Thanksgiving and the turkey

I'VE always liked turkey, even if some people think it's a totally tasteless bird. I suppose it all depends on the stuffing and rub used on its skin. I have been eating it since I was little, so even today, I eat it as a sandwich, although usually what restaurants serve in their sandwiches are white meat.

Anyhoo, every time Thanksgiving in the U.S. comes around, I always get caught up in the news stories of Americans trying to rush home to their families, the dishes served and the various recipes used, and try to catch the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade broadcast by some U.S. news shows. (One of my favorite films on this American holiday is Home for the Holidays, starring Holly Hunter and directed by Jodie Foster. It's a funny take on the kind of homecoming people get from their families and how one survives all the weirdness.)

Btw, Thanksgiving is a common celebration in a lot of European countries and in some form or another in Asian and South African countries as well, because it traditionally celebrates good harvests.


But why turkey on Thanksgiving? One web site I read said when the Pilgrims/Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians celebrated the first Thanksgiving in 1621, they had other food served than just turkey. One story goes that roast goose was actually the traditional bird to celebrate good harvests in England. But in America, there were more wild turkey available than geese, so turkey became identified w/ Thanksgiving.

In Saipan, where I worked for a year, I was able to attend a Thanksgiving feast w/ some Pinoys. I was happy for the turkey, which was served along w/ lechon and leche flan. Coolness. Hankering for a more authentic American Thanksgiving dinner (okay, I just couldn't have enough turkey, yumm!), I went to one of the restaurants and ate turkey again w/ some pumpkin pie. (It was so long ago I can't remember if I liked the pie.) Stuffed, and happy at experiencing some kind of American holiday, I went home w/ still more turkey in hand, for the next day's baon at the office.

Here in the Philippines, we don't actually have Thanksgiving as a tradition in November, although some hotels and restaurants capitalize on it and offer turkey dinners to their dining patrons. But we do give thanks for our blessings during Christmas. So there are families, like mine, who've served turkey, alongside the regulatory baked leg of ham, lengua estofada, quezo de bola, chocolate eh, and ensaimada.

This year, we decided to forego the turkey (sniff!) primarily because we have yet to find someone or some establishment in the Alabang area (where we celebrate Christmas) w/c roasts it well. (Santi's last year was just too chaotic and couldn't give us a straight answer when we could pick up the bird.) The only other roaster I know of, and w/c we've used in the past, is in Makati w/c is just way too far for Christmas Eve pickups. For a few seconds, while my sister and mother were discussing the Christmas menu, I did think of roasting the bird myself. As an amateur cook, I always like challenging myself to experiment w/ certain difficult dishes. The thought, as I said, lasted no less than 10 seconds as I realized that roasting a bird would just be too much stress for me.

So I will not have my roast turkey this year, and will have to get my fix some other way. How depressing. Meanwhile, if you want to read up on the pressures of cooking a Thanksgiving dinner, the NYT is hosting a Live Thanksgiving Blog by one of its food writers. The entries so far are quite amusing, and makes the reader feel thankful we don't get that crazy on this day. Except during Christmas boo-hoo.

And while it's not a Filipino holiday, I still want to wish everyone, especially my friends and family residing in the States, Guam, and Saipan, a Happy Thanksgiving. And I give thanks for my loving weird family, my crazy fabulous friends, and all the great blessings I continue to receive through the year.

SONA mukha mo!

I don't have a computer right now as i'm in the process of upgrading. But I just had to blog my thoughts about today's State of the Nation (SONA) by our beloved presidentita.

The presidentita has the best fiction writers around. Only they could come up with crap like that and weave it into a literary masterpiece. If her SONA speech were a novel, it would top the New York Times Bestseller List...for FICTION!

I rode a cab today coming from an interview and the driver said with gas prices so high (premium is over P60/liter), he has very little saved up from his daily earnings minus the boundary.

"Sabi ni Gloria, konting tiis pa daw. Lahat kaming mahihirap nag-tiis...di na kami makakain. Mahal ang sardinas, P13 sa tindahan, bigas, instant mami...baka sunod nyan, parang hayop na kami dahil damo nalang kakainin namin. Kokonti nalang nagtitiis ngayon kasi lahat namatay na."

And that, people, is the real state of this nation.

(P.S. Red is really the presidentita's color. But I dunno why she wore a Ma. Clara outfit today w/c again, infantilized her...tyanak nga e sabi ni pangs...A terno would have been more becoming. Ayan, sablay na ang economic policies, but wardrobe sablay din. The only thing that works is her botoxed forehead!)

Begrudging his bedazzling

"The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers. She can’t turn on her own charm and wit because she can’t get beyond what she sees as the deep injustice of Obama not waiting his turn. Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy."

(Clever. Click Maureen Dowd in today's NYT for the rest.)

'A professional smolder'

Guess who's on the list of Salon.com's Sexiest Men Living 2007? E di sino pa? My one and only Lust (Caution!) Tony Leung! (Pant! Pant!) Says this fab web site:

"Martin Scorcese's Oscar-winning 'The Departed,' a remake/rip-off of the nail-biting 2002 Hong Kong thriller 'Infernal Affairs,' turned off fans of the original for one unavoidable reason — and it wasn't Jack Nicholson's scenery-chewing. It was the absence of the smoldering Tony Leung in the role of the undercover cop lost in a convoluted game of spy vs. spy. As good as Leo DiCaprio's Boston honk and flinty rage are in the remake, he just can't hold a candle to Leung.

But then, of course he can't. Leung is a professional smolderer; the guy's a virtual human Duraflame. Throughout the past two decades, in 'Hard-Boiled' (1992), 'Chungking Express' (1994), 'Happy Together' (1997), 'In the Mood for Love' (2000), 'Hero' (2002) and '2046' (2004), he's left only glowing embers in his wake. In this year's 'Lust, Caution,' he added a sadistic streak we'd never seen from him before that caused us to recoil — and still come back for more." (Read on at Salon.)

How sad that NYT didn't get the point of Lust, Caution.

Guys like travel buddy Pangs, also didn't like the film and can't understand why we ladies are going gaga over Tony. He says he doesn't know what we see in this guy. Simple. The girls call it the "paso" factor.

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Here's a good read though, still from NYT, about how PepsiCo is trying to green their production of Frito-Lays. While some companies are harping about minor environmental changes in their operations as a marketing strategy, PepsiCo appears bent on implementing wide-ranging changes. For the sake of Mother Earth, let's hope this move by one of the world's largest food and beverage firms, jumpstarts a radical industry-wide, global revolution.

Read on at Low-Guilt Potato Chips.

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Back in Manila, there's news of World Bank's cancellation of a $232-million road improvement project due to ehrmmm, "anomalies."

Why so surprised? Monkey see, monkey do.

Colbert for President!

(...of the U.S. that is. Read the column of Bill O'Reilly's alter ego in the New York Times' Sunday op-ed page. Maureen Dowd sorta got lazy today? Hee-hee)

A Mock Columnist, Amok
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: October 14, 2007

I was in my office, writing a column on the injustice of relative marginal tax rates for hedge fund managers, when I saw Stephen Colbert on TV.

He was sneering that Times columns make good “kindling.” He was ranting that after you throw away the paper, “it takes over a hundred years for the lies to biodegrade.” He was observing, approvingly, that “Dick Cheney’s fondest pipe dream is driving a bulldozer into The New York Times while drinking crude oil out of Keith Olbermann’s skull.”

I called Colbert with a dare: if he thought it was so easy to be a Times Op-Ed pundit, he should try it. He came right over. In a moment of weakness, I had staged a coup d’moi. I just hope he leaves at some point. He’s typing and drinking and threatening to “shave Paul Krugman with a broken bottle.”

(Continued at NYT)