D for Delicious

Bites off the expat life

At a crossroads

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I’ve been here before

It took me more than 9 months to finish this blogpost.

I’ve been struggling with blogging. The publicness of it all. It’s not that I have not been completely silent on the Internets. I have been talking a lot on social media of choice. I’m not telling though, even if it is Google-able. -_-  Uh-oh. I just incriminated myself. *facepalm*

I have a lot of things I want to say and stories to tell, but I stop myself every single time.  There is just a fine line between public and private that I suddenly am afraid to cross.

There are things that I would just want to scribble onto the pages of my notebook, then disappear into the depths of oblivion. There are things that I do want to shout from the mountain tops. There are some things that I want to share to my people – family and friends: useful things, insightful things. But then there are things that are still tangled up in my head, stories unfinished that still are awaiting their ending.

 

Like this blog. It is awaiting an ending. Where do I take it? Do I continue, forge on? Or do I just end it?

Happy 7th birthday, Obi Juan!

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Today, our little Obi Juan turns 7 years old. Human years that is. So in dog years, he would be 44 years old. Is that mid-life? Or is he approaching his senior years?

Coincidentally, we will be celebrating this milestone of his with fellow corgi owners and their corgis, one of whom will also be celebrating his birthday later this month. There will be doggie birthday cake! Yey!

I am happy that he has reached this milestone, at the same time, a little worried as our baby is getting older. I know, he hasn’t been a puppy for some time now, but he is our baby. My baby.

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Great Scott of Louisiana: The Boudin Ball Capital of the World

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Eh?

As I exhale, smoke magically comes out of my mouth. Okay, it’s not magic people, but science. It is now officially cold. I have a harder time crawling out from being sandwiched between the warmth of fleece covers and fleece sheets. I pile up on clothing before heading out, even if it is just to get the mail or letting out the dog to wee. I cannot help but fall asleep on the couch on lazy afternoons, snuggled under my blankie with the dog beside me.

Plus,it is the perfect weather to head down to Louisiana and just eat. Nice cool temperatures that will not give you that sticky, sweaty, tiring feeling.

If I had the chance to magically transport myself to Louisiana now, I’d head to Scott with spacious cooler filled with dry ice in tow to tour the three great boudin, crackling and specialty meat shops. Amusing how these three are within a 1-mile radius of each other. I guess you can never get enough variety of boudin and other tasty meat treats.

Scott’s boudin ball variety platter

So first of all, what is boudin? It is a pork sausage made with meat, liver, rice and spices. It is tasty in itself, but somehow these guys decided to form the boudin filling into a ball, roll it in breadcrumbs and deep fry it. Drat. Boudin balls are just genius! I didn’t say healthy if you’ve noticed, just sheer brilliant, addictive pork and rice goodness. The deep fried, crispy and sometimes crunchy breadcrumb coating adds a contrast of texture versus the creamy insides of the boudin.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, where to go for your boudin fix? Let’s start…

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Christina Topham’s Swedish-ish Fruit & Nut Rye Bread

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Cross section of the bread

If there’s one bread that inspired me to learn how to bake, it’s this one. Why? Because it is a no knead, hence, no mixer needed kind of bread. And funny how I’ve only come round to baking it now after more than 6 months of baking more complicated knead intensive breads.

But I’ve come to realize that the timing is just perfect. Yes, the seasons have finally changed. We now said goodbye and good riddance (for now…until next year!) to the awful Texas summer. I welcome the cold air with open windows, jammies at night, fleece blankets, warm snuggles and the constant hunger pangs. How constant? Instead of eating every 4-5 hours, I get really hungry after 2-3 hours. The first time I experienced it, I thought there was something wrong with me. But eventually I learned that the hunger pangs are more frequent because the body burns more energy to keep it warm. For those who experience real winters, you do know that the struggle is real. Hahaha!

This is the bread to have in the cold months as it is dense with fruit, nuts and seeds, making it a hearty snack to satiate those crazy cold weather hunger pangs. It is so easy to make and stores well in the freezer.

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Almost gone with the wind

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Uh-oh.

This morning, we had our first brush with the possibility of a tornado. Yep, tornado. As in like in “Twister” the movie. Recall: flying cows, trucks, running for your life and hiding in a shelter.

Texas is part of what you call the “Tornado alley“, states that have the highest occurrences of tornadoes. We don’t get tornadoes as often as Kansas, but the possibility of it happening is there. In the short time that we have been living here, there have been tornado occurrences, but usually in the cities and towns outside of the DFW metroplex. They’ve said that the tornadoes are more likely to form in areas with wide open spaces for the funnel to touch ground. We lived in a suburb, which was growing with multiple real estate developments, didn’t seem like a hotbed for tornado formation.

Every once in a while, sometimes on perfect, cloudless sunny days, the warning sirens go off. Then at the end of a few minutes of wailing, an announcer would say “Testing. Testing.”

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#TrailingSpouseStories: And we all lived happily ever after…

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Our fairy tale wish (Photo by AForestFrolic)

Welcome to the very last #TrailingSpouseStories blog crawl. This last time, we all give our final words about the entire trailing spouse journey. 

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a Princess fell in love with Prince from the neighboring kingdom. The Prince loved her so much that he asked her hand in marriage from the Good King and Queen. Though they were saddened that their baby girl was all grown up, they agreed that it was time. The Prince and Princess were married and everyone – all the nobility, the Fairy Godmothers, and all commoners – in both kingdoms celebrated on their most joyous day. And they lived happily ever after…

No, the Prince and Princess’ story does not end here, but begins there.

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Un-DSTing: Turning back time

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Photo by Patrick Down

I spent most of my years oblivious to the concept of Daylight Saving Time or DST. The Philippines’ clock stays the same throughout the year. We do not spring forward nor fall back on certain days of the year. In Dubai, there also is no concept of DST. So imagine the confusion to me when we were required to adapt to this new concept.

This time of the year, we will be asked to “fall back”, adjust all our clocks 1-hour backwards. We will get an extra hour of sleep, they’ve said.

Earlier, I thought that when you fall back, we get into DST.

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Big Tips for the State Fair of Texas

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Big Tex waving hello (and goodbye)

Last year, The Husband, a friend and I went to the State Fair of Texas to check out what the fuss was all about. We, though from a tiny country half-way around the world, have honestly never experienced anything like this. Okay, we didn’t grow up in the forest nor in the rice paddies of the Philippines. The Husband and I are big city slickers. We ain’t got big ass annual peryas like this. After the fun that we had – watching ostrich races, eating all that fried food, checking out all those pick up trucks and dancing to Kool and the Gang’s free concert – we told ourselves that visiting the State Fair of Texas once was more than enough.

BUT since we had visitors over from the Pacific Northwest, we decided to visit again. It was after all a quintessential part of the entire Texas experience, an event Texans have looked forward to every year since 1886.

And after this second visit, we’ve picked up some tips that perhaps you could find useful if you visit Texas and be here when the State Fair is open.

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My Stepford Trailing Spouse Village

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Let’s start building! Photo by Chris Christian

Welcome to September’s #TrailingSpouseStories. This month we share trailing spouse village – who is part of it, how we’ve built it or maybe who we’d like to be part of it.

There are days that I wished that the moment my feet landed on new soil, everything would be laid out for me. Who doesn’t want to live a smooth sailing, blunder-free, work like clockwork trailing spouse life? I do! Remember the film “The Stepford Wives”, where the wives were so perfect – beautiful, intelligent, skillful among other things -that every day went like clockwork. This is how I would dream everything would go, not that I’d have a perfect wife. Silly. But that I’d have a perfect support system, a dream team, a “village” to help me raise myself in an environment that is completely alien.

A girl can dream, right?

If I would build my perfect trailing spouse village, it would have all of the following people the very moment I step out of the airplane into my new expat location:

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The History of Obi Juan: A Maalaala Mo Kaya Story

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Please explain to be why would you give up such a beautiful dog. This is Obi in his younger years. Photo not mine.

We didn’t have Obi Juan as a puppy as we adopted him as a full-grown corgi. As of late, The Husband and I are Obi’s 6th owners.

Yup, Obi’s bounced around a number of owners and I’ve always wondered why. He was potty trained; save for a few accidents when he just couldn’t hold it any longer. He knew when it was time to get into bed. Say “bed” or “beddy” and he will trot towards his bed and hop into it. He knew how to sit. He played fetch nice. He came to us when we called his name; well, most of the time. He travelled very well, sleeping in his spot at the back, not demanding to be played with. He was pretty chill at home as well, no demands to play when we were busy.

So I really didn’t get it.

He was extremely cute, uber handsome plus he seemed to be, rather, he is a good, sweet dog. And I wanted to thank whoever who had him first for training him well, which made our lives with Obi so much easier. And that chance of meeting that person was slim to none. Who knows where Obi really came from? When his birthday was? How old is he really?

But yesterday, I met this person.

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