Windowsill Garden

I am turning into my mother, apparently I got her green thumb. The front space of our house is mostly covered in concrete but my mom has filled it with plants. The incredible thing about her gardening is that she doesn’t buy plants, she gets them from her friends or from our trips. We always joke about how my mom would spot a plant she likes by the side of the road, make my dad stop the car and tell my brother to go out and get some of the plant for her.

Print More Photos

2012 has been a good year filled with good food, great company, and awesome trips. The Mayans believe that the world will end tomorrow but I believe that they got their calendar wrong and that 2013 will be even more awesome.

I made a photo book for the parents to highlight 2012′s events and trips. Digital photography is the shit and all that but there’s still something special about seeing photographs printed out.

Apartment Tales: Second Quarter

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Food, Pets

Apartment Tales: First Quarter

Mema Mondays: Post Number Thirty-Nine

As in memapost lang. Mema Mondays’ explanation / etymology from Post Number One here. Previous Mema Mondays posts can be found here.

Summer’s definitely here and it’s so fakkin hot in Manila these days. This is something that we do at the apartment to ‘perk up’ our drinks and make them extra refreshing.

Slice a lemon and put the slices in a liter of water for a day. After a day, take the lemon slices out and you’ll have lemon-infused water (duh) . Now you may add sugar for a liter of instant lemonade but what we do is we freeze this lemon-infused water on ice trays. When this mixture turns into ice you have an instant ‘perker upper’ (lolz) which you can put in water, iced tea and surprisingly even in soda. I usually put two cubes in a glass of water for an extra refreshing drink.

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Fangirling over Celebrity Nails

Forgive the pa-girl post, I know that I usually blog about food and books but let us not forget that I do have XX chromosomes.

Getting a pedicure is rejuvenating to a woman’s soul. Char, ang drama. But seriously, getting a pedicure is one of the best ways to unwind after a long day. I wanted to get a pedicure last night after an awesome dinner with friends but the salon at Gateway was already closing up so we just went home and got online to look for a home service nail spa. After a few attempts at calling other spa services, we called Celebrity Nails and said, “Hurrah for late night pedicures!” The operator on the other end of the line was kind enough to ask us if we wanted two separate technicians and we said that one would be fine.

In less than 30 minutes, Ainah of Celebrity Nails Katipunan was already at our place. Props to her for hauling the big ass pink luggage up five flights of stairs. (Our building’s elevator ain’t installed yet boo.) Ainah was courteous, attentive, and best of all, she didn’t seem like she was in a hurry to get our pedicures over with unlike other nail salons that I’ve tried. We got to choose about which products we’d rather use or not use. This is a far cry from the little salon in front of our building with its teenage KK-shorts wearing manicurista of whose service I’ve availed once because I was desperate for a pedicure.

That big ass pink luggage was magical, Ainah had everything she needed to make us feel pampered. Cue in “You make me feel like a natural woman.”

The awesomest part is that it was done in our apartment, I was watching The Pickers and smoking while getting my nails done! At Php250 for a classic pedicure it was really sulit! I can’t wait to have my nails cleaned again next week, high five Celebrity Nails!

You can stalk Celebrity Nails here or tweet them @celebrity_nails.

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New Year’s Eve

Happy New Year everyone from Felise, Lisa, Rikka, Robbie (whom we just met tonight) and me! We’re posing with the awesome decors that Felise hung tonight, I’ll take more photos of it in the morning when the light is more awesome. For now, I’ll get back to playing pusoy dos and drinking some more! Cheers to an awesome year to come!

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Homemade Lychee Yakult

I’ve had purist tendencies towards milk tea before but recently I’ve been fooling around with Lychee Yakult. I passed by the grocery on my way home last night and inspired by Todd Wilbur’s Top Secret Recipes, I decided that my Master Chef career would start with Lychee Yakult.

They only have canned lychees in syrup so I bought the cheapest at around Php40 (so that if ever it turns out shitty at least I didn’t spend that much.) I also got Yakult (duh) and a plastic container for Php50 since those metal shakers are damn expensive. I also got sago balls but I didn’t put them in the drink since they apparently take about 3o minutes to form.

Ta-da, Lychee Yakult ala Ayla. I put about a cup of Lychee syrup with two Yakult bottles, put ice cubes and shook what my mama gave me. I came up with two glasses of Lychee Yakult and deym I swear they taste just like the commercially available ones. The canned lychees can make about five glasses so I spent less than Php20 per glass.

I don’t know if I should’ve put tea in it and I’d experiment with sago on another day but I’m happy that my version of Lychee Yakult doesn’t have floating particles. Swing by the apartment and let’s experiment with mixing other drinks! Next project: Future’s My Shirota which is basically Yakult with vodka. We already have both in the fridge, this should be fun.

Oh, and I realized that Yakult is the new butter, it makes everything taste better.

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