The Grand Cooking Experiment

After my wife and I got married, I came to the realization that cooking was not one of her strong points. Mind you, she can cook when she puts her head into it and she collected recipes from the different restaurants she was employed. Her Korean fried chicken wings is one of my favorites. The problem starts when she get fixated on one particular recipe. Like that one time where she cooked the same recipe three times in one week and they never seemed to came out the same way. My wife has the habit of tweaking the recipe by adding or deleting an ingredient or two every time she cooked the same dish. One of my Mom's advice came in handy on occasions like this. "However it taste, always asked for a second helping," my Mom said to me. I realized that my wife put the effort in cooking the meal and that I should appreciate her and the food. I am lucky so far that all the meal she experimented with came out fine, if not great. I remedied the situation by volunteering of cooking the meal myself. She loved the meals I cooked and she never complained about my cooking. I wonder sometimes if I got tricked. I wonder?

Neighbor's Fried Chicken

When I was living in San Juan, Manila, Philippines, I and some friend would hang out at the the street corner every weekend. We went there for a great occasion. Our next door neigbor would be deep frying whole chickens in her kitchen with the back door opened wide. The smell was wonderful nothing like I ever smelled before in my entire young life. I always associated fried chicken, whole ones, as the height of luxury and great taste. My friends and I would dream of being invited to eat one of those succulent chickens. The crispy skin, the delicous meat and the enticing aroma would dance in our heads making us sigh. Mind you, we were not starving children, we ate pretty well as a middle class income family, but the luxury of a whole deep fried chicken was a little beyond the budget. I still have flashback of those days when innocence and youth makes eating a fried chicken a holy grail to be achieved. I ate my share of chickens since then, but I can still smell that aroma on it's meandering danced from our neighbor's kitchen to the street corner.

Happy Bithday Dad!

Happy Birthday!
On this occasion,
many wishes,
I hope I don't
end up doing
the dishes.

More music,
more smiles,
more joys,
more years,
more love,
more cheers.

A great husband
to a loving wife.
A firm father
to four crazy kids.
An adoring grandpa
to his grandkids.

All the best!
The best is
yet to be,
the future
is undefined,
we loved you
with all our hearts.

Wanderlust

When I was around ten or eleven, my paternal grandmother would asked me to join her in one of her many escapades. For a woman in her sixties, she loved to travel around the metropolitan city of Manila and surrounding provinces . She would visit each of her children, several churches and large markets in her wandering. She had the wanderlust in her blood and she have logged plenty of miles cris-crossing the island of Luzon. Amazingly, she did all of this travelling with bad eyesights. This was the reason she took me along in her journeys. I am her eyes in a world she can barely see.

Even with her bad eyesights, she would later have eye surgery, she would not listen to people about curtailing her travels. I became her travel companion, an excuse to continue her wandering. There were times that I knew she was doing things from memory. She have memorized the bus schedules, the roads and destinations. We can go from each of her childrens houses, even how remote or how many transfer we have to make on the buses. We have visited her favorite shrines and churches dozens of times. We have a lot of adventures together. I think I received my wanderlust from her, my love of travel, my itchy feet.

Restaurant: Seafood Port

My Dad celebrated his birthday on Sunday, instead of Tuesday, at one of our favorite restaurants. My Mom and Dad invited my wife and I for lunch at Seafood Port Chinese restaurant. My wife was not able to make it since she was working, but she asked me to buy her wonton soup for after work. My Mom ordered the fried whole fish, fried rice, scallops, shrimp chow mein and others. The food was wonderful. Of course, as usual, I came late, but I was still able to eat a lot of food. The whole family was full when we left the restaurant.

Seafood Port Chinese Restaurant
21180 Hawthorne Blvd.
Torrance, CA 90503
310-370-8478