old wives' tales

There are some old wives' tales - "mga pamahiin ng matatanda" - that I realize I instinctively believe for a few seconds until my good sense takes over and reminds me there is no truth to them. Like when I saw this photo of a child sitting on the hood of a car... My automatic reaction was that she'd get "balisawsaw", that peeing problem my Lola [grandmother] said I'd get from sitting on hot things like a car's hood or concrete stairs that have turned hot under the sun. I feel the same about itchy palms. When my palms get itchy, my automatic reaction is to put my hands inside my pockets... until I realize I can't suddenly turn rich & lucky by merely putting itchy palms in my pockets. I still believe that touching your eyes after touching a butterfly can make you blind. Gosh, is there any truth to this? Or is this also an old wives' tale?

I have to admit though that there are myths I wish my kids still believed. Particularly those old rituals on New Year's Eve. When I look back on New Year's Eves of my childhood, I remember how fun it was to jump 3 times with my brother & cousins when the clock struck 12. I also remember a NYE when we crawled around - underneath our dining table - with huge luggages believing that ritual would assure us of travel that year. 

Noah is quite a realist, reluctant to jump this past NYE because he found it ludicrous that jumping on NYE would make him tall. To some extent, I agree that we shouldn't propagate these myths (Just last week, a co-parent at Noah's school said Noah was "handsome. Pwera, usog.", licked her thumb and reached out to touch Noah with it. Thankfully, another co-parent stopped her, saying, "Hindi totoo yang usog-usog na yan!". Thank God, coz I was too shocked to keep her saliva from touching my son!). But it's still a shame because the NYE rituals we did when we were kids were quite fun to do. And I can't help wish that Noah embraced the fun of it more (vs. half-heartedly jumping). After all, while they're really old wives' tales, they still make for such happy, nostalgic stories of childhood. 

Photo from annnniegirl. 

my thing about personalized monograms

My his & hers post here made me realize that - for someone who loves wearing her kids' names or initials around her neck here, I am not a fan of my own monogram or initial. I realized I don't have personalized label stickers like a lot of people I know. I don't even put my name on my books so book nameplates are useless for me. And I've never been attracted to the idea of having my designer bag monogrammed.

I wonder if it's because I have two names... My family calls me by my first name. Naturally. But my friends & co-workers call me by my maiden name. It started in school. My classmates just got into the habit of calling me by my maiden name largely because it sounds like a nickname. It caught on so it's the name I've been using since I started working. In fact, after I got married, very few of my co-workers know that what they think is my nickname is actually my maiden name. Anyway, obviously, my family couldn't get on board with calling me by my maiden name. So I ended up with a different name for my family vs. my friends. And maybe this is why I don't like plastering my name or initial on anything.

I wonder though if the reason behind this quirk of mine is my 91-year-old Lola (grandma). Because as you will see in this post about her of ocmominmanila here, she put ghastly-looking labels of her initials all over our house. I grew up with our TV, electric fan, even our flashlights displaying a masking-tape marked JH. Maybe those horrible labels just turned me off of personalized labels?

Whatever the reason, I won't be having our towels or pillows embroidered with our initials anytime soon. I guess this would be the only possible embroidery on our pillows...

It's no wonder then that I am loving the charming non-monogrammed his & hers items here.

Photos from pinkwallpaper and annnniegirl.

Click here for another post about what makes my Lola such a character.

partyline, pakibaba

Do you remember the days of the rotary phone? Did you dial 9 and wait for the rotary dial to go back to its position? Or were you one of those who would force the dial back to 9?

Do you remember the days when someone interrupts your conversation and you have to say, "Partyline, pakibaba"?

Do you remember the time when the yellow pages were so important? Nowadays, they seem to be more useful this way...

Okay, my Lola (grandma) still uses her thick yellow pages book. So maybe they are still useful. But I'm sure even my 90-year-old Lola will agree that these are a much more beautiful use of ye olde yellow pages.

Photos from here and adverblog.

Today, I am un-loving...

Today, I am un-loving... the fact that my kids have no ratatouille. Anton Ego was the tough food critic from the 2007 Disney Pixar movie, Ratatouille. When he was served ratatouille, a peasant stew, he was shocked. But the second the flavor hit his tongue, he was transported to his childhood.

He returned to the time he crashed his bike and his mother prepared the same meal, the same way for him. It comforted him in a moving, inexplicable way.

I feel the same way about my Lola's (grandma's) cooking. Her chicken in brown sauce is my comfort food. No matter how bad a day I have, when I taste that first bite of her chicken in brown sauce, I magically feel better. None of us can recreate it (not that I ever expected I could. See related post here). I cannot even figure out what goes into the mysterious brown sauce. To this day, my 90-year-old Lola cooks me my chicken in brown sauce, my ratatouille, as my birthday gift every year.

I realized recently that my kids grew up with Inday's (Inday is a typical househelper's name here in the Philippines) cooking. We've gone through our share of different Indays through the years so there really isn't any dish - cooked in a distinct, personal way - that they grew up with and could call their comfort food, their ratatouille.

Sigh. Today, I am un-loving... that my kids do not have their own ratatouille.

Photos from here and here.

Click here for previous posts from the Today, I am un-loving... series.

undomestic goddess

My Lola (grandmother)  was the goddess of our kitchen. She did all the cooking when I was growing up and when we tried to whip something up ourselves, she would scold us for not doing it right (read: her way). You see, my Lola was quite the control-freak (read more about her O.C. ways here and here). So I never learned how to cook. Seriously. I had no idea how to cook rice (yes. seriously. rice.) or fry an egg or even a hotdog. :(

But with all the Food Network shows I had watched, I seriously believed I was a natural chef - deep inside. With kitchen magic waiting to be unleashed if only I would be allowed to do the cooking. But when I had my own kitchen, my busy working-mom schedule (read: laziness) kept me from unleashing the magic. It was only when I was sent by my office to Singapore for 6 months that I finally got compelled to actually cook my first dish lest I have takeout Yoshinoya beef bowl yet again.

I was actually excited. I decided to start with something I thought was easy since there wasn't a restaurant in Manila that didn't serve fried chicken. I bought my drumsticks and McCormick coating mix from Marketplace in Paragon. I even saved the McCormick wrapper because I thought I would put it in a scrapbook as the dish that unleashed my kitchen magic.

I unleashed something alright. More horror than magic. I didn't know at first. My chicken was the perfect golden brown on the outside. And when I speared it with my fork and cut off my supposed first bite, it unleashed the bloodiest insides I have ever seen! So I put it and the rest of the drumsticks back in the pan and fried it some more. Fry, cut, fry, cut, I went. And in the end, my chicken was burnt black on the outside and still bloody red on the inside. Sigh.

Turns out there isn't a masterchef deep inside of me. I did survive the 6 months though. I had my canned hot & spicy tuna from the very Pinoy Lucky Plaza stalls which I ate with the rice or penne pasta I eventually learned to cook. I mastered heating various bottled pasta sauces for my penne and learned to cook my weekend breakfasts: bacon and daing na bisugo (dried salted fish to get back at my Indian neighbor whose nightly curry's smell would travel through the hallway and into my apartment!). I did accomplish cooking adobo but ended up eating it for over a week so that was the end of following a recipe (which was always way too much for just one person). My adobo was pure pork since I steered away from chicken after that first cooking disaster. It's been a couple of years since, but fried chicken remains to be my Everest. I wonder when I will have the courage to try frying a chicken again? 

Photo from life123.com.

"Life is like our kitchen cupboard."

Way before Forrest Gump, my now 90-year-old Lola (Grandma) taught me that "Life is like a box of chocolates our cupboard; you never know what you're gonna get".

My Lola was obsessed with joining raffles. Growing up, half of our bodega (storage room/attic) would be filled with wrappers upon wrappers upon wrappers that would allow her to send in gazillion entries to manufacturers' raffle promotions. When Purefoods or Swift would have a running raffle, this would greet me when I opened our kitchen cupboard...

I would mean to grab a can of Vienna sausages but end up opening a can of pork n' beans. Sigh.

Her obsession continued even after I got married. She would strongly urge my husband who smokes Marlboros to smoke the Hope and Winston cigarettes sitting on her home-office-desk in their silver foil - wrapper-less of course. Sadly, she never won an "ixpidition". But she did win us a portable crib for our daughter by secretly collecting all the proofs of purchase of her diapers!

These days, her obsession has been channeled to the Lotto. She records every winning lotto combination in her little pad. She even logs the VisMin winning combinations even if she can barely get out of her room (due to Osteoporosis), what more fly to VisMin to buy a Lotto ticket there?! Check out photos of her records and the rest of her OC habits on ocmominmanila.

For someone so obsessed with control, it's ironic how she loves to join these games of chance. Perhaps she's trying to beat the system? My Lola: what a character!

Photos from Google images.