Daily Report: Good Eating, Good Viewing

Younger sister Ednel is having a great time at culinary school, and she is without doubt learning a lot more than I would have given the little fledgling culinary program credit for. Plus, I'm learning, Ednel has a bit of natural talent.

(For those of you interested in joining The Culinary Institute of Cagayan De Oro, they are located on Facebook. It is an 8-month weekend program with a monthly tuition of 6,500 pisos plus books and other fees.)

For lunch, Ednel served up some barely-battered Cream Dory fish fillets, served with a garlic ranch sauce.

For dinner, I challenged Ednel to cook something using chicken and pineapple. She invented curry. She had never heard of, nor tasted a curry before, and the ingredients she used in making her dish were nothing like how a "real" curry is made, but the taste was very similar... therefore, I can say that she "invented" it.

I like to think that I'm as helpful in teaching Ednel as her professors at school are. I'm teaching Ednel the difference between being a cook and being a chef: A cook starts off with a recipe and ends up with a meal. A chef starts off with ingredients and ends up with a recipe. I give Ednel the ingredients and see what she can do with them.

I've been watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine on DVD. I have only seen most of these episodes once, over a decade ago. I forgot how enjoyable a show it was: Unlike The Next Generation, this series did a great job of developing characters with many shades of gray and spending lots of time on their stories, their motivations, and their skills of manipulation and debate. Quark is a fantastic character: Shrewd, cowardly, honorable, dishonest, and entirely consistent within his own set of values. Garak the tailor is another: Affable, friendly, evil, reliable, yet always self-serving. Fantastic television. DS9 is really an underrated Star Trek series: In terms of character development and fleshing out of the "Star Trek world", it is actually the best Star Trek series.

I've also been watching The Tudors, which Simon brought with him from Thailand. Now that I've finished Rutherfurd's books, "The Forest" (a history of Hampshire), "Sarum" (a history of Salisbury), and "London", I'm quickly becoming an English history wonk. The Tudors is a highly-focused look at the court of Henry VIII (one of England's worst yet most important monarchs). It is stunning, startling, and — except for minor plot details — fiercely faithful to the historical record, and the writers use the "unknowns, blanks, and guesses" in that record to create fantastic drama. My recommendation: Watch the show with your laptop nearby to Google various things you see and hear to get more information and educate yourself fully.

It has been raining regularly here. Tyson is a pain because he likes to wander in and out of the house pretty regularly: First hanging out with me and waiting for attention and food scraps, then going out to the fence to say hello to his canine friends who wander up and down the street. By the end of the evening, the wet ground outside makes wet paw prints on the floor tiles by the door. Closing the doors blocks the cool breeze and causes Tyson to have a fit, and it only takes a minute to mop up the paw prints, so I just let him do his thing.