Flavours

I don’t like eating just for quantity. Which is why I hate carb-laden meals; you keep chasing a flavour, but you never quite catch it. Things like pizza, pasta, potato salad, and noodles. When I was a child, the only time I ate a lot of rice was when we had something like fried pork chops, and I basted my rice with the fat that was rendered from the pork and seasoned it with fish sauce. Salty and umami locked together, the silky feel of the fat in your mouth, you wanted it again and again and again.

Sad to say, I have never again dared to eat this as an adult -scared for my heart and and my veins - after my mother’s horror stories of people she knew collapsing right after eating such meals. But I’ve also learned a very adult skill- self-regulation. For how can you continue to enjoy dishes like salty adobo, pork binagoongan, curry, Filipino fried-chicken, kare-kare, bopis if you omitted the rice? But I’m more focused now on the flavour and to eat slowly. Now, I never eat more than a cup of rice with these dishes and I’m still satisfied afterwards. When faced with lechon or pork-belly, I can omit the rice altogether as long as there’s a vegetable side-dish.

The weight of a big meal is, well, heavy. The kids and I had Korean BBQ night at home on a Monday and you realise afterwards that you duped yourself into thinking that a lot of little things- pork belly, wagyu strips, kimchi, vermicelli- amounted to a little thing. But this is the effect of a buffet- you just carry on cooking and eating and cooking and eating.I was literally still burping the next day.

But today for dinner, I assembled one of my favourite easy meals- freshly cooked rice, kimchi, one duck egg and two normal eggs- yolks still runny- showered with spicy furikake. It’s a lot of little things, but it all amounts to flavours- the tangy bite of the kimchi, the velvety yolk with a hint of sesame and the sharp, cheddar-cheese like saltiness of the duck-egg.

Sunday's purchases

My domain is inside the house, though if the dishwasher broke, I wouldn’t have a clue on how to fix it. Lately, I’ve been focusing on the kitchen and how I could make it better (without a full renovation which it actually needs). I transferred all the coffee stuff to the other side of the bench away from all the cooking and prep stuff (air fryer, rice cooker, microwave) and what do you know, suddenly I miraculously gave myself more space. Next would be getting a better food processor after the old one started to fall apart (bought a Kitchen Aid one which is on its way); perhaps finding a smaller rice cooker as opposed to using a Russell Hobbs all-in-one cooker and maybe, just maybe, I would plunk down some serious $$$ on that Kitchen Aid mixer I’ve always wanted.

Then there’s a new utensils drawer, proper cutlery, some Le Creuset pans…the list is long.

Today, we saw a good deal on a Dyson vacuum. The price is still pretty steep, but the proof is in the vacuuming and wow- I think the carpets look and feel cleaner fluffier…

Saturday

Power breakfast

I don’t buy bacon that often because I end up eating all of it myself (all 2kgs of it). But it’s been months, so…nothing beats a breakfast full of fats and some rice. The scrambled eggs used four eggs.

Birnam Wood

I could’ve read ‘The Luminaries’, it wasn’t that of a big deal, but I just didn’t like, didn’t get the subject matter. But this one- read the 1st 10 pages at the mall while having coffee- sounds promising.

The viral round croissant

Some call it croons (??). I’ve been meaning to try it after seeing it on all my social feeds, but just couldn't organise myself to go to Newmarket’s Luna Cafe which was the 1st one to offer it. This one is from Z Pattisserie. If it’s supposed to be a croissant, then the texture is wrong- it’s too dense and bready as opposed to being a bit chewy and flaky. I wouldn’t rave about it, but I’m not giving up on it yet until I get to taste Luna’s.

Fat for breakfast, fat for dinner

But I did this in the air fryer so…

Wednesday's List

1. My siblings posted photos of the kids’ Valentine's Day dates on our family chat account- time flies. But I still feel the same though I doubt if I still look the same.

2. Have yet to find an available booking for a root canal; might use the money instead for some facial treatments.

3. People sometimes act strange. The good thing about it is that I don’t really consider them good/close friends, so I’m never really obliged to ask why. It’s good sometimes to go about your day just doing you.

4. It’s certainly hard to make (real) friends after a certain age, but I don’t mind. After all, I only made some well into my mid to late 20s and I can definitively say that friendship can be over-rated.

5. Back into semi-serious body-training again. Ugh.

It came and we waited...

I had to Google it- ‘how different is a typhoon from a cyclone’?.

Turns out they’re the same, with the name difference based on location.

But they don’t feel the same- and I should know, having been the veteran of a hundred or so typhoons since I was a baby. The year I was born (and I’m not telling you the year), a succession of strong typhoons inundated most parts of the island of Luzon. The deluge was such that BongBong M’s daddy intoned while surveying the damage from a helicopter, ‘“For the first time, the waters of Manila Bay linked up with those of Lingayen Gulf...”

Years later, older and not necessarily wiser, I had spent the night drinking in a friend’s house as a typhoon raged, not realizing that the worst was yet to come after I had passed out in their living room. When I woke up, nearly all the trees and power lines in Naguilayan were down. Our narra tree, planted the year Binky was born (I think) had fallen and I managed to crawl through it and get inside our house and pretend that I was home during the night.

When I came to New Zealand, it was a pleasant surprise to realise that there was virtually nothing in nature that could kill you. If you were harmed, it was basically because you made the decision to swim through the rip-tides, walk through the bush without telling anyone, or climb up a mountain unequipped with the right gear.

Nothing in this country was actually hostile until the weather started to change. And change it did, and now we have tornados (killed a Filipino worker a few years back) and cyclones that could be coming more frequently.

The topography of Auckland is strange because just over 40kms away from where we live- and that’s not a great distance- there were massive flooding and landslips, while we actually had none. But we didn’t take any chances even if what we did wasn’t much- I filled the bathtub with water in case the water supply was cut off, filled empty soda bottles with drinking water, kept my more expensive shoes away from windows, cooked an extra pot of rice…

And we waited as the slow-ass cyclone (moving at a glacial pace of 11kms per hour) made its way down. I set the alarm at 4am which would have been the time where it was nearest to Auckland. I slept through it and was woken up by the cat at 5am who wanted so badly to pee (we closed the laundry door to prevent the rain from going through the cat flap).

Everything was quiet. The house was intact. And I was in the middle of a dream where I was cooking Peking Duck, so I went back to sleep.

Sunday's Kahuku style shrimps

I must say I’ve been craving shrimps for the longest time and I’ve tried a number of products, none of which were satisfying until I found farm-raised Ecuadorian shrimps. SHRIMP ALL THE WAY FROM ECUADOR!

But a quick Google search reveals something surprising: Ecuador is the world’s 2nd largest producer of (sustainable) shrimp, so there.

Since these were raw and still in their shell, I thought that the perfect style of cooking them was Kahuku style- a favorite local dish in the Hawaiian island of Oahu, popularized by a string of shrimp trucks (or stands) found in and around Oahu's Kahuku community. We had this when we were in Hawaii and have been replicating it ever since.

There’s a million recipes of it and this is how I made it:

Ecuadorian shrimp is good

Ecuador's insistence on lower stocking densities and the use of naturally disease-resistant shrimp ensure healthy and flavorful development without the need for techniques found in other parts of the world, including heavy use of antibiotics and genetic engineering.

Flour and baking soda

Truth be told, we’ve never really cleaned shrimp back in the Philippines. But I did it anyway- they were big enough- and then dredged them in flour and a teaspoon of baking powder.

Fry them first

I fried them quickly in high heat, and you can already see the fat in the heads melting and coloring the olive oil. The flour and baking powder coating also crisped up the shell, making them edible. Tip: trim off the walking legs and the swimmerets. This would make it easier to peel off the shell. After frying, set aside.

Do a whole head of garlic

Don’t mince them too fine

Use the best better you've got

You will end up eating a lot of butter so might as well use the best one, preferably grass-fed unsalted butter (this is Westgold).

Then add in your shrimps

At this point, I also added a chicken-flavor cube, paprika (should have been cayenne) and some water which helps create a thick, delicious sauce. Lower the heat and stir occasionally for about 15 minutes.

Peeled or not?

I might try a version with the shells taken off just to make the eating of them is easier and less messier. Most of the flavour was there though I have to admit. I might still batter the shrimps and leave the heads intact.

Best shrimp meal I've had in a long time

Can’t wait for the next one (the box did have 1.8kgs of shrimp).

Storm watch

I’ve lived in New Zealand for over 15 years now and I have never experienced, 1) more than an hour of the power going off, 2) work cancelled because of a storm, 3) of a truly destructive storm in the scale of what I’ve experienced in the Philippines.

And I hope I never do, so here’s to jinxing it.

For the first time, government authorities have actually issued a pre-storm warning ahead of Cyclone Gabrielle making land-fall or a pass through.

The wondrous beauty of a deboned whole chicken

For deep frying, I buy supermarket chicken. If it still has skin on, it’s cheaper so this is what I get and mostly boneless thighs. Sometimes the bone-in chicken thighs are even cheaper so I get that instead. I’ve learned how to roughly take out the bone from a thigh using kitchen shears which is way faster and safer than a knife.

I discovered a whole- size 13 (around 1 to 1.1kilos, $26.99)- deboned chicken from the neatmeatstore and it has sat in our freezer for a bit and I’ve only taken it out yesterday. Frankly, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Stupidly, I was somewhat expecting it to be whole, as if the bones had magically dissolved underneath and leaving behind a kind of ‘chicken dress’.

But you can see that it isn’t so, and different really from like say, a chicken deboned for when you make a chicken galantine, at least the way we make it back in the Philippines. The galantine chicken is pretty much whole and the wings are left intact on the sides along with the drumsticks.

But this one has the leg and wing bones expertly snipped out. I guess one can technically sew it back together to hold the filling if you wanted to make a galantine, but that would be for another day.

It’s on my To-Try-And-Master list: deboning a chicken.

The chicken is free-range and ethically sourced, and while I can’t tell the difference between a free-range egg from a barn or cage raised one, I can tell with the chicken. It tastes cleaner, tastier and when you poach it, which is my preferred cooking method for this kind of chicken, there is hardly ever any scum in the broth.

This chicken gives me three meals (everyone here is dieting).

How much of your daily life is really yours?

It’s beginning to dawn on me, that Saturday is the only day that I get full possession of my life.

I wake up anytime I want and have ditched setting alarms. If I wake up at noon, then so be it (I never do). I do a quick check of the phone charging overnight on my bedside table. If it’s nothing urgent, I just leave it there. I avoid reacting to the news. If a comet had crashed into the earth in the middle of the night, there’s nothing we could have done. We’ll get painlessly pulverised in our sleep hopefully, and be mercifully eternally bound in whatever dreams we’re in.

Coffee. Then another coffee. A great bowel movement. Shower. I put on my face- serum, moisturiser, sunscreen if we needed to go out somewhere. Unlike weekdays where I don’t eat any breakfast, we either eat out or have some old favourites like Spam and rice, pancakes, a well-buttered toast.

Then it’s chores. The week’s laundry in batches; coloreds, whites and delicates. There is some sort of weird comfort in the washing cycle- wash, soak, rinse, spin. I love doing laundry because it echoes life. I’m perpetually organising my clothes, my shoes. I think of the week ahead and mentally put together outfits. I feel that I have too much. I also feel that I never seem to have enough.

I think about dinner because more than likely, there is something that I’d like to eat, something I’d like to cook that I’ve been planning for the whole week.

For this Saturday, it’s a simple roast chicken but done the way this restaurant in Paris does it. They only use a small portion of the breast and serve it with a hefty shaving of black truffles and bearnaise sauce.

I won’t be putting shaved truffles on it, but I was thinking of making bearnaise sauce (you can check out a YouTube video of how Le Clarence makes its roast chicken here).

But by midday, I’d changed my mind about the bearnaise sauce; we had gone to the Asian store, but I had completely forgotten to get white wine vinegar and shallots. Maybe some other time then.

The only thing unusual with the way the restaurant roasts its chicken is that it’s placed inside a dutch casserole and then placed in the oven; it’s then taken out at regular intervals where it’s basted with its own juices. Towards the end when it has browned, you put in butter, garlic cloves and fresh rosemary, basting it again over and over until it’s done.

This forces me to always check the clock.

The done part was about 45 minutes more than the usual way I roast chicken. I make a salad out of leftover romaine lettuce. I’ve taken out buns from the freezer and defrosted them. I make a normal gravy with chicken cubes and buttered roux. We start to eat at 6:15 pm, later than usual, but in the middle of summer, it feels more like noon.

The chicken is much more noticeable moist than usual though. It’s delicious actually though I detect a hint of bitterness from the rosemary; perhaps I put too much.

What next? I feel like doing something and automatically, I try to look for the time. It’s always, do I have enough time??

I stop myself and make a drink (gin and tonic, which I don’t normally do) instead.

Japanese curry

I can’t remember how I discovered it. It might have been at a Japanese mart or an Asian store.

I like the thickness of it, the beef stew-like sauce but without all the effort of making an actual beef stew. Come to think of it, I might try making a beef one which I’ve never done. The protein here is chicken breasts (ugh, it always turns out to be tough- how do you make tender chicken breast pieces??).

What are you reading? Love & Other Rituals by Monica Macasantos

Get to know the author here

What's On

American Horror Story: Double Feature

Someone makes a pill that enhances the creativity of those who are truly gifted, while condemning those who don’t to a grim fate. I agree that it sucks when you definitely discover that you have zero talent. But to be punished for it by becoming a feral vampire with neither immortality nor beauty REALLY SUCKS! Would I take the pill?? Of course! I’M VERY TALENTED..

The Glory

It’s the girl from popular Korean dramas Full House and Descendants of the Sun and perhaps the only Korean actress whose face I definitely remember, and have not confused with anyone else! This revenge series is dark, yet has moments of levity when the romantic scenes take a page off the romance dramas Song Hye-Kyo became famous for. Part one ends in a cliff-hanger with the series finale airing sometime early this year. It asks the question- how far will you go to punish a bully?? As someone who has been bullied, my answer would be- ALL THE WAY!

Gannibal

I’m still not sure if the title is a play on ‘Hannibal’ (Lecter)??. But the infamous flesh-eating doctor will feel right at home in a sleepy, picturesque Japanese village where some of the villagers turn out to be cannibals. Based on a hit manga.

New Year's Resolutions list (1)

1. Schedule that goddamned root canal

2. Clean and re-season the iron skillet

3. Look at getting a new food processor

4. Look at either signing up at a gym or updating your fitness equipment

5. Sort your clothes for real (give them away to the Salvation Army)

6. More cardio

7. Go see a dermatologist

8. Increase your vegetable intake

9. Aim to read more (start on the books you already have)

10. Less of the bad fat

11. Start writing again please, even if it’s in small batches

What do you have planned for 2023?

Hope springs eternal as they say, so even if I enter 2023 with not enough money (it’s never enough isn’t it?) or personal accomplishment (where’s that novel huh?) or abs (my thighs have grown muscular though), I have an (over) abundance of hope- and the will to try, and try again.

As I’ve always said, if you’ve stopped trying or fallen behind a certain threshold of trying, you might as well check out (not literally).

Not all barbecues are made equal

Right off the bat, I went for the brisket and while it was good, we’ve had better (the brisket at Blue Ox Babe is superior).

And this is the thing with food places that focus on barbecued and grilled stuff; more often than not, you really go there for the heft and the quantity.

Nothing fills you up like really good protein. The sides are there just to serve as a palate bridge between meats. The ribs were good; the bacon-wrapped peppers filled with cream cheese were a revelation; the jalapeno-spiked Kransky sausages were a bit tough; the chicken wings had a nice tangy and sweet glaze; and the salmon we brought home nearly intact in a doggie bag. It felt like the odd man out in the group.

Matt was right; after a while, you were wanting for some rice!

MooMoo Smokehouse gets a 7 out of 10.

The eating is almost done

T'was NOT the night before Christmas