Stuff that happened

In May I continued to hack away at converting this blog into a Gatsby-powered, headless WordPress site. I ran into many roadblocks along the way (which I’ll write about in a separate post) but I managed to get it to a point where it’s basically 1-to-1 with this site. It’s not quite ready to be launched, but you can see a preview of it here (UPDATE June 9th: site launched! You are now browsing the Gatsby version of the blog 😁).

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Near the end of the month, I helped out my jiu-jitsu teacher Koji with his pop-up Okinawan restaurant at Noren. Koji runs a pop-up restaurant once every few months, and this time around he reached out to me for help.

We had a nice and efficient three-man team going. Koji was responsible for cooking, Raf was our waiter, and I prepped the food and washed the dishes. We started preparing everything at 10 AM and opened the shop at noon. At times it felt like real-life Overcooked, but for the most part, it was smooth sailing.

I had a lot of fun helping out and was really happy to see our patrons enjoying our food. What was cool was that I ended up learning a few tricks on how to cut food from Koji. For example, did you know that there’s an easy way to dice onions? I sure as hell didn’t! 🔪

I’m looking forward to helping at Koji’s next pop-up!

What I played

This month I picked up Cuphead for the Nintendo Switch. I purchased it for PC back when it came out in 2017, but I put it down after rage-quitting one too many times. I decided to get it for the Switch so that I play it without having to boot up my PC.

Cuphead was brutally hard but somehow managed to be fun. I beat it on the regular difficulty in about a week (I spent half of it on that stupid bee boss. I don’t know if I’m enough of a masochist to play through the hard difficulty.

Cuphead was also one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. I’ve always loved the old cartoon aesthetic, so to be able to experience it in an interactive medium was incredible.

I recommend Cuphead to any gamer looking for a challenge. It’s not Celeste-hard, but it’s up there.

What I read

This month I finished reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. In it, Pollan investigates the three main food chains that sustain us today: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer.

What stuck with me most in this book was how much we rely on corn. Corn is an ingredient in almost everything we find at supermarkets and fast food joints. Anything sweet we like to snack on most likely contains corn syrup. Corn is used to feed cow, chicken and even salmon instead of their natural food source such as grass. It was scary to read all of the negative environmental and health impacts of growing and relying on corn.

There were many other parts of the book that made me reflect on the food I eat, including a section on the way animals are treated in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operation) and how “organic” food doesn’t really mean what we think it means. It made me think about where I can get grass-fed, ethically raised meat around Montreal instead of the mystery meat from the supermarket. It also made me want to watch other documentaries on this topic, such as Food, Inc., King Corn, and Eating Animals.