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)
Breakfast today will make use of leftovers to produce a bean chilli pizza. This’ll work, right?
Update: yeah. This works.😋
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.
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:
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!).
#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.
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…
The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.
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. 😋
After a morning of optimising a nonprofit’s reverse proxy configuration, I feel like I’ve earned my lunch! Four cheese, mushroom and jalapeño quesapizzas, mmm…
For some reason, the breakfast chef assumed that when I asked for two eggs benedict that I might want them on two separate plates. As if I WEREN’T totally planning to scoff them both myself! 😂
This child is eating sausages with one hand while playing a video game about eating sausages with the other.
Is this life-imitating-art or the other way around? Who can possibly say?
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Right in time for International Crisp Sandwich Day (St. Crispin’s Day) tomorrow, I’ve taught myself to enjoy Pickled Onion Monster Munch.
There’s a need for somebody… anybody… to eat Pickled Onion Monster Munch in our household, because we have a bit of an oversupply. In order to reliably get both of the other flavours that people like (Roast Beef and Flamin’ Hot, respectively), we end up buying multipacks that also contain Pickled Onion flavour, and these unwanted extras pile up in the snack cupboard until we happen to have a houseguest that we can palm them off onto.
My entire life, I’ve claimed not to like pickled onion flavour crisps. As a kid, I would only eat salt & vinegar and ready salted flavours, eventually expanding my palate into “meaty” flavours like chicken and roast beef (although never, absolutely never, prawn cocktail). Later, I’d come to also enjoy cheese & onion and variants thereof, and it’s from this that I realise that I’m probably being somewhat irrational.
Because if you think about it: if you want to make a “pickled onion” flavour crisp, what flavouring ingredients would you use? It turns out that most crisp manufacturers use a particular mixture of (a) the ingredient that makes salt & vinegar crisps taste “vinegary” and (b) the ingredient that makes cheese & onion crisps taste “onioney”. So in summary:
Maybe that deliberate and conscious thought process is all I need? Maybe that’s it, and just having gone through the reasoning, I will now like pickled onion crisps!
Conveniently, I have a cupboard in my kitchen containing approximately one billion packets of Pickled Onion Monster Munch. So let’s try it out.
It turns out they’re okay!
They’re not going to dethrone either of the other two flavours of Monster Munch that we routinely restock on, but at least now I’m in a position where I can do something about our oversupply.
And all it took was stopping to think rationally about it. If only everything were so simple.
This morning’s actual breakfast order from the 7-year-old: “A sesame seed bagel with honey, unless there aren’t any sesame seed bagels, in which case a plain bagel with honey on one half and jam on the other half, unless there aren’t any plain bagels, in which case a cinnamon and raisin bagel with JimJams on one half and Biscoff on the other half.”
Some day, this boy will make a great LISP programmer. 😂
Why don’t I like pickled onion crisps?
I like pickled onions. And I imagine that the flavourings used in pickled onion crisps are basically the onion flavouring from cheese & onion and the vinegar flavouring from salt & vinegar, both of which are varieties I like.
This checkin to GC2GR3Z The Brass Bands of MK - Secklow Brass reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve been working in Milton Keynes the tail end of this week while my kids attend a ski camp at the X-scape centre. While eating my lunch today I came out for a walk to find this geocache.
Approaching from the direction of the car park was definitely the right route and I was soon standing at GZ alongside a likely host. I had to search for some time, though, before I found this surprisingly we’ll-concealed cache.
(I was hindered perhaps by my own eagerness to check the hint, which left me searching several feet lower down than the container eventually turned out to be!)
Right, back to work for me! TFTC.
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