This is is just a re-post from my other blog site. I find it timely to share with you since the update is that my dad already has a job. Woot-woot!

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It's remarkable how one learns something from a long time ago and still be able to apply it in the present. Such is the case of my mom. I woke up recuperating from my sinusitis to see her cooking something in the kitchen. It smelled good but looking at what she was mixing, I didn't recognize what the concoction was.

"What's that?" I inquired with much interest since I was awfully hungry already.

"Just marmalade. For toppings on biscuits, " she replied rather surprised that I asked because smelling something was the last thing I could do that late a night.

"Just where did you learn how to cook one?"

"Oh, it was long a time ago in school. You see, we were taught how to do so in a cooking class, " she replied in between motions of mixing. "As a young girl I used wooden pans of sorts, " she added. "I told your dad that it's better to make our own marmalade than buy that medicine-tasting grocery concoction."

I grinned. I knew better. Dad was jobless for two months and it was only after days ago when his schedule for his new job started (thank God).

Now they just need to come up with biscuits.

Here's a recipe for orange marmalade:

Ingredients:

* 1 tumbler orange marmalade
* 1/4 cup cold water
* 1 tablespoon lemon juice
* 3/4 cup boiling water
* 1/4 package of gelatine

Instructions:

1. Soften the gelatine in the cold water and dissolve in the hot water; add the marmalade and lemon juice.
2. Stir occasionally until the mixture begins to thicken, then turn into mold.
3. Serve with cream.
 
 
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Mussels Sunday massacre

I normally dislike seafood or any kind of food from the sea that needs to be taken apart before I can even taste that which is edible inside. The painstaking effort weakens me and robs me of my appetite.

Seafood lovers like my mom and dad, however, take the opposite approach to such kind of food. The process is a delight for them. The effort involved leads them to crave for more. And once taken out, whatever seafood meat there is from the bone or the shell, the craving just gets more intense.

This is particularly reasonable since my country -- the Philippines -- has a total irregular coastline of 36,289 km. This means that a seafood meal such as mussels for lunch is inevitable on a weekly basis. Of course, our household can have a variety of other seafood choices such as squid, crab, etc. to rotate on a weekly basis

Yesterday's lunch was a different experience for me when my mom served mussels. I grumbled that everyone knows at home about my beef (with pun intended) with seafood to which she replied, "We're having pork adobo (a soy sauce-based Filipino dish) for dinner."

Pork adobo is heaven for me, but did I need to go through a seafood lunch hell to make it to dinner?

An hour later and two bowls of rice, I changed my mind. Maybe it was my empty stomach. Maybe my mom is just a good cook. Maybe as a grown up I just needed to grow up a little more, food-wise. The result is I loved the meal. Above is a glimpse of what I tore into for yesterday's homemade lunch.

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How the mussels got served