More Than This

I also don't have much feelings or thoughts about this book. I wasn't into the story at all until the flashbacks started happening, and was honestly more invested in finding out what happened before the main character stepped in the ocean than his current predicaments. That said, the ending is good and sends a clear message, so it's not a bad book either. 

hum

Another song, another week

Yung Shinra · Persona 5 - Beneath The Mask - Rain - LoFi [Prod. Yung Shinra]

tender

I've made Kenji's pan pizza 3 or 4 times before, but this is the most successful yet (from the bread's perspective at least):

My theory on the bread is having fresh yeast and cranking the oven as high as it'll go (unfortunately still only 500F) will get a good rise, while lots of oil on the bottom will get a crispy crust that contrasts with the airy interior.  I would skip the slices of large tomato for topping, it releases too much water. Halved cherry tomatoes are ok as the skin holds all the juices in. 

Overall effort is also quite low, so hopefully pizza will have a regular appearance during meal time. I do recall saying the same thing before, but hopefully it'll ring true this time. 

...

Also made some ice cream sundae on a different day with leftover fruits:

Chopped up some strawberries and cherries and cooked it with just a bit of sugar to make a fruit sauce. I really enjoy the taste of cooked fruits, in this case I think the sour and sweet is in better balance after a brief simmering. And by brief I mean I threw fruits into the pot as I chopped them and turned the heat off once I added all of the fruits in and gave it a good stir. I imagine a little bit of spices would also be great in the sauce. 

Want Not

I found this a really solid book: liked the characters, liked the structure with different PoVs that somewhat converge, liked the ending that is tied up not too loosely or tightly. 

syrup

 I tried making fruit tea and it doesn't taste anywhere near as good as bubble tea shop's wahhh.

...

In other news, my cream puffs are solid now. Creme diplomat really is the way to go.

Religion for Atheists

I read two others books by Alaine de Button many years ago and thought they were pretty meh, but enjoyed this one a lot more. Some of the selected topics were pleasantly surprising to me, namely pessimism and perspective, which are also my favourite concepts in the book. 

Some quotations to remember:

All buildings give their owner the opportunity to recondition visitors’ expectations and lay down rules of conduct specific to them.

Our vulnerability insults our self-reception; we are in pain and at the same time insulted that we could so easily be so.

Religion proposes that the central issue for education is not so much how to counteract ignorance - as secular educators imply - as how we can combat our reluctance to act upon ideas we already fully understood at a theoretical level.

The benefits of neo-religious pessimism are no where more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.
[...]
These religions do recognize our desire to adore passionately. They know our need to believe in others, to worship and to serve them and to find in them perfection which eludes us in ourselves. They simply insist that these objects should be divine rather than human. [...] Faith has the good sense to give us angels to worship and lovers to tolerate.
[...]
Modern secular optimists, on the other hand, with their well-developed sense of entitlement, fail to savour any epiphanies of everyday life as they busy themselves with the construction of earthly paradise.

During moments of frustration and disaster, [Spinoza] recommended the adoption of a cosmic perspective [...] ‘under the aspect of eternity’ sub specie aeternitatus. [...] Spinoza proposed that we use our imaginations to to step outside of ourselves and practise submitting our wills to the laws of the universe, however contrary to our intentions.
[...]
Rather than try to redress our humiliation by insisting on our wronged importance, we should instead endeavour to apprehend and appreciate our essential nothingness.
[...]
Our secular world is lacking in the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place. It surreptitiously invites us to think of the present moment as the summit of history, and the achievement of our fellow humans as the measure of all things - a grandiosity that’s plunges us into a swirl of anxiety and envy.

We are therefore in need of art to help our own neglected hurt, to grasp everything that does not come up in casual conversation and to coax us out of an unproductively isolated relationship with our most despised and awkward qualities.

sun

Making a big bowl of tomato salad is the right way to honour the first big harvest:

Featuring half and half of raw tomato with basil and cooked tomato with garlic & olive oil.

grad

 My mom rightly pointed out that I never leave the house when I visit her, and so have not visited any of the nearby parks. This is finally no longer a true statement. 

We went out for a walk around sunset and there were lots of people out enjoying the last of summer. 

The wet lands are great, should've waited here longer to see the skies light up. 

This is actually looking towards my favourite part of the nearby lakeshore, but my vantage point was too low to capture the cove nicely. This spot will make a dramatic photo on a stormy winter day? There'll be less grass blocking the curve at least.

choux

 My goal is to be proficient at making cream puffs before the end of the month. 

I thought my first attempt had gone really, really wrong when I was piping the dough onto the baking sheet. The dough was extremely wet and could not hold it's shape well. But alas they did spring up in the oven and ended with nice crumb.

I do still think the dough was too wet, it's hard when recipes can't provide an easy description for water content, unlike temperature. Not sure how I'm going to make sure the next iteration is less wet since the dough looks pretty much the same...and by the time I would realize it's too wet it's already too late. I also do hope that a drier dough will result in a taller shape. 

The filling this time was just whipped cream, which also isn't ideal. It squishes out too easily when biting into the puff. Think I'll go with creme diplomat for next time. 

push

 Basil pesto redux:

This time with the first batch of tomatoes from the garden, and lots more almond. Tomato and garlic sweated down in olive oil, with some basil, hard cheese, and almond is the ideal fresh pasta for summertime. 

Also my mom's table is perfect for moodier food shots.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

I finally got over my aversion to reading books on regular screens and started borrowing e-books from the library. It's actually kinda nice reading on my phone screen before bed, it fulfills the stupid desire to look at my phone before bed, but be reading a book rather than scrolling through other stuff. 

I don't really know how I feel about this book. I do like how Reva is a foil for the MC...and that's about all I'm certain of. Some quotations that I like are:

Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness. 

Her obsession with the material world pulled me out of whatever existential wormhole I’d wandered into. 

And that was exactly what I wanted - my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again. 

Did they know that glory was mundane?

pull

I bought a lot of dairy products hoping I'd become proficient at making pate a choux. But first some chocolate cream (with orange caramel sauce and a dollop of greek yogurt to offset the sweetness) and some basil pesto spaghetti:

It's great having free basil (from mom's garden) again. Soon it'll be tomato time!! 

terminal

Another song to repeat during the workday, found via Peachy's playlist:

Bhonstro · POV

I'm happy that the producer also likes Summer Wars. 

carry

It's been a while since I've been super obsessed with a song:

Cloudchord · Cloudchord, Birocratic, Ian Ewing - Twitter Telephone [EDM.COM PREMIERE]

I get major Cowboy Bebop vibes from this, moreso than another song that actually samples Spike's lines. The...horn(?) at the beginning is so similar to how a song from the OST begins, and the rest of this song just has the rest general vibes (especially the tempo?). I wish this is 2-hour long so I can repeat-one it forever (tho I am already doing that). 

baste

Fridge clean out meal of pork chops and potato salad, and always an egg on top: