The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
We wanted to achieve three things when we decided to relocate the dining room: 1. Maximize natural light which I so need for taking food photos; 2. Declutter (some say it isn’t a grammatically correct word but it illustrates the intention perfectly) the kitchen by moving the dining stuff into the dining area; and 3. ... (more)
We’re still in the midst of redoing parts of the house. It started simply enough as an attempt to maximize the use of natural light in areas where I normally take food photos and block out the harsh afternoon sun where we watch TV and hang out. But things have gotten a bit more ambitious. ... (more)
Just before Sam started college, I bought her two photography books (okay, that’s in addition to all the other photography books I’d been buying her for the past two years). One of them is… Ummm, this is the part where I stood up and started hunting for the book which I was sure I left ... (more)
One thing about this house is that, strictly speaking, there is no “living room” and “dining room.” Instead, there is a living area and a dining area. Meaning, the dining and living areas are contiguous and no wall divides them. Now I like every area of the house to be defined. The easiest solution would ... (more)
As far as I know, condiment saucers are very Asian. We Asians have this penchant for dipping sauces like patis (fish sauce), the mixture of soy sauce and kalamansi, bagoong (shrimp sauce) and a dozen other different things which we do not like to get mixed in with the food on our plates until we’re ... (more)
Flashback: the magazine page with a photo of the dining chairs I wanted. Thirty days later, the dining set was delivered together with the living room furniture and bar stools. Why not a design with cushioned backrests? Ventilation, of course. This is the tropics where people sweat nine months out of every year. The cushioned ... (more)
Apart from the decor of the dining room, the table linen, the china, the glassware and the flatware set the dining mood as well. I have had an assortment of table cloths and placemats for as long as I can remember. I even had a Christmas set with appliqued poinsettias from The House of Ramie ... (more)
The thing about antflies and the dining room light is that because the lamp is open at the top, the antflies fly directly into the hot light, die and fall to the bottom of the lamp. When we’re eating and we look up, we can see the dead gamu-gamo and the girls go, “Eeewwww…” The upside is that they don’t fall into our food after getting scorched.
The other problem is dust. Dust settles at the bottom of the lamp…
Yesterday was order-the-furniture day. We already had “some ideas” about where to buy the furniture but we had not really made up our minds. We had scoured more than a dozen places, including Tiendesitas, Greenhills and malls, and still hadn’t made any final decisions. We were clear on one thing though — we want hardwood ... (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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