Cut-Throat's 2017 Resolution Round Up

I have been busy. Accordingly my last quarterly review will be replaced/superseded by the cut-throat annual round up, which starts now.

1. Seize the Day (Off).

So I started this year wanting to make more of my free time. In particular I wanted to plan ahead more so that I could do more interesting stuff with my days off outside of 'whatever strikes me as fun/practical on the day'.

This one has been a mild success, the use of a calendar helped but to be honest phone apps proved more effective. No one checks their calendar anymore, but you check your phone hundreds of times a day. It just makes more sense to organise your life through your phone. However while I have been able to do more exciting/interesting things with my time off, at least some of that success must be attributed to the more stable, predictable and easily planned 9-5 lifestyle that I now lead.

Either way this is just something that I expect to get better at with practise.

2. Learn a Craft.

I wanted to get a more technical grounding in a combat sport; originally I was looking at grappling but quickly switched to Muay Thai. I have trained with two/three different teams since the start of this year and am looking to get back into fighting. The coaching I have received has been some of the best technical and strategy focused coaching I have ever had. I am hugely satisfied with my achievement on this front.

3. Specialise in the Kitchen.

I ended last year after going back to the basics in the kitchen and have spent this year learning Scandinavian and Japanese cooking. They are rather eccentric choices of cuisine but they were deliberately picked for their obscurity. The idea was that by learning about schools of cookery far removed from what I had experienced before, I would be able to expand my knowledge of food much faster than if I had done something more orthodox.

Learning to cook this way has been fun but it has made hunting for ingredients more time consuming; though it is often a pleasant adventure to go rooting around in specialist stores looking for a herb or seaweed that you previously had never even heard of. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly depending on your perspective, I have gotten the most satisfaction out of the development of classic skill sets like stock-making and butchery - despite having actually done comparatively little of them. Next year I'm probably going to focus more on this side of cooking.

Otherwise I feel like I have begun to flesh out my grasp of world cuisine and develop tastes of my own. No doubt there is a long exciting road ahead, and it feels good to have had such a strong start this year.