Saba shioyaki at home

I bought some frozen saba (mackerel) fillets and was looking up how to cook it. Of course, the simplest recipe would be grilling it with salt (saba shioyaki). I found this recipe which also explains everything nicely! I pan-grilled the fish instead of using the oven, and I also used Chinese cooking wine instead of sake. So the only steps I followed from the recipe was using alcohol to "clean" the fish and then marinating the fish with salt for 20 minutes. (I even set a timer!)

The result was extremely good, if I may say so myself. :D

The other side actually looks lovely as well...nice and golden.

I am glad that I found the recipe before I took out the fish, because once I opened the packet, the fishy smell was really strong! It would probably have gotten me worried. Every time I touched the fish, the smell was left on my hands...

But then I was seriously impressed by how quickly the smell disappeared when I rubbed on the cooking wine.

Now I wonder whether I can use the fillets for other recipes, though probably any recipe would need the fish to be treated with cooking wine beforehand.

Wooden bars

Can you guess the theme from this photo? 

If you say that you can see nothing but wood, then you are right!

Does this look familiar to you somehow? You may have seen it if you have crawled beneath a table before...

I want this in my car!

I went to Tesco today (I've been using their Order & Collect service, which is pretty good, but I won't go into that now), and while circling around for parking, I saw this!

Gotta get one of these for my car! How about a different Pokemon for each window? :P 

By the way, the window seemed to be rolled down a tiny bit, which is probably why the Pikachu looks lower than it should be.

Awaken the good plots!

I just watched 365: Repeat the Year and said it was great, and on its heels I found another good one! Awaken has awesome twists and turns in its plot, making it an extremely enjoyable watch.

It had its flaws, but it was near perfect. I didn't like the ending very much, but I can accept that they chose to end it that way.

This is one drama that I was extremely glad I did not look much at the cast of characters before watching; knowing which characters are "important" would have taken out some of the mystery.

So what is not that good about it? This of course will reveal some spoilers...

Two of the characters want to go to a remote island, and they had difficulty finding someone who was willing to take them there on a boat. After they get there, they get stranded because they stayed till dark and the boatman had left when they got back to the dock. And then the bad guys are there trying to kill them. Now it was not revealed whether the boatman was made to leave by the bad guys, but that is still fine...it's still plausible. But the problem is that, later another bad guy (a third party) also appears on the island, and then a good guy comes to save the first two. It was so difficult for the first two to reach, and now everyone reaches like it's easily accessible?

In another scene, there are some people with almost-supernatural powers, because they had been injected drugs as children. So one of these guys snaps the handcuffs on his wrist pretty effortlessly, after pretending for quite some time to be powerless. There's another (also supernatural) guy who has either handcuffs or some straps holding his wrists together (I think they were straps...like a belt, but I can't be sure), but somehow he doesn't do it immediately after the first guy; instead he waits quite a bit. What was he waiting for? *eye-roll* (okay...maybe he's not as powerful and needed time to gather his strength...anyway, it made me feel that there was something wrong with the picture)

By the way, the opening scene of the drama looked like something out of a horror movie...I almost thought that it wasn't going to be my type. But after that it quickly shifted to present day events and all the mystery got me hooked :D So I enjoyed it practically from the beginning.

And the supposed genius somehow didn't think of something and needed an old man (a pretty capable one, to be fair...) to come up with an idea. But the interaction was funny (supposed genius says "eh you're pretty smart!"), so I forgive them. :P

Another funny scene that I appreciated: capable old man is also a sniper, even though that was long ago, so he is a bit rusty. He is pulled in to snipe by the supposed genius (I kinda like that nickname, haha), and he shuts one eye, moves his eye to the gunsight, then says "Why can't I see anything? Oh." Then he shuts the other eye instead.

A red city

This week's theme was city.

It's MCO season, I'm not going out to the city!

However, there was a city that came to me...

Repeat the year

365: Repeat The Year is an awesome thriller!

It has a number of flaws here and there, and there is one burning question I am left with at the end, but despite that, I still fully recommend it.

Now, on to some SPOILERS...

The group "resets" back a year at one exact time and place. After the reset, they make different decisions to improve their life, and there are of course some butterfly effects that cause unintended results. But somehow, the things that the previous resetter (aka Lee Shin, who invited them to reset together this time round) knows are unchanged, for example the date and time of death for each of them.

The plot is that Lee Shin had already reset several times in the past (the reason for this is kept "secret" till close to the end, but it was easy to guess that she was resetting for her daughter who dies a bit before the reset), and the other resetters are people who were fated to die that year. But on the previous reset, she saved their lives, and then invited them to reset together. (Why? For "fun" so that reliving the same year wouldn't be boring. But to me, that reason is weak...)

Initially I thought that these people had something to do with her daughter's death, and she was resetting until her daughter manages to live somehow. To me, that would have been a more plausible reason. But somehow it wasn't the reason, and when they reveal the actual person behind the reset, it is Prof Hwang, who had pretended to be one of the invited resetters with the others. And Prof Hwang's reason is exactly that: to have "fun". It makes more sense for him though...because he is an old man who might just want to have fun living...while Lee Shin just wants to spend time with her daughter.

But there is a discrepancy here where Lee Shin suddenly says that she doesn't know how to reset, and only Prof Hwang knows. But earlier there had been a scene where she was driving her car to a cliff to commit suicide, but wakes up in her body a year ago (which is how they reset). Supposedly this was how she discovered how to reset. This scene was not even where she was talking (aka lying) to someone, but just her thoughts. So it did not make sense for her to be talking about something fake. I wonder whether they initially wanted Lee Shin to be the sole mastermind, and then decided to add Prof Hwang to stir things up. They revealed Prof Hwang quite close to the end...

So Lee Shin is protecting Prof Hwang so that he can help her reset after her daughter dies, and suddenly we see that Prof Hwang actually tries to inject Lee Shin's daughter with something. In this reset, Ga Hyeon (female lead character) catches his minion in the act and saves Lee Shin's daughter. They say that Prof Hwang had been killing Lee Shin's daughter every year because he needed her to reset with him. But here's the thing..why would he need her? This part makes no sense. In the end, Prof Hwang even reset by himself...which simply proves that killing Lee Shin's daughter was totally unnecessary. This is my biggest question...the other flaws can probably be explained away by the fact that they were needed to keep the plot going...but this was totally unnecessary! The daughter could have died naturally just as her mother thought! (she had a disease, so it would not be totally "natural", but she didn't need to be killed...)

Another thing that didn't make sense was how the killer still tries to kill the two leads in the end. Prof Hwang had told the killer that he would let him reset together. So all the killer had to do was lie low until the reset date (why it's only one date, I have no idea...) and then he could go back one year and be careful not to get caught. But here he was an escapee and he still risks getting caught by going back to kill them, on exactly the same date as before (which is ridiculous! So many different things have happened, and your revenge date is still the same?). Plus the killer is actually close to Hyeong Ju (the male lead character) and was supposed to not really want to kill him.

But the storyline was still amazing, so I absolutely enjoyed the ride :D

Where's the contrast?

This week's theme was contrast.

I didn't really have a good idea, so that's it! I was thinking of contrasting colours, but the chocolate colour would have been diluted by water, so I left it as powder. (probably I could have put in just a tiny bit of water to make a thick brown paste...) In the end I guess we could also say that the contrast is in liquid vs solid.

Winter in the freezer

They love giving the theme winter every winter! And it is always difficult for me to find a wintry photo in this equatorial weather...

However this round I thought of this!

I have often thought of taking a photo of the frost that forms on my freezer containers. They always look so pretty... 

But every time I take a box out of the freezer, I will hesitate a bit, and the frost will have disappeared by the time I get my camera (if I do go and get my camera). After a while, I gave up on taking such photos.

But in this case, I guess it's a good enough representation of winter!

And what's inside the container? My orange zest! I can't wait for the next time I make crêpes with orange zest... (actually I can't wait for when I eat them...I'm not so thrilled about having to make them :P )

Expired 2020

The photo theme for the last two weeks of 2020 was Looking Back at 2020.

I looked back and found two packets of unused Domino's chilli flakes.

For a long time, I didn't know how to customize the tilt-shift option on my Redmi camera. Initially I thought there was no way of customizing the angle of the parallel tilt-shift. But when taking this photo the other day, I accidentally changed the tilt-shift angle while zooming in and out, and even accidentally shifted the blurry area to the middle of the photo instead. After that, I had to search online on how to fix it. Luckily, I found a Redmi manual (why didn't it come with the phone?!) and figured out how to customize the tilt-shift.

So this photo is a little better in that I managed to shift the focus to the small strip where the date is. Unfortunately I couldn't move the focus area out of the centre of the photo, so the packets are not in the middle of the photo!