da tomāto

goodies received! the last of my amazon (.com) purchases for the year (for me, that is) are finally here. luckily, my time on mturk has been rewarding even if i only get gift certs for it. bought these in june/july and have been gathering dust in my sister's house, waiting for anyone to visit the PH so we can ask them the kind favor of bringing these along. now, i can't thank them enough for saying yes. lovely stuff. will get on with "the hobbit" after i finish "the adventures of sherlock holmes" from proj. gutenberg. it's nice to be reading books again. excited to send presents to my darlings - my main reason for joining mturk. i've got nice stuff on amazon's gift organizer for them. so very excited.

Here's a piece of a day-old french toast. Didn't know it could keep overnight... But it was kept in the fridge so obviously, it can be stored and not go bad. Spread berry gelée on my french toast yesterday -- v. good combo. Had homemade daing (salted, dried fish) earlier. Impressed that they can make daing right here in stead of buying from the market. But we might have been too excited to dig into them today because they haven't dried as much as I'd have liked. Also, how pretty is my omelet today? Pretty. It was thicker than how it looks here and had a gooey yumminess in the center when I cut into it too. Mmm... Will try to use flash on future photos. These are too dark. I would've adjusted exposure on these before posting but I am trying to take pictures that I can just run with. Good luck to me, then.

To get a cup of decaf the way I like it -- I make it myself. Don't mind hauling all these containers in as long as these aren't left here overnight. Getting the hang of using the new phone's camera is proving to be slightly difficult than expected. One thing I've learned is not to use the touchscreen's capture button. In spite identical settings, the hard shutter button on the side produces better results than the touchscreen's. Alas, the new, clean, fresh look of my blogger blog isn't playing well with IE7 (don't know about other browsers though - except for mozilla FF where it looks the way I like it). My sidebar is down the bottom of the page on IE. Shame on the site's template designer for sucking me in, teasing me with this pretty template, then keeping me out by not loading at all. Though I can go back to standard layout with html, I won't. I've decided to keep this for now. [edit: looks fine on IE7 now. don't know what

Finally got to change my header too. Simple. Clean. I wonder how long this simple, clean theme's going to last - maybe another two years, who knows? Now, to food... chicken liver . Mmmm.... This was rich and yummy adobo - neither overcooked nor undercooked. I guess cooking liver (pork or chicken) is tricky because it gets tough quickly. I hear they put it in chopsuey or menudo at the last minute (or two). Very good. Rich in iron, too!

Had a bad cold last night. I woke up this morning from an aching jaw. In fact, it felt like the lower part of my face was sore from the inside - gums, cheeks, ears, jaw... My cold was cleared up though. My sinuses must've been so congested that there was pressure on facial nerves and such. Since I couldn't get back to sleep (and I really wanted to) 'cause of the pain, I had breakfast and took a couple of Tylenol caplets. Afterwards, I lied in bed and waited for the meds to kick in. Good news is that I woke up a few hours later and my jaw was ache-free.

Ah, new blog layout and background, I like this now. It's fresh and clean. Now about that header...

"Brrr.." temps were felt yesterday. It's quite cool today too. Here's last night's warm egg-drop soup with those yellow sugary croutons that made the dish more sweet than savory. Made myself some decaf mocha tonight. That's with half a cup of hot water + half a teaspoon of decaf + 1 small sachet of Milo + half a packet of sweetener. Warms the tummy... mmm.

Still getting to know this phone's camera's settings - which work to get good shots and which don't since its auto setup doesn't take good photos at all. Here are some of its recent almost-successes: tinapa + itlog na maalat + tomato slices Having just one piece of tinapa doesn't seem enough, really. In this case, the fish wasn't very salty so I would've easily eaten two pieces at the time. Two would've been enough to finish all that rice.  This was brunch earlier: Mini hotdogs + scrambled egg + sweet sausage slice (longganisa). See how sticky and wet our rice is? That's what I meant when I said that it's not very good for fried rice. I'll eventually learn to work with this camera... future photos should be better, I hope.

We typically use KDO 3-in-1 sugar-free coffee mix but the store didn't have it in stock the last time they went grocery-shopping. We're currenty on Nescafe sugar-free coffee mix instead and sadly, it's not very good. Nescafe's mix is weak, not creamy at all even with my usual half a cup of hot water. Do they even put their nutty, yummy Coffee-mate in it? Doesn't taste like they do. Well they should. KDO's sugar-free mix still gets my vote. Hope they'll be in stock soon.

" Tradeport .com .ph " order received! The long 3-day weekend and an issue about them replacing a faulty charger delayed the shipping of my first order from local online shopping site, Tradeport. This arrived in the AM on Tuesday and I would've made a whole "unboxing" photo sequence but excitement won over. So, I settled for an after-shot. A couple of sad notes on my Tradeport shipping / shopping experience: (1) They didn't give me my package's Air21 tracking info, and (2) the charger* doesn't work. (*See Dec 18th update) [* update* Nov 7th] Managed to get my phone's microSD card out last night and saw that it was 4GB instead of 8GB that I expected. Add this to my "sad notes". Below is a screenshot of its Tradeport product details page that hasn't changed since I've placed the order (except for the sales price). Oh, and only one ear bud works on its headset* (*See Dec 18th update). Click the image to see its original s

Finally, we made fried rice! We call it kalo-kalo in this house. It's still sticking together though and not buhaghag that I like... Me don't likey sticky rice-y (I think I've said this before, guess can't say it enough). Canned mackarel sauteed with egg and onion -- yum. Not really a fan of onions so I picked out the bits as I ate. I like the taste it left in the dish but don't like biting into onion bits. Corned beef was left out and didn't re-heat it so it looks "bleh" here but it was Purefoods so it's still "yum" for me. That thing on the left was left-over embutido that I didn't touch. Tummy upset a couple of days last week turned me off left-overs... for the time being.