Uh oh. A week to go and kiddo will celebrate his birthday and its theme is SpongeBob. At age seven he has started to hate past favorites. He has bid goodbye to Mickey Mouse, Dibo, Barney (this I welcome), Ben 10, and Jollibee. Almost everything he used to be so fond of. But SpongeBob stays–Oggy and Lego too.
I now wonder how he will react once he learns that Jollibee now has free SpongeBob movie figures (we watched The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water on Black Saturday) for their kiddie meals. Will he ask us to cross the road, grab kiddie meals and have it served during his birthday party at McDonald’s? We’ll know.
The recently concluded weekend breaks routine. On Saturday, with wifey and Marcus, I attended the 7th birthday party of my officemate’s daughter. It was a good way to meet some of my colleagues away from the confines of the office, it was just about (fast)food and fun. Thanks to Jollibee and the party’s Hello Kitty theme, it erased for a moment the pressure of the Friday that was.
Every time we attend a Jollibee party, however, it reaffirms Marcus’ dying admiration of its mascot. Just like any Filipino kid, he once used to go crazy at the mere mention of meeting the famous red and yellow bee. He was once a big fan that he can even identify the store’s illuminated signs the instance he sees any of it from afar and it is usually when he would excitedly shout ‘Jollibee’ in gibberish. He was less than a year old then. But wifey and I now have observed that Jollibee parties for Marcus mean just parties with free food and loot bags. Period. In the past couple of years, whenever we talk about kiddie birthday celebrations, Marcus would strongly express that he prefers McDonald’s. Or Pizza Hut. Well maybe leaning more on Pizza Hut because lately he loves singing the pizza chain’s ‘making it great’ jingle.
The next day was entirely different. No balloons, no loud music, no screaming kids. On Sunday, we found ourselves at my MBA classmate’s place somewhere near Nuvali. It was a good time to re-connect and chat again after three years since I last met her. (Great house by the way.)
In both days, I am pleased that we successfully skipped the malls—we easily convinced our son to be home after each event. I now wonder if Marcus has started getting bored being inside these places? Has he become more fond of his Call of Duty Xbox game? Or has he begun to know the last-stretch-before-payday feeling? I think I have an idea.
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Happy birthday again Keih and Anna. Thanks for inviting us. Until next time.
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Mood: 2/10 Honks! (Still stuffed. Need to lift weights later.)
“You have to know what you want when you reach the end of the line…” – Andrew Zimmern, Bizarre Foods host.
I’m one of those who consider breakfast as the most important meal of the day. I can skip lunch, dinner and whatever snack there is, but never breakfast. I become grouchy when I miss it in the morning. This is often why I’m grumpy on my way to the office and becomes grumpier upon reaching our canteen once I discover that the menu at the counter doesn’t stand true to the enticing smell reaching our company’s parking lot.
So what is it with breakfast that makes me crave for it every day? Well, a typical breakfast for me includes coffee and egg. These two may be combined with longganisa (sausage), hotdog, tocino, corned beef, and spam, just to name a few—a few oily ones. Sometimes fish and veggies are accepted for health reasons but if I can avoid it they won’t get near my breakfast selection.
As weird as it may seem, I enjoy watching movies that have scenes of people having breakfast either in their own home or inside a restaurant. And to make it even weirder, other than the great car chase and firefight, one of the scenes I won’t skip in Ronin is the part where one of the assassins cooks egg as the others plan their heist.
You see I have this thing for perfectly cooked sunny side up eggs. I can’t exactly recall how long I’ve been into this obsession but I know that it has been years since I started trying to mimic the well-rounded sunny side up of McDonalds (or Jollibee).
And to prove how serious I am with what others would consider a trivial part of breakfast, I’ve spent time and money, fortunately not a fortune yet, on my quest to perfect my own sunny side up which led me to buy and test ‘tools’ to achieve my ultimate goal.
My egg tools: 1. Egg rings 2. Microwaveable egg cooker 3. Mini Teflon frying pan 4. Teflon frying pan
I started of course with the promising Teflon frying pan. It is flat it is non-stick, but it doesn’t work. I’ve used different stove settings to see if the egg will cook differently, yet to no avail. The shape just doesn’t stay round.
Then I found the microwaveable egg cooker. This product’s box shows four heart-shaped (it’s not round but as long as it’s perfect I will go for it) sunny side ups. Sadly, the item not only failed to meet the promised result, but the egg tasted bland and felt like rubber after coming out of the microwave.
I also tried poaching with the expectation that once I drop the egg into boiling water, it will miraculously attain the coveted shape as I have seen the chefs on TV do it. Instead what I got was an egg lacking crab and corn mixture. I read that some trim the edges to attain the round shape but I consider it cheating.
And there’s the egg rings. I found these in the grocery store and it looked like a foolproof way to finally have breakfast with a McDonalds-like perfection but right after I cracked the egg, all hopes were gone when the egg white leaked like water from the lower sides.
A smaller Teflon frying pan was my latest purchase hoping that its size will make the egg form along the pan’s side. At first it actually did but the top side does not cook well which led me eventually flip the egg and ruin its form in the process.
Egg snafu
With the outcome I have mentioned, I will continue my search for the sunny side up and hope that someday I’ll start my day with a lovely egg I could proudly say I personally cooked to complement the brewed coffee and bread or whatever goes well with it. Hopefully, that day will come before we welcome to our home a new family member or else I’ll be forced to serve him either scrambled or boiled eggs just because I can’t cook the perfect sunny side up.
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Immediately after I finished this blog, I wondered why I haven’t checked the internet if someone is as desperate as me. Well, I guess I may not be alone after all since I discovered this after typing “How to do a perfect sunny
side up.”
Marcus Can Blog 