Learning Myself Classical French Cuisine

Last night, I came upon this book in a book store. I wanted to buy it, unfortunately, my pockets run shallow. Instead, I asked the lady to open it for me. The first few pages were about sanitation, which piqued my interest (Patrick has given me sanitation/cross-contamination tips in the past). But what really made me shiver inside like a little school girl was the page illustrating the different cuts of vegetable. Pare, jardiniere, julienne, and brunoise. “Come here, Sophie, quick!” I told my best friend. “Here is the KILIG page!” And we chortled … though she might’ve chortled more AT me.

In any case, I was determined to learn myself classical French techniques. This was of course, further intensified by our dinner at Momo — lemon cod with walnuts and hollandaise over spinach cream risotto and roasted vegetables. YUM!

So … some reading and YouTube videos after, here I am. Made myself croque monsieur for lunch for the very first time. Sauteed spinach and garlic on the side to make it vaguely healthy. Then tonight, I made dill-spiced pork chops while braising chicken legs in mirepoix.

The chicken is done now. The broth is DELICIOUS! And I am ever so excited at my work. I strained out the mirepoix because I wanted my dish to be clean, uncluttered. Am proceeding to chill my most recent creation so I can skim off the excess grease.

I remember judging an Iron Chef wannabe competition and eating the most fabulous tortellini in chicken broth. This tastes like that (although I wish I had white wine in the stuff). There is tortellini in the grocery (I saw it this afternoon), but I am scared that it’ll suck. So I’ll have to figure out how to complete the dish some other way tomorrow.

Just wanted to say I cooked some good things today. And ate some of them, too.

Notes on Moving

When I moved out of my mother’s house to live on my own nearly three years ago, I didn’t really know what I was doing or how I was going to do it. But I knew that I was going to DO IT. There was no question about it.

I remember Papa telling me after graduation, “It’s better to know where you want to go and not know how to get there than knowing how but not knowing where.” Badly paraphrased, I’m sorry. But that was the idea. I kept those words in my heart the whole time and just bent my neck and just did it.

Today, I find myself in a similar situation. It’s moving time again, but this time, no more subsidies from my Stepfather. I am moving in with friends and this is the first time I’ll be in a paying-housemate situation. I am nervous-scared about it, but more excited.

The truth is, I don’t have that much to my name. My salary has only risen by five grand since I first started working, and boy, that really isn’t much. However, I have the support of my sister — in more ways than one — and I have learned a tremendous amount of things in the last three years that I’ve lived away from home.

When Bajoy and I were looking for an apartment, it was really slim pickings. I asked my sister what strategy I should have when looking for a place. “Ate, should I feel excited about a certain apartment or just be ok with what I think is liveable?” She said it should feel right.

This apartment feels right. I cannot think of any other place I would like to live. And so even if paying the rent means I’ll really have to tighten my belt, and there’s still this 3rd housemate situation to sort out, I am really not letting go of that apartment as long as I can help it.

I don’t pray too often (but in my defense, I can say that I have always been as kind and decent a person I can be), but these days, I’ve really, really been praying.

Lord, please, this is what I want.

Just caught a glimpse of the plague

You know, the Biblical kind?

Was minding my own bee’s wax, surfin’ the Internet at my dining table, when suddenly there was the sound of falling rain.

“O, Ya! Umuulan!” I told my Yaya who was chillin’ in my apartment. But I looked up at my dining room light, and it wasn’t rain … It was A MILLION insects flying and slapping themselves on to the lampshade!

/Freaking out ensues.

We had to get a few basins and dishes half-filled with water and lay them on the floor.

“Turn off the lights! Light candles!”

I shooed them flying bugs to the garage with the giant envelope that held my fugly college graduation picture.

/Slap, slap. Fan, fan the bugs past the screen door to the garage!

Set a candle and a dish of water here in the garage (where I am currently typing) and plonked another candle in the middle of a basin of water by the front door.

Schadenfreude: the sound of insects toasting; their wings hissing as they hit the flame, then an imaginary thud to the floor or splash into my little water trap.

Please don’t report me to PETA or anything or get all Gandhi on me. I really freaked out (without screaming) as the bugs flung themselves at me as I led them out with a candle. I felt a little like the Candyman! Swearz.

I am calming down now, sitting in my garage on my rattan love seat, typing. I look like a lady who didn’t pay her electric bill! :O

“Welcome, Easter” or “Welcome / Easter” Party

<3

Happy.

Happily reconnected with old friends in a house very special to me. J’s house had been, ever since I met him, a home to me. It had always been filled with love, friendship, safety … and the occasional bo0ze and dro0gz.

G was also there. And we talked and joked around just like old times. At a pause in our conversation, I couldn’t then find the words, but they came to me when I was driving home — for the first time, I saw him as G, my friend and not G, my ex. At once a beautiful thing to find friendship again, one that I had missed, but also, to feel a sort of liberation … that will, I hope, only serve to make a better friendship.

Cx then treated me out to (shredded) tapsilog near her house. Yes, a very rare after-party!

Happiness.

Happy Easter!

Happy re-birthday, Jesus! (Hehehe.)

An Excerpt from John Santos’ Dekalogo Exhibit Notes

Mabini’s 9th commandment speaks of Otherness – its beauty that is at once an invitation to friendship and a threat. It is a relationship, fraught with tension…

Two Mabinis in a staring duel. One is visible, sitting in plain view, a halo around him; the other, behind a closed door fixed with a warning, “No trespassing.” Where is the line to be drawn between the love for one’s neighbor, and the love for one’s self?

- – -

Excuse me, but may I just gloat?

I love the painting I wrote this for and I also happen to love what I wrote … Maybe you can say the work was really inspirational.

So happy.

Catch the original works at UP Vargas Museum, the whole month of May! Opening May the 1st, 2010 at 4pm. Yeah!

Am Terrified,

To tell you the truth.

I’m moving out (again). And I’m terrified that

1) my prospective roommate will not move in with me for one reason or other and that

2) I might have to live in a hole.

I am having trouble sleeping.

The beginnings of forgiveness

This Monday has been unproductive should I measure it by what I should have today accomplished — the five overdue write ups of the artists’ works participating in our upcoming exhibit.

On the other hand, I have been reading, reading, and watching things about art, trying to learn me some art theory/art criticism and what not.

Letting the mouse take me wherever I need to go, I jump from one artist to another, from one painting to another … and I remember how, “Yes, I saw that … and that …” because my mother took me to the Louvre, and all the museums we could get tickets for when we lived in Europe.

For this, I am grateful and perhaps I can begin to forgive her for the many things I have been angry at her about … there are some things that she did, in fact, do right.

A Poem Before Bed

Power

     by Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

A Few Lines on Writing

At lunch today, my friends Ira and Andy swooned, “I realize … I love teaching!”

I have never taught professionally. But tonight, as work is piling up and I am trying desperately to do damage control … “I realize … I love writing.”

It is a struggle. But a loving struggle. And I realize that I would not love it and enjoy it this much if it weren’t.

Dinner Tonight Was Delicious

In an effort to conserve money (to pay off my credit cards) and eat myself thin and healthy, I have been cooking my own meals again this week. I used to always cook my own meals, however, laziness had been getting the better of me.

When you’re training for a run and trying to just be fit, eating out just really isn’t the way to do it.

So on the way home today, I did my grocery shopping. Something stewed in beer was what I wanted and I was hoping to get a nice new, dark beer — like Chimay which I’ve never tried. Unfortunately, no Chimay there. A nice, dark German beer looked interesting, sounding a little like Jagermeister or something (not Jager), but it was PhP97.00 too expensive for my taste.

Happily and just as I had thought, there was still some of the Jackaroo Shiraz Janssen and I bought last Christmas. And stewing liquid it became!

Beef shoulder seasoned with my own version of Emeril’s essence, browned first, then stewed with red wine and tomato paste, canned button mushrooms, potatoes, green bell pepper, and peas (added a flour slurry to thicken). Taken with a toasty, buttered baguette … Dinner Tonight Was Delicious. I wish someone could’ve enjoyed it with me.

On tomorrow’s menu, pork tenderloin with lemon grass. I would’ve made the marinade tonight already, but I had forgotten to buy limes. Hopefully, after my morning run, kalamansi vendors will be along Philcoa.