thoreauism

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." - Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau certainly got that right. I'm taking baby steps towards my end goal: to become a chef. So I'm about to start (fingers crossed) in the hot kitchen, no pay except meals, just to get some experience. Hopefully I don't lose any thumbs.

That would suck, not having opposable thumbs.

easy peasy japanese-y

This post is kinda overdue, but anyway, here it is.

A few weekends ago my family ate at this Japanese resto by Manila Bay. I don't remember the name of the complex, but it seemed a popular destination--it was brightly lit and attracted a good number of people. You could smell the sea and watch twinkly lights from across the bay.

The bay walk had so much potential, but now it's always crowded and incredibly smelly (because the people who sit on the walls by the sea don't know how to dispose of their trash--all the nooks and crannies among the big rocks have garbage stuffed in them). The sunsets there are the stuff poetry is made of, beautiful enough to rival Boracay sunsets.

Except, yeah, it stinks. And it's noisy because the restaurants along the walk put a bunch of carnival games and dancing girls and...it's really not what you'd want in a romantic walk by the bay.

BUT! The food in this place is still good. It's not exactly in front of Mall of Asia (where aforementioned unpleasantries are) so it's a little more secluded. It's on the second floor of its building, facing the bay so you get a good view over dinner.

This is it. "Tajima."

And this is the view across the bay!

This was the "tiangge" in front of the complex, by the parking lot.

And this interesting looking place is a floating restaurant called Mahi-Mahi that I want to try. It was closed then, but it looks worth a try, if only for the novelty of its place.

Anyway, Tajima. On your table they've got this built in grill so you can cook your own food. They serve great teriyaki beef strips that are sizzling hot and dripping in fat and sauce and just oooghghghghhh sooo yummy with the Japanese rice. Or even the lettuce leaf garnish. Their sushi is fresh and their uni sashimi is to die for. I know most people aren't taken by uni, and I used to be one of them, until the day I had another taste. It wasn't at all fishy, and it was cold and just so fresh tasting. 

You know what else they're good at? Beef sashimi. Raw slices of beautifully marbled Angus beef. I didn't get a photo of it because...well, I was too busy stuffing it into my mouth. It's so refreshing with just a dash of soy sauce. Who'd've thought? 

Raw beef. Ever since that episode with Mr. Bean spitting out his steak tartare and hiding it under his napkin and plate the thought never occurred to me that raw beef might be good. 

Well, it was. 

It's one of my favorite dishes there. If it's not your thing you can just throw it on the grill and watch as the slice begins to sweat and the fat begins to melt and then you can pop it into your mouth like a mini-steak. Now how can that ever be not good???

Be sure to give it a try when you're in the area.

Surprise!!

Friday night The Boyfriend surprised me with a dinner at...

...his house! Cooked by him!

He'd been bragging about how great his steaks are, and apart from that he can't cook much, so he showed off for me by cooking me up a superyummy steak dinner. With squash soup and broccoli and baked potatoes on the side. No occasion, just a regular weekend. He's spontaneous like that. I love my boyfriend!

So, yeah, that's all that was left, pretty much. Practically demolished it. I was sooo full though 'cos I ate broccoli (for once) and lots of the soup (I adore squash soup! With bacon bits!) and the baked potato that I couldn't finish the steak.

I have to say, I'm picky with steak but that was good! Just some regular cut beef that he seasoned some hours before with pepper and salt and it came out so tasty and tender! Pan fried with butter before my very eyes. Rested for a few minutes and voila! Rosy pink steak with a grey corona. The carnivore in me was overjoyed.

The Boyfriend was even thoughtful enough to remember that I really really like frozen iced tea (a.k.a. iced tea slush! I'm a girl of simple joys) and it was a perfect match to the hot, humid weather we were having, so he had some of that too. Finished it all :)

We were both so full by the end of the meal but after sitting around the table for a while just talking in the heavy humidity of a summer's night, we decided we had space for Razon's halo-halo.

I usually don't like halo-halo but I make an exception for Razon's. They've got the most luscious, refreshing evaporated milk slush on top of generous heaps of macapuno and ripe banana chunks, topped with two caramelly sweet  slices of leche flan. Obviously, I'm a fan. It's like halo-halo for non-halo-halo-lovers. It doesn't have all those beans and jellies that usual halo-halos do. It doesn't even have ube! (I don't like ube) This is pure, streamlined goodness.

Hooray!!

I just passed my first interview at Starbucks! Booyeah :) I'ma see you at the Tomas Morato branch, I'll be your friendly barista in black. (Crossing my fingers!)

Kokekokko

Last weekend my family went to Anilao, Batangas and I got so sore from too much fun. I was looking forward to some wakeboarding but what I got instead was an upgrade from the gigantic blue Starboard windsurf board I usually use to a slightly-less-gigantic white sinky wobbly board. No big feat but as a beginner, I appreciated the level-up. And I was beginning to learn to use the harness as well. What happened was that I ended up drifting each time I tried to use it and I had to be saved by kayak.

Arms sore and back burned, I kayaked over 100 meters as many times as I needed saving, and went to play scrabble instead. Lots of it!

My siblings and I are noobs at Scrabble, it's my mum who bought the set and thought we might wanna learn (she beats us big time). Here's a photo of our game one night. It must look pretty lame compared to the words Scrabble fans usually score. We didn't have a dictionary either, so it was pretty much went like "is that really a word?" "yeah." "mama, is that a real word? can we use that?" "mmm, yes." "okay." and we used slang all over the place, Scrabble rules be damned.

On the way home we passed a gas station and I bought myself a pack of strawberry Yan-Yan. For those unfamiliar with Yan-Yan, it's a snack with short, sweet bread sticks and a chocolate or strawberry creamy dip. I hadn't had Yan-Yan in a long time, so it surprised me to see designs toasted into the bread sticks. Designs such as "owl up at night" "bat only in the night" "elephant jumbo" and other weird nonsense (which you can find in the Yan-Yan wikipedia entry).

Elections: check.

Two days ago I stood under the unforgiving sun for almost four hours, waiting my turn to mark the ballot and have my finger stained with indelible ink.

I've found that registering to vote has been more cataclysmic in my life than turning eighteen was, that suddenly I've been thrust into a world that had all sorts of things hidden from the politically inactive citizens (i.e. me last elections).

It's the first time, stupidly and brazenly (although not the first time to be stupid and brazen), that a country has attempted to switch from fully manual to fully automated with zero transition, and entered election period with thousands of glitches "guaranteed" to work smoothly come election day itself.

Didn't happen. Of course not.

So I stood outside for a few hours in a crowd with lines you could barely distinguish, delayed further by the breakdown of our PCOS machine, stressed by the discovery that we would be filling out our ballots and those would merely be watched by Parish Pastoral Council for Responsible Voting personnel (some of whom have admitted to not wanting to be there, not "supposed to have volunteered" at all--scary thought) and processed later on. When I got in I waited another hour to receive my ballot, snapped and fought with my brother out of hungerexhaustionimpatience and sat down to have some people trying to peek what I was marking out.

I had my ballot rejected twice, turned it every which way and had it accepted on the third try, then a nun dabbed a little ink on my finger.

It was like a, "Congratulations, you've just gone through your first ever elections. How does it feel?"

Not light. There was pride involved, but there was a lot of fear, a lot of apprehension, and a lot of expectation for disappointment.

As of now, results haven't come out. My president is winning, but my vice president is neck to neck with his rival.

I voted out of an obligation, not a belief that my vote would make a difference. I wish I were optimistic, but it's so difficult. So many people died just trying to fight for clean elections, to fight for a chance to change the way politics is run. But nothing's changed.

All I have is a little ball of hope, flickering candlelight that everything will right itself. Maybe not in my lifetime, but I'm going to start heading in that direction. So I'll keep voting, keep hoping that having what looks like a dead fingernail for two weeks will be meaningful, eventually.

Lupang hinirang o hinarang, minamahal pa rin kita.

I Wanna Move Out!

I haven't moved out of my house yet and already I'm thinking of stuff I'd wanna have in my new living place, wherever that may be.

photo (c) Giam

 

I'd love to have this expandable dryer out in a balcony or something! Or on the roof. Wherever. Then you can tuck it out of the way when you're enjoying the space and there's nothing to dry.

photo (c) NatureMill

 

This handy dandy indoor composter looks pretty awesome, too. Definitely want that.

At the rate I'm going, I'll have an impossibly long list of stuff and not enough house.

Local Coffee!

A few weeks ago I went up to Baguio with my family. It was unusually warm (for Baguio weather--but still cool by any other Philippine standard) and humid, I actually sweated a little. Still, it was fun, and after a weekend of waiting around at the club veranda for my parents to finish playing golf, I went to the Baguio market for the first time.

Bad ass lolo on a bicycle buying rice in the market! Biking around Baguio. All those hills. Auughh the thought makes my thighs cry. So many people at the market, hustling and bustling and whatever else you might think happens at a market. My mom even hired a little boy to carry around what we bought. Loads of stuff.

Particularly, coffee.

We got twelve kilos of the stuff. TWELVE KILOS. That's a lot of coffee for a family of six. And only my parents really drink a lot of coffee. Well the seven kilos were gifts to other people but still. You could smell the roasted coffee from fifteen meters away.

They sold flavored coffee, but all we got was the darkest roast of Benguet coffee. Benguet is in the Cordillera mountains, somewhere in the middle region of Luzon.

I'm not a big coffee drinker, but they make amazing coffee. Ever since my dad tried Benguet coffee, he stopped buying his imported Arabica and would just get from Baguio instead. It looked like a lot of people felt the same way, 'cos I noticed a lot of people from Manila stocking up at the stall.

With the deliciously dark smell of roasted beans being ground wafting in the air, I couldn't help but hang around and take big, deep breaths. Soooo good. I like the smell of coffee better than I like drinking it.

Apart from the wonderfully smooth taste, it has the added advantage of being local. Maybe I'm generalizing, but it would be good to support our local farmers and buy local coffee, especially since it's so good anyway.

This guy's one goofy walis seller. We bought a bunch of those too. The walis, not the guy.

Cooooookieeee

Mmm. Cookies and milk.

I made these yesterday afternoon, White Chocolate and Cranberry cookies with the dough of the Big Fat Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie. They turned out sweet and long lastingly chewy. Nostalgia called and I had an urge to down them with milk.

Which is odd, considering I never really ate cookies with milk when I was younger. I ate lots of cookies and drank lots of milk but hardly ever together, by way of the Western custom.

I can't wait to move out of my house so I can have cookies and chocolate for breakfast.

How Things Like This Begin

I told my boyfriend, I want to start a blog. I already have half a billion blogs somewhere out there, but I said, I want a blog that other people can read, where I can share stuff I find interesting. Like food. And culture. And fashion. Photography. Traveling. I particularly like that last one. Politics, sometimes. Personal ideologies. Quotes. Films. And this list can go on for as long as I can think of something else I'm fond of. Let's start with poetry.

The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. France has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.