Sunday, May 07, 2006

fishy stories or stories of fishes

I am a bad blogger. I promised myself that once I started a blog, I would write on it everyday. But...

Anyway, here is what I've been occupying myself with the last couple of days.

Friday was a fun day. John and I went to the zoo to look at animals and people. For all those who don't know, we are expecting a baby and she is due sometime in July. I thought going to the zoo would be perfect for observing parents interact with their kids. We are going to be first time parents so we need all the help we can get. We went and saw the new exhibit there featuring Visayan Warty Pigs. They are totally punk rock! The males have mohawks and some of them even have beards. They are critically endangered so for all my filipino folks out there in the Visayas, stop eating them! Come on now, mohawks don't look too tasty.

So what did we learn from our little zoo adventure? 3 things for sure: 1. Visayan Warty Pigs are not food, 2. Little girls really do like the colors pink and purple, and 3. Elephant ears (the cinnamon-sugar kind) sold next to the Asian Elephant cage are just as yummy as the ones sold in fairs or farmer's markets.

We also watched this documentary about WalMart called "WalMart: the High Cost of Low Prices". It pissed me off. John always said that I shouldn't watch sports or political documentaries because I get riled up pretty fast. Anyway, I usually don't like to talk about my politics because I don't want to offend anybody but I'm sure we all dislike cheats, liars and greedy people so for the record, I would just like to say that I strongly dislike (hate seems such a harsh word but I was 99.5% close to using it) WalMart. I will not go into it out of respect for people that like WalMart (please, for the love of god, tell me why you like them?!).

Saturday. WalMart is truly evil. They must have felt my dislike vibes because they just sent me ridiculously friendly letter (oozing with propaganda) to obviously spite me! Apparently they are trying to build one around the neighborhood and they are asking me for help (!). So as responsible citizens and mature adults, John and I decided to fill out their little checklist in the bottom to show our support.

Thankfully, my friend Natasha saved the day because she sent me some of her gorgeous handspun, handyed yarn. For all those people who are yarn and knitting junkies, you all should check out her stuff. Once you start knitting with her yarn, it will be very, very difficult not to scoff at store-bought yarn. Click here for some delicious, delicious yarn and fiber.

Sunday. John and I are just chilling at home. We finally finished "building" and organizing our home office. Yey! John is making me some tapas tonight, some bacon wrapped scallops and some thai corn fritters with sweet chili sauce. He is the bestest husband in the whole world! I will go and see what he is up to, I think I smell bacon ...

BTW, here are the beginnings of a painting that I am doing about the Dagupan Milkfish Festival. It is basically a festival celebrated by the good people of Dagupan City where the high point of the whole celebration is the grilling of 24,000 Milkfish on a 2 kilometer grill. More on this later ...



Lastly, for all you guys that need to get something off of your chest, check out this site.

1 comment:

Christina said...

Bangus story for you :)
Relyenong Bangus. My mom used to take special orders for parties and I was her helper in the kitchen. I did her mise-en-place for the tiny diced carrots and celery. She would defrost the fish, beat it, with a meat mallet to loosen the flesh from the skin and then cook the scraped-out fish meat. After it cooled enough to touch, I'd pick through the meat to remove all the fishbones. I'm sure you know, bangus has a crapload of tiny bones.
When I was done, she'd continue cooking the picked through meat with the carrots, celery and seasonings, stuff the fish skin with stuffing, sew up the fish and then bake it.
It was a lot of work but darn tasty!