The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
A friend posted the video on Facebook. I learned the song when I was in grade school, years after it was released in North America. I didn’t even know at the time who the singer nor the composer was. I wouldn’t know the name Joni Mitchell until I was in high school when my brother ... (more)
New here? My younger daughter, Alex, is a college freshman taking up Technical Theater. She’s a theater lover but she especially loves musical theater. She got hooked on Andrew Lloyd Webber when she was in grade school, the fascination turned into passion and she’s now a Theater major. You have to understand. I was a ... (more)
I don’t watch American Idol. I didn’t know who Adam Lambert was until AFTER he lost. Then, I watched the reruns and whatever videos I could find on Youtube mainly to understand why Sam was gaga over him. And I became a fan. Not of American Idol but of Adam Lambert. Since January when I ... (more)
For the past few months, I’ve been tempted to conduct a survey among parents with teenage kids. The question: has Glee invaded your home? It sure has invaded mine. Because of Alex, not Sam. Sam is nuts over Adam Lambert. Her classmates say that if Adam comes to the Philippines to do a concert, Sam ... (more)
(Today’s column) Filipinos are music lovers. We like listening to music and we love singing and dancing as well. Music evokes different kinds of emotions and reactions. It can be soothing and relaxing, it can be upbeat and exciting, it can even be nostalgic. But when one’s love for music results in the rest of ... (more)
While most people associate rainy days with something drab and gray and depressing, I feel that rain, mist and fog make the most romantic setting ever. Perhaps, it’s a carry over from the first time I read Wuthering Heights which, to this day, I consider to be the most romantic novel I have ever read. Or a subconscious rebellion against the association of rain with wrath and punishment and destruction — you know, Noah’s Ark and all that. I see rain as a necessary ingredient for growth. It is something the quenches the thirst of the earth. It is a cleansing and a renewal.
A couple of nights ago, Speedy was cleaning out his closet and he took out a stack of playing records. Alex stared and said, “What’s that?” Kinda hard to explain to a kid whose earliest memories of music storage are audio CDs. The exchange inspired me to take photos of the playing records with Sam’s old Girst Generation iPod Nano which was handed down to Alex a few weeks ago.
For those too young to know, those large cardboard containers house playing records… which were played on things called turntables like these. Playing records are the iPods of the 1880s through the mid-1980s when audio CDs first hit the market. Their content were non-changeable unlike the iPods that you kids have today.
A few days ago, I saw singer Regine Velasquez on TV airing some “gripes” against those who criticized her Twenty concert. She said she wouldn’t feel so bad IF the critics had bothered watching the concert before lambasting it, or something to that effect. I was curious. When I caught the televised concert while waiting ... (more)
Back when I was in the College of Law, Tears for Fears hit the international music scene. Music videos, the medium that would catapult Madonna to stardom, was a new phenomenon and it was through them that I was introduced to the music of two ex-mental patients (or so I heard; Wikipedia refers to it ... (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 … »»
In Chinese philosophy, the moon is Yin to the sun’s Yang. 
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