Author: brandon
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The Placemat Era
September 2018, Acton, and a blue plate resting on a placemat with enough pattern to suggest someone in this household was, at some point, trying to make dinner presentation a whole thing. The wings themselves look like a solid oven batch — good color, no obvious burnt bits, the placemat doing its part to elevate…
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Southborough, Take One
The first of what turns out to be a small trilogy of Southborough wing outings, this one from a low-key Memorial Day weekend in 2018. Wings, celery, a black ramekin of ranch, a white plate — the platonic ideal of “fine, unremarkable, would order again.” No restaurant name survives in the photo, which by this…
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The Plain One That Almost Didn’t Survive the Archive
A round, lightly-topped pizza with a browned edge, preserved only as a small, low-resolution thumbnail — April 2018’s entry didn’t make it through the years in full quality, but the shape of the story is still there: another pizza, another Thursday, another photo taken mostly out of habit by that point. By April 2018 this…
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The Well-Done, No-Regrets Rectangle
A large, oblong pizza with a seriously charred crust — this one pushed further into “well-done” territory than almost anything else in the archive. Late March 2018, and someone clearly wasn’t afraid of a dark crust that week. Some people call that burnt. This household apparently calls it flavor. I’ll invent that the oven ran…
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The Skillet Pizza Nobody Photographed Well
A round pizza in a metal pan or skillet, photographed in low light with what survives in the archive as a fairly low-resolution shot — March 2018, and this one clearly wasn’t the priority documentation-wise, but it still earned a photo, so here it is. I’ll invent that this was a cast-iron-skillet pizza experiment, deep-dish…
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Basil, Tomato, and a Margherita Moment
Fresh basil leaves scattered across a red-sauce pizza, photographed just eleven days after the white pizza above — January 2018 was apparently a two-pizza-in-two-weeks kind of month. This one leans margherita, and the basil placement looks almost deliberate, which for this archive counts as high styling effort. Invented detail: I’ll guess the basil came from…
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White Pizza on Dark Parchment
Ricotta dollops scattered across a round white pizza, photographed on dark parchment paper in January 2018 — a full seven years after the archive’s first pizza photo, and the white-pizza-with-ricotta formula is clearly still in the regular rotation. Some combinations just work and stay in the lineup. Recipe inspiration for anyone inspired to start their…
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Cambridge, Round Two: Still No Idea Where
Nine months after the Harvard Square incident, I was back in Cambridge, apparently unable to learn from my own poor documentation habits. This time: a white plate, a respectable pile of wings, and a blue ramekin of ranch that suggests at least a mid-tier establishment. Still no restaurant name anywhere in frame. I was clearly…
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A Perfectly Unremarkable Tuesday
No occasion, no experiment, no new sauce — just a plain white plate of wings on what the timestamp insists was a Tuesday in April 2017. Some of the best home cooking happens exactly like this: not for anyone, not for content, just because it was Tuesday and wings sounded right. Recipe inspiration: Inspired Taste’s…
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Wings at the Desk: A Working Lunch, Sort Of
There’s a keyboard in this photo, which tells you everything about the state of my work-life balance in March 2017. Somewhere between emails, I apparently decided the responsible move was a plate of home-cooked wings eaten at my desk, mid-afternoon, no plans to stop working. Efficient, if not exactly ergonomic. I’d like to say I’ve…