jonettevalenciano.com

Hi everyone. It's a pleasant early, early Sunday morning.

James and I have had the pleasure of having my good friends Jo, Irl, Ditas, and their twins Jodie and Ronnie for a night of good chili, yummy pasta, and some good-old beat-em-up games on the PS2 last weekend. It was fun watching the boys go at their combos and super-moves and us cheering them on to "Go get 'em, go get 'em, that's him! You can do it! Beat that Boss up! YEAAAAAH!"

Beat-em-up games. Always makes for awesome stress relief. (We presently recommend Warriors Orochi 2 for the witty, funny dialog and fantastic character design, and Dynasty Warriors: Gundam for the Mecha fans out there. Both make for great, straight-forward gameplay, and are pretty easy to understand once you've got the controller in your hands. they can get very challenging and addicting -- one scenario might not be enough!) Of course, bashing virtual bad guys coupled with good food and great company makes for a winning weekend in my book.

The chili, as with most of my lunch and dinner dishes now, was made by crockpot. It's a simple affair of half a kilo of ground pork and half a kilo of ground round, set to brown over a high setting for about an hour and a half or so. I next put in a large packet of tomato sauce and a small can of tomato paste, let it simmer for a bit, then added about three medium-sized cubed potatoes, and two large peeled, cubed carrots, and set the crockpot to Low. I let the veggies cook while I puttered about cooking the rice. After about half an hour, the chili was ready, and we all ate rather heartily that night. (And voila! A covert recipe in this post!)

I'm glad I took Irl & Ditas' advice to get a crockpot. With a crockpot, you can pretty much put in all the ingredients your dish needs, set it to cook on Low for a number of hours (say, 6 to 12? Long enough for you?) go to work, sleep, or do your thing, and come back with your dish ready to serve. What's more, your meats will stay moist and juicy, since the moisture just circulates within the ceramic interior and glass cover of the appliance. Oh, and sauce-y dishes are best prepared with crockpots.

I'd say this is a big help for me, specially with weekends. This now means I can start cooking Lunch early in the morning when I come home from work while I bustle about and clean around the house.

Breakfast is not a problem for me, really. I can whip up rice-omelette-hotdogs-tocino in an hour and a half, bam, done.

It's Lunch, however, that can get freaky.

Picture this: you and your boyfriend get some shut-eye late-morning Saturday after a long evening work shift. You both wake up mid-afternoon, both groggy and hungry. Very hungry. It doesn't help either that your boyfriend's tummy is hyper-acidic, and must be filled before the acid gets the better of him. You yourself have just woken up, and you barely remember what the contents of your pantry and fridge are.

Time's tick-tocking. Your boyfriend's on the brink of a hunger crisis, your brain is post-sleep slush, and you have no food ready.

Did I mention the crockpot's our saving grace? ^_^"

Another plus I've encountered with crockpot-cooking is a return to packed lunches. With the recipes I've been experimenting with, I find they yield more than James and I need for a day. Even two days! The sauce is also a major bonus, I think. So, why not pack a lunch for myself to bring to work? It's a great way to save money. I've also noticed that I've begun to eat rather well ever since I started bringing packed lunches to work. Most definitely beats fast food very often. :)

I'm really excited to keep trying more recipes with this baby. I've next set my sights on this Mac-n-cheese recipe, and maybe, just maybe, make an attempt with home-made yoghurt. Think of it: lassi to go with curries like Rogan Josh, right in the comfort of your own kitchen.

What about you? Do you also cook with a crockpot? What are your favorite recipes?

There will always be an element of fun in finding a package on your table -- and much more when you find it comes from a friend.

Meream sent me this quite a lovely trove in the mail, all thanks to her birthday giveaway. (Thank you, Meream!)

A confession: It's been quite a while since I truly wore hoop or dangling earrings. I'd always felt they were quite decadent for everyday wear, and oh how unabashedly womanly they were.

Earrings like these would go tremendously with low or shoulder-baring necklines. Oh my.

Behold the necklace. It delights me how it closes in front instead of the back. Lockets are designed to house secrets, and I shall find one such secret to keep in this.

There's just something sensual I find in large pieces. Perhaps th word sensual is not enough to capture the entire idea; jewelry is meant to kiss your bare skin, give it another layer of sensation aside from the touch of cloth or air. It could be the susurrus of fine chain, or the friskiness of beads rolling, rolling, rolling about.

Large jewelry pieces also make me strangely more aware of my body, and how each part flows, melts into the other. Take a necklace. The necklace makes me aware of my head, which flows into my neck, which flows into my shoulders, into my chest, my breasts, my sternum. It leads the eye down this path, and it makes me keenly aware of it over and over again.

Wearing jewelry is another way of seducing yourself.

Coco Chanel instructed to "... put scent where you want to be kissed". I believe the same is true for jewelry. You wear jewelry where you want someone's eyes to linger. You wear jewelry where you want them to feel arrested, enthralled. you wear jewelry where you want them to wonder what it must be like to kiss you there.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Ahem.

Together with the jewelry came yet another gift from Meream: Grill Pan Cookbook: Great Recipes for Stovetop Grilling, by Jamee Ruth. It's been a long-standing desire of mine to treat James and I to delicious indoor-grilled food, and this just might be the start to giving in to it. This, and a sturdy grill pan, of course. Much love to you, Meream. You shall be the first to hear of the book's christening one day, hopefully soon. :)

Hi everyone. sorry for the long, long bout of blogging silence. You know how it with life: when you're not blogging, you're living, and boy, I've been doing a lot of living lately.

Mostly of the domestic persuasion, but yeah, still living. :)

To be honest, I'm not sure how to begin. What do I tell you?

I'd like to say I'm lucky that May is a month full of French holidays. This means I get to rest at home --- "rest" translating into "cleaning and refurbishing the house and forgetting to relax all the same."

Oh no. Yours truly has been a chronic homemaker this May.

Here, let me show you.

Meet _____, the crockpot. I still haven't named him yet, but I am deadly sure it's a him. He doesn't look like a Gordon, nor an Emeril, nor an Alton. Here his being christened with my first slow-cooked chili, recipe made on the fly. Ditas and Irl had a taste of it, and said it was dee-lish. *curtsy* I'm on a roll right now with cooking my fourth crockpot dish, and wow!

I'll also write post recipes and my own exploits with the crockpot, so please stay tuned.

(A-ha! We shall name him Cooking Master Boy!

-- such decisions are made when one needs to stay up late, getting nostalgic over episodes of the anime of the same name, and watching Stephen Chow's God of Cookery. Yep.^_^*

The past few weeks have also brought some unexpected chaos to the house.

One, the main water pipe leading to my apartment exploded. Again! It's specially tough when the pipes go all 'round the main house before they reach our apartments, and with some crafty placement of the water meters, it seems the repairs for my bused pipe are my sole responsibility. *sigh* Ah, well. I'm just glad Mang Julio once again came and put a stop to my waterwork woes once and for all. Instead of having to constantly repair and rely on the weak old pipe, he decided to dig a shorter path from my water meter to the apartment, and installed a brand new PVC water pipe route. We now enjoy hot bath water in the afternoons and cold water in the evening, courtesy of the cement surrounding the pipes. And to think, he just did all this in three days! If he's not a wonderworker, then I don't know what he is!

Err, second.

I've finally upped and gone done rearranging and cleaning the bedroom, for the sake of mobility, breath-ability, and my own personal sanity. Right now, the room still has much in the way of order, but I'm glad with the progress it's made so far.

This excavation attempt, the first of many to follow, have also not been without its treasures. Again, pictures and an exposé to follow.

I also took a leave to celebrate my dad's birthday last Friday.

A brief background, if I may.

For the past two years, I've always had the strange experience of getting all excited for Papa's birthday -- and then missing it by a week, either earlier or later. *sigh* I just have this terrible tendency to forget dates.

Now this year, I made it a point to be right on the dot, show up on his doorstep, large confectionary gift in hand, and surprise him. Wow! I actually and unbelievably got it right this time!

And it turns out the entire family's out and about, packed with work to the gills, and have left the front porch to the supervision of my dad's two birds.

Ah.

Well, more to this narrative in a few posts to come.

Then there was meeting up with Mikhal and George for for a grand file-swap escapade that started in Starbucks Eastwood Mall, to SM Marikina, to Mikhal's House, and home again home again, jiggety jig.
Comics scans and episodes and movies and documentaries galore! Right now, I snuggled quite comfily into issues of Alan Moore's Promethea, Thank you, Mikhal, for helping me fall in love with comics all over again.

Then, of course, there's the shirt-to-grocery-bag tutorial I've still to write up. Que Barbaridad!

So there: three recipes, and two stories promised.

I now leave your with Tombe the Cockatoo, and Noddy the Sun Conure, with matching videos to entertain. enjoy.

Let's take a break from election mode for something totally different, and just as awesome and politcal-minded. ^_^*

Now, if that wasn't enough... release the kitties!

Many, many thanks to laulan for these goodies. These totally made my late-late-night Monday. ^_^*

Here's to all the moms out there,

The traditional,
The accidentals,

the forward-thinkers,

the workers,

the stay-at-homes,

the independent,

the committed,

the long-suffering,

the protective,

the supportive,

and so many more.

If it were not for you,

we wouldn't be where we are

and who we are today;

we wouldn't realize what we wanted to be,

and we wouldn't make the best mistakes

we'd best learn from.

We learned the lessons we'd need to get through life,

became as strong,

as weak,

as fragile,

as creative,

as determined,

as confident,

and as happy

and as loving as we were meant to be.

You weren't perfect.
You didn't know everything,
you and I both knew and know that,
but it was the best you could give us,
It was the best you could do,
and how you'd give it all to us,
and that means everything to us.

And we're learning new things everyday,

by the second,

and becoming better people for it.

Aren't you proud of us, Mom?

I bet you are,

and we'll make you even prouder.

So, once again, we say,

Thank you, mom,

for bringing us into this world,

and making us the champions

from a long line of winners.

You're a winner!