Weeknotes 268

Last Sunday I cocked up my evening batch cook so comprehensively that I thought I was going to have to throw it away. In the end it did produce something edible, albeit far more portions than I’d intended. So I’ve been eating dal for lunch & dinner all week which is delicious but does get a bit samey.

Note to future self: as the recipe says, drain the tomatoes, otherwise when you triple the quantities you’ll end up with a huge pot of sloppy liquid that’ll need a lot of additional lentils to soak it up, and then you’ll have made fifteen portions by mistake, and that’ll cause new problems.

Also, I assume I’m the only person in the world who didn’t already know that Kashmiri chilli powder is importantly different from normal chilli powder. I almost used so much of the latter that the resulting meal would’ve been inedibly hot, only to rescue it at the last moment when a tiny voice in my head said “that looks like way too much chilli powder”.

I accept I might not be a naturally talented cook.

Incidentally, Anna Jones’ website is good now and has a nicely organised database of recipes. Slightly idiosyncratic though; for example, I dunno why the reliably excellent cassoulet is tagged as neither vegan, bread nor tomato. Maybe older recipes have spottier metadata.

Gym: three times. I’m still enjoying Children of Time and preemptively bought Children of Ruin & Children of Memory to make sure I don’t run out of material. It continues to be residually thrilling that I can leave my phone at home and listen to books from my watch.

At this point I’m confident I’ll accidentally make it to the end of February without drinking any booze.

Good Severance this week! Four episodes left to tie some things up.

Still nothing from Club Mexicana about their inexplicable Shoreditch closure, which is kind of shitty. They’re teasing something new, so maybe they’re going to reopen it. I’d like to storm off in an entitled huff but I’ll be happy if the saga ends well, even though I definitely don’t approve of this way of communicating with your customers.

I didn’t buy Lost Records: Bloom & Rage yet, partly because Life is Strange: Double Exposure is giving me a crisis of faith about whether I even like this style of narrative adventure game in the first place. Maybe it just depends on how compelling the story and characters are, which for Double Exposure is “not very”.

I’m still chipping away at Double Exposure in the hope it’ll start to converge on something interesting. Right now it’s strayed too far into being weird & confusing and I don’t feel invested in what happens to anyone.

I tried to replay Uncharted: The Lost Legacy but it made me feel a bit queasy after half an hour. Ugh, is my video game motion sickness getting worse?