Slice of Life (New Topic: Off to Tokyo)

Yay, birthday topic :)

I kind of treat my birthday as an excuse to, ahem, "splurge". On food.

For a whole year, I kind of take mental notes on food that I want to eat, taste or buy to make myself. Like when I go to a Subway store, I take note of the priciest food they have, or what exotic type of sausage they have there that I'd like to taste someday. Or when I go to the supermarket to buy bi-monthly groceries, I always go to the deli section and have a look at exotic food I'd like to taste or buy to cook myself. Just last month I went to the supermarket, the cheese section advertised they now sell gorgonzola, parmigiano reggiano, and manchego. I saw once in Iron Chef they used parmigiano reggiano on pasta, so I'd like to try it someday on my pesto.

And it extends on the whole week, the week my birthday falls in.

But I already am an office guy, so when birthdays come at the office the celebrant is expected to throw an afternoon mini-party with food and drinks included. On my birthday, I bought two whole bilaos (in English, "winnow") of pancit bihon and palabok, ice cream, and five 1.5Ls of Pepsi Blue, all for about 50 people at my office division.

I did make one small mistake with that. When birthdays come at the office, pancit bihon is the typical food that the host serve for us. So when my birthday came, I too bought an XL portion of the same, but due to my inner gut to provide some "options" for the diners, I bought an L portion of palabok. Lo and behold, when I started to serve the food, I immediately noticed that my officemates preferred palabok instead, and they kept coming back for more. I tasted the palabok just to make sure, and I immediately knew why - it was awesomely delicious (I bought it at a Chinese-run restaurant called Federal), Jollibee's was like cheap bullshit compared to what I bought. The pancit canton, sadly, became at best a second option, and at the end of the day I had 3/8 of it left, which I put in a Tupperware and reheated in the office microwave and gave to the kind office cleaners who helped me cleaned up the plates and plastic cups. Mental note - next year, palabok.

For my family, I scheduled on the immediate Saturday an eat-out at an all-you-can-eat restaurant called YakiMix. It was a trendy restaurant with Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Filipino dishes, and a smokeless grill at the center of each table. It also has a Japanese sushi bar with sushi chefs making each one by hand (sadly no sake). It was fun seeing my parents squirm over the grill, first time they saw a grill on the table itself. My dad easily caught on to it and soon was grilling his choice of beef cuts (mostly he does it quick so it's almost rare), but my mom was kind of hesitant and took us hours to help her land a goddamn kebab on the grill itself. And neither of them knew how to handle chopsticks. I enjoyed grilling curry beef and bacon cuts rolled in thin mushroom stalks on the grill, and it tasted good on spicy sauce. Though I pigged out on the sushi (and sashimi as well), I ended up with my dad berating me for clearing five full plates of sushi. Those plates were the size of dinner plates, about 10" wide.

And for the "rare" foods I ate that week:
- A Sara Lee ice cream (Irish Cream flavor). Never saw one before, so when I chanced upon it on the ice cream section I immediately put it on my cart.
- Kielbasa. I cooked it for breakfast with Ramsay-esque scrambled eggs.
- Melon pudding.
- A Jägerbomb shot. Ordered it in a bar when I saw it under "Crazy Sh*t".
- Cow's foot stew. Despite its putoff-sounding name, it's a savory stew and the foot is cleaned and prepared. The soup was very very thick, and sticky due to the abundance of collagen.
- Avocado banana pineapple smoothie. I asked a local fruit shake maker to make me this smoothie and I'll pay her double. Fucking crazy taste.

And also, I tend to buy manga on my birthday, this year was no different. I bought seven books.

My birthday was quite a blast, for me and my wallet.