Day 191 - Cooking and shopping

Strangely, some of the things I have missed most on this trip are the ordinary, day-to-day activities like grocery shopping, cooking, and going to the laundromat. Today I did two out of three. I got permission from Auntie T to use her kitchen, and Cz's mom took me to the market. I spent the bulk of the morning happily puttering around mixing marinades and figuring out how to reproduce the fried eggplant from yesterday's food stall. It turns out to be surprisingly simple.

Ingredients:

Chinese Eggplant
Eggs (enough to coat the eggplant)
Flour (enough to dredge the eggplant)
Oil
Salt to taste

Grill or broil the eggplant whole, stem and all, until the skin is slightly charred and the flesh is tender but not mushy.

Set aside to cool

Lightly beat the eggs in a bowl

Mix a nice amount of salt with the flour in a wide, shallow dish. A pie plate or casserole dish would work well

Peel the eggplant - the skin should pull off easily with your fingers. Leave the stems on.

Flatten the eggplant. I used the side of a wide knife.

Dip in Egg

Dredge both sides in flour

Fry in very hot oil until brown and crispy. It is essential that the oil be quite hot (nearly smoking) as otherwise the eggplants will absorb it an become greasy. They don't need to cook very long - the eggplants are already done, the frying is just to put a nice crust on them.

The weird, red lumps just down from the watermelon are meatloaf. I put some sausages in them for flavour. Turns out the sausages were mostly food colouring, resulting in decidedly lurid meatloaf. Didn't seem to slow anyone down in eating it though. The whitish lumps are fish marinated in a ginger/garlic/soy sauce mixture, then baked. It's really simple, and works with any flavourful fish (ie. bluefish, salmon, mackerel).

After lunch, I blogged for a while, then it was off to the shopping center to get Christmas presents for everybody, and to pick up Cz's barong and glasses. Remember how Cz claims to hate shopping? This trip to the shopping centers - totally his idea. First stop, the barong tailors, where the barong fit perfectly and looked very nice. Next stop, the chaos of last-minute Christmas shoppers to buy 24 picture frames at the discount mall near the barong tailor. Stop 3, the more posh mall to collect Cz's glasses and to develop pictures to go in said frames. Everyone on our list, naughty or nice, is getting a picture of us and a picture of somewhere we've been. If you read this blog before you get yours, just act surprised when you unwrap it.

While waiting for the pictures to print, we had halo-halo...again. The stuff is seriously addictive. Well, Auntie R had halo-halo. The rest of us had variations on the theme of bubble tea.

Home again, we set to work labeling, framing, and wrapping gifts. Auntie R was a big help, and we were done by 11. After we finished wrapping, we went downstairs for a midnight snack, and found Auntie T still awake. The business is so crazy before Christmas that she has no time for a break during the day, and is busy until late at night. She was still up when we went to bed at midnight, and planned to be awake at 4:00 for tomorrow's Misa de Gallo. I don't know how she manages to stay awake, let alone function and stay cheerful.

Several of the family own their own businesses, and all of them work incredibly hard. It is interesting to see how owning a business makes what would be a a 40 hour a week job at someone else's workplace into a 24 hour occupation. It is a little like freelancing I suppose, in that we are consumed at all hours by what we do, but at least we have the freedom to choose our jobs, or say, to leave the country for eight months.