The Road to 40 Day 218/365: Reconnecting with the OG’s

We spent Saturday mostly at home, but we were set to meet some old friends for dinner.

It was a bit of a rainy morning, so we didn’t really have the urge to leave the house or do anything. We started binging on a new K-Drama, As You Stood By in Netflix.

We haven’t finished EXchange yet, but I think it has done its duty to clean up our palette in mysteries and stressful stuff, so we’re ready for this short series now.

The ending of each episode was a cliffhanger, so we quickly breezed through six of the eight episodes before Che went to meet her friends.

When Che started working in Coke, she had a couple of batchmates, one of which was Kenneth. Luckily, he turned out to be one of the realest people we’ve ever meet. He’d become one of her closest friends as they both climbed the ranks through different paths. He’s practically Che’s work husband until he moved to a global role and didn’t go to the office as much because he operates in a different timezone.

Through the years, she also met an amazing person in Amanda. It was rare for Che to be friends with someone outside of her work function, but it’s just a testament to the kind of peson Amanda is for Che to trust her so much. Her life experiences and sound judgement have made her like a big sister to us on occasion.

We’ve met plenty and often back then, but their roles have not allowed that to be the case recently. I’m happy for all of them, because they’re doing really well in their respective professional careers, but they’ve been too busy to get some personal time for themselves, much less together.

On this night, Amanda cooked for us in her home.

She said she has almost exclusively cooked Chinese food as of late, and it has been almost a year since she cooked western food. It’s still great, though. Not sure what spices she did with the pork, but it was very flavorful, and she paired it with an interesting sauce.

The chicken, she said, was not roasted enough, but it was cooked well. Vino finished the pasta we put on his plate and enjoyed the meat as well.

As we were eating, Amanda asked if I wanted her to cook lamb. The last time we met, she cooked this incredible lamb rack that didn’t have a lot of that distinct lamb taste. It was cooked so well, I got Che to try some of it.

Amanda has been cooking the whole time we were there, so Che told her not to bother cooking it anymore. She insisted, though, saying she already bought the ingredients, and it was just a matter of cooking it.

It was still really good this time around. I felt like I had the responsibility to eat it all because all the others were already full.

Age wasn’t on our side, as the crew got tired already and decided to call it a night just a little before midnight.

It was a relatively short gathering, but it’s always fun with this bunch. It was a much-needed catch-up as we haven’t really gotten together this long since we came back to Singapore.