flowers

It's nice when you randomly look away from your screen and see a spot of pink in the sky.

passata

I've avoided making any sort of "pan cooked egg in tomato sauce"...or rather it's most famous version shakshuka for the longest time because the first couple recipes of it that I came across all prominently feature pepper and I thought I wasn't a fan of pepper.

Then I made these kerala style egg curry, so good omg.

Even better with a giant dollop of yogurt mixed in with the heavily spiced tomato sauce and rice. This recipe also wastes no time, it comes together so perfectly:

• The slow heat from turning on the hob gently toasts the spices (oh yeah I learned how much easier it is to grind toasted spices in a mortar and pestle). 
• Chop onions while spices toast, both tasks finish at about the same time
• Sweat onions while chopping the remaining ingredients, it takes quite a while for me to finely mince ginger and garlic
• Add in ginger and garlic and grind up the spices while those cook
• Add in spices and tomato puree and cook. Not much left to do...drink some water and wash some dishes. 
• Add in eggs and cover to steam. Microwave rice in the meanwhile.
• Assemble & eat :D

Will try with pepper next.

...

This song and this manga is a good pairing.

strike

I've found a treasure chest of baking science: Joe Pastry, bless this man. I'm fully reading the comments section too.

I made a graphical summary of his guide to sugars, which is a category of ingredient I find exceedingly confusing. So many things to keep in mind: acidity, moisture content, sucrose vs glucose, NA vs UK names "orz

Though I'm sure I'll feel equally overwhelmed by the flour section which I'm about to read. Fats was alright, the key difference is mostly saturated vs non-saturated fats and knowing which synthesized fat was made to replace which natural fat.

ladybugs

My (animal crossing) life is complete!

after all you told me I'd be okay

Rejoice! For I finished the first draft of that awful renewables energy assignment yesterday.
It's been a while since I wrote such a long report by myself, was super carried by my team for capstone. But Paul would be proud at how succinct my executive summary is! Capstone also trained my patience to make long appendices (I recall our report body was about 30 pages while just our structural calculation appendix was 60 haha...thanks Ang & Eleanor!) and caption all those tables and charts...and fix all the formatting at least 3 times because an entire appendix would appear in the cross referencing field due to some weird glitch.

...

I'd also like to thank these Martin Garix songs for helping me fill tens of thousands of cells in excel (even if most of it was dragging to copy formulas, it still takes time to fill in 8760 rows of hourly load data twice). I did learn how to make a stacked and clustered column chart in Excel, which is useful knowledge.





and So Far Away which has the embed option disabled :(

slide

Bath can't deal with snow at all... actually no that's more so Atlanta, Bath is just a bit better.

Walking an hour each way to friend's house is not as bad as I imagined it to be, as my reference was that one New York trip where I wandered from lower manhattan to midtown when it was -20. This is no where as near cold, but walking on fresh snow dissipates a lot of energy. I ate until I was absolutely full, but felt fine once I reached home.

glide

Adding sesame seeds is a substantial improvement to cashew brittle, maybe I'll try chia seeds too next time. Salt and chilli pepper are also nice flavour boosters.

There is a need to increase the amount of caramel. I stuck with my original ratio of ⅓ cup mix-in to ¼ cup sugar and it turned out pretty dry. The caramel is also more viscose because of the butter that I added, which does add a lot of richness. Next time I'll probably use a 1:1 ratio of mix-in and sugar, with some additional eye balled amount of sugar syrup to decrease the risk of crystallization (but really because I admit that I'm not that into pancakes so I need to use up the syrup that I bought). I'm not a fan of having to stir the caramel as it melts, my laziness very much prefer making pure dry caramel, but it's easier to add the butter in the beginning than having to carefully drop it in 300˚F molten sugar.

I also feel smug that I realized to use my big non-stick pan as the form.