Today's the birthday of my cousin
JR, who's grown up to be way different than what I expected - I guess he turned out "cooler" than a lot of us in the family, haha. Stay chill JR and enjoy your birthday! It won't kill you to smile!
Over the years I've more or less developed a format for my LJ entries. I beginning to think that I need to create a separate section / placement for my cooking discussions. My past entries seem to be constantly overwhelmed by discussions of food and such and I don't seem to be blogging about much else. Just thinking out loud here.
Work was weird. I woke up way late because of getting into I ♥ Katamari, which Tobie managed to procure for me. The wonders of internet research, various cd-burning applications and stubborn determination. Anyway, it was too late to take the MRT and I had to ask Tobie to bring me to work, especially given the rain. It was a good thing I went in - two of my supervisors were out for one reason or another and my boss Carlo was stranded at home, too. Thus it was pretty much me, one supervisor and to some extent my director holding the fort. It's a good thing that a significant number of managers and fellow department heads had also been unable to make it to work, so email traffic was slow.
The key achievement of my day was a simple yet important line graph. It doesn't sound like much when I describe it that way, but it's hard to capture the joy of sorting and scrubbing data and getting your tables all aligned as you need them. Plus it's work stuff, so I can't disclose much.
So instead, let's talk about cooking!
So last night because of my not waking up on time, I also didn't have time to cook the pasta dish I had planned. Bugger. So instead, I opted to cook that for brunch after our quick run to Shopwise to restock a few key consumables. Plus today's grocery trip was just enough for us to qualify for a Wise Card. Yay to loyalty programs!
Anyway, once we got home I plunged right into the preparations. This was my first time to cook without an actual recipe - I just sort of have ingredients in mind for the sauce and of course memories of previous pasta sauces I had enjoyed. A quick combination of garlic, onions, tomatoes, tuna, tomato sauce, rosemary, cayenne pepper, black pepper, salt and capers and bingo...a decent tuna pasta sauce, hehe. It took a while to conquer the sweetness of the tomato sauce but eventually we figured it out and came up with a pretty decent-tasting brunch! The noodles weren't too tricky - that much I had learned to do back in high school given the endless need to cook more noodles for the family's hunger, haha. It's just always a little frustrating how tricky it is to get the noodles just right in terms of the
al dente target without under cooking them or shooting right past that mark and over cooking them. Just added some Parmesan cheese over the completed dish and some bread sticks on the side and presto - a hearty and fulfilling lunch! I'm just glad I didn't screw it up, although I definitely need to work on generating more sauce. This more like a very chunky tuna paste, haha.
While I cared for lunch, Tobie whipped up an evil dessert - vanilla ice cream with peanut butter, cookies and cream ice cream, chocolate syrup and dark chocolate shavings! Yikes! All this and getting to watch the second half of
My Neighbor Totoro made for a great lazy afternoon. Now I need to figure out how to get enough sleep for the last work shift of the week - but ack! I feel so full!
That hat says it all, hahaha 
