The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
I got an email from a fellow U.P. Law alumnus asking if I would share this project with my readers. You know how allergic I am to people asking for free advertising but this is something I would have gladly and voluntarily advertised if I had come across it before anyone contacted me about it. ... (more)
Very rarely does a book get translated into a movie and survive the translation. More often than not, a lot of substance flies out the window to comply with cinematic requirements including the length of run time. Then, there’s the actual and more serious problem of translating words into visuals. End result, people who have ... (more)
Dreamworks’ Sinbad was on Cartoon Network last night and Alex was already watching it when I entered the family room. I had never seen it before and I didn’t know whether I was seeing a scene from the first half, the third quarter or the last five minutes of the movie. I didn’t recognize the ... (more)
In the age of mass media, and the internet, people have developed the “scoop” mentality. Everyone wants to be the first. Media outfits will pay good money to get the scoop on an event and internet publishers sometimes try to out-scoop media. The more serious movie goer and book reader do it to their peers ... (more)
Yesterday after lunch, Speedy and I were having coffee in the bedroom. The sliding door leading to the garden was open and I had a good view of the portion of the garden where the two sili (chili pepper) plants grow. One of the two sili plants, the taller one, is propped up with a ... (more)
On Sunday evening, my daughter Alex sat down next to me in my study with Neil Gaiman’s “M Is For Magic” in her hands. Apparently, a lot of nursery rhymes were referenced in the short stories and, not being familiar with many of them, she decided it was more convenient to ask me rather than ... (more)
I found this copy of James Clavell’s Tai-Pan in a second hand bookstore, my signature on the flyleaf says I bought it in 1986 and the tag price on the front cover says I bought it for P36. It’s in terrible condition today after I’ve read it oh, so many times. I’ve also loaned it to a cousin (she still says to this day that I started her on the road to reading) who bought a copy of Noble House> afterward and loaned it to me after she had read it.
I don’t like memes and I don’t often do tagging that is nothing more than a thinly-disguised meme. Even in Facebook, I don’t respond to all the tags. There are, however, those that I like either because they fun, or they share information that are valuable or interesting, or both. Like this one. The rule: ... (more)
There are three bookstores we go to regularly — Powerbooks, Fully Booked and A Different Bookstore. What about National Bookstore? Oh, we go there for school, office and art supplies but when we want books, we go to real bookstores. Rarely do we go to Eastwood City without passing by A Different Bookstore although Sam ... (more)
Note: I know that the blog has gone offline at least twice during the past 24 hours. It might be a hardware issue; still looking into it. [Yesterday's column] After reading Neil Gaiman’s novella “Coraline”, I am now eagerly awaiting the film version. Although I am not exactly a fan of 3D animation (I really ... (more)
Casa is Spanish for house. CASA is also an acronym for Connie, Antonio, Sam and Alex. We are all surnamed Veneracion. We all love to take photos -- of anything that catches our fancy. It's a family obsession.
This is a journal of how we live, eat, learn, play and have fun. Work? Work is part of playing and having fun. Seriously.
In 2003, a time when I hadn't heard of the term "blog", I started a recipe website at cooking.houseonahill.net using a now defunct content management system that ran on ASP. Ok, never mind the geek talk, I'm sure you're not interested in that. The contents easily multiplied and, in 2004, I moved the food site to pinoycook.net. Always unhappy with the fact that the dot com versions of houseonahill and pinoycook weren't … (click here to read all »)
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