This Rugged JoyFull Home

There is something about the sound of rain that immediately pulls you toward the kitchen. It makes you crave the comfort of home, with the soft music playing from another room, and the familiar aromas of childhood. Trying to frame a perfect view for a windy, rainy morning here on this side of the planet. It's a perfect day to cook a family-favorite ulam , which is none other than the delectable laing . And because I hail from the province of Oriental Mindoro, I also call it pinangat , or pangat for short. The main ingredient of this well-loved Filipino dish is the lowly dahon ng gabi that propagates in your swampy backyard or in your neighborhood's unkempt vacant lot. If you are friends with your neighbor who grows a gabi patch, you can score it for free. The same situation applies to your malunggay and dahon ng saging cooking needs. Gabi , or taro in English, is primarily a starchy root vegetable that has huge green leaves and tuberous stalks. It is loaded with essentia...

I finally gave in... to this nagging idea of buying an additional kitchen tool for our baking needs at home away from home. F or weeks I held on to disciplining myself by not buying extra kitchen implements  sa ngalan ng pagtitipid   knowing that as expats in Moscow our tenure here has an expiry date. We want to economize on purchases as much as we can.  And we will try our very best to refrain from buying duplicates  the fact that whatever kitchen tools we decide on purchasing here, we already have them back home in the Philippines.  We don't wan't to create a  pugad  here. A  pugad  as most of us Pinoys know is a Tagalog word for nest, a bird's nest, that is. But this kind of nest is a different kind of nest in that it is our cunning way of naming  kalat  slash  sukal  slash clutter build - up in our home.  Well, it's a family thing, a sarcasm on ourselves as a reminder to keep clutter at bay in a joking way. A...

Baking banana bread is not rocket science. All you need are the basic wet and dry ingredients such as eggs, butter, over-ripe bananas, flour, fast acting yeast, salt, and sugar respectively. These ingredients are readily available at supermarkets anywhere in the world. So, it's really not a problem finding your supplies because they are actually your kitchen staples. You may not have to leave the house to buy them because it is likely that you already have a stash of them in your pantry. What I've found a bit tricky though was measuring each ingredient in the exact amount as we would have done back home in beloved Philippines. Although we're grateful for our tiny, yet homey kitchen here in Moscow, where there's an old but well-maintained electric stove-top and a good-sized oven,  it does not have the luxury of your kitchen baking implements like measuring spoons and cups, baking pans, mixing bowls, sifters, or an electric mixer. And I have been disciplining myself...

I am torn between my two loves, Russia and my beloved Philippines. And although Russia's ginormous land area is 17.1 million square kilometers which is about fifty times the size of the land area of the Philippines at 300,000 square kilometers, I see  from my mobile phone's eyes plenty of commonalities that these two great nations have. After all, isn't this a natural tendency of ours as OFWs peppering the world? to find the connections in things and see the similarities in people that we meet, no matter how diverse we are as individuals? and then gradually, and eventually making yourself at home, away from home? You sense that you've reached a moment in this process of uprooting and re-planting that   your roots are steadily growing , until you can't tell the difference between your two home-countries any longer. You tell yourself, "this is my Father's world. I am on a bent posture in awe of His Omnipresence - the ALL - Present - GOD. Where are You not?...