inahandbasket

I’ve been making overnight oats in jars for the bloke and me since the start of the year, and have experimented with varying ingredients and quantities. I think I’ve finally found the balance I like best, so I’ve carefully documented this below in case I ever stop making them regularly.

Base layer is 3 medium-sized strawberries, chopped into 1cm pieces. For the bloke, 4 tablespoons of oats, for me, 3 tablespoons.
Shake the jar to mix oats and strawberries. This is especially important if using the jumbo oats (as shown here), otherwise I end up adding too much milk.
Add milk to just below the top layer of oats. For him, whole milk, for me, oat milk.
Add full-fat Greek yoghurt. For him, 3 heaping tablespoons, for me, 2. This helps to moisten the top layer of oats, and also gives a smooth layer between the oats and the crunchy bits at the top.
Add Linwoods Milled Flaxseed, Sunflower, Pumpkin & Chia Seeds & Goji Berries. Two teaspoons for both of us. I used chia seeds on their own for a while, but I found that I didn’t much care for their crunchy texture and tendency to get stuck in my teeth even after soaking them briefly in water to activate their mucilaginous properties. This mixture is much nicer.
Add 3-4 teaspoons of pomegranate seeds. These have the right balance of juice and crunch after the yoghurt layer.
Finish with granola. I prefer the stuff that has freeze-dried strawberries mixed in. For him, 2 tablespoons, for me, one.
Put lids on jars, store in fridge until morning. I find these fill me up sufficiently that I’m rarely hungry before lunch, although I often eat a banana around coffee time just to give myself a little boost.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Quick note that post-by-email and comment-by-email is (sometimes?) failing silently without actually posting right now! I'm pretty sure this is related to last night's shenanigans and will be fixed once Mark can finish the full fix for it, which he's working on, but if you've posted or replied by email in the last 24 hours, fish it out of your sent folder to check if it posted!

EDIT: This should be fixed as of around 7AM EDT! We *believe* everything that was stuck in the plumbing has been sent along to your journal or the comment thread it was meant for; it's definitely not where it was stuck anymore, at least.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

Robby has managed to put in a temporary fix for the site errors and things failing to refresh or not showing up where they should! The permanent fix is going to need Mark's experience, and unfortunately -- seriously, this literally never fails -- Mark has been on an international flight all day, because of course he has. (Never. Fails. He and I are not allowed to both take vacation at once.)

The site will work just fine with the temporary fix in place, things just might be a little slow here and there. We'll keep you updated.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

We're aware of site traffic issues and are working to fix them for the people who are having problems! (The tactics the damn bot traffic uses are endlessly shifting, and they're really good at looking like real traffic, sigh.)

nanila

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I seem to have been a little obsessed with the flowers in our garden this month, which have been blooming spectacularly. Our bank holiday weekend in Norfolk comes out rather well, too, thanks to the weather!

nanila

In an average week, how many nights do you eat home-cooked dinners?

7 out of 7, unless I’m on travel. We rarely eat in restaurants, not least because it’s fiendishly expensive for four people compared to preparing our own food.
Do you plan your meals out in advance, or just wing it?

Usually there is a loose plan at the start of the week, because we have to plan for nights the children have activities (most weeknights) and / or when one of the adults will not be there.
How many nights per week do you eat out or order food delivered?

If you average it over a month, 0.25 nights per week for eating out, 0 nights per week for food delivery. We live in a rural area so very few places deliver to us. Also, only one of our children likes Indian or Chinese takeaway; the other one won’t touch it, so it feels pretty pointless when you’re still going to end up preparing at least one meal.
Do you keep a stock of nonperishable foods from which you could whip up a meal or two if you needed to?

Oh yes. We have all the pasta shapes and all the tinned goods.
Have you ever tried preparing meals for the week all at once, say, on the weekend?

See the pinned post at the top of my journal. I don’t do this every week, but when I know the bloke is going to be away, all the meals get slow-cooked the weekend prior.

My slow cooker is hands-down my favourite electrically powered kitchen device*, followed closely by the KitchenAid stand mixer and now the Ninja Creami.

* Kettle, toaster and microwave excluded from this hierarchy as their presence is not contingent upon whether or not I like them.

[I have not been around here much. I apologise. I have been disinclined to write since Comet's death, but I'm starting to come out the other side of that period of silent grieving now.]

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

It's been a while since we've done a full code push rather than just hotfixes for bugs, so we are well overdue! Depending on availability, we're aiming to do one sometime soon; we'll let you know specifics once we've worked out good timing for everyone who needs to be available.

However! The reason it's been so long is we kept trying to get some of the stuff that's pending to "really finished" instead of just "mostly finished", and then we once again looked around and went "oh no, this is a really big code push with a lot of changes". Those make us nervous, because while we do a lot of testing ourselves, y'all are really creative in how you use the site and we inevitably find a bunch of edge cases when we let you loose on new code with your real-world data!

So, if folks have some spare time in the next few days, it would be a huge help if you could spend half an hour or so using the site the same way you normally do but with the "Site-Wide Canary" beta features flag turned on. Canary mode is a sort of "live testing" mode: it's your real data, but running the most up-to-date code.

Canary mode always does have a few glitches -- there may be missing text strings or errors about missing database properties, which is a limitation of how we run it. We don't need to know about those, but anything else weird that you run into, leave a comment with what you were trying to do and the error message you got.

I'll repeat that the "here be dragons" caution that's on the beta features page: some things may be broken, so don't use it for when you're doing something important. But a few more eyeballs on it before the push will help the push go more smoothly for everyone.

For folks who want to concentrate on what's changing, we haven't finished the second code tour of what's going to be in this push, but the ffirst one has a good chunk of what's going to be going live. (We'll get the second half done ASAP!)

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1SE for May 2026

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Testing needed in advance of code push!

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