TOPAZ HORIZON

My dearest darling friend, Mariel, is here from a too-long stay in New York. She'll only be here for a month--meeting friends, family and fixing the details for her upcoming wedding to Alvin. Finally!

Anyway, we had lunch at C2 at Shangri-la a few days ago. She was starved for Pinoy food. So was I actually. Been eating unhealthily these past few weeks, just chowing down on burgers and pizzas. Ack!

This is the fruit and seaweed salad. It was interesting. The seaweed was salty and pops in your mouth. The sweet fruits were an excellent foil to the saltiness of the seaweed and the bitterness of the cabbage leaves.

This is Matthew, Mariel's adorable six-year-old brother. He's super jetlagged and tired from all the family reunions but he's valiantly trying to fight it. So cute! It's his first time in the Philippines and finds our food too rich. So he had McNuggets.

This is pan de sal with kesong puti. Is kesong puti goat cheese? Anyway, the cheese is toasted and put in freshly baked crunchy rolls. Yum!

This is pansit Malabon. Pansit is noodles. Malabon is a place. So this is a noodle dish from Malabon, I guess! It's noodles drenched in seafood. So it was kinda really salty. Not really my type of pansit.

Okay, quick post today, dear readers and lurkers alike! Am having a very busy weekend--a wedding, a seminar, an eyelash extension repair, a play, and a dinner! In fact, I do have to run by a tech shop, too, for flash memory drives. Need more storage for all my photos! More updates soonest!

If you're vegetarian or from PETA, skip this post. You've been warned!

Food master (chef, author, TV host) Anthony Bourdain finally visited the Philippines and the show was on last week (and it took me this long to post about it because my new Nine West shoes and new Gucci bag totally distracted me!). Vince and I love his show "No Reservations" because we loooove food and any show that tackles food is a good show! Anthony's is different from most because, unlike most people, he has a very open mind on food and he tells it like it is, so if he says it's good, you betcha it's good. And if it's bad, I'll take his word for it, too. Other hosts are such huge fans of their own food (usually bland) that they can't appreciate the cuisines of other cultures.

So when he came over and said that our lechon, or roasted pig, is the best in the entire world, well, I assure you that a lot of pigs will get roasted as Pinoys all over celebrate the fact that Anthony Bourdain just proclaimed our lechon as the "Best. Pig. Ever!"
I just want to say that, while "No Reservations" is a food show, he tackled one mighty question: Who is the Filipino? It really bothered Anthony that if our food's so good, why isn't it on the culinary map? Why aren't we promoting it and pushing it because, to him, the few dishes he ate were some of the best-tasting stuff he's ever had. Hell, yeah! Pinoy food forever! In fact, our food is so good, Filipinos are fast becoming a nation that desperately needs the best diet pill ever! Tee hee.

Anyway, this is a very serious question that applies to all aspects. I've had the opportunity to meet many foreigners. When the hosts of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" visited, they were surprised to see how fashionable Filipinas are, which begs the question: Why aren't Filipinos on the fashion map? Some American and European friends of mine who've been to many beaches and diving sites all over the world visit the Philippines and get so flabbergasted at how beautiful our shorelines are, which begs the question: Why aren't our beaches--the very best in the world!--in the travel books? And so on and so forth.




Watch the show as Anthony and the Pinoys he interviews grapple with this question. This is the comment I left on Anthony's blog:

"Our identity has always been debated on. Everyone says we have none because--like you said--we are too nice and struggle to please and be integrated. But underneath that, there is a Filipino identity, very subtle, but we recognize it in each other as soon as we step out of the country. Like you said, Filipinos are nice. And everywhere in the world, if you meet a friendly, smiling, eager-to-please, kind, happy, funny, all-suffering person, I bet my life you just met a Filipino.
"And I want to add that the Filipino identity is wrapped around food! Why do you think your show has so many Filipino fans, it makes you nervous? =D As long as it's about food, Filipinos will devour it!"

If you're Pinoy, stand up and be proud! And let's have some lechon while we're at it!

*photos from Anthony Bourdain's online journal

British Vogue:
InStyle:
Current hot movie of the month:
Everything hot pink, sunny yellow and bright orange is back! So, of course, I dug through my closet and found this old dress I bought from Karimadon about three years ago for a mere PHP500 (USD10). Don't you just love fashion? Never throw away anything because trends just keep coming back!

Now that my screaming orange dress is hot hot hot, I wore it to the most exciting day of the week...

When I finally got my limited edition Gucci shoppers bag! There's only 100 of these babies around the world, and I got one! Yippee!

The bag comes with an 18-carat gold plated bag tag. I'm removing it, though. It attracts too much attention.

I won this delightful prize with my blog post on the movie Confessions of a Shopaholic. The contest was sponsored by Columbia Pictures, Walt Disney Studios and Nuffnang Philippines (here I pose with them happily). Thank you so much! Now off to shop I go!