The Sassy Lawyer & Pinoy Cook on food, family and home.
It was Sam who gave us our first taste of watermelon iced tea. She cut seedless watermelon into small cubes, dropped them into glasses of iced tea, gave Speedy and me each a glass and, oh wow, were we wide-eyed with surprise! So simple, so basic, so very refreshing. How could we not have thought ... (more)
Sam likes buying those frozen seafood balls in the grocery — fish balls, squid balls, shrimp balls, prawn balls, crab balls, lobster balls… I always ask her to choose fish balls over the others because I am allergic to crustaceans. Last time, she wanted lobster balls and she couldn’t be persuaded to choose something else. ... (more)
When Sam’s in the mood, she makes magic in the kitchen. She browsed the web for instructions on how to make mochi, I gave her a bag of glutinous rice flour and she made pink mochi with a bowl, a fork, the microwave oven and red food color. The first time she gave me a ... (more)
Saturday night, we went out to see The Avengers. Alex had seen it with her school friends on opening day because, well… she had to be among the first. It’s a Robert Downey, Jr. thing. She’s smitten. Speedy and I, on the other hand, hate seeing any movie on opening day. We don’t like jostling ... (more)
When we were living in the city next to my grandmother’s house, Sam and Alex spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s garden. Alex was very young then, just learning to talk. Sam was already the most talkative toddler ever and she liked to christen the plants and flowers. Because it was the Disney ... (more)
My first encounter with vegetable protein was a disaster. I was in high school, my mother was flirting with vegetarianism, she bought bags of TVP (textured vegetable protein) and added the cubes to meat dishes. The TVP label said that when cooked with meat, the TVP would acquire the same taste, color and texture of ... (more)
The recipe was born as an afterthought. Sam loves lychees — canned, for convenience — and her favorite thing to do with them is to make a lychee smoothie by roughly pureeing the fruits in a blender along with the syrup, sugar and ice. But because she can’t finish an entire can of lychees by ... (more)
On Saturday, after lunch, we were watching TV and Sam had her guinea pig on her lap. Pepper, our cat, came in, sprawled on the floor, Sam picked her up and decided it was bonding time for guinea pig and cat. She called me over to show how the two were getting along. I got ... (more)
Sam was born on August 20, 1992, exactly two months before my 29th birthday. And for my birthday that year, Speedy gave me a rocking chair. He had this idea that if I held Sam in my arms, sat on the chair and rocked gently, she would soon be asleep. Well, it worked when Sam ... (more)
We already knew that Sam wouldn’t be coming home this weekend because she’ll be out of town on a photo shoot. We were, however, expecting that Alex would be home. In fact, because she doesn’t have classes on Fridays, we made preliminary arrangements to pick her up on Thursday afternoon. But she couldn’t come home ... (more)
Since my mother arrived on Thursday, she had been talking about the free McDonald’s meals she was entitled to from her credit card purchases. Apparently, there’s a promo that for every single purchase of so much, there’s a free McDonald’s meal somewhere. But since the freebies have to be personally claimed, no one wanted to ... (more)
Alfalfa is a flowering plant that belongs to the pea family. In the West, it has long been grown for cattle feed. In Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, alfalfa has been used for centuries to treat many health disorders. From Herbal Supplement Resource: Alfalfa has a long history of use in China as an appetite stimulant, ... (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 … »»
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