Week 69: Not Manchester

A week of cooking and eating, pasta recipes, office visits, leaving drinks, several great TV series, winning at board games, and not being in Manchester.

Posted on by Rowan Manning.
Tagged with FoodGamesTVHolidayWorkBoard GamesLove is BlindKevin Can F**k HimselfOne of Us Is Lying

  • Ravioli, a parmesan crisp, and butternut squash cut into heart shapes

    Charlotte and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s day, but on February 14th we do have Heart-Shaped Food Day because several years ago I jokingly cut a slice of lasagna into a heart shape. This year I tried a bit harder than usual: I made heart-shaped spinach and ricotta ravioli, heart-shaped roasted butternut squash, a heart-shaped parmesan crisp, and a brown butter and sage sauce. I need to work on my presentation but it might be the most delicious thing I’ve ever cooked.

  • After a long time of trying different pasta recipes, the simplest one (of course) seems to have yielded the best dough. It’s just 1 egg per 100g of 00 flour, very easy to remember and 100g is also about right for each portion.

  • Coming from solid last into second recently, I now have a strong lead in My City after playing this week. I feel a lot more energised after work lately and so I actually have the mental capacity for board games.

  • I went into the office twice this week, and it was excellent hanging out with a bunch of the nicest people. There were also a couple of pub trips (Old Change Happy Hour is always a bad idea), one of them being leaving drinks for Mel (😢). Just so good to see everyone though! chee got the goofs and tequila appeared.

  • There’s been a lot of great TV.

    • Love is Blind Season 2 continues to be wild. There has been some top meddling from the producers in the latter half of the series, well done all.

    • We watched all of Kevin Can F**k Himself, I think I loved it? Or maybe I just love Annie Murphy? It’s a dark comedy following a kind of stereotypical sit-com wife, and transitions between bright sit-com style scenes and the more bleak reality behind them.

    • We started watching One of Us Is Lying, 2/8 episodes and enjoying it so far, apart from the classic US trope of 20-30-year-olds-playing-high-school-students.

  • Charlotte and I finally used a gift voucher for Sabor, a fine dining Spanish restaurant we’ve been meaning to go to since before the pandemic. The food was all delicious, my only advice would be to keep the deep-fried items to under half of your selection rather than a solid 80%.

  • We’re not in Manchester, as was our original plan for the weekend. Eunice did a number on the trains, but our hotel and travel were re-bookable. We watched a lot of videos of things blowing around in the wind instead.

  • I’d already declined all my Friday meetings due to being off work, so when I cancelled my holiday I had a completely free day to get some focused work done. Number-of-PRs is a bad metric for productivity, but that doesn’t stop me from being pleased with getting seven of them merged. Soon I’ll stop talking about how nice it is to write code again, promise.

  • Week 69, that’s the sex number. Nice.