"Honey, when are they gonna send me home ?" ---- Steely Dan
My sister will probably kill me for this but I will tell you a family secret.
You are probably wondering how the darn commercial restos can make Crispy Pata crisp. While you can only manage to waste your time in boiling it to a near pulp and then deep frying it without much success in making its heavenly skin crisp.
Well then, I will tell you the secret to making it crisp ("crispy" is not a word, its a Filipino invention because we cannot pronounced crisp pata in sucession without sounding like we have a lisp) .
This will only be a partial tip because I do not want to share the whole recipe. You are correct in boiling the crispy pata for a very very long time until its meat is almost seperated from the bone. That part of your method is correct. However do not overdo that because if you do that, it will be very hard to handle the pata and it will eventually join the broth and instead of Crispy Pata you will end up with Pata Soup which to me is inedible. Try to take a sip of pata broth, your veins will be full of sebo and you'll probably have a heart attack right there. Besides, its malansa and we throw that infernal broth in the sink. No self-respecting Filipino no matter how impoverished should be forced to taste that. It belongs in the sink.
Where was I ?
Oh yes. How to make the pata, Crispy Pata. Pay attention now, this is quite technical.
Place the boiled pata in a Pyrex, a big one. Like I said this is an incomplete tip. Of course you season it, with what I will not tell even if you stick a submachine gun in my ear. Use your imagination for the seasoning.
Well then, place them in a Pyrex and then Freeze them ! For 24 hours, freeze the darn thing and then deep fry it the next day. And for heaven's sake do not deftrost it. Thats the secret of making it crisp by deep frying it frozen. Freeze and Fry Frozen !
Got it ? Now if you will excuse me, I gotta make the sauce. Tip: put some water in there with the soy sauce, vinegar, onions, garlic and get this: a little, just a hint of sugar. Voila ! You have Crispy Pata sauce.
But then you ask: how can you make it so darn tasty ? Oh well, I can tell you that but then that will cost you $3,000. Sorry.
The Random Ramblings, Unrestricted Musings and Blustery Babble of Jet Guerrero
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Friday, March 6, 2009
Mii and My Son
My son's initial fascination with Wii did not come from its games , what attracted my son first to Wii was Mii.
Mii is that section of Wii that lets you create your own game characters. Basically, it was designed to make you personalize some of your Wii games by making caricatures of yourself. So that when you are playing the games, you can see "yourself" on the screen playing it and not some pre-made character.
It is very entertaining specially for my son who loves artistic detail and whose sense of color is quite acute. Mii lets him choose the shape and size of the face of the character you are creating. It lets him choose in intricate detail: the shape, size, expression of the lips, the eyes, the nose and the ears. It lets him select the hairstyle, different moustaches or not, even the size of moles the faces of his creation if he want any. You have total control over your creations, its like Corel Draw Lite.
Aside from the face, it lets you choose the size of the body: slim, thin, chubby or fluffy. It lets you choose the type and color of shirt and pants. Short pants of every color imaginable are also available for his dabbling.
For example, not only has River created the characters for each member of our family but he has created the character of each and every relative he remembers: his cousins, his Titos and Titas, in intricate detail and in shockingly accurate ways. When he created my character I was flabbergasted by the comic caricature of myself as my son saw it in his mind. He got every detail of my face, he's spot on in the matter of my physique and he knows what colors I like to wear.
But not only did he create characters for our family and relatives. He also created each and everyone of his 17 classmates as well. And some of their parents too ! The accuracy of his memory stuns you to disbelief. His choice of facial expressions is hilarious and comical, but only because they are accurate.
Whenever we go to the mall, in the early Days of Wii, he spends 2 hours or more making characters of all kinds. He has a character for McCain, Hillary and Obama which he probably got from my geek-level focus on the US campaign. He also makes characters from scratch like an artist making something out of pure canvas and raw paint.
Many kids who are in line for a try on the Wii consoles they let you play around stores here like Best Buy, the almost gone Circuit City and Game Stop get impatient. They just get exasperated by his near total concentration on creating Mii characters. Because, you see he recreates the characters back home on these sample Wiis and he does not stop until he fills up the all 100 spaces alllocated to them.
Thats right, he creates 100 characters every time we visit the Mall, and kids are practically begging him to play the featured game already. Which he is oblivious to, of course, he just shuts down on the rest of the world and enters the Land of Mii in the Village of Mii. He swings his body and perspires when he's doing this, his focus is total. Its like watching a great piano player play his composition, he is totally in that zone and it hits him like a bug.
Thats Mii and my son.
Mii is that section of Wii that lets you create your own game characters. Basically, it was designed to make you personalize some of your Wii games by making caricatures of yourself. So that when you are playing the games, you can see "yourself" on the screen playing it and not some pre-made character.
It is very entertaining specially for my son who loves artistic detail and whose sense of color is quite acute. Mii lets him choose the shape and size of the face of the character you are creating. It lets him choose in intricate detail: the shape, size, expression of the lips, the eyes, the nose and the ears. It lets him select the hairstyle, different moustaches or not, even the size of moles the faces of his creation if he want any. You have total control over your creations, its like Corel Draw Lite.
Aside from the face, it lets you choose the size of the body: slim, thin, chubby or fluffy. It lets you choose the type and color of shirt and pants. Short pants of every color imaginable are also available for his dabbling.
For example, not only has River created the characters for each member of our family but he has created the character of each and every relative he remembers: his cousins, his Titos and Titas, in intricate detail and in shockingly accurate ways. When he created my character I was flabbergasted by the comic caricature of myself as my son saw it in his mind. He got every detail of my face, he's spot on in the matter of my physique and he knows what colors I like to wear.
But not only did he create characters for our family and relatives. He also created each and everyone of his 17 classmates as well. And some of their parents too ! The accuracy of his memory stuns you to disbelief. His choice of facial expressions is hilarious and comical, but only because they are accurate.
Whenever we go to the mall, in the early Days of Wii, he spends 2 hours or more making characters of all kinds. He has a character for McCain, Hillary and Obama which he probably got from my geek-level focus on the US campaign. He also makes characters from scratch like an artist making something out of pure canvas and raw paint.
Many kids who are in line for a try on the Wii consoles they let you play around stores here like Best Buy, the almost gone Circuit City and Game Stop get impatient. They just get exasperated by his near total concentration on creating Mii characters. Because, you see he recreates the characters back home on these sample Wiis and he does not stop until he fills up the all 100 spaces alllocated to them.
Thats right, he creates 100 characters every time we visit the Mall, and kids are practically begging him to play the featured game already. Which he is oblivious to, of course, he just shuts down on the rest of the world and enters the Land of Mii in the Village of Mii. He swings his body and perspires when he's doing this, his focus is total. Its like watching a great piano player play his composition, he is totally in that zone and it hits him like a bug.
Thats Mii and my son.
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