It's going to be colder the next few days but in the garden outside the scent of hyacinths says "spring." Sprinkling on and off today, the weather may even bring light snow tomorrow morning. The hyacinths are just opening fully, the earliest daffodils are past their prime, the mid-season ones just now blooming. This year I had more amaryllis blossoms but didn't take any photographs. This is from last year.
Lunch at 8 China is my Saturday highlight. I am lucky to have a place like this to enjoy. I am there every week so the owner knows me by face. While others queue up for a table, she gestures me in to sit wherever I like. I usually sit at one of two tables by the window. The waitress, Ninny, also knows me and automatically brings me my tall glass of water and cup of jasmine tea. At 8 China I could not feel better if I was a lord in some medieval kingdom or a New York City magnate that owned the restaurant.
I could never prepare the like of the foods the buffet offers. Many take hours and special skills to fix. The Chinese like my people in the Philippines like seafoods so there dozens of seafood preparations. The variety always reminds me of the dinner buffets served on the beach at night in Boracay. Boracay, an island resort that is perhaps the most known resort among foreign tourists in the Philipines, is just off the northern coast of the island where my family still lives, Panay. It does take five to six hours to drive up there although the roads are generally well maintained unlike in Palawan where many were just gravel roads.
At 8 China (eight is considered a lucky number by the Chinese), one of my favorites is pork ears that back in the Philippines we boiled, then marinated in coconut-flower vinegar and garlic and called kilawin. At the restaurant, they take it a step farther and fry the marinated strips of ears until they turn golden while still remaining limp. They are delicious. I always put a mound of them on my plate.
Another favorite is bovine stomach that we called libro because of the page-like flaps covering the surface. It is boiled, then cut into strips and sautéed lightly in garlic and onions with a little of the broth in which it was tenderized. In the Philippines, stomach is seldom served by itself. It is added to beef in clear-broth stews with vegetables like potatoes and cabbage. In some regions the stew is flavored with iba, eyedrop-like, light green fruits that are very sour. Filipinos like sour in stews and use other ingredients like tamarind leaves, unripe guavas, guava leaves, etc. These peculiarly Filipino additions to foods are what I miss the most in America.
At the next table, a French guy was trying to get his children to eat vegetables. Adrian, age 2, and Annemarie, age 5, are half-Japanese and speak a babble of languages. Their dad had also worked in China so spoke some Mandarin. He taught his daughter to say, shi-shi, when the waitress brought her extra fortune cookies.
Encounters with strangers continue to spark my days. I live alone so I welcome these short, impromptu conversations. At McDonald's yesterday, an elderly guy came by and told me he saw me at Bally's. His name was Hollie. "It was my father's name," he told me when I remarked on how unusual it was. Another guy, seeing that the order line was long, came by and chatted with me about AT&T's digital TV offerings. He approached me at first to ask if my laptop was using Internet and how I did that.
Rain clouds have moved in. The sky is darker. I'll run the vacuum cleaner then walk for a bit at the gym.
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