A quesapizza is a quesadilla, but made using pizza ingredients: not just cheese, but also a tomato sauce and maybe some toppings.
A quesapizza-pizza is a pizza… constructed using a quesapizza as its base. Quick to make and pretty delicious, it’s among my go-to working lunches.
The one you see above (and in the YouTube version of this video) is topped with a baked egg and chilli flakes. It might not be
everybody’s idea of a great quesapizza-pizza, but I love mopping up the remainder of the egg yolk with the thick-stuffed cheese and tomato wraps. Mmm!
We’ve been enjoying the latest season of Jet Lag: The Game, which has seen Sam, Ben, and
Adam playing “Snake” across South Korea’s rail network. It’s been interestingly different than their usual games, although the format’s not quite as polished as Hide & Seek or Tag Eur
It, of course.
The Taste Test Buldak roadblock required the Snaker player to do a blindfolded identification of three different noodle flavours.
In any case: after episode 4 and 5 introduced us to Samyang Foods‘ Buldak noodles, JTA
sourced a supply of flavours online and had them shipped to us. Instant ramen’s a convenient and lazy go-to working lunch in our household, and
the Jet Lag boys’ reviews compelled us to give them a go1.
Buldak (불닭) literally means “fire chicken”, and I find myself wondering if the Korean word for domestic chickens
(닭 – usually transliterated as “dak”, “dalg”, or “tak”) might be an onomatopoeic representation of the noise a
chicken makes?2
So for lunch yesterday, while I waited for yet another development environment rebuild to complete, I decided to throw together some
noodles. I went for a packet of the habanero lime flavour, which I padded out with some peas, Quorn3, and a soft-boiled
egg.
There’s no photogenic way to be captured while eating ramen. I promise that this is the least-awful of the snaps I grabbed as I enjoyed my lunch.
It was spicy, for sure: a pleasant, hot, flavourful and aromatic kind of heat. Firey on the tongue, but quick to subside.
Anyway: I guess the lesson here is that if you want me to try your product, you should get it used in a challenge on Jet Lag: The Game.
Footnotes
1 I suppose it’s also possible that I was influenced by K-Pop Demon Hunters, which also features a surprising quantity of Korean instant noodles. Turns out there’s all kinds of
noodle-centric pop culture .
2 Does anybody know enough Korean to research the etymology of the word?
3 I checked the ingredients list and, as I expected, there’s no actual chicken in
these chicken noodles, so my resulting lunch was completely vegetarian.
Shower thought for the morning was: why is cream cheese spread ‘Philadelphia’ called that? Is it from Philadelphia? (My box isn’t, of course: it came from Ireland.)
Nope, it turns out that it was originally invented in New York in the 19th century and named for Philadelphia because Philadelphia, PA was at that point famous for its dairy industry.
Just another bit of parasitic branding leveraging a borrowed association, like the Quaker Oats
guy or the Rolls Razor. Now I’m wondering how many other examples I can find!
Hanging with my team at our meetup in Istanbul, this lunchtime I needed to do some accessibility testing…
(with apologies to anybody who doesn’t know that in user interface design, a “kebab menu” is one of those menu icons with a vertical line of three dots: a vertical
ellipsis)
Ruth bought me a copy of The Adventure Challenge: Couples
Edition, which is… well, it’s basically a book of 50 curious and unusual ideas for date activities. This week, for the first time, we gave it a go.
Each activity is hidden behind a scratch-off panel, and you’re instructed not to scratch them off until you’re committed to following-through with whatever’s on the other side. Only
the title and a few hints around it provide a clue as to what you’ll actually be doing on your date.
As a result, we spent this date night… baking a pie!
The book is written by Americans, but that wasn’t going to stop us from making a savoury pie. Of course, “bake a pie” isn’t much of a challenge by itself, which is why the book
stipulates that:
One partner makes the pie, but is blindfolded. They can’t see what they’re doing.
The other partner guides them through doing so, but without giving verbal instructions (this is an exercise in touch, control, and nonverbal communication).
I was surprised when Ruth offered to be the blindfoldee: I’d figured that with her greater experience of pie-making and my greater experience of doing-what-I’m-told, that’d be the
smarter way around.
We used this recipe for “mini creamy mushroom
pies”. We chose to interpret the brief as permitting pre-prep to be done in accordance with the ingredients list: e.g. because the ingredients list says “1 egg, beaten”, we were
allowed to break and beat the egg first, before blindfolding up.
This was a smart choice (breaking an egg while blindfolded, even under close direction, would probably have been especially stress-inducing!).
I’d do it again but the other way around, honestly, just to experience both sides! #JustSwitchThings
I really enjoyed this experience. It forced us into doing something different on date night (we have developed a bit of a pattern, as folks are wont to do), stretched our
comfort zones, and left us with tasty tasty pies to each afterwards. That’s a win-win-win, in my book.
Plus, communication is sexy, and so anything that makes you practice your coupley-communication-skills is fundamentally hot and therefore a great date night activity.
Our pies may have been wonky-looking, but they were also delicious.
So yeah: we’ll probably be trying some of the other ideas in the book, when the time comes.
Some of the categories are pretty curious, and I’m already wondering what other couples we know that’d be brave enough to join us for the “double date” chapter: four challenges for
which you need a second dyad to hang out with? (I’m, like… 90% sure it’s not going to be swinging. So if we know you and you’d like to volunteer yourselves, go ahead!)
I have A Plan for today. Step #2 involves a deep-dive into Algolia search indexing, ranking, and priority, to understand how one might optimise for a diverse and complex dataset.
So obviously step #1 involves a big ol’ coffee and a sugary breakfast. Here we go…
This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called
frogs-in-the-dip).
It worked out pretty well.
Micro-recipe:
1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it’s hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.
Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?
Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…
Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.
Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I
supposed to be tidying again?
Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.
Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s
fine, by the way!).
Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋
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