Underneath the Lamp

One of Bikram's favorite riddles is "where is the darkest place in the world?" This is one of the many questions he loves to throw out when he lectures, we teachers and regular audience members at the Bikram circus keep our mouths shut as newcomers yell out guesses. "A cave?" - blah, Bikram is bored by this answer. "Yoga class?" - some giggles, now he's bored and irritated. "The night of my soul?" "No!" says Boss, "it's SO SIMPLE! The darkest place in the world is underneath the lamp - think of it!"

And so I have, in fact I know for certain I first thought about it far before I'd ever heard of Bikram, thanks to the enforced reading of Thoreau in 10th grade. I found an old sheet of study questions on the "Conclusion" chapter of "Walden" in a pile of old papers the other day. I must have kept it because I got an A+ on it, something that didn't always happen in English class! So the last question on the sheet was, "Identify one of the paradoxes in the last paragraph of the chapter and comment upon it." To which I answered:

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us." - light is not dark - this is the paradox: how can you call intense brightness darkness? Thoreau's reasoning is that true understanding of the world and "what is essential to life" comes in the form of intense brightness, but to someone who doesn't understand, there is no light, and to someone who cannot grasp fully the secrets of life, their greatness blinds him and he is reduced to "seeing" only darkness.

I read this and was immediately reminded of Bikram's "darkest place" riddle. Always underneath the lamp, often the glory and beauty of it shines inspiration, possibility and joy into my life, but often I am in that place, so blinded the magnitude and intensity of the light (that must still be there) that I experience only darkness. Looking back on high school, the years before and the years after it, really life before I started practicing yoga, I see those years as dark, "unenlightened" as it were. It's reassuring to see evidence of a glimpse of that light way back on December 14th, 1990, intellectual and detached as the experience might have been - my recollection of reading "Walden" was that it was a boring slog. Knowing as I do now that Thoreau and his contemporaries were some of the first Westerners to read and be inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu scriptures of which Bikram teaches all the time, it doesn't surprise me that Thoreau hits on such a similar point as Bikram.

Reminder to self: Revisit Walden, as well as the Gita!

Warmly,
Carol

The Loss of Lovely Sky

Alas, the story of Sky has a sad ending. Sky passed away yesterday in her sleep, in the loving care of the vet and staff of PAWS PARC, where she is now buried. She was doing well for a few days after I brought her back to Scout Bayoran Street, eagerly eating food that I brought, settling back into her life like nothing had happened. But on Saturday, her fifth day back on the street, I found her sitting disconsolately, walking stiffly and painfully, and unwilling to eat. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday morning I tried all sorts of food for her - fish and adobo from the calendaria, mashed-up kibble mixed with water, baked chicken breast minced up into tiny pieces - and while the other cats around eagerly attacked all of my offerings, Sky would eat nothing. She got weaker each day, still leaning her head into my chin scratches but by Monday morning when I stopped to see her and offer chicken before teaching the 8:30am yoga class, she couldn't even stand up, her legs splayed out from under her when she tried to get up to greet me and she just lay pitifully on her side, unable to even use both paws to cradle her head as cats usually do.

I was convinced that she would be dead by the time I returned from teaching the 8:30am class, and it devastated me to think of her lying there dying on the ground. My students were very supportive and thank goodness for yoga, whether teaching or practicing, it brings wonderful peace of mind. When I returned after teaching she was lying there taking short little breaths, still alive but looking like she was suffering and in pain. I don't know if she would have preferred to die on the street or in the hands of humans, I just knew that I did not want to see her die on the sidewalk there and find her on the trash heap when I returned later, nor did I want her to have to suffer any longer than necessary. So, having a few hours to work with before an appointment in the early afternoon, I took her to PAWS to be euthanized. When I got there the first thing we did was give her rehydration fluids. She had a notch on her ear from the spaying that looked as though it had healed, but when we rehydrated her a bit it started bleeding - she had been too dehydrated to bleed! Poor angel. Her breathing got deeper but more labored and she panted from time to time, like she was really hurting. The vet offered to put her on an IV to really rehydrate her and get some nutrition in her, but if she didn't respond and seem to improve by 4pm then we agreed it would be best to put her down. I said goodbye to her and reluctantly left for my appointment.

I called at 5pm to find out that Sky had passed away peacefully in her sleep at 3pm, an hour before the euthanize decision was to be made. I felt sad that she was gone, but relieved that her suffering was over. So many emotions. I do sometimes wonder, and others have wondered to me as well, why even allow myself to get emotionally attached in a situation like this? I mean, a sickly street cat, how could it possibly turn out well? But really there was no choice for me, in the first place I love cats - and dogs, though I am more attuned to cats - and my eyes and heart always leap when I see them, either in someone's home as a pet or living on the street. And Sky in particular was just a very special cat, perhaps she had been raised in a home and then become homeless, because she was so unusually social and affectionate. From the moment she caught my eyes in hers and rubbed up against my ankle I was smitten. She was a beautiful creature, she brought joy and light to my day whenever I saw her, and she got me not just thinking but also acting to help the lot of animals in Manila. As the adage goes, it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.

I only wish I'd met Sky earlier and that I'd had the chance to have her spayed before she was on the brink of death. Cats are truly a part of the Manila ecosystem. (The same goes for dogs but I'll keep the focus on cats here for consistency and simplicity.) Think of it as though in every neighborhood, on every block, there is a fixed number of "cat slots," each slot simply demanding the presence of a cat like a vacuum attracts matter. Cats are adaptive, tenacious survivors. They may be graceful, beautiful, and fastidious - cats spend hours grooming themselves, licking each bit of fur into shiny smooth perfection, even if that means filtering and processing the smog and grime of Manila through their astoundingly resilient bodies - but they also patrol the streets controlling the populations of rats, cockroaches and other small undesirables. Cats are everywhere mostly because there are so many places for them, however due to the lack of spaying and neutering, there are often heartbreakingly too many, as they reproduce so often and there seem to be far more kittens being born than available cat slots, kittens (and cats) dying on the street wherever you turn. The isolated example of Sky's TNR, or trap-neuter-return, did not work out in the long term for Sky, but the strategy in general is a sensible and compassionate way of managing the cat population. Of course if all the cats were neutered and spayed there would be no kittens, however the reality of the situation is that we will never reach 100% of street cats spayed and neutered - far from it! But the more "cat slots" that are filled with healthy spayed, neutered cats, who are not run down from fighting over potential mates (males) or mothering (females) litter after litter of kittens who cannot be supported by the resources in their environment, the healthier and happier the general cat population will be, and the litters born to cats the TNR efforts don't reach will have better prospects in life as they fill slots that naturally open up over time.

The task of managing the cat or dog population in a city like Manila, like so many problems in the world, seems insurmountable. Just like I can see the train of thought that says trying to help Sky was an impossible task, a waste of emotional energy, time, and money. But if you're reading this, you are probably thinking about TNR as a way that we humans can compassionately coexist with our street cats and dogs. I hope you'll get involved, by donating to PAWS (http://www.paws.org.ph) (The Philippine Animal Welfare Society, which provides low-cost spay/neuter and works with passionate dedication to encourage the humane treatment of animals.) or an animal advocacy group near you, by leading or supporting TNR efforts in your neighborhood, and especially by always giving the street animals you meet a kind look. Any of these would be a beautiful memorial for Sky.

Kinky and Sky Get Spayed

Last Friday Kinky went through an important rite of passage of the domestic cat - she got spayed. I took her to PARC, the PAWS Animal Rehabilitation Center (PAWS stands for Philippine Animal Welfare Society), where I have been volunteering about once a week for the past couple of months, and where they have low-cost spay-neuter (P1000 for a female cat, P800 for a male).

I also brought a lovely little street cat I've been watching out for for several months now. There are always a few cats living next door to my building - right where I found Kinky last November. This little mostly-white girl with the vivid blue eyes stands out to me because she is so affectionate and friendly. She's quite emaciated and run-down-looking too, and I thought she was pregnant until a week ago when suddenly she had three six-to-eight-week-old kittens nursing on her, yet when I bring food she will get distracted from the food if I start petting her, she loves the attention so! If I am walking by and don't have any food, she and one or two other cats will coming running out to me because they recognize me as a frequent food-giver, but if I don't have any food the others will run away. Sky, as I've named her because of those amazing blue eyes, keeps after me to get her scritches behind the ears and backrubs. She even allowed me to pick her up a few times, very unusual and special for a street cat.

When I set Kinky's spay appointment I decided I would try to get Sky spayed also, about the time that it became clear that she was not pregnant, she was nursing - though coming to the end of nursing, her three kittens were eagerly chomping on the food I was bringing by. By Thursday when I brought Kinky in for a pre-spay checkup, it was down to two kittens, one disappeared in the typhoon on Tuesday night. (I came down Wednesday morning to teach 6:30am class and found Sky looking on over one soggy kitten curled up in the corner of each of two attached columns jutting out from the wall of the building where they hang out and I wondered, if there had been three columns, would have all the kittens have made it? Did the left-out kitten just get blown away?) I asked at PARC and they said bring Sky on in with the kittens, the kittens could stay at PARC with her for the three or four days while Sky recuperated from the surgery. And then when I went in to teach on Friday morning, leaving Kinky at home complaining bitterly about the total lack of available food and water in my apartment, it was one kitten - one of the two had been run over by a car in the night. And by the time I returned around noon with Kinky in her basket to put Sky and her remaining kitten in Kinky's airplane case, the third kitten had disappeared. I asked the building guard and he said the last kitten had disappeared that morning also. Life is not easy on the streets for kittens, so many die, so few make it to adulthood! So I lured Sky into the cat case with some fish from the sidewalk Calendaria on Tomas Morato next to Rustans and we headed off to PARC.

At PARC, Kinky was the first cat to be spayed since she'd not eaten since the night before and she was going home later. Sky was scheduled later because she'd eaten some fish when I lured her into the case she traveled in. I spent about 20 minutes hanging out with Sky in an enclosed room at PARC, let her out of the box and petted her a bit, but she was so tired and stressed I decided it would be best for her to just stay in her box - she sniffed around the room once, then found a corner under a chair to lie down in and, while she seemed happy to be petted, she just seemed to want to sleep. Who could blame her, having lost two kittens in the last 24 hours and then been tricked into a box by her trusted food-giver and brought to a strange place? So I hung out helping to clean cages and play with the newly-acquired cats in the cat quarantine area - before the cats are allowed into the general population they spend a few weeks to months in quarantine getting neutered/spayed, vaccinated, and dewormed, during which time they are pretty lonely so one of the things it's always helpful for volunteers to do is hang out with and socialize the quarantine cats and kittens.

Both cats made it through surgery with flying colors. Dr. Will, the vet at PARC, does hundreds if not thousands of spay operations a year and is a real pro, making a tiny incision, maybe 1cm - though he doesn't use a scope, the end result practically appears like he does the surgery arthroscopically! He did say that Kinky was a little challenging because "she's so fat" ... 3.5 kilograms (7.7 pounds) is a lot I guess for a 9.5-month-old cat. (I certainly don't want her to get bigger, she's going off her Royal Canin kitten food and onto "young adult spayed female food" now, that should help her stay stable.) Before leaving with Kinky I said goodbye to Sky who was still very groggy. Kinky woke up pretty thoroughly on the ride home and when we got back to my place she wanted to walk around but she couldn't really stand on her hind legs yet. She wobbled around like a drunken sailor making a beeline to her food bowl - LOVED the new food, she's always clamoring for more now that I know her weight and food allowance and am rationing her properly. Soon I heard a clattering sound, her failing to jump up on the counter and falling onto an empty water jug. So I started watching movies, she always sits with me when I watch movies. We had a little Johnny Depp double feature, watched Edward Scissorhands and Donnie Brasco before it was time for bed. The next day she was jumping up onto the counters and sink no problem and I decided there wasn't anything I could do to stop her. She's fine, and being pretty good about taking her Amoxicillin and getting swabbed with Betadine twice a day.

Today I returned to PARC to get Sky. She was in a cage in the quarantine area and looking pretty sad. She wasn't eating the kibble - she didn't understand it was food! I went to the calendaria and got her some adobo and bangus, which she devoured like she hadn't eaten for three days. I hope she'd eaten a few bites of kibble, I have no idea. She was so dirty too - I don't think she'd done anything but just lie there for three days, the poor little sweetheart. But she jumped right up for her pats and scratches when I arrived! I left her alone to digest and get ready for another meal while I went to help with some of the other cats and ended up giving a bath to Harley, a roughly six-week-old little calico orphan kitten who has long Persian-like fur and had lots of food and poop matted up in it - no mommy to groom her! She is used to being bathed and was pretty cooperative, and loved the hair dryer. This gave me idea - would Sky let me bathe her? She's let me hold her and seems pretty trusting, but who knew? I got clearance from the vet and gave it a shot. I was amazed at the level of trust the calm little creature had in me - she let me wet her down and shampoo her, at which time I discovered that she had lots of fleas! They were incapacitated and easy to take out, along with their nasty little black eggs. No wonder she'd liked me to scratch under her chin so much - there were lots of fleas camped out down there! Then came the blow drying, and I was amazed, there was a brief struggle after the first couple of minutes but she settled right down and let me dry her previously gray and oily fur into a fluffy soft whiteness, all the while scouring for and removing more fleas. After the initial resistance to the blow dryer she just totally surrendered. It was so sweet, she practically hugged my leg, purred, and let me groom her. Finally she was dry, I put her back in her cage with some more food, found the travel box, put her in, and took her home. In the cab ride home she cuddled in my arms the whole way. It was tough to put her back out on the street, if I could bring another cat into my no-cats-allowed apartment I would have but I will just have to trust that she will be much better off on the street spayed and rested than she was before. But please, if anyone wants to adopt a sweet, mellow little cuddlebun of a cat with eyes like the water at Boracay contact me ASAP!

In The Process Of What To Do Next

I am facing the end of my contract in Manila in three months and I don't know what I will do next. This is upsetting to me. I'm afraid of struggles I foresee with my family and with myself about my future. And practically speaking I need to figure something out for September. To be perfectly honest I don't have a plan for the rest of my life. I am very happy with what I am doing right now and, because of that, I am grateful for the path I've taken to get here though certainly there have been challenges. This doesn't mean that I am set on doing the same thing in the same place in the same way forever, far from it. But, being happy with the current situation and acknowledging that I have had no preconceived "Master Plan" that has brought me here, I am questioning the necessity of having such a plan at all - or maybe of having a plan that meets the approval of those whose approval I have sought in the past.

Imagining how my life looks through the eyes of my parents, my current situation teaching yoga in Manila is a diversion, something I'm getting out of my system so I can (finally) settle down and get my life on track once this escapade is over. (This is not just idle imagination, if I may quote my parents as I left for Manila, "Well dear, we think this should be a good way for you to get this yoga thing out of your system and then when you get home you can get back on track.") And I have been conditioned enough by my life's intertwining with theirs to still buy into that a bit - to the extent that I'll let them believe it. Maybe I need to continue to let them believe that. Really it's their beliefs, what I want them to believe doesn't much affect what they do believe! There's a major problem with this, however: When I reach a mile marker like the end of this contract, up come the old issues of getting on track, having a plan, and abandoning living my life in the current reckless whimsical fashion.

I love to look back at my memories of my past, how I thought and viewed the world, the assumptions I made and which limited me. To paraphrase Gibran, the shell that enclosed my understanding. It makes me all the more aware that that shell is still alive and well and curious to find out what the next revelation will be as I recognize and break through another aspect of that shell. Is it a shell at all? Maybe a series of shells, or perhaps the malleable and enveloping curtain of my own mind protecting me, keeping me safe within the scope of ideas that are safe for me to live in at the moment, not unlike a parent, sometimes overprotecting me but nevertheless well-intentioned and something I accept as a part of myself even as I seek to melt it away with the light of understanding. So once upon a time I believed that my parents defined the plan for my life. A set of assumptions based on careful observation and listening, the plan involved becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a businessperson or a professor or some other clearly-defined professional. My task was to select which one of these boxes into which to fit myself. I tried several of them out, none of them fit - perhaps because the empty shell of a person I was, so very little self-knowledge and self-love within that tiny shell of understanding, could never be happy anywhere. A vague inkling that there might be more to life and to myself, but afraid of the unknown.

I think the greatest benefit I have gained from practicing yoga is the recognition of the possibility of breaking that shell, and the courage to break it. Sure it's great what while I couldn't do splits at 10 I finally achieved the flexibility to do them at 30, wonderful that I so rarely get sick, and I love being able to take a 3-day, 160-mile bike ride every year with no actual in-the-saddle training and walk away from it feeling strong, healthy and uninjured. But for some reason the regular facing of myself in the mirror as I was pushed to my physical and mental limits made it impossible not to question the assumption I had made about having to fit into the current box - as I found in yoga something new, beautiful, and powerful. Something that had never been even remotely available as an acceptable track for me, but nevertheless interesting to me on a far deeper, more soulful level than anything else. And so to pursue it I took my first tentative steps out of the land of the boxes, amongst which I might have unhappily bounced for the rest of my life.

Opening my awareness to possibilities in life not defined by those boxes I gleaned from my parents was a step. Immediately I wanted my parents to accept the new possibilities. Wanted them to - I had no illusions that they would, but the desire was there. And I may always desire this approval. I love them and I want them in my life. I suppose that the latest shell I'm seeing is the willingness to be rattled by the pressure to get back into one of the old boxes. I have to take care of myself - and in three months I need to find a new situation where I can support myself (and my cat) as comfortably and fulfillingly as I have been doing in Manila. So that's the plan for now. And without worrying whether my parents approve, perhaps developing a vision that's truly in line with what's in my heart! Because there is tremendous value in having a plan, it just has to be your own plan. I think I've been having trouble because I've been trying to come up with plans for others. Eventually, as I am doing, the parents may even learn to trust my approval of myself.

Kinky's House

I've been in my new apartment, aka Kinky's apartment, for about five months now … about time I shared some pictures! The other day I got the place all spruced up and organized and took some photos. Kinky managed to insert herself into almost all of them, it's almost as though she was engaging in digital territorial marking. She does tend to follow me around as I go about, so I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. She tends to be very affected by music, she gets really mellow when I put on jazz like Billie Holiday and turns into a hyper attack cat when I play hard stuff like Jane's Addiction or Guns N' Roses. Apparently Jimi Hendrix is “follow Carol around and pose adorably for her photos” music. The shot above was early in the shooting and seems to capture the “this is my kingdom (queendom?) and how charming of you to drop by to pay obeisance to me” vibe that cats so instinctively exude. Note the elegant, relaxed sprawl, the regal tilt of her chin, and the disinterested sneer, accented by the dramatic, alert ears and powerful paws with claws ready for unsheathing at a moment's notice. Kinky my dear, you really know how to own a countertop. Thank you for allowing me to share your pad with you.

Kinky eats her dinner and watches me bake cookies and do other cooking in the kitchen here. A major step up from the other two kitchens I've had here in Manila, it has a full-sized fridge, a nice big double-welled sink, and a real oven (thus the ability to bake all those cookies, and empanadas). It even has a clothes washer, this strange plastic double-tubbed thing, but no dryer so for me the washer serves as a countertop. The major challenge in the kitchen is that there is not one single drawer. Who designs a kitchen with no drawers?!? So I have a lot of hooks on the wall holding strainers, potholders, tongs, etc., and a lot of stuff on the countertops and in cupboards that I would normally put in drawers. Outside the windows is the roof of the downstairs unit, which extends further out than my unit. Birds like to hang out on the roof there.
Kinky likes to hang out and watch the birds.

The picture above is of the entry door and the bathroom door; on the right is what you see as you walk into the apartment (except that Kinky is usually hanging out by the door looking to snoop around the hallway or get picked up, not sitting on the island/table/counter). The TV is part of the unit furnishings. For someone who watches no TV and movies pretty seldom, I have two of the nicest home theater setups I could imagine in a place this small – one in the living room here and the other in the master bedroom.

In the corner with rather sparsely-decorated walls is the couch. Kinky likes to chill out there listening to music. Here she is the mellowest I've ever seen her – Jerry Garcia Band turns her into molasses!

Before we head upstairs, here's the bathroom. One of Kinky's favorite hangout spots is on the mat in front of the shower. The pink towel is mine, the purple one (which gets a lot of use) is Kinky's – I turn on the water for her and she runs into the shower and either drinks the water or uses the facilities – either of which ends up with her pretty soaked. She's been a shower-playing cat pretty much since she could walk, and when I took her to the vet at a few weeks old for her first vaccination the vet sternly said, “don't give her a bath until she's at least 3 months old.” Oh well, she'd already had dozens by that time and showed no sign of stopping. In my defense, I never give her a bath – she takes them herself!

And on we go up the stairs. There's a little ledge around the stairs at the height of the floor of the second level, and I decided to put books around it – they remind me to read them and think about them as I go up- and downstairs. The only air conditioner in the place is in my bedroom, the door to the left off the landing at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I use the fan there to try to blow cool air down into the lower level. Fortunately it seems naturally cooler down there, as the lower-floor windows are more sheltered by overhangs outside.

To the right at the top of the stairs is the guest bedroom, which also serves as my extra closet and storeroom for suitcases, balikbayan boxes, etc..

Kinky's bedroom (she lets me stay here too), with the second amazing home theater setup.

Finally, here is the reason I moved from the other QC apartment – which is on another floor in the same building – to this one: the bathtub. I don't know who other than me would put an alcove off the bedroom containing only a bathtub, but how wonderful it is!!! The perfect place for reading all those books, as long as you don't mind a water-loving cat sitting on your chest while you're in the tub. It's very difficult to find a place with a bathtub in Manila. In this culture, people just don't take soaking baths – in fact, if someone says “I took a bath,” what they really mean is they took a shower. The concept of soaking in a tub of hot bathwater just doesn't register with most Filipinos. But some kindred spirit of mine designed this condo, and I lucked out in finding it. Once upon a time many years ago I saw a picture in Vogue or Architechtural Digest or some such magazine of what, as I recall, was the master bedroom in Gianni Versace's Manhattan apartment. He had a big claw-foot tub right in the middle of his bedroom. I thought, “someday when I grow up I want a bathtub in my bedroom too!” So I guess I'm grown up now!

Warmly,
Carol

Cookie Monster

Ah it's Easter break here in Manila, meaning that the yoga studio is closed, I have four consecutive days off, and I have lots of time to write blog posts! So here's the second one in a week...

I love chocolate chip cookies. I love eating them, I love baking them, I love sharing them, I love pretty much everything about them. Particularly Toll House chocolate chip cookies, except with way more chips than the recipe calls for. Chocolate chip cookie dough is nice, but in my opinion its role on Earth is merely to serve as an adhesive to glue as many chocolate chips together as possible. It's a wonderful substance for enclosing chips in a neat, portable vessel that allows you to enjoy melted chips on the go with a hint of sugar and spice and everything nice and without getting your hands too chocolatey.

In my nomadic life, I've lived in many places, since high school moving on average more than once a year. It's become a tradition of sorts to celebrate settling into a new place by baking cookies. I gather the requisite equipment: a big bowl and a small one, a wooden spoon and a spatula, a cookie sheet or two, a cooling rack, measuring cups, measuring spoons, and an oven thermometer. And the ingredients: flour, salt, baking soda, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla extract, almond extract (my favorite extra ingredient), butter, eggs, and a big ol' bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips. Ideally also Nestle Toll House chocolate chunks, a most wonderful addition to the Toll House product line. Then it's time to go!

I end up making dozens of insanely delicious, highly addictive, exploding-with-chocolate cookies and then I must quickly get them out of my new place or else I will pig out on them incessantly until they are all gone. So now the manager, guards, and maintenance staff of my building, the yoga studio staff, my yoga students, and pretty much everyone else around me has had chocolate chip cookies foisted on them. Fortunately they don't complain. I didn't have a proper kitchen with an oven in my Makati apartment or my first Quezon City apartment, but in my current apartment I have a nice little kitchen with a real oven and it has been wonderful to get back into the habit of making cookies.

A bunch of people have asked for my recipe, which is basically the Toll House recipe but with enough subtle and not-so-subtle changes and tricks that I figured I'd put down here all of my cookie-baking tricks and secrets.

First of all, ingredients. For about 30 big cookies (slightly bigger than Mrs. Field's) or 60 cute little cookies if you want to get the "5 dozen" Nestle says you'll get, follow the recipe on the 12 oz. bag of chips. Here are the amounts I use:

2 and 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter softened to room temperature
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1.5 tsp vanilla extract (official recipe calls for 1 tsp)
1 tsp almond extract (not in official recipe)
2 large eggs
at least 3 cups (18 oz) Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels (recipe calls for 12 oz, my standard is 21 oz and I've gone as high as 24 oz!)


The MOST IMPORTANT ingredient is the chocolate. I am a particular fan of using actual Toll House chips in these cookies, they end up tasting just they way they should. However, probably the best chocolate chip cookies I ever made were ones I made when I thought I had a 12 oz bag of chips in the house, but I actually only had about 1/4 cup of chips. Not wanting to go out to the store, I ransacked the house for every bit of chocolate I had - and being a total chocomaniac I had dark chocolate bars, milk chocolate bars, baking chocolate (sweetened of course), Easter bunnies, all sorts - and I chopped it all up into chips and chunks and made cookies with that big random pile of chocolate. The cookies were amazing, every bite was different due to the roughly six different kinds of chocolate in them. The chocolate dust left over from the chopping got all into the batter so even the batter was chocolatey. Mmmm. But I digress, Nestle Toll House chocolate chips are the best, most dependable way to go. Chips that are too small won't be melty and gooey enough. The Toll House chips are big enough, the chunks are awesome. Another benefit of Toll House is that they're sweet, but not too sweet.

Make sure you get UNSALTED butter, or else leave out the salt called for by the recipe. (Unless you are my friend Amanda who likes salty cookies, then use salted butter and additional salt!) In order to cream the butter and sugar, the butter must be soft and room-temperature. If you forget to let the butter warm up, there are several techniques for quick softening: For my double batches which require two cups of butter, I put two one-cup blocks of Magnolia Gold unsalted butter in a small plastic bowl and nuke them in my wimpy microwave on medium-low for about 1 minute 15 seconds, until the butter is really soft and a little melted butter is just starting to collect in the bottom of the bowl. Also: You can microwave butter sticks in the wrappers (NOT metal foil wrappers!) on high for 10-15 seconds. You can chop it into pats and let it warm naturally. You can take half the pats and nuke them until they're starting to get melty and even a bit runny and then mix them with the cold half. Be careful with the microwaving - if the butter is too warm when you mix up the batter your cookies will be more likely to spread and flatten in the oven (you'll have to refrigerate for a while before baking). If you live in the Philippines and your kitchen is not air-conditioned, you can just leave the butter out while you measure out the rest of the ingredients and it'll probably be soft in a few minutes anyway. A note on margarine: you can use margarine with this recipe but while the cookies will come out edible, they won't be nearly as wonderful. Perhaps another time I'll post my recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies. They are made with margarine and without eggs but they're surprisingly delicious. If you must make cookies with margarine, best to use a recipe that's designed for it.

Microwaving for a few seconds also solves the hardened brown sugar problem. BUT if you have a big bag of lumpy, hardened brown sugar, try to measure/chop out roughly the amount you need and then nuke that for a few seconds to soften it. If you nuke the whole bag, it'll be soft for a few minutes but then go back to being harder than ever.

Be sure to crack your eggs individually into a small bowl before adding them to the batter. Bad eggs are extremely rare, but it's still worth the extra step of cracking it separately so that you don't dump a rotten egg into your creamed sugar-butter-extract mixture - one bad egg doesn't have to spoil the whole batch of cookies!

So when you're ready to go, preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit (189 degrees Celsius). I use an oven thermometer - if you do, you will be astounded to discover how rarely ovens actually heat to the temperature that the dial says! My oven here doesn't have temperatures on the dial at all, the dial goes from 1 to 10 and there's a little chart that gives the degrees in F and C. The oven thermometer is easy.

First, mix up the flour, salt, and baking soda in the small bowl. I don't bother sifting the flour, for fancier baking it's an absolute must but I've made cookies carefully sifting, dipping, and measuring and I've made them just scooping the flour out of the bag, and both techniques create delicious cookies, I don't remember being able to tell the difference when I did some comparison testing a few years ago.

Then, in the big bowl, beat the granulated and brown sugar, the butter, and the extracts together (sniff that measuring spoon before you rinse out the vanilla and almond extracts, mmmm) till you have a creamy, uniform mixture. Add your individually-cracked eggs and mix again until nice and creamy/soupy.

Now it's time to add the flour mixture. You have to do this carefully, if you just dump all the flour into the bowl and mix vigorously you'll end up with yourself and your kitchen covered with flour. I usually mix in the flour in two or three additions, adding some of the flour and then mixing it in almost completely, then repeating the process. The more flour that's in the batter the more challenging it is to mix it all in, be patient. If you stir slowly, after 10 or 20 turns of the spoon most of the flour will start to be incorporated into the mix and then you can pick up the pace to get the batter thoroughly blended. When all the flour has been added, make sure you've got the batter fully uniform before adding the chips - it's really difficult to smooth out flour lumps once the chips are in.

Final step is to add the chips. Dump 'em in and stir, if you have a small bowl it may be a challenge to keep from losing the chips too, even though they're much easier to control than the flour. Mix it up good and try not to eat all the cookie dough while it's raw! I must say, however, one of my favorite things about baking chocolate chip cookies is eating the raw cookie dough - much to the chagrin of my yaya Lola when I was a kid, she was always warning of the threat of the dreaded LBM (Westerners, you'll probably have to look that one up).

Now it's time to put the dough on the cookie sheet. Don't bother with those air-filled cookie sheets, they must be useful for other baking applications but I find that they just result in undercooked cookie bottoms - and if you soak them in water when cleaning up, water tends to get inside them and ruin them. No need to grease the cookie sheet either, there's so much butter in the dough that the cookies basically grease the sheet themselves as they cook. If you're using an old cookie sheet with crusty stains on it, you may choose to put a layer of aluminum foil down so the cookies don't stick to (or - ew - soak up) the crusty crud burned onto the pan. A "rounded" spoonful is one where there's at least as much dough piled out of the spoon as there is inside. So a "rounded" teaspoon is more like two or two-and-a-half teaspoons, same idea for a "rounded" tablespoon. Rounded tablespoons will make roughly Mrs. Field's-sized cookies and rounded teaspoons will make cute little cookies. If you make a lot of cookies, consider investing in a mini ice cream scoop to portion out the dough. Whatever size you choose to make, leave enough room between cookies on the sheet so that the diameter of the cookies can double while cooking. And before putting the cookies in the oven, wet your fingers with water to keep the dough from sticking to them and push them down so that the cookie dough lumps are no more than about half an inch (or a little more, maybe 1.5 centimeters) high. This will ensure that they can cook through without the edges and bottoms burning.

I find that if the oven is exactly 375F, 9 minutes and 35 seconds is the ideal amount of time to bake them. Maybe a minute longer for bigger, thicker Mrs. Field's-sized cookies. The cookies will look a little bit underdone when you pull them out of the oven. They will continue to cook and brown for a bit on the sheet when you've taken it out of the oven. Leave them on the sheet for about 1 minute, then use a spatula to transfer them to a cooling rack. (If you don't have a cooling rack, just move them to plates or the countertop or some other non-375-degree surface to cool, but the air circulating around the rack definitely helps.) Ideally you will be using two cookie sheets so you can load up sheet 2 while sheet 1 is in the oven, then by the time sheet 2 is done you'll have been able to load up sheet 1 again. But cool the sheets completely before dropping fresh dough on them - I like to put a few ice cubes on a hot cookie sheet and rub them around to cool the sheet, then wipe off the water and whatever small bits of cookie residue were left on the sheet after removing the cookies with a dishcloth or paper towel. (If you add dough to a hot cookie sheet, the dough will melt and bleed out at the edges but without rising because of the lack of oven heat coming from all sides, so your cookies will have kind of deflated edges.)

Warm-from-the-oven chocolate chip cookies + cold milk = bliss.

So that's pretty much it. Credit to Lola, Mom, Betsy, Dreux, Amanda, Jeanie, Christine, Meridith, Hilary, and Eric for helping me hone these techniques over the years, pretty much all of these tricks I've learned from y'all!

Warmly,
Carol

LASIK

I got LASIK three days ago. Wow!!! I'm amazed, it's everything I hoped it would be. Better even! Seeing clearly without glasses or contacts is better than seeing clearly with glasses or contacts. With glasses, there's the lack of peripheral vision, and the annoyance of having glasses on your face. Want to adjust your hairband or change clothes? Take off the glasses first. Eye makeup? Nowhere near as dramatic when hidden behind glasses frames. Forget where you put your glasses before going to sleep? Good luck finding them in the morning without glasses! And I only wore contacts because they suited my lifestyle so much better than glasses - yoga classes, living in sunny places where sunglasses are so important outside and not wanting to be constantly juggling clip-ons or prescription sunglasses and regular glasses, etc. But my eyes were always pretty contact-unfriendly, gooping lots of buildup on them, threatening to eject them if I blinked wrong, and getting dry and blurry requiring lots of blinking and drops to restore proper focus. I wore contacts in high school, and then in college I found myself getting REALLY tired every day around dinner time. Then I realized that if I took out my contacts and switched to glasses my energy came back. Then I realized that if I didn't wear contacts at all I had more energy in general. So I went for about 10 years not wearing them till I started using one-day disposables after I started teaching yoga. The one-day disposables were a major improvement, but still I would usually have to take them out by dinnertime to restore myself to a fully wakened state.

So I've been looking forward to LASIK, and it's a very commonly and successfully performed surgery here AND much less expensive than it is in the US. It cost me P63,600 including the P61,600 surgery fee and two P1000 pre-screening appointments. That's a little less than $1400, or $700 per eye. I decided the last time I bought a 6-month supply of contact lenses that I would get LASIK before buying another supply. So a couple of weeks ago when I pulled out the last two months' supply I decided to head into American Eye Center at Shangri-La Plaza Mall in Ortigas, where so many of my friends have had their surgery done with great results. Last Monday they checked me out, and they had a spot the following Monday, which was the last day before the Easter holiday that they were doing surgeries. When I took out my contacts that day, it was the last time I ever wore them - you have to go for a few days without contacts before LASIK as wearing contacts slightly deforms the cornea, and the cornea must be in its natural curvature during the surgery so that the changes made by the laser end up focusing your vision properly on the retina.

Focus it did, I was -3.00 in my left eye and -1.50 in my right eye before the surgery. The best line I could see on the Snellen Chart with my left eye was the 20/100 "F P" line, and the best my right eye could do was the 20/50 "L P E D" line. Now both eyes can read the little text below the red bar, "L E F ..."!

LASIK is not painful. It is, however, very uncomfortable. Absolutely worth it, but I'm glad that a couple of people warned me about this and I wish I'd been warned more. So if you're reading this, consider yourself warned! About an hour before the procedure they use drops to dilate your pupils. All the way - I got a peek of my eyes in the mirror and my normally blue eyes were totally black wide-open pupils with a less than 1mm rim of color around the edges. Focusing is a challenge with your eyes dilated like that - they make sure that you read and sign the consent form before the dilation. Then after waiting around a bit (and in my case having your retinal exam done, it can also be done in advance, but since your pupils have to be dilated for it they'll do it the same day as it's quite rare that the findings would result in calling off the LASIK) you go into the laser waiting room and eventually into the laser room, which is cooled by two huge air-conditioning units for the optimal functioning of the laser - I was grateful when they put a blanket over my legs, I'd brought a nice warm cozy sweater as recommended but worn shorts. By this time I've had drops put into my eyes at least 4 times already - dilators, moisteners, first round of antibiotics - and more drops now, anaesthetic this time. They act fast, within a few seconds Dr. Arroyo is taping my eyelashes back and, Clockwork Orange-style, pinning my eye open with this reverse tweezer thingy that hooks under the lids. Not painful thanks to those anesthetic drops, but I can feel the unrelenting stretching as my eye is pulled waaaay open, ew. The doctor instructs me to focus on the blinking red light above me - even if I can't see it momentarily, keep focusing (yes sir - I realize that my future vision depends on this, focus focus focus)! Now the suction cup/lens flap cutter - an eyeball-sized suction cup - is put over my eyeball, (blinking red light, says the doctor, red light) it sucks up my eyeball with enough pressure to temporarily blind me and cuts a flap out of my cornea (red light, very good, blinking red light). Thankfully the suction cup thing is removed and, as I've been watching the video monitor as patients before me have been operated on, I know that the doctor is irrigating the eye with drops, pulling back the flap of my cornea and making sure the laser is focused properly (red light, blinking red light). The laser's operation is automated - it is programmed to optically determine what it needs to do to my cornea to allow it to properly focus images on my retina. The laser computer says something like "target acquired" (red light, you're doing very well, blinking red light - I am using all my yogic powers of focusing, the most important thing in the world is focusing on that red light, hanging onto it with all my visual and mental might). Now there is an eerie greenish light and a mild burning flesh/ozone smell as parts of my cornea are obliterated, just a few seconds (red light, blinking red light, red light) and more irrigation as the doctor replaces the cornea flap over the recently-ablated interior surface. The tweezer stretcher is removed, the eyelash tape ripped off (yikes) and a patch placed over the eye. Yay - right eye done! In the moment between eyes I ask Dr. Arroyo how many times a day he says the words "red light". "A lot," he laughs. OK, the laser moves over to the left eye, here we go again.

After both eyes are bandaged you're completely blind, they help you off the table and out to the waiting area. I'm glad I have had the foresight to set the mp3 player on my phone to play at the push of one button - I can listen to music for the 15 minutes of bandaged sitting rather than listening to the same non-information about the Moscow subway bombings being repeated over and over on CNN. My eyes itch. I want to fidget. The Beatles, Morphine, U2, and Liz Phair are doing a great job helping me get through this but it sucks. A nurse takes off the bandages, I can barely open my eyes, they're crazy sensitive to light, and they feel like they have sand in them. I can only see a teeny bit out from under my not-wanting-to-lift eyelids and I can't tell if I can see any better without glasses than I could before. I am led over to an examining machine and a doctor looks at each cornea, pulling the lid up and shining a BRIGHT LIGHT (argh!) for the final check and I'm cleared to go. In the anteroom before the waiting room a nurse gives me my first round of antibiotic eyedrops, steroid anti-inflammatory eyedrops, and rewetting eyedrops - I'm to use the first two every four waking hours for a week, the others every four hours or as needed for a month. The nurse tapes some annoying clear plastic shields over my eyes. I put my sunglasses on over them, and she says I can take the plastic things off for now as long as I sleep in them the first night. Thank goodness. I can open my eyes a sliver every few seconds to get my bearings, I can make it home - thank goodness again that I know this city really well and, preferring being able to open my eyes in the sunlight to having good focus, I've been navigating the city half-blind in my non-prescription sunglasses all week and am used to walking around only kind of being able to see where I'm going.

It would not be a bad idea to have someone take you home after this - certainly driving is not a possibility. I had planned to take a taxi but finding taxis and dealing with the annoying ones who try to not use the meter because I look like a gullible tourist is such a drag and the entrance to the MRT is not just in the mall but on the same floor as American Eye Center, so I decide to take the MRT. The MRT is perfect - I take it so much I think I could even take it 100% blind, and it offers just enough easy stuff to concentrate on that I am sufficiently distracted away from my annoying, itchy, don't-you-dare-touch-them eyes. A friend asked that I text him when the surgery was done, but I can't focus to text so, how very un-Manila, I call to say that my eyes itch and I can't scratch them but I am otherwise OK. I am grateful that I don't have anyone fawning over me to ask me how I'm doing (crappy, thanks for asking) and that I don't have to be keeping an eye out to make sure that my taxi driver isn't taking me to Marikina or somewhere else other than Tomas Morato. Four stops to GMA/Kamuning station and a short walk to a tricycle to home where Kinky is waiting to give me sweet sandpaper kisses and be fed. I get myself a glass of water, a glass of wine, and the delicious bangus dinner a student happened to make for me the day before and an hour after leaving the clinic I'm feeling almost human. My eyes are still quite uncomfortable but the dilation seems to have worn off and I can text again - I text my friend to say that I'm doing much better. But it's not until I wake up in the middle of the night - in my sunglasses, those @$#% eye shields were so annoying - and look out the window that I realize that this has worked. I never really looked out my bedroom window with my glasses on, so I was surprised to see details out there! Satellite dishes on the roofs of far-away buildings! Windows and balconies! Leaves on trees! (Manila has plenty of light pollution, even at 1am you can see a lot outside.)

The next day, my eyes were comfortable enough to do yoga first thing in the morning - pretty much like normal, I was very surprised to find. At the one-day checkup later in the morning my vision tested at 20/15 in both eyes. Actually the 20/15 row was pretty easy to see - I might have been able to see a 20/10 row if they'd had one on their chart. Three days later and I'm doing great. Maybe my eyes tend to be a little dry - but wearing contacts I always struggled with eye dryness, if the dryness improves it will be yet another step up from my pre-LASIK experience. I'm not allowed to go swimming for three weeks after the procedure, and then I'll be good to go.

Luxe Dining and One Reason My Postings Tailed Off Last April

A year ago I wrote about going to Boracay with my friends Nina and Maureen. Maureen, who is now in Milan studying fashion, was the fashion editor for Philippine Tatler at the time and brought with her two restaurant review assignments. What I didn't mention about those reviews is that I snatched them up and did them myself in a bid to become one of Tatler's regular reviewers. My scheming worked, and for a couple of months I reviewed 1-2 restaurants a week for Tatler's "Philippines Best Restaurants 2009" book that came out in July 2009. 11 (count 'em!) reviews. That's a lot of eating and a lot of writing!

For someone whose job involves standing up in front of large groups of people in her underwear, restaurant reviewing is a real challenge. All that food and wine!! But it's worth the risks, as the gig is pretty cool. You grab a friend and enjoy a fabulous all-inclusive meal for two at one of the best restaurants in the Philippines. Then you write it up for the restaurant guide. What a wonderful outlet for the pithy yet flowery style of writing that was honed in my K-12 years at Brearley! The space in the book for each restaurant is very limited - a mere 130 words to sum up the food and help guide the reader to most thoroughly enjoy their restaurant visit, a few words here and there for atmosphere, wine list, service. Buffets are probably the biggest challenge. Both the buffets I reviewed (exquisite ones at the highest of high-end hotels) probably had more food choices than I had words to describe them. And I don't really like buffets - I like to be served when I go out to eat, and I like to focus my attention on a few dishes, preferably my own and a bite or two of my companions'. I come from one of those families where ordering at a restaurant is a group negotiation, oh you're ordering the seabass, I was deciding between that and the lamb but I'll make a deal with you, you can have a bite of my lamb if I can try your seabass...

The reviews I wrote are online at the Asia Tatler fine dining website, Luxe Dining. Here they are:
145 Fahrenheit Prime Steaks & Seafood - sublime, elegant steakhouse in Quezon City
Aria Cucina Italiana - Italian on the beach in Boracay
Cafe Bola- casual Philippine comfort food in Manila
Cibo - Italian cafe in upscale malls all over Manila
Cuillere - Food like what I remember from two weeks traveling in Burgundy, France, on Serendra near the Fort/Market! Market!
Fiesta San Miguel - Pub food of the world at Dusit Thani hotel
Pamana - celebration of Philippine culinary heritage in Tagaytay
Paseo Uno - buffet at Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Makati
Santis Deli and Cafe - Filipino and European deli/cafe in Tagaytay
Seven Corners Restaurant - buffet at Crowne Plaza Hotel, Ortigas
Zuzuni - Greek on the beach in Boracay

The 2010 review season has just begun. I will try to be a more attentive blogger even as the restaurant writing picks up!

Warmly,
Carol

Kinky the Champion of the Road

My friend Sam from New York came to visit and we rented a car, piled in, and drove six hours on a Friday night up to the coast north of Baguio to spend a few days at the beach in La Union province. This was Kinky's second road trip, the first one being to Tagaytay the weekend before I went to Cambodia. Kinky, like family cats Beaver, Chervil, and Snickers, has taken to car travel like a fish to water. After a good visual and nasal inspection of every inch of the car, she likes to settle on the shoulders of either the passenger or the driver, reclining between their neck and the car's neck rest. I'm not sure how well this will work when Kinky weighs more than 2.5kg, but for the time being it's soothing and cute.

La Union is known for being the surfing capital of the northern Philippines and there are many sweet pictures of huge waves taken when the surf has been up there, but by the time we got there mid-March the January to March season had already tailed off. Monaliza, the break reputed to be the best, had some measly 2-foot swell in a roughly 100-meter stretch that was clogged to the gills with surfers desperate for a wave. Excellent surfers – able to catch rides on these teensy waves and then duck and weave around each other with surgical precision. It was a little sad to see them clustered up like a school of fish in an evaporating pond, not to mention intimidating to novice surfers like ourselves. So while we had hoped to do some surfing, we decided to leave the experts to ride their ripples and devote the weekend to the worthwhile pursuits of hanging at our resort Coconut Grove, swimming, drinking Red Horse and San Mig Light, eating, lazing around, and watching Manny Pacquiao and Formula One on the tube. It was a gloriously lazy weekend. Sam, a photographer and videographer, greatly enjoyed shooting pictures of the rowdy local crowd at the beachside bar where we watched the Pacquiao fight. No need for pay-per-view, the owner had managed to hook up a great internet feed of the fight to his TVs.

Monday morning came around as it inevitably does and it was time to load up the car and head back to the city. Departing at 8am with 8 hours until my teaching engagement in Makati seemed like a safe margin. The car was a Corolla, either a '96 or a '99 depending on which rental car employee I asked. No sign of the user manual to verify and I never bothered to check the VIN. Just the type of car I would choose to drive around the Philippines – about a third of all cars on the road here seem to be Corollas. Though I'm not sure I will trust a rental car company again to send such a car out in operable condition – perhaps I should have taken more heed when I had to struggle to get the dipstick back into the car after checking the oil at my first gas stop – I was looking for plenty of oil (check) but not aware of or wanting to think about the disastrous omen portended by a loose dipstick well. Three hours into the return trip we were already about an hour away from my apartment in Quezon City about to exit the SCTEX (Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway) for the NLEX (Northern Luzon Expressway) when the engine started going bang-bang-Bang-Bang-BANG and I could just barely get it to the side of the road before a final heroic BANG!-CRACK!-clunk-sputter announced the end of the engine's life. Smoke seeped out from the sides of the engine. Why I even bothered to try to restart it I don't know but I could swear the engine laughed and cried at the same time as I tried to turn it over. We looked under the hood to see that a HOLE had been punched through the crankcase, and the matching 3x1.5cm oval of flat metal to fit the hole had conveniently landed on a panel shielding the bottom of the car from the road.

Thus began the 7-hour ordeal of making the usually two-hour trip from the top of NLEX to Makati. I called the rental car company and they immediately dispatched a driver with a replacement car. The desk person really wanted me to say the car had overheated. If a renter allows a car to overheat, that's negligence and the renter's fault. When I explained that the radiator was fine, the engine temp gauge was below the middle mark, and that there was a hole in the engine, she backed off a bit. Still, after about 30 minutes when the SCTEX patrol came to get us towed off the road, they initially refused to pay for the tow charge. I put her on the phone with the SCTEX patrol person and it turned out that since we were in a tow-required zone (actually just over the line onto the off-ramp for NLEX) the law required that they pay for the tow. Great tow too – a flatbed tow for P1200!

They towed us to the nearest car shop and the tow operator explained to the rental car company driver how to get there. He'd left at 11am, at this point it was about 1pm, he'd be there soon. And we waited. And waited. We let Kinky out to explore a bit, she was getting pretty warm in the car although the tow operator had brilliantly left it under a big shady tree. The driver texted at about 2:15pm to say he was almost there, about half an hour away. We got some halo-halo at the shop next door. The driver finally showed up at 3:30pm and it was 4 before he'd decided the Corolla was sufficiently incapacitated enough to justify our taking the Altis he'd driven up in – with the tank two bars from empty, which became one blinking bar the moment we started heading south on NLEX. I'd already switched to teach 6pm and 8pm in Makati instead of 4pm and 6pm, but we ended up reaching Makati shortly after 6pm with another teacher covering my 6pm class.

Did I mention that Kinky doesn't use a catbox? Apparently cats learn about using the catbox from other cats. I got Kinky a catbox back in the days when I was still coaxing her to go to the bathroom by wiping her butt, hoping that she would associate the place with the deed when it was time to drive the whole process herself. But Mommy uses the toilet, you see, so as soon as she was big enough to get up to the toilet she started using it Mommy was not interested in using the catbox to demo its proper use, and was also amazed that her genius cat had taught herself to use the toilet at the tender age of a few weeks. Alas, the toilet phase lasted about a week until she got frustrated with sometimes falling into the toilet and noticed that Mommy also sometimes uses her shower (for #1 only of course!!). She quickly adopted the shower as her official bathroom place, sometimes supplanted by the kitchen sink for a tinkle if Mommy is washing dishes. On car trips, the issue has never come up. On other excursions around Manila she's demonstrated the ability to hold it for at least 12 hours – she doesn't like to go in unfamiliar bathrooms – so a five- or six-hour car trip is no big deal.

Here is where Kinky went above and beyond the call of duty. It was time for her Rabies booster shot and we had an hour and a half to kill right around the corner from her vet. So, yes, I took her in for her shot. The little champion whined a little bit while getting the shot (and a LOT while the vet took her temperature, she's not so kinky that she likes that) but as soon as it was over it was like nothing had happened. Then we had to leave her in the parked car on the street for two hours during yoga class – no mess, no fuss. I am in awe of this little girl. She is a superstar and a sweetheart. And she doesn't need any more shots for a year!

Ham, Pork, Chicken, Garlic, and Onions!

At my brithday party a couple of weeks ago I served a couple of dishes from recipes of my Lola, her Baked Empanadas and her Bam-I. By popular demand, here are the recipes, both of which feature the magic flavor combination of ham, pork, chicken, garlic, and onions:

Note: If making both Empanadas and Bam-I, save time by cooking the chicken for both recipes together!

Baked Empanadas
(Lola and many others have told me that traditionally, empanadas are fried, but Lola developed these baked empanadas in Cebu in the 1950s for her daughters who asked for a lighter, less greasy version that didn't have to be fried again to reheat. Basically the same filling, but using pie crust and baking 20 mins at 400F rather than deep frying in a thinner, more pliable wrapper.)

Yield: About 40 empanadas

1/2 lb (225g) pork, cubed or ground
chicken to yield 1/2 lb (225g) cooked chicken meat, cubed (~1 lb whole chicken pieces)
chicken stock spices
1/2 lb (225g) ham, cubed
potatoes to yield 1 c (240ml) cubed (~2 medium potatoes)
1/2 c (120ml) raisins
3/4 c (180ml) cooked peas
1/2 c (120ml) carrots, cubed
1 onion, diced + 1 whole onion
2-3 bay leaves
~ 8 whole cloves
a few peppercorns
3 cloves garlic, finely diced or pressed
1 large egg, raw + ~5 large eggs, hard-boiled and cut into cute little pyramid pieces with yolk tips
~ 11 c (2600ml) flour, sifted
~ 4 c (950ml) Crisco shortening (I use butter-flavored)
~ 4 tsp (20ml) salt
~ 2 c (475ml) ice water

. Pie crust: Make in batches and use a pastry blender. Keep everything as cool as possible - avoid mixing dough with your hands. I have had success putting some ice cubes in a big plastic bowl and then making the dough in a metal bowl sitting on the cubes, this may be overkill, but it's easy. Mix together 2 2/3 c (630 ml) sifted flour and 1 tsp (5 ml) salt. Use pastry blender to blend in 1/2 c (120ml) Crisco until mixture is of small pea-sized butter pieces coated with flour. Add 3 tbsp (45 ml) ice water (maybe a teensy bit more but start with just 3 tbsp especially if the climate you're in is not cool and dry) and use a fork to press the dough together into a single mass. Press the dough into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and put in fridge. It'll take about 4 of these dough disks to provide enough dough to make all the empanadas. One dough disk is enough to make a two-crust pie.

. Hard-boiled eggs: puncture the end of each eggshell with a pin. Prepare an icewater bath. Put the 5 eggs in a pot and fill with water so eggs are covered by one inch of water. Cover and bring to a boil. As soon as water boils, take pot off heat and allow eggs to sit in hot water 10 minutes. Transfer eggs to icewater to cool. Shell the eggs and cut them into the pyramid pieces: cut in half lengthwise, cut halves into three lengthwise sections each, cut sections into little pyramids. Try to get a yolk tip on each piece. If anyone is around, they will undoubtedly steal egg pieces. 5 boiled eggs gives you lots of extras.

. Cooking the chicken and potatoes/making chicken stock: PUt the chicken pieces, potatoes, the onion cut in half and studded with the cloves, bay leaves, peppercorns and other chicken stock ingredients you like in a stockpot and cover the chicken with water by one inch. Bring to a boil and cook until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and the potatoes, cube them to yield the 1/2 lb (225g) cooked chicken meat and 1c (225ml) cooked potatoes. Reserve 1 cup chicken stock. Find something else fun and tasty to do with the rest of the chicken stock. (May I suggest Bam-I?)

. Prepping the other ingredients (might want to do this while chicken and potatoes are cooling enough to cut without burning your fingers): steam the peas (let the size of the peas be your size guide for cubing), cube the raw pork meat (if not using ground pork), cube the ham, cube the carrots, peel and press/finely dice the garlic.

. Cooking/combining the filling: Saute the pork over medium-high heat until cooked. Remove pork from pan, leaving enough lard to saute the onions, garlic, and carrots. Saute the onions and garlic until they start to soften, add the carrots and saute for a few more minutes. Add chicken and pork, add ham cubes, add potatoes, when mixture is cooked and heated through, add raisins and remove from heat. Filling can be refrigerated or frozen and empanada assembly/cooking completed later.

. Empanada assembly and cooking: Heat oven to 400F (204C). Crack the remaining egg into a small bowl and beat it for brushing over the top of the empanadas for a shiny cooked appearance. On a floured work surface with a floured rolling pin, roll an approximately ping-pong ball-sized lump of dough out into a slightly elongated circle. Put about 1/4 c (60 ml) of filling in the middle. Top with an egg piece. Fold the long side of the dough over and press the empanada shut. Cut away dough in excess of ~1/2 inch (1 cm) and use the tines of a fork to press a pattern into the edge of the empanada. Do not combine the cut-away scraps of dough with the unused dough, combine the scraps until you have enough to make a whole empanada with a crust made completely with scraps. The less you touch pie crust dough while assembling your creation, the less the butter suspended in the dough will melt before going into the oven and the flakier the crust will be. With empanadas, super-flakiness can be a detriment because it can make them crumbly and difficult to eat as finger food, so you don't have to be super-paranoid about touching the dough. However, using a pastry spreader (a thin flat spatula about 1.25x6" (3x15cm) will make peeling the dough off the surface and moving the empanadas to the cookie sheet much easier. Place the empanadas on an ungreased cookie sheet (all that shortening in the crust is grease enough!), brush tops with egg, and bake for 20 minutes at 400F (204C).


Bam-I

Yield: Will fill a platter about 9.5x12x2 inches (24x30x5 cm).

Ingredients:

Chicken Stock:
1 whole chicken, cut into pieces
1 onion
~ 8 whole cloves
2-3 bay leaves
a few peppercorns
1 cube chicken boullion (I used Knorr)

cellophane noodles: 200g Safoco rice vermicelli
Cantonese noodles: 250g Crane Pancit Canton

Saute:
200g pork sausage, sliced into ~ 1/5"/1/2 cm slices - original recipe calls for Chinese sausage (fatty red sausages about 3/4"/2 cm in diameter), I used Pampangas Best Skinless Tocino, which really didn't hold in slices but became little lumps but was still yummy!
chicken from stock (cooked meat of 1 whole chicken), cubed
150g ham, cubed
1 onion
6 scallions (or 1 more onion if scallions are not available)
8 cloves garlic
salt and pepper to taste


. Cooking the chicken/making chicken stock: Put the chicken pieces, potatoes, the onion cut in half and studded with the cloves, bay leaves, peppercorns and other chicken stock ingredients you like in a stockpot and cover the chicken with water by one inch. Bring to a boil and cook until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and cube the meat.

. Cooking the noodles:
Cellophane noodles: Bring a pot of water to a boil. Pour boiling water over the cellophane noodles and leave them in the water for 5 minutes. Pour out the water and replace with cold water to stop the noodles cooking.
Cantonese noodles: Bring a pot of water to a boil. Put the cantonese noodles in a bowl of cold water for 2 minutes. Transfer the noodles to the boiling water and boil for 3 minutes. Transfer the noodles to cold water to stop them cooking.

. Saute and final assembly: Over medium-high heat, saute the sausage until cooked through. Remove the sausage, leaving the lard for cooking of the other ingredients. Add the onions, scallions, and garlic to the lard and saute until the onions soften and become translucent. Add the chicken and ham and saute until warmed, then add back the sausage. Add chicken stock as desired. Add the noodles. Warm through and remove from heat. Add salt and pepper to taste (may not need any due to salt and pepper from stock, ham, and sausage). Serve.

Kinky, Part I

I have a new kitten, or "kuting" (pronounced koo-ting') in Tagalog. She popped into my life early on Wednesday, November 11 at 5:55am when I was headed out of my condo on the way to teach the 6:30am class. Walking up the little hill on Scout Bayoran Street, I heard a sound like a car alarm emanating from the spot by the road where people leave trash and leftovers that area cats come around to eat. I soon realized that the big sound was coming from the tiniest of kittens, staggering out into the street towards me screaming at the top of its lungs. Its eyes must have just barely opened.

"Here's my cat," I thought, and picked it up. It immediately stopped meowing, and a quick peek at its underside suggested that it was probably a she - a guess soon to be verified by the vet. We
jumped in a tricycle and sped over to yoga, where the students were surprised to see this adorable, teensy kitten with me. She literally fit in the palm of my hand - which was fortunate, because not wanting to leave her alone in the dark studio during the early morning class, I held her in a washcloth in my hand throughout the whole thing. Good thing that Bikram Yoga is supposed to be taught without hands-on corrections!

I'd been waiting for the right cat to come along for a while. It is said that fortune favors the
prepared mind, which is what my mind was with respect to this 2-week-old kitten. My family are total cat people. We always had one, briefly two, while I was growing up, my parents now have two and my sister one. I've seen so many cats on the streets of Manila, generally they do a lot better than the stray cats I've seen in New York and Boston, probably because of the warm year-round climate here. But it's clearly not an easy life, and I've seen many dead cats and many dead kittens on the street. I've also seen many tiny kittens alone in the street, kittens who are undoubtedly not long for this world. I've always thought it would be fascinating to raise a kitten from a newborn, though I didn't want to take a kitten away from its mother before being weaned. A newborn kitten tragically separated from its mother before being weaned, however, I knew would provide me the chance to rear a tiny kitten. After I moved into my new apartment on the weekend of November 6th-7th, I guess the universe knew I was ready to take on the challenge of rearing a baby kitten.

By the time the 6:30am class was over, studio staff had arrived and the kitten had someone to hang out with in the cool lobby rather than having to sweat it out with me in the yoga room. I ran down to the deli downstairs to get some milk for her, but didn't have much luck trying to feed her using the straw as a dropper.

After teaching the 8:30am class, what else was there to do but Google "raising baby kittens"? Sometimes it seems that most of what I learn these days is from the internet. I quickly learned that she would need to be bottle-fed formula every 2-3 hours for the first several weeks of her life. Also that for the first few weeks, she wouldn't be able to go to the bathroom for herself - at the age when kittens are in their mother's nest, the mother licks them to stimulate going to the bathroom and swallows the waste, thus preventing the nest from being soiled. So tiny kittens need to be massaged with a damp tissue to allow them to go to the bathroom! When I did this for my little girl, she peed amamazing amount for such a tiny creature - indeed she did not produce so much pee again for several weeks when she was much bigger and eating and drinking much more. It must have been a while since she'd last been helped to go to the bathroom.

What a day to pick up a new kitten - unusually, I had two more classes to cover in Makati in the evening for another teacher. I didn't bother to find out if pets are allowed on the MRT (turns out
they aren't, but it was a long time before I found that out) - I tucked the curled-up little girl in
the shawl around my neck and she quietly sat there as we went through the bag search and into the MRT. (About until the time I went home for Christmas, she proved an expert shawl-hider and we sneaked into malls and the MRT frequently.) I stopped at MegaMall in Ortigas to stop in at the pet store I'd seen there, Animal House, which turned out to be a great place - they have vet services, and they carry kitten formula and bottles. They weighed her (135g), confirmed her gender as female, estimated her age at 10 days to 2 weeks, and instructed me to bring her back in a week for her first deworming treatment.

Before teaching I met my friend Andria for coffee. I'd been challenged to get the little baby to
drink her milk, but Andria (who has a young son and thus experience feeding babies) got her to take her first long drink, and she was an expert bottle-drinker from that time forward. Andria and I also came up with a name for the kitten. She has an unusual tail - it's very common for cats in Manila to be tailless or to have strangely formed tails. This little kitten had a tail that was normal for about six or so vertebrae, then turned about 90 degrees to the left for about six more vertebrae. With such an adorable kink in her tail, (and a family traditon of having cats with suggestive names - it's a long story, but the cat we got whe I was in 5th grade was named Beaver - that's right, a pussy named Beaver), how could I resist calling her Kinky?

Kinky came with me to the Makati studio, slept like a champ while I was teaching, and got fed after each 90-minute class. Then we took a cab home and thus began two weeks of waking up every two hours to feed the baby. All I can say is I'm glad kittens grow up so much faster than human babies! I can't imagine waking up for middle-of-the-night feedings for months on end. Thank goodness the little princess was sleeping through the night after about two weeks - two weeks during which she more than doubled her weight!

Cycling Music

Hello again after a long hiatus. In the past several months I have moved (again, to a different unit in the same Quezon City building I moved to in August 2009), adopted a kitten, gone home to visit the US twice, taught lots of yoga, and have been enjoying Manila immensely.

Pictures of my new apartment, the story of my kitten Kinky, and other updates will follow, I promise! For now, I'm posting a list that's interesting to me, perhaps you will find it interesting as well. It's simply the list of songs I've collected in the mp3 player on my BlackBerry since I discovered that its speaker is loud enough for me to hear while I'm riding my bicycle. I love riding to music but would never ride with headphones - you have to be able to hear what's going on in the road. But a little stereo system? That's alright! The BlackBerry fits in the little "Bento Box" bag I have on my top tube, and at top volume is just loud enough to hear as I pedal along. So here, in alphabetical order by title, are the songs that inspire me to keep spinning:

A Fifth of Beethoven (Based On Beethoven's Fifth Simphony)	Walter Murphy
A Head With Wings	Morphine
Across The Universe	The Beatles
Ahead of the Curve	Jim's Big Ego
Alone (from "Live in the Fall")	Blues Traveler
Animal	Def Leppard
Anything Goes	Guns N' Roses
Armageddon it	Def Leppard
Baby Got Going	Liz Phair
Baby You're A Rich Man	The Beatles
Be Prepared	Tom Lehrer
Beautiful Day	U2
Beauty Of Gray	Live
Believe (from "Run Lola Run")	Franka Potente
Better Way	Ben Harper
Bite Me (Hard)	Jim's Big Ego
Bombtrack	Rage Against The Machine
Bubblehouse	Medeski, Martin & Wood
Burden In My Hand	Soundgarden
Burning Down The House	Talking Heads
Calling Elvis	Dire Straits
Cannonball	The Breeders
Come Out And Play	Authority
Comfort Eagle	Cake
Comfortably Numb	Scissor Sisters
Cornman	Kinky
Crazy	Gnarls Barkley
Crazy Love, Vol. II	Paul Simon
Cream	Prince
Dardanella	Louis Armstrong
Dark Road	Annie Lennox
Dear Yoko	John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Deeper And Deeper	Madonna
Disappear	INXS
Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough	Michael Jackson
Drive My Car	The Beatles
Effigy	Gov't Mule
Everybody Knows	Leonard Cohen
Fame ('90 Remix)	David Bowie
Free Time	Penn, Michael
Gallows Pole	Led Zeppelin
Ghosts In My Machine	Annie Lennox
Girl	Beck
Golgi Apparatus	Phish
Good People	Jack Johnson
Graceland	Paul Simon
Groove Is In The Heart	Deee-Lite
Had A Dad	Jane's Addiction
Help Me Mary	Liz Phair
Helter Skelter	The Beatles
Hey Ya!	Outkast
Holiday	Madonna
Hot for Teacher	Van Halen
Human Nature (Radio Version)	Madonna
I Don't Know	The Blues Brothers
I Gotta Feeling	Black Eyed Peas
I Know What I Know	Paul Simon
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For	U2
I Will Follow	U2
Idiots Rule	Jane's Addiction
Introduction (from "Run Lola Run")	Tykwer, Klimek & Heil
Ivory Tusk	Blues Traveler
Jealousy	Liz Phair
Johnny Feelgood	Liz Phair
Jump	Van Halen
Just Can't Get Enough	Depeche Mode
Just Dance	Lady Gaga
Kelly Watch the Stars	AIR
Killing In The Name	Rage Against The Machine
Kiss From A Rose	Seal
Kiss Of Life	Peter Gabriel
Knock On Wood	Ami Stewart
Limelight	Rush
Loaded	Primal Scream
Love Tractor	Widespread Panic
Love You Madly	Cake
Lovegame	Lady Gaga
Magical Mystery Tour	The Beatles
Mathar (Discovery Of India Mix)	Indian Vibes
Meanies	Jim's Big Ego
Mesmerizing	Liz Phair
Minarets	Dave Matthews Band
Missionary Man	Eurythmics
Money Honey	Lady Gaga
Movin' On Up	Primal Scream
Need You Tonight	INXS
Never Let Me Down Again	Depeche Mode
New Sensation	INXS
No Rain	Blind Melon
Oh Yeah	Yello
Only Happy When It Rains	Garbage
Paradise City	Guns N' Roses
People in Love	Loudon Wainwright III
Poker Face	Lady Gaga
Pour Some Sugar On Me	Def Leppard
Power Of Love	Deee-Lite
Praise You	Fatboy Slim
Prince Charming	Jim's Big Ego
Ray Of Light (Radio Edit)	Madonna
Recently	Dave Matthews Band
Rocket	Def Leppard
Rocket Queen	Guns N' Roses
Rubber Biscuit	The Blues Brothers
Run On	Moby
Schroeder	Vince Guaraldi Trio
Sco-Mule	Gov't Mule
Sexy Boy	AIR
Silent E	Tom Lehrer
Smooth	Santana Feat. Rob Thomas
Smut	Tom Lehrer
So Far Away	Dire Straits
Soun Tha Mi Primer Amor	Kinky
Spybreak!	Propellerheads
Standing In The Shower... Thinking	Jane's Addiction
Star Wars (Main Theme)	John Williams, Skywalker Orchestra
Stash	Phish
Stay Up Late	Talking Heads
Stickshifts And Safetybelts	Cake
Strangelove	Depeche Mode
Stupid Girl	Garbage
Sunset Road	Béla Fleck & The Flecktones
Super Sex	Morphine
Superfreak	Rick James
Supernova	Liz Phair
Take Your Mama	Scissor Sisters
That Train Don't Stop Here	Los Lobos
The Bug	Dire Straits
The Elements	Tom Lehrer
The Masked Marvel	George Winston
The Masochism Tango	Tom Lehrer
The Rockafeller Skank	Fatboy Slim
The Spirit Of Radio	Rush
There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)	Eurythmics
Tilt-A-Whirl	Masters of Reality
Treat Street	George Winston
Tubthumping	Chumbawamba
Upside Down	Diana Ross
Velvet Pants	Propellerheads
Walkin' (For Your Love)	Widespread Panic
Watching The Wheels	John Lennon & Yoko Ono
Welcome to the Jungle	Guns N' Roses
Werewolves Of London	Warren Zevon
What It Is	Mark Knopfler
What You Need	INXS
Whipping Post (from "Live at Fillmore East")	The Allman Brothers Band
Who Was That?	Deee-Lite
World Clique	Deee-Lite
Yellow Submarine	The Beatles
Yes	Morphine
You Sexy Thing	Hot Chocolate
You Speak My Language	Morphine