The 'ugh' list

  1. Lip readers

  2. ‘Righteous’ people calling out Lea Michele

  3. The far-right

  4. Real-estate people on TikTok

  5. ‘Experts’ on TikTok

  6. Under-seasoned food (like this breakfast platter I had recently at Bird on a Wire)

  7. Any kind of vegetable that is 2x its normal price

  8. Fast-fashion

  9. Summer fashion (you don’t need it- what you need is a perfect body)

  10. House of the Dragon (boring, boring, boring)

What's your fantasy?

In the Christopher Nolan film, Inception, there is a scene where Cobb (played by Leo Di Caprio) and his group tour a secret basement filled with sleeping men hooked to IVs and dreaming the equivalent of 40 hours a day.

‘The dream has become their reality’, the watcher says.

A scene from the movie Inception

When I was growing up, reading books had the same effect on me; I’d be in bed reading away for hours or days on end.

I would remember the books I read, but not the time I read them. There is a Christmas that I don’t remember to this day, but I vividly remember the book I read- The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy.

I was made to expect that when I finally ‘socialised’, or ‘got some friends’ or left the one-person island that my mother said I spent so much time in, things would be different. But alas, it wasn’t!

The world was boring! The people in it were as dull as the oatmeal I forced myself to eat every morning years later, in the (vain) hope it would lower my cholesterol levels. Or- it could all be just me. So to this day, I would dive right back to books when I needed a different and better reality.

I have a soft spot for fantasy; if genres were drugs, I would pick it not for the high but for its hallucinatory effect, and the longer the better.

The Chronicles of Narnia were the 1st fantasy books I read when I was in the 6th grade. It was so real to me, I kept inspecting closets for that secret door to another world.

In high school, I plowed through War & Peace and Anna Karenina- hardly fantasies, but to a 14-year old, 19th century Russia seemed exactly that- and I don’t think I finished either. In college- which really didn't get exciting until my last year- I passed the tedium of days reading through Tolkien (LOTR & The Hobbit ). Then it was the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, but I only got as far as the third book. Tried to start Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson with Gardens of the Moon, but couldn't finish it for some reason. I would have gone on and finished the entire Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, but in the era before Kindle, it was hard to find books and they were also expensive- I only finished the 1st four books.

And it also happens that there are some books that are better off seen on screen. I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, but opted to watch the rest of the series on the big screen.

Lately, I discovered Raymund Feist’s Riftwar Trilogy which I finished while I was in Ashburton to visit Doyet and the family. It felt like being at home again in Pangasinan, comfortable with no care in the world; you read, slept and ate with the food magically appearing on the table.

Feist’s world-building of magicians, lords, dragons and sorcerers is familiar, but it’s the conviction in the writing that creates the illusion of being firmly in that reality. A thousand pages fly past like a fast-moving photo carousel and it no longer feels like reading, but living.

I finished the trilogy just as I was heading back to Auckland so I didn’t feel the full weight of that emptiness that almost feels like grief, as if you had just lost someone, when you finish a book that you’ve inhabited so completely.

You just sigh and face this reality with some reluctance.

bake, bake, bake

It’s slightly stressful doing heaps of little things and I had a couple of pastry sheets left over so… the thing with pastry sheets is that you don’t get to use all of them and you chuck the rest into the freezer with the intention of using them, but you never ever do.

So I used up all of them and made more palmiers; this time I made savoury ones stuffed with grated cheddar cheese and sprinkled liberally with paprika. And because they tend to be a bit bland, immediately after bringing them out of the oven, they were doused with a generous sprinkling of chicken salt.

But this is the thing with savoury palmiers; if you don’t brown them, the pale pastry takes in some moisture the next day (even if stored in a container) and would taste like pastry that had been sitting on a table for a day. So lower the temperature when you bake them so the cheese doesn’t burn and allowing the pastry to brown.

I also made chocolate palmiers by mixing cocoa powder and brown sugar- not so successful as the sugar burned too quickly.

And with the one pastry sheet I had left, I made three bacon and egg pies in a muffin tray. Cut to fill the cups and into that goes an egg and as many small strips of (rendered) bacon as you can fill it. Cover with a pastry piece, make vents through it and bake in the oven for like 15 to 20. And don’t forget the egg-wash!

It's because of yoga

I’ve been doing yoga consistently for the last three weeks, so it must be because of it!

I’m been calmer and more contemplative. When I made these Palmiere cookies this morning- something at work pissed me off so I had to step away to bake something yes- I wasn’t rushing it like I normally do.

I took my time assembling the ingredients and fastidiously cleaning up as I went, that I felt I was in one of those Asian ASMR videos. There’s a part in this recipe where you spread the cinnamon sugar all over the pastry with your fingers and the surface glinted like the rose nebula (use caster instead of granular so it would be less sugary) and I thought, life is to short to be pissed off at shit.

If you want the recipe for these cookies, click here

The weirdest thing you ever cooked

Lately, I’ve been on a food funk, craving this and craving that. And the craving is made all the more worse by the fact that the food item in question is hard to find or totally unavailable in New Zealand. Here is a short-list

Hard-to-find
1. caviar
2. fresh shrimp
3. seafood-boil
4. actual lechon
5. Ube ensaymada

Unavailable
1. fresh bangus
2. Lingayen tamales
3. Laduree macarons
4. camote leaves
5. fresh plantain (saba) bananas

On a whim, I went to the supermarket with no clear idea of what I wanted but was wanting something and I ended up buying a tomahawk steak and some watercress. The weather prediction was stormy and cold so I knew I wanted some comfort by way of broth and voila…tomahawk steak (seared first) cooked in a ‘pinapaitan’ broth with Chinese sausage, watercress and sweet corn. It’s a mash-up between a Filipino traditional bulalo and Maori boil-up.

tomahawk steak with broth, sweet corn and watercress on a white restaurant plate

Postcript to that dinner last Friday

We hosted this dinner last Friday for Mary’s friends - women of a certain age - and I started what was turning out to be a really long treatise on friendship when I realised that these women weren’t really my friends, even if we had been sharing what could be one of the better dinners/get-togethers I’ve had with anyone these last couple of years.

But the affection is there, the honesty and the candidness is there, the ease of self is there for which is only possible around people who know and accept you.

And this is the thing with friends, which I have been fortunate enough to have and have had, that the best ones have come into my life by accident; Leila, Chris, Eric..that’s it. And it has been enough, more than enough. God made me self-sufficient, but these people give me happiness and comfort. Remember that scene towards the end in the Netflic movie ‘Don’t Look Up’ when the world starts actually to fall apart?

That’s how I’d like to go if it ever came to that (which is becoming more likely by the day it seems if you read the news) - around a table full of great food with my family and my dearest friends..

Saturday morning (in images)

Early this morning, I was woken up by the cat meowing loudly in the spare bedroom we’ve christened the budoir- a walk-in closet of sorts, the racks now groaning with winter coats and jackets, the floor, three rows deep with shoes. She was clearly looking for something, and without my glasses, I couldn't make anything out on the dark, hairy rug. And then I almost stepped on it, my big toe touching something (still) warm; it was a small wax-eye with that distinct while colouring around its eyes and that dusting of pistachio green on its head, wing-tips, and tail.

It was literally the early bird getting caught by a cat.

Lily has a bell around her neck so it’s either she’s clever and the birds are dumb or the birds are clever, but she’s cleverer. Or she could also be cunning- an adjective that is a step above clever. There are so many ways of looking at it, but does it matter which one is more accurate? Or truer?

It’s too early in the day to mull over these things so you just take a breath and to realise that you need to see the fundamentals; this is the nature of cats, and birds are prey in the hierarchy of things.

The sun’s out (in spite of weather predictions to the contrary) with a nice stiff breeze so you can do the laundry. You woke up early so now you have time to replant the blue cypress that hasn’t been liking its pot. You can work on that presentation due Monday. You can do the pork butt, 3 kilos split into two generous portions, one for Korean barbecue and the other for a pulled-meat recipe. So I did all these all before 9:30am.

Life is a combination of circumstance and the choices you make to work with these and sometimes, you don’t need to be as clever as Lily the cat.

You just have to do it.

Canned goodness

Growing up, the foods that comforted us the most came from a can- Spam, Ma Ling Pork luncheon meat, Philips Sausage and Ligo Sardines. When we had unexpected guests, fruit cocktail (from a can) served with cubed ice was a treat. I had always believed that canned peaches were the most glorious things in the world, and this was further reinforced when I had them, freshly plucked from a tree.

When we were older, there was more variety- Purefoods corned beef (which Matt adores), Turkey Spam, Low-Sodium Spam, canned sisig and my old college standby, Century Spicy Tuna.

When I find myself at an Asian store, I would treat myself to an occasional can; Philips sausage makes for a good omelette and canned sisig saves you the trouble of having to prepare a whole pigs head (or two) to make the real thing.

On New Zealand’s supermarket shelves, there are only a couple of canned meat products that we gravitate to and one specifically, Hellaby’s corned beef, is the best I think; meaty and densely packed, a can is enough to feed four (!!) for breakfast. But for the last couple of years, the price has continually gone up and lately, you almost always never find it at the supermarket.

And then I see this one on the shelves, Countdown’s own corned beef. But at $3.50, why the hell not?

The proof is in the eating, and yes, it’s good.

Twister is on Netflix

I have strange viewing habits. I have a whole bunch of movies that I love, but I don’t watch them again in their entirety. I skip to the (good) parts I want and call it a day. In this day and age of soooo many things to watch and only 24 hours in your day, you only have so many hours to spare so this is actually being smart about it.

One of my favourite films of all time from the 90s - Twister - is available for viewing on Netflix.

Here are my favourite bits from the film- yup, the parts where I skipped to.

Where have you been?

After recovering from Covid, it was straight to work- a show, which was essentially the work of three and then a death and a funeral of someone I had known for years. And there was the drama of that - most of which was not visible on the surface- so there was also the effort of pretending that you didn’t know (nor care, which both look the same).

And then back to work again, a treadmill at full speed. And it’s June- half the year is gone and that familiar rising panic that time is too short.

I mean this is my life which compared to other lives, would probably be inconsequential, normal maybe for some or worse, fortunate.

But it’s mine.

And at the end of the day, we do the best we can.