Some days are exactly what they are in photos.
Saturdays
Some days are exactly what they are in photos.
Some days are exactly what they are in photos.
Popeyes didn’t open and the cake wasn’t what you expected. But these are not really problems.
It’s still a good day.
A full head of hair is over-rated
A good friend is hard to find
Bacon can kill you
Stick to the truth no matter what
The past is pointless if all you do is look back and remember
Moderation is under-rated
Imagination is king
Kindness should be your baseline behaviour
Loving is so EASY
Hating is so HARD
Hating is not worth your time and energy
When it’s time to let go of something, you’ll know
The last couple of months since going back to the gym, I’ve been feeling hungrier than usual. I had a couple of moments when I felt that condition that Filipinos call ‘nalipasan ng gutom’- you’ve eaten (like your first solid meal of the day at 5pm) but the weakness lingers.
So I did a food diary which I had intended to do for at least a month. I stopped after over a week because every-day (except weekends and special holidays) looked exactly like this:
Morning
Coffee (two espressos with almond milk, artificial sweetener)
An espresso around 10am topped up with water, no sugar + a cookie or two from the office kitchen pantry
Afternoon
Packed lunch (usually a protein and rice)
Watered down espresso after lunch and around 3pm
Evening
Pre-workout drink
Protein and a cup of rice after work-out
Espresso!
A protein shake if I remember it
So yeah, I need to eat a bit more!
I think I’ve told this story before; my mom made this once and then never made it again. I don’t know if I got obsessed over it because it’s a great dessert (it’s not fancy, but it is comfort desert) or that my mother made it only once and had been mysteriously evasive when I asked her why. But it’s now part of my desert rotation (made it last Easter) and it’s one of those things you make a trip to the fridge for at odd hours of the day (and yes, I cradle it in my arms with the fridge door open as I take spoonfuls of it).
My dilemma about this is that the proportions never seem to be right. You either end up with too much of the paste and butter, or too little of them. Ramen I think is the right noodle for it, but it’s never quite satisfying as good quality spaghetti (we use Garofalo). But the addition of protein (shrimp) and some greens (peppery watercress), more than makes up for the seasoning question. Recipe here
I am ashamed to admit that there are some adobo basics that have escaped my attention. I have always wondered whenever I made adobo why it still had this slight sour tang. More ashamed to admit that I think I found the answer watching one of Marjorie Barretto’s YouTube videos- apparently when you add the vinegar, you have to let it evaporate by not putting the lid on. And it worked. My chicken adobo never had that sour tang again and I’ve always added butter to it ever since, thanks again to that video. Butter is the perfect complement to the Kikkoman soy-sauce.
It’s always this dream and variations of it; I’m somewhere which in my dreams is an amalgamation of all the places I’ve been in my life, and I’m trying to get home but I can’t. I get delayed by something or someone. Something doesn't work. I walk and I get lost. I take a car and it doesn’t move. But it’s never clear to me really where home is. In a variation of the dream, I am home (in the Philippines), but I’m still trying to leave, to flee.
And the dream never resolves itself. I wake up and it’s small comfort at least in that moment when you’re half-awake, that you’re in your bed, in the place that feels and smells like home.
Not too many chocolates
An empty gym
Getting to sort your clothes
A nice, sunny day
Great lamb
Being at peace with your choices in life
Choices!
Good for value Korean BBQ
People who stay at home and don’t clog up holiday traffic
Denis Villeneuve
Dune 2
Auckland’s unpredictable weather
Kind strangers at the gym
Filipino crew at McDonald’s
Fifteen years in and I’m still haven’t totally warmed up to the idea of bunnies, chocolate and a deluge of hot-cross buns.
The part that I do like is preparing something nice for Easter Sunday dinner, and (Easter) Monday as well. We’ve always done the usual roast lamb, but this year, I saw a nice Merino lamb oyster shoulder already cooked (sous vide) so I thought, why not do birria tacos? I would’ve gone for beef but inexplicably, it’s hard to find a whole beef chuck roast online.
For dessert, I was thinking of something that involved Biscoff, two tiers and icing, but then thought, I didn’t really want to do something complicated; so ended up with good old Tapioca pudding!
Today, I didn’t bring my work home. Or rather, I forgot the external drive where I usually put all my content work in. Putting stuff that I’m currently doing on the drive allows me to work anywhere where I can obviously plug it in.
But today, I forgot to bring it home and I saunter into the house as if I was seeing and smelling it for the 1st time. I do take a sniff - it’s a small house with a kitchen upstairs and I never cook anything on a regular rotation that would allow the smell to stick around. So I don’t cook fish (too expensive anyway), and we always do Indian and Chinese to-go (what you make at home doesn’t taste the same). I’ve ridden in enough Uber Camrys smelling permanently of Chicken Tikka Masala, and been inside cozy $1.2m Auckland apartments reeking of cabbage and onions to realise, that unpleasant food smells are more offensive than clutter or tacky decor.
Today, there isn’t any discernible smell, not even from the butter-laden shortbread that I made last night on an impulse. But I did see the clutter in the spare bedroom that we -or rather I - converted into a ‘laundry room’ where freshly-laundered clothes are dumped into the bed for sorting, or for ironing later. I’ve started to sort out my sock and underwear drawer; all the ‘small’ sized Calvins are going, and no, I didn’t get fat. I had started doing steep, inclined treadmill runs the last couple of months, and suddenly, I could feel the pinching tightness of the fabric against my groin and my testicles. So now they’re on a pile on the bedroom floor and I’m thinking, what happens to old underwear? Should I take a photo of my buff hamstrings?
I find Lily on the bed and she automatically goes into begging mode. I realise that it’s actually past 5pm which is her feeding time. I feed her half a packet of her prescription food (she has a delicate tummy) and a packet of broth, which is $1.50 for about two tablespoons of a gelatinous liquid and a smidgen of meat or fish. She eats for about five minutes, walks away, and goes up to her tower in a manner that is meant to attract my attention and means, where’s my after-dinner treat? This is what she does every day. This is her routine.
I give her two of the Temptations and then I make myself a double espresso. I get a piece of the shortbread and settle myself down on my desk and wake up the Mac. I open Outlook to check on my emails. This is my routine.
Well, not doing this today. I put the Mac to sleep and now I’m completely and utterly at loss at what to do…
$40K bathroom redos
Coalition government clowns
sugar crashes
people who do the bare minimum
people who think they’re too good to work and feel entitled to welfare
people who think they’re interesting enough to do podcasts
X (Twitter)
people who hate vaccines
China
Roses who hold onto the waning days of summer
Ted Lasso
Supermarket security
9 degree mornings
cold showers
people who put themselves first when it’s actually necessary
Chinese science-fiction
Supermarket made hot-cross buns
Manipulative cats
China
Sorry, I’ve tried, but I think I’d rather do sex work than do physical labour.
We look at the world, and it spurs a strange kind of busyness; but we’re merely reacting thinking we’re doing something productive or substantial. We’re not.
An acquaintance has been messaging me without fail (on WhatsApp) and all I could say were variations of, I’m busy. I’m being truthful though. I’ve been tempted to make something up just to be different, but the messages stopped and it’s been two years.
And stupid me - I WAS TOO BUSY to realise that maybe it was my turn to message back.
Looking forward to April for a bit of a slight break.
Every so often, I would come back to Raymond to reassure myself that even as I don’t even get a foothold into the fiction writing that I did when I was younger, I could still apply the creative rules that characterised his body of work - to life.
(on why his favourites were poems and short-stories) Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on.
A lot of writers have talent. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else.
No (cheap) tricks or gimmicks.
A writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe - in absolute and simple amazement.
It’s officially autumn, but you still get extra hours of daylight up til 8pm which gives you the illusion that 5pm has stretched itself to three hours. So we went to the gym a bit late and getting home, I realised that I had half a chicken steeping in a marinade that would take at least 45 minutes to cook. But it was all I had - or a can of corned beef that I had been saving.
It was supposed to be chicken nasal - the marinade I made, plucked randomly from the internet called for vinegar, lemon grass (I used a powder), lemon, real-sugar sprite, brown sugar, patis, salt and pepper. Then there was a basting of atsuete powder and melted butter.
My only memory of chicken inasal was of course Mang Inasal, and my version - dumped into the air fryer for faster cooking - tasted nothing remotely of that memory. Maybe it should have been grilled over charcoal; maybe it needed real tanglad (lemon grass). Maybe it needed more acidity.
But I didn’t really care. The chicken was tender, the skin crisp and caramelised and the butter-annatto sauce dosed up with chicken salt was perfect with rice.
Buns
We heard on the news that this cafe in our area is closing down because of some housing issue (they’re leasing a space in a historic, council-owned building), but what caught our attention was that they allegedly sell Auckland’s best cinnamon buns.
So of course, I bought some for pick-up the next day because it would be a shame that we’re in the vicinity of a much-praised food item and we haven’t even tried it (FOMO much). We’ve never been to the cafe because we’ve never been cafe-going people unless there was a special occasion, or we were in the grip of craving for chicken and chips at the one, not-so-fancy cafe that we do go to, Hollywood Cafe. And we also hate having to share cafe space (not really spacious) with animals and caterwauling kids, so…
The place was packed- I guess people heard the news so they probably came to see what the fuss was all about. The staff were full-on and there were two queues in opposite directions, leading to the tiny space where you placed your orders.
So it was a good decision to just pick up the buns which we had to wait for just five minutes. I had no idea of how big they were and thought that $48 for six was a standard price. But they were huge and had a loose free-form shape that didn’t look like the compact scrolls we’re familiar with (eg. Cinnabon’s).
But were they Auckland’s best? (I’ve honestly hadn’t had anything else from Auckland anyway). Probably Top 5; my sister’s version is better.
But to be fair, it all comes down to preference really. They were a tad too sweet for me; the glaze I initially thought, was condensed milk (why??). The next day I realised that it was actually cream cheese that probably had (a lot of) sugar added. And strangely, they weren’t cinnamony enough- you didn’t even get that whiff of cinnamon even if they were handed to us still quite warm. But I know some people who would adore all of its gooey, one-note sweetness.
Chicharon
I made binagoongang baboy and I took off the skin to make into chicharon- you don’t waste it when you have it! I realised later that I actually didn’t know how to make it into chicharon. Jong makes a big batch of it in their unpredictable oven but I haven’t gotten to asking how he makes it. I ended up cooking it three ways- frying it first (didn’t quite work not to mention the mess of exploding oil); then dumping it into the air-fryer, before I decided to put it finally in the oven on a baking rack, at low temp for about an hour. It didn’t have a lot of fat, and I ended up with something like a measly 200 grams. But look, it’s a luxury and an indulgence- you don’t need a lot of chicharon in your life.
Sunday steak and fries
I don’t eat a lot of red meat, but when I do, I get something nice like Wagyu. I’ve also perfected the method to cook it which isn’t complicated- fry each side for up to 5 minutes (this is for a 250-gram piece) for medium- rare and let rest for 10 minutes. I did a simple soy and butter gravy, made some skinny fries in the air fryer, and as a veggie side, had crisp, peppery water-cress which I just flash fried in butter and olive-oil (Sam had the beans). Done.
Media jobs
Taylor Swift
Plus-sized, body-positivity influencers who lose weight
Selena Gomez
Alabama, Texas and Florida
Putin
Russia
New Zealand’s coalition government
Blink-182
Kourtney Kardashian
Repeal of New Zealand’s SmokeFree law
Politicians who keep quiet
Unimaginative restaurants
The US Supreme Court
Duterte family
Christopher Luxon
The whole trip took a little over 7 hours. A flight to Christchurch, then a connecting flight to Hokitika and an hour and a half of driving through the interior of the West Coast.
And all the quiet landscapes; empty, brutally beautiful, remote.
I always picture myself driving through these (in a motorcycle of course which is the dream), or having a moment (wading, swimming in the shallows?) at some picturesque stream or river. But in that fantasy, I never stay, I always keep moving.
I’m never one to shy away from solitude, but there has to be something more alluring than quietude for me to consider staying just a little bit longer. But what would though, other than that feeling of wanting to be disconnected from a world, that is increasingly hurtling towards something dark? Can we truly disconnect? Can I really disconnect, me??
I think it’s an illusion to believe we can get away from it all, but after having spent the weekend in this little town, I think that you probably can - here in New Zealand anyway.
There was a time when I over-thought making adobo.
I seared the meat first; cooked the pork and chicken separately; added honey; added mirin; added sesame oil; put in two whole heads of garlic. I watched a lot of stupid YouTube videos that claimed they had the ultimate adobo recipe.
Again, you always reference your memories, of how your dad for example, made it. And the fact is, I never really watched him prepare it. How I thought he made it was most likely something my mom or my sister told me. So you go by taste, making it over and over until you do get it. But I realised that I probably won’t; that it’s like chasing a ghost.
So I’ve made my peace with it and have decided, that I will make it the way I like it.
So Tuesday’s Adobo, is Ryan’s adobo.
Ingredients
-Chicken pieces, drumsticks and breast with skin (about 700 grams total)
-A whole head of garlic
-peppercorns, fresh bay leaf
-butter about 50 grams
-half a cup vinegar
-half a cup Kikkoman soy sauce
-teaspoon of brown sugar
Method
Sear the chicken pieces until brown. Add vinegar, peppercorns and bay leaf and let simmer until it’s almost all evaporated. Add butter and garlic cloves, letting the chicken fry in it for a bit. Add soy sauce and cover. Let simmer in low temperature for about 30 minutes. Uncover and raise the temperature until the sauce thickens.