Manila!

The first thing I said when I got back to Swarthmore was "Twenty-four hours ago, I was still wearing shorts, flip-flops and T-shirts and eating mangoes with every meal." Coming back to a freezing-cold Philadelphia wasn't the most awesome thing ever. But seeing everyone who was abroad last semester is fantastic!

Anyways, the Philippines was great. The country is going through what they call a "cold spell," which means that the temperature is absolutely perfect and 70ºC every day. The first few days were spent in the Cordillera mountains, near the city of Baguio (~150mi southwest of Manila). The American embassy maintains a compound there for expats to visit to get out of crowded and polluted Manila. It's gorgeous:

From Manila Winter 2009

And for you history buffs out there, the Japanese actually surrendered their control over the Philippines in this building:

From Manila Winter 2009

We went into Baguio city proper a few times (not that interesting of a city, unfortunately) and ate at this cute cafe one of these times. They served a lot of chocolate, such as hot chocolate made with Carabao milk. It was delicious.

From Manila Winter 2009

From Manila Winter 2009

And the sticky rice was really good too!

And back to Manila...

From Manila Winter 2009

Manila from our 53rd floor window. The large concentration of high-rise buildings is Makati, the major commercial section of Manila.

With the abundance of amazing mangoes, and still craving that sticky rice, I decided to make Thai sticky rice with mango, Kow neuw moon, as often as possible.

From Manila Winter 2009

The dish is super easy to make if you have a rice cooker. Just replace the water for the same amount of coconut milk and add a bunch of sugar (about a 1:2 sugar to rice ratio, but this is definitely personal preference) and voila! It helps if you have sticky rice (short grain), but plenty of people use medium or even Jasmine. This is definitely a recipe worth fiddling with since the payoff is so excellent.

Last bit of news. We got a puppy! His name is Leo.

From Manila Winter 2009

From Manila Winter 2009

Best pumpkin pie ever?

This past Thanksgiving, Roy and I went over to the lovely Uyehara household for Thanksgiving, and I wanted to bake a Kaz-friendly dessert for it. I ended up finding a fantastic recipe using coconut milk and a bunch of spices, and it was amazing! It turns out that pumpkin and coconut milk are extremely compatible. I'm making this pie again for Christmas dinner this year, but with a buttery pat in the pan crust instead.

This is a rather plain view of the pie. It looks so much better when it's cut into slices. You'd be able to see the layer of crushed walnuts between the crust and the filling that gives the pie a lot more texture and flavor. AND as a bonus, this pie is incredibly resistant to being dropped upside-down! (Not that I would know personally, of course...)

From Edacious Eatings

Roy and I made the pie using a 9-inch pie pan, and we ended up having a lot of batter left over, so we ended up making pumpkin muffins by adding about 1/2 cup of flour and tiny pinches of baking soda and powder to the batter, and baking at 350ºC.

From Edacious Eatings

And the best thing about those muffins was that we could eat those right away!

Not your typical college student's midnight snack

Bethanne and I went to Trader Joe's a while ago (a really long while ago, I just never got around to this post), and came away with some delicious snacks.

A little caprese:

From Edacious Eatings

And some fresh avacado:

From Edacious Eatings

Classy? Definitely.

First Snow!

From Swarthmore - Nov. 2008

From Swarthmore - Nov. 2008

From Swarthmore - Nov. 2008

From Swarthmore - Nov. 2008

SEPTA fail

An addendum to my last post:

From Edacious Eatings

Yes, it really does say 85 minutes late. The other picture we didn't take involves the entire board of train times in red. Major SEPTA fail.

In other news. It snowed at Swarthmore today. It was absolutely gorgeous. Best present ever.

Fuji Mountain

Chris and I went to a Japanese restaurant in Philly last Friday for our one-year anniversary (!). The weather was gorgeous and warm, and the streets and trains were filled with semi-inebriated people celebrating the Phillie's win.

The funny thing about Fuji is that Chris and I have previously passed it before, and I dubbed it as "generic looking." And I booked a reservation a week ago not knowing that it was the same restaurant. When we got there, it was TOTALLY empty. I was really worried that it really was going to be a bad restaurant. But then we realized that it was 6:30 on a Friday night, and we were being total old people getting in on the early bird special, so we took our chances and went in. Luckily, my intuition was totally wrong and it ended up being a sweet little restaurant.

I ordered the Nabeyaki soba, which is a huge bowl of buckwheat noodles in clear broth with fish cake, eggs, and some veggies. One of my main worries about soba is that it will turn out hard and chewy, but theirs was perfect -- tender but not soggy. Definitely a solid dish. Chris, on the other hand, got a yaki udon, essentially thick white noodles in a "special sauce." It turned out a bit too saucy and the meat was a bit funky. He ended up giving the dish a grade of 90%, although I think there was some grade inflation involved here. Other than that, their sushi was good, but tempura was oily and not excellent. Get the mochi ice cream for dessert. It's worth it. And the service was pretty decent.

From Edacious Eatings

From Edacious Eatings

The real kicker from the night was our adventure back to Swat. Because of the parade, SEPTA was completely backed up. Silly Septa thought that they could handle the number of people in the streets that day. But the fact that our train was 85 minutes late definitely told otherwise. We ended up taking the sketchy subway to 69th street and taking another sketchy bus, finally arriving back on campus at 11pm at night (we got to 30th street at 8:30). Oh man. By that time, I was just glad that I wasn't alone.

Fall

I have fallen in love with this season again. Completely, in an over-my-head sort of way. And remember: I'm the girl who, when in an argument about what's the best season, would always take spring's side. Who would want a season when everything dies? (Of course the fact that my birthday is in May brings no bias to the table). But now, I'm considering ditching the pink and sprightly season of spring and embrace something more mature and bountiful and beautiful. Seriously, is there anything that this season can't do?

My first real encounter with fall this year involved our wonderful backpacking trip to the Whites, which I'll tell you more about as soon as I get my hands on some of the pictures my compatriots took. But in the meantime, a teaser: It involves golden, yellow, and orange leaves still on the trees and on the ground as far as the eye can see and remarkably comfortable beds of leaves everywhere you choose to sit. The air is crisp and the sky is clear, revealing an almost-full moon. There is a warm fire next to you, with a pot of couscous containing fresh onions and mushrooms bubbling away. Chris and I agreed that this must be the prettiest campsite in the world.

Oh man, the fall foliage. It's somethin' else.

Now I'm back at Swat, feeling the full force of nature and endorphins withdraw and spending too much time in lab where there's no sun and too many Dana bugs. The only good thing right now is how much I'm buying food and cooking for myself. It's nice feeling a sense of control over what you're putting into your body.

I went to the co-op right before it closed tonight and fell in love with the amount of fresh local produce it had.

From Edacious Eatings

Asian pears, bok choy, spinach, heirloom (?) cherry tomatoes, big tomatoes, and (not pictured) apples of every variety (I got Jonagold, Winesap, Gala, and Fuji).

Of all the things I got, the pears, apples, spinach, and tomatoes are all local. Talk about carbon footprint-reducing and delicious.

And the tomatoes. I have to tell you about the cherry tomatoes.

Not only do they look absolutely gorgeous and smell exactly the way all tomatoes should smell (even though few do these days), they are some of the juiciest, tastiest, sweetest tomatoes I've ever eaten. They have a really thin layer of flesh enveloping all the tart, sweet juices and seeds, so thin that you really have to consciously make sure your mouth is closed when chewing. I told myself I'd save some for later, but ...oops.

I love fall.