Daniel J Isom

I have a lot of food opinions and I also happen to love top 10 lists. More often than not I scoff at the choices on those lists but they are fun to read all the same. So I plan on doing a series of top 10 lists that are all about what *I* like. You likely won't agree with my choices as the definitive best in a category but since it's all about my taste, you don't have to.

I brought leftover pizza that I made last night for lunch today and on this day last year, I posted on Facebook that you should be making your own...from scratch. Yes, even the dough. So I thought this would be an interesting topic for me to talk about and to share some of my limited wisdom.

It's the end of the year and time for an update on how well I did on my two (actually 6) goals. Goal #1: Improve Overall Health I think I did everything I could to try and not get this one done in the second half of the year. Well, I did try and was successful with two out of the three, but the first one was really my main goal and I couldn't stay focused on making it happen. Get Below 25% Body Fat From our trip in July through Christmas, exercise was sporadic at best as were my eating habits. I got back on the wagon at the end of December and have made a very dedicated effort with calorie tracking while fitting in some exercise and I was able to get down to 26.9% for the year. Obviously I didn't get to my goal, but having pizza making as my other main goal didn't do me any favors. For next year, I'm focusing on this single year long goal. Average Sleep Score Above 85 I know what I need to do to get a consistent sleep score above 85 for a given month. The question i...

  I bit off a bit more than I could chew in 2021, but did still had some great successes across the six goals I set for myself. For 2022, I'm scaling back and focusing on just two goals in 2022 because they're more involved and important to my health and happiness. There are some other personal and hobby things that I want to put more time towards, but don't want to set goals for them. Not having specific goals for those eliminates the obligation to get them done. After the last two years, I want to make 2022 a little less stressful. That being said, each of my 2022 goals have multiple objectives within them that need to be completed in order to meet the overall goal. Goal #1: Improve Overall Health Health comes first. I've written often about my health and have set all sorts of health related goals over the years. The thing that turned everything around for me was making exercise and healthier eating a part of my daily routine. That doesn't mean I always eat clean...

August always flies by because the school year is about to begin and we spent another week in North Carolina for the second straight summer. The boys and I played a 18 hole disc golf course while in NC. It was the first time we went out together and we had a blast. Of course it wasn't without some drama as they both threw a disc directly into water on one hole, thankfully we were able to retrieve them. There was a slow down on the amount of board games I played, but as you'll see in that segment that I'm still crushing it for the year. Right now I'm debating on pulling back from in person gaming some as work is about to get really busy for me. I'll probably have more to say about that in the coming months. All in all it was a good month, but I'm happy to get back into our routine this month.  Blah Blog Log Just the one post for August. July 2024 Wrap-Up  - A trip to NY, back to Rockville, MD for work, and a lot of gaming. Bored  Board Games In August, I played 2...

This is going to be a long post that's personal and is probably longer than anyone cares to read. If you just want to know what the big announcement is, scroll down and read everything after the graphic. With that part out of the way, let's go back 10 years to when Christine and I first moved to Delaware. I was still searching for a job after arriving here, but had two interviews with a credit union that resulted in a formal offer. Having just left over six years of banking in NY, I was more than qualified. The position would be a bit of a step back both professionally and monetarily. I recently got the reminder about this on Facebook where I called myself a bad person for really not wanting the job. I felt I should have been thankful for the opportunity but I didn't like the work and really didn't want to keep doing it. Ultimately, I declined the offer and decided to keep looking elsewhere. Following the advice of family and friends, I took the opportunity to try out s...

Pizza is definitely one of my favorite foods and probably one of the things I've made the most. I went from cooking it on a pan to cooking it directly on a stone. I make my own dough and often make my own sauce as well. I've written about pizza a few different times on this site because it's one of the few perfect foods. This recipe was one of the ones that encouraged me to buy the book. I followed the recipe exactly the first time around and it was pretty good, but I didn't love my pictures and wanted to try the actual grilling process again. It certainly takes some practice when using dough on grill grates. For my second attempt, I was making pizza only for myself because Christine didn't love the crust the first time around.  Unlike traditional pizza cooking, the sauce and toppings get added after the crust gets cooked on one side before being flipped over off of the direct heat. Working with an oiled dough, you stretch it out to a circle or oval, carefully drop...

    The new school year brought a whole new set of headaches, as we navigated virtually learning. It was an overall better month than August for blog related matters, but not by much. 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month Shared about Cribbage with Grandpas , a mobile game that's very important to me. Wrote a haiku when I couldn't come up with anything else to write about. 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge We got our second play of Takenoko and our first play of Legendary Encounters: The X-Files Deck Building Game in with Shawn and Kelly. That leaves us with 7 total plays left, so we'll need to play 4 games a month for the final two months of the year. It's not looking good folks. However, we do have a lot of time off because of holidays, and with no expected travel, we might just get there. Trying to keep it positive. 3)  Bake at least 2 different baked goods each month October was good month for pizza and other bread type items. Expect more sw...

March was certainly a chaotic month for us. Christine and the kids were home for the whole month because the schools closed and then moved to distance learning. Working for the Division of Public Health, I've been rather busy dealing with COVID-19 related matters on top of my normal work. Due to the madness, it was a really great month for one of these, okay for one, and a disaster for another. 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month My picture of the loaves of Banana Bread that I made blew up on Twitter. Twenty One Pilots released an anthem for our quarantine. 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge I was kind of hoping that April was going to bring some extra game playing, but it was difficult with everyone home all of the time. For the second month out of the first four, we didn't play any of our challenge games. The only gaming I did was with the kids. They've really gotten into War and Go Fish lately. I was also able to play a few games of, Drop It,...

   We're halfway through the year and I'm doing pretty well with these goals. I could definitely be doing a lot better with some of them, but I'm not stressing about it too much. It's been a much more relaxed year so far, goals wise, as I'm not feeling overwhelmed with just too much to try and complete before the end of the year. Goal #1: Improve Overall Health Of the two main goals, this is the one that I could be doing better with for sure. Seeing some improvements across the board, but need to be more disciplined if I'm going to get there. Get Below 25% Body Fat I'm getting pretty close to completing this one, currently sitting under 27% according to my new home scale. My Amazon Halo body scan has me a bit higher, but being diligent with calorie and macros tracking, I'm down from the beginning of the year. Finding "healthier" snacks has helped with this goal a lot. However, I need to cut back on snacking from our overloaded pantry of goodies...

   The new school year brought a whole new set of headaches, as we navigated virtually learning. It was an overall better month than August for blog related matters, but not by much. 1)  Write at least 2 blog posts each month We went to the Jurassic Quest exhibit in Philadelphia. Shared my new favorite thing to watch: T90Official's Age of Empires II casts. 2)  Complete the 10 x 2 Board Game Challenge We got the first of two plays needed for Gold West in with Shawn and Kelly. I really like this game a lot, but Christine isn't really a fan. We now need to average 3 plays a month for the rest of the year. I've moved beyond concerned that we might not finish this challenge to seeing it as doubtful.   3)  Bake at least 2 different baked goods each month It took some time before baking commenced in September, but as the temperatures dropped I got more in the mood. I started the month off just making a couple loaves of rustic sourdough. They came out pretty...

Blokus - "Roll and Write" The game design bug bit me last month. I hadn't had any desire to design a game in quite a while, until I had an idea for a "roll and write" version of one of my favorite games, Blokus. I thought just writing out the idea would get it out of my head, but these types of games are so easy to prototype that I ended up doing that when I couldn't stop thinking about it. While the design doesn't have any dice to roll, there is a deck of cards that players use. The deck has 21 cards, each showing one of the pieces a player normally has playing Blokus. As cards are revealed, each player chooses any of the four colors and colors in that piece somewhere on their sheet. I guess it's more of a "flip and write", but games that use this mechanic are still classified under roll and write. The two major differences between this design and the original, other than there being no physical pieces or board, are: each player is wo...

I was planning on making a completely different dish for dinner this week, but the preserved lemon I need is nowhere to be found in my area supermarkets. That's a story for that recipe's blog post. This salad recipe was going to be my lunches for the week, but I thought it would be a nice side to go with pizza since I was making the dough anyway. Everything about this recipe breaks the rules of a traditional Caesar salad. Sure, the romaine hearts are there, as are the anchovy, garlic, and Worcestershire sauce. However, that's when things take a turn towards the bizarre. Lemon gets replaced by red wine vinegar and hot sauce. The Parmesan cheese gets swapped out for Pecorino Romano. Egg and olive oil are replaced with Hellman's mayonnaise. That last one isn't so crazy and actually allows you to keep in longer in the fridge. Like most dressings, it's incredibly easy to make. All you do is add the ingredients to a blender and then puree until it's s...

September was a great month! Settling into new routines and schedules got me back on track. I'm now 3/4 of the way through the year and looking to finish strong. 1) Bake more bread from scratch I've got a solid handle on the master recipe from the cookbook I've been using for the free form white loaves, so in September I wanted to try something new. I've never worked with whole wheat flour before I got a bag and started the month making light wheat loaves. I little whole wheat in our diets is better than nothing. Rather than doing free form, I busted out the loaf pans to see what results I could get. The first loaf I did was 1.5 pounds of dough that I formed into a oval shape. Then let rise a bit in the pan. It got some good rise but when it expanded to the sides of the pan, the top blew out. I still tasted pretty good, although I think it needed another 5 to 10 minutes in the oven. The crumb on the ends had some nice hole structure but the middle was a tad ten...