After just a week of taking it easy and acting like I was on holiday, I started to look for ways to keep myself occupied and productive.
the tag
food
I left 5 days before the big day to help with whatever my sister needed. That meant errands, crafting, and just being there for her as she was about to transition into marriage.
On the 2nd week of December, we flew in to Dumaguete for 2 shows. On the 8th, we had a concert at the Luce Auditorium at Silliman University, followed by a Christmas tree lighting event at the plaza the next day. As with most of my work trips, so long as time permits, it doubled as a QuicKation, or so I've come to call them. Day 1 We were on a red eye flight, so breakfast was the 1st order of business when we arrived. While Casa Rubin prepared our rooms for early check-in, we ordered food at their restaurant Co[...]
Hello, it's week 2 of Ub-session ? Last week, I made sweet treats, but this time, I wanted to do something different with the ube that not a lot of people explore. Looking for savory ube recipes was short of impossible for 2 main reasons. First, though we may translate our ube to "purple yam" in English, the Philippine ube is not the same as the purple yams available in the US, like Stokes Purple or Okinawan Sweet Potatoes. Ube skin is very thick and looks like wood from the bark of a tree. The only way I could pe[...]
It all started with 2.2 kilos of ube that I bought from our trip to Wawa for P136. This was *gasp* the 1st time I'd ever seen ube in its raw form, and it was pretty humongous, too. I was excited to see what I could make out of it. The first thing I made was halaya, a sort of jam taken from the Spanish word jalea, which means jelly. There were many recipes for it, but most were typically made with coconut and/or condensed milk and some butter. I don't know about you, but I've always found it so inconvenient to ea[...]
I had quite the adventure last Monday, and leading up to it. I had been wanting to hike up Mt. Masalakot and Nalayag Rocks since I saw photos of its monolith, but this guy from Instagram warned me that there had been news of militia in the area in September. That's never a risk I want to take, despite assurances that they leave civilians alone. So I looked for another option, defaulting back to my favorite province of Rizal. 1st Choice Mt. Lubog was a promising choice, its altitude and difficulty pe[...]
Pinoy Playlist Music Festival For 2 weekends, I frequented the BGC Arts Center for the 1st Pinoy Playlist Music Festival. I was there for 3 out of 6 days, performed twice, and watched 16 artists. It was food for the soul, taking part in that as both performer and audience. Regardless of the size of a venue or the amount of people in it, live performances feel so intimate to me. As an artist, I can absorb all the emotional energies from those watching and use them to adjust my delivery of a song or movement. As a sp[...]
After foiled plans to go to Bangkok (the forecasts predicted daily thunderstorms) and Bali (late booking during peak season made everything absurdly expensive), we decided on a more practical destination that we were sure to enjoy even with minimal planning. Ry and I drove up to Baguio for his short, and only, vacation leave of the year. Not wanting to just replicate our previous trips, we asked friends who live in or frequent the mountain city for new things to try. The response was a list of food, breweries, vie[...]
This week has been slow and long, and exactly what I needed to get my bearings back after a long workation-turned-holiday. The Holy Week is the only time I like Manila, because the streets are practically empty, with regional immigrants returning home to the provinces and locals vacationing elsewhere. Even social media was quieter, a little less agitated, a little more sensitive. In the religion I was raised in, this is typically a period for fasting and reflecting on our faith. While I no longer follow Catholic[...]
By tomorrow, it'll be 20 days since my last post, and I'll have been back in Manila for 5. As I've gotten older, jet lag has become harder to bounce back from, so I've been drifting between sleep and wakefulness at atypical hours. Aside from wishing I were still somewhere else, experiencing new things every day, I came home to a city that's just about to take a break for the Holy Week. Things are moving slowly, and there's no urgency to be productive just yet. BUT what's to stop me from trying new things just beca[...]