years you will be alive on this planet.

As long as you are going to die anyway in the future, you may as well enjoy the privilege of being a human now while you can appreciate it because it is a gift that you would be a fool to squander.

Must-Have Free Software

General Utility

• 7zip: In case anybody doesn't know, the freeware compression/decompression utlity of choice for zip, rar, etc
• Abyss Web Server: Host from home.
• AutoHotkey: Very powerful open source tool can script+customize macros, hotkeys, everything input related within the Windows environment right down to mouse clicks.
• Bulk File Changer: Batch utility for altering file attributes.
• Cabos: file sharing client for the Gnutella network. Not as much customization as the shareware Limewire but it does the same job.
• CDisplay: CBR/CBZ format sequential reader, which are rebranded zip/rar extensions popular for image archives such as comic books, guitar tablature, etc.
• Cheat Engine: Extensive memory editor/manager. sort of like Game Genie/Codebreaker for PC.
• ClassicShell: Restores many of the Windows features that were stripped for Win7 including disk free space on Explorer's status bar, restores toolbars, the classic file copy dialog, etc.
• Crosshair: Replaces the mouse cursor with an origin point along x and y axis and is surprisingly more handy than you might realize.
• CPU-Z: Simple utility for monitoring system components+performance
• DC++: File sharing client for the Direct Connect network that was providing a superior experience over the official Neo Modus client for years.
• DriverSweeper: I've been using this for some time to clear old drivers from systems.
• EaseUS: Several great products like Partition Manager and Disk Copy, generously free for personal use.
• EasyBCD: You would want this in order to manage boot loaders and restoring+repairing broken entries under Windows.
• FileTypesMan: All the features Microsoft stripped from file extension management in Vista and 7, and all the features they should have implemented in the first place.
• Filezilla: Fully featured freeware FTP client.
• Flare: Decompile Flash swf.
• Go PlayAlong: Shareware guitar tablature player for Guitar Pro formats. Just recently got into it, but I love the mp3 sync feature for backing tracks.
• HJSplit: Who could live without a handy file splitter-joiner?
• HTTrack: Downloads web site resources to generate a mirror for offline browsing. Use responsibly.
• inSSIDer: Seems to be the wifi scanning tool of choice now days.
• JoyToKey: J2K can map controller input to keyboard keypresses, useful if a game fails to provide joypad support when they should have. Results may vary.
• Less Msiérables: Extracting contents from a .msi file.
• Microsoft Power Toys: More from the "why isn't that built into XP by default" category, includes utilities like CmdHere that will add a directory context to Explorer for opening a command prompt at that target location.
• Opera: Yeah, all those features people rave over Firefox? Opera was doing them years prior.
• PeerBlock: Monitors connections and blocks many of them based upon lists of registered IP ranges belonging to various government, anti-p2p, etc. agencies.
• PowerMenu: Adds 'always on top' and other functions to Windows. I think I got this for some emulators lacking it.
• Putty: Excellent Telnet+SSH client with great functionality. I've been using it for my *nix shell as far back as I can remember.
• ShellExView: If you want to cut down on some of the unnecessary shell extensions crowding the right click menu under Windows Explorer, this is a handy way to do it without manually editing the registry.
• Soulseek: Used it for gathering some hard-to-find music way back. Because it runs off users shares, it doesn't have the shorter lifespan of most torrents but it's more manageable than Limewire and those types.
• Sysinternals: Every one of these should come packaged in Windows by default. All the utilities you may want as a Windows power user are here including Process Monitor and Autoruns.
• Utorrent: My favorite bittorrent client to date. They're not kidding about the lightweight and efficient part. Also customizable and fully featured.
• WatchCat: Really old program for a few functions like toggling visibility of windows to hide them from observation. It was great for hiding the omnipresent banner ads in some software through the 90s. I'm sure there are some potential uses for it even today. Still works under Windows 7!
• WinDirStat: Very useful utility builds a graphical table of any drive or directory tree in order to quickly identify consumption.
• Windows Resource Hacker: Can import+export the resources of Windows formats including exe, dll, ocx, etc
• XN Resource Editor: If Resource Hacker isn't up to the job any more, there is Resource Editor.
• XVI32: My preferred hex editor.
• 7zip Theme Manager. I like this one in particular
• DOSBox: fully emulates dos, including sound drivers, mouse, etc.
• Foxit pdf reader: I use this when the adobe one opens too slow. I don't think it supports as much specialised functionality, but when your files are plain pdfs and you don't like waiting then you're good to go. Metamorphose: similar to bulk file changer
• Imgburn: disc recording software, though these aren't as useful as they used to be because of memory sticks being smaller, higher-capacity, and rewritable. Sometimes you need it.
• mediainfo: context menu option to review the media. Shows video track(s), audio track(s), and data like codecs, frame rate, data rate, aspect ratio, audio sample rate, etc. An enthusiast's wet dream, really.
• Superfinder XT: get back the ability to actually do a real filesearch in windows 7 (vista, too?).
• Teracopy: for when you need to copy a lot of files; like 2 GB to 2 TB at a time. Can replace default copy handler, but I usually disable it and use it only for large actions. Performs CRC32 after copy if you tell it to (can make it default in options). Tells you the transfer rate as well.

Email

• Thunderbird: not exactly a secret, but it's free and it's awesome. Set accounts to imap and you're good to go. I have 5 accounts on my thunderbird and it makes checking mail painless.

Graphics

• Microsoft GIF Animator: Classic, no frills tool for creating gifs.
• Paint.NET: an excellent replacement for mspaint. If you can't make a solid and bulletproof argument on why you need photoshop, you can use it in place of photoshop.
• Inkscape: vector graphics editor

Productivity

• Calibre: convert between text types and ebook formats. Notably useful is converting epub or html to mobi.
• PDF Creator: Create watermark-free PDF files. Do they even sell those stupid programs anymore? Plus some programs (like chrome) have built-in save-to-pdf functions. This creates a printer that you can print to, and then save to PDF for whatever else doesn't support it.
• LibreOffice: maybe a bit quirky when compared to office 2003 (which is obviously-heavily-"inspired"-by), but it's free and it does the job.
• Notepad++: just a nice text editor. Best replacement for ol' notepad.exe I have found yet (doesn't mean it's the best, though). Does tabs, highlights brackets, highlights commands, does nesting, etc. It also supports plugins if you want even more than what is built-in.
• GraphCalc: a decent calculator, and tabbed 2D/3D graphing.
• Foxit: Freeware PDF reader as the less annoying alternative to Adobe.
• Programmer's Notepad: My preference for a text editor+Notepad substitute. All the best features like code differentiation formatting, tabbed organization, managing projects.
• Sumatra PDF: Seems to be a popular lightweight reader. Has one .dat file for preferences, doesn't require an installer and supports numerous file formats.

Video & Audio

• Audacity: multi-track audio editor. Supports a ton of filetypes. Very excellent.
• AVI cc changer: In case you need to alter the identifier in video files
• AVI Mux: Utility for managing multiple audio streams in video files. For example, adding a commentary track from an mp3 file to an avi video.
• virtualdub: a way-more-specific-crowd kind of tool, but I'm going to list it. You can get plugins so it supports almost all file types, but it usually works in AVIs. It's great for a few things (stripping sound, uncompressing video, chopping streams, Video->image sequence, and some other stuff).
• CCCP: The Combined Community Codec Pack, which I've found immensely useful for installing on other people's systems so I'm not plagued by requests to troubleshoot+resolve every little codec issue they encounter.
• DVDx: Rips video files from dvd source.
• Exact Audio Copy: Once upon a time CD ripping and encoding wasn't available in every other program. Still seems to be used by many people.
• Gspot: Tool for gathering information on video files and infinitely useful for troubleshooting codec issues
• Handbrake: easy x264 encoding
• Media Player Classic Home Cinema: My own preference for video player, and immensely superior to WMP.
• MP3tag: Probably the best and fully featured tag editor for media files around, far better than Winamp and iTunes.
• Real Alternative: Play .rm files without having to install the worst player ever.
• VLC: media player. Just get it.
• VCD Gear: Various functions for mpeg & vcd formats
• VideoLAN media player: A decent player to install on other people's systems because I still hate getting phone calls over mundane issues like codecs.
• VirtualDub: Great video processing utility for encoding and editing videos.
• Winamp: Still my favorite audio player since the 90s, and has grown to continue supporting everything I need with plugins like ml_ipod and the new Bento interface.

Emulation

• VirtualBox: create virtual machines and run alternate/old/sandboxed operating systems. Good if you don't trust some program. Also good if you want to use linux programs like LaTeX in windows (I found it was much easier to install LaTeX in a virtual machine than it was to get it working in windows a while back). You might need a more-modern cpu (one that supports virtualization) in order for this to work. It also isn't great at win95/win98 (pegs out a CPU at 100% and is laggy as hell).
• Daemon Tools: Even after going commercial they're still the optical drive emulation software of choice as far as I know.
• DeSmuME: Seems to be the only major Nintendo DS emulator in development as of 2012. Not sure why anyone would want it when a NDS+flash card are so cheap though.
• Dolphin: The only solution for Gamecube and Wii, because you haven't enjoyed New SMB until you've played it with a Sony controller.
• DOSBox: DOS emulator for Windows, because Microsoft can't be arsed to provide real backwards compatibility for their own OS legacy.
• ePSXe: Definitive PSX emulator.
• KEGA Fusion: There are quite a few SEGA emulators out there. This one is best.
• Hoxs64: Very faithful Commodore 64 emulator.
• MameUI: Formally Mame32, Windows port of Mame.
• NNNesterJ: Granted NES emulators are as abundant today as Tetris clones. But this one seems to be a little bit better than the others.
• PCSX2: The foremost Playstation 2 emulator has developed enough to become playable for most games. A modern gaming system is absolutely required. Systems with integrated graphics adapters need not apply.
• Project64: N64 emulator
• Red Dragon: If you wanted to emulate VirtualBoy (for some reason)
• ScummVM: PC adventure emulator for just about every known platform.
• SSF: Fully functional emulator for SEGA Saturn. It does include an english language option within the program.
• Stella: Atari 2600
• Visualboy Advance: Emulates the entire line of Gameboy systems.
• x360ce: Emulates the Xbox 360 controller Xinput.
• ZSNES: SNES emulator for Windows.

How to get a Good Night's Sleep

Having trouble sleeping? Here are some things you can try:

1. Go to bed at the same time every night, or as close to the same time as possible.

2. Get up within an hour of the same time every morning, no exceptions except emergencies.

3. When the alarm goes off, get up. No Snooze, no rolling back over, get up now.

4. Stop drinking caffeine at least 6 (8 is even better) before you want to go to sleep.  Same for sugary food and energy drinks.

5. Minimum if 10 minutes not staring at a screen (TV, computer, phone, tablet) before going to bed. The longer the better. Light tricks your eyes into thinking your body should still be awake.

6. Environment is important. Keep it as dark as possible. A small amount of white noise might also help.

7. Try a natural alarm clock. This is an alarm that uses light to wake you up. If you sleep in darkness your body will naturally wake up when it gets light. Condition yourself that dark means sleep and light means awake.

8. If you live in the city and there's a lot of noise, consider ear plugs or acoustical sound dampening foam. Use a fan or a rain or water sound to create some white noise.

9. Counting sheep isn’t about the sheep, it’s about occupying your mind with something routine and repetetive.

10. Stop watching TV in bed, reading in bed, doing work in bed, etc. Your bed is for sleeping, not for working or relaxing. Again, it’s all about a routine. Don’t let your bed become another place for your mind to be occupied.

11. Try meditation. If you’re still having trouble sleeping after all the above, your mind it trying to process something. Let it do so before bed and you’ll drift off to sleepy time when you finally do hit the sheets.

12. Your body has a natural rhythm (called circadian rhythm) that governs many things, sleep being one of them. The most simplistic way of looking at it is you need to get in touch with that rhythm and find the 90 minute cycle that you’re on. Five 90 minute cycles = 7.5 hours. Use these "cycles" to determine sleeping time. So for example I get up at 6:00 every day. Counting backwards that’s either 10:30 or 12:00 that I want to be asleep, so at either 10:00 or 11:30 I start getting ready for bed.

13. If you live with someone and your sleep routine doesn't work together, you're gonna have a bad time. If said partner snores, tosses or turns, etc.,   talk about it and figure out what works.

14. Temperature matters. Typically, a bit cooler works better for sleep. Find what works for you.

15. Experiments with pillows of a different thickness and firmness. Flat or no pillow for stomach sleepers, medium thickness for back sleepers, and thicker for side sleepers.

What Causes Temporary Ringing in one Ear?

Unilateral tinnitus (a ringing in one ear only) that doesn't go away is probably something you should talk to an audiologist about. Occassional ringing in one ear is normal and harmless.

To understand why it happens, you need to know a bit about how the ear turns vibration (from sound) into electrical signals in the brain (that you hear). The mammalian cochlea has two types of sensory hair cell - inner hair cells and outer hair cells - which convert movement into an electrical signal. When a sound arrives at your ear, the pressure fluctuations in our inner ear fluids vibrate a long, spiral trampoline-like structure called the basilar membrane. Movement of this membrane is detected by the inner hair cells (which sit on top of it), and they in turn send signals to the brain via the auditory nerve.

However, the whole structure is suspended in the salty water of the inner ear, which reduces its ability to move in response to sound (if you've ever tried to run in water you'll know that it's more difficult than running in air - there's much more friction due to the viscosity of the water). That's where the outer hair cells come in. Like the inner hair cells, they also detect movement of the basilar membrane (called "mechanoelectrical transduction"), but unlike the inner hair cells they are also capable of vibrating themselves ("electromechanical transduction").

Rather than send lots of signals to the brain, their job is to contract and expand in time with the vibration they detect, thereby cancelling-out the friction. This increases the size of the vibration by a factor of 100-1000 (like being on a swing and kicking your legs at just the right time) and this improves your hearing sensitivity by between 40 - 60 dB, particularly in the high frequencies.

Putting energy back into this vibration is called "positive feedback". In this case, it's actually "saturation feedback" because it's nonlinear - the process amplifies very quiet sounds much more than loud ones. Usually it works pretty well and everybody's happy, but being a biological system, things aren't perfect.

Occasionally the gain (amplification level) of one or more outer hair cells will become a bit too high and the system will burst into spontaneous oscillation. This may be audible to us as a sudden-onset ringing tinnitus in one ear.

And being a biological system, there are various homestatic control mechanisms (negative feedback loops) that exist to fix the problem and get rid of the oscillation. These include various efferent nerves from the brain whose job it is to tell the hair cells and/or auditory nerve to turn it down a bit. It takes them about 30 seconds for this loop to get into gear and send the messages that suppress the ringing, over which time the tinnitus percept slowly fades away.

It often sounds like it's accompanied by a slight reduction in hearing sensitivity (like the background static noise we hear suddenly gets quieter), and a feeling of fullness in that ear, but it's usually back to normal in about a minute.

It's a tightrope really - you want the ear's gain turned up high enough to maximize your hearing, but not so high as to cause spontaneous oscillations. Frankly, it's a tribute to these regulatory mechanisms that it doesn't happen more often.

Guide to Using Herbs in Cooking

Tarragon and chervil are soft herbs, meaning you only use then at the end of cooking, or don't even cook them at all. They are two of the four part "fines herbes". Add chive batons and picked parsley for the complete set. Do not chop them, except for the chives.

Toss fine herbes with salads, haricot verts and other fresh beans, chickpeas, lentils, potatoes, sunchokes, artichokes... the list goes on. If you are going to use them for something served hot, toss the herbs in at the very last moment. If you don't want to buy more herbs, just leave the parsley and chives out, that's just fine.

Tarragon pairs well with assertive flavors, being one itself, so things like artichoke, corn, lentils, citrus, eggs, fennel, mustard and vinegars. Does well with potatoes too. Also, essential for making your own béarnaise/hollandaise sauce, which pairs especially well with artichokes, and of course, eggs.

Chervil is quiet, and is more of a supporting player. Pairs excellently with potatoes, cream based soups, and does well with eggs, fennel and carrots. Consider a vichyssoise, super easy, very cheap, and will both look and taste great with garnishes of picked chervil atop.

Thyme, rosemary and sage. Classic herbs for meat. These are very savory, but can be used for many different preparations. Thyme as rosemary are complimentary, and can be used together to create super flavorful dishes.

Thyme is probably the most useful cooking herb there is. It is piney fresh, but even a few seconds of cooking will release an incredible amount of aroma, similar to rosemary. If you want it to add complexity to a dish, add it early on in the cooking. if you want it an upfront flavor and aroma, add it at the end, right before you bring it to the table. Almost all stews or stocks have thyme as an integral flavoring. Anything roasted, potatoes, tomatoes, vegetarian chowder, beans, carrots, corn, honey, and mushrooms and onions especially.

Try a French Onion and Mushroom soup, replace beef stock with vegetable stock. Caramelize the onions well and brown the mushrooms before adding them. Use some sherry and sherry vinegar, or hard apple cider and cider vinegar, and of course lots of thyme. Don't forget the gruyere and toast!

Rosemary is a heavy-hitter, so go light on her. Use in the same way as thyme, early for melding the flavor and adding complexity, later for in-your-face rosemary. Potatoes, polenta, beans, tomatoes, garlic, lemon, onions, cabbage. Grilled vegetables with a compound butter of rosemary and lemon is an idea. Or polenta with rosemary and Parmesan cheese. Or pan-roasted cauliflower/Brussels sprouts/fennel/parsnips with rosemary, garlic, lemon and white wine with chili flakes. Or a white bean cassoulet along with thyme and sage.

Sage needs to be used later in the cooking process, or it will lose its flavor and aroma. Works well with pasta and nuts, traditionally but not limited to walnuts. Beans, cheese, corn, winter squash, onions and garlic, mushrooms, butter, potatoes, tomatoes. The leaves of sage are good fried in butter and used as a garnish. A classic pairing, try a winter squash soup with fried sage leaves as a garnish.