Sweet Potato and Heart Stew

[smartads] Okay to continue.  It’s still Sunday 18 Dec and I just finished talking about how I wanted to start trying different foods.  The first is to be sweet potatoes.  I will have the results of that taste test today, plus the next item up for taste.  Of course I have other hopefully interesting things all around that subject.  I know you will remember to click on the pictures to get more information about the picture, so I won’t say anything.

Lita found the harmonica that I brought over from Texas.  I bought it because I wanted to learn it, I thought.  I guess it was one of those I’m bored moments.  I did mess with it a little in Texas and I have been checking it out again today.  I have a CD to load for it so I may be doing that later.  I don’t know how to play any musical instrument and I’d like to be able to, so I probably will give it a go.  At times there is nothing else much to do, especially when we have one of our brown outs.

Lita just let me taste a little bit of some sweet potato that Chatty cooked.  It was boiled and tasted like there was no seasoning, but it wasn’t terrible.  I don’t think I could eat it cooked that way on a regular basis though.  I will still cook some later on a la french fries to see how those taste.  As I said before, Lita seems to think I’ll like them and she’s usually right in about 90% of these cases.  I’ll start with only 1 sweet potato just to be sure though.

Heart is here again today, it’s Sunday remember.  They are sitting on his bed talking.  Jay says that there is a disco going on down the road tonight and wanted to know if I was going.  I don’t think so, but I told him that he should go.  If Lita complains, then I’ll take the rap for it, because I said he could.  I wouldn’t want Lita to run out of things to complain about.  She likes to have him around on the weekends so he can do things for her around the house.  I must admit that when he is here, it’s less I have to do also.  He needs to have some sort of social life anyway.  Just going to school and working gets old quick.  He normally doesn’t get home from school until 8:00pm, so maybe he is sliding a little social life in there somewhere.  When he comes home, he does his chores and is usually in bed by 9:30pm.  Heck even on weekends, he’s in bed by 9:30pm.  I told him that wasn’t natural for a 20 year old to go to bed so early every night.

A bad thing about being behind on these notes is that I can’t always remember everything that I said before, so please excuse me if I repeat a few things, like the next item.

We have had a new country join our little blog community.  It is the country of  Armenia.  Another country that I had to look up.  It is a small country close to  Turkey.  The population of the whole country is less than the city of  Houston.

I was much better at inserting pictures on the 18 Dec post, but I still need some work.  I did finally figure out how to do a link on here and actually I like this way better although it takes a extra step to accomplish.

At 11:00pm tonight we were blessed with a 1 minute brown out.  It didn’t knock anything out permanently though.

It’s 0033 (early, early Monday morning) and they are still blaring music down the road somewhere.  It’s a good thing it doesn’t bother me.  I’m going to be watching TV for the next couple of hours anyway before I go to sleep.  That is if there is anything good on.  I usually have to depend on whether there are any good movies on at that time, if I have already seen the NCIS and/or Bones for the day because it’s a repeat from the afternoon.

Useless Knowledge:  The Orchid releases a chemical that makes bees drunk. When the bee becomes disoriented, it dumps its load of pollen into the flower, thus pollinating the flower.

Okay now it’s a more reasonable time on Monday morning (19 Dec), it’s 0825.  I just finished making myself smell and look good (showered, shaved and brushed my teeth).  It’s a lot of work to make me look good, but it’s worth the effort sometimes.

I need to call JimBoy about this computer.  It’s super slow when starting up and I don’t think I have an abundance of things that happen during start up.  Besides, my DVD drive still will not open.

About 10:30 Lita wanted to lay down so I came out here to LolyKat.  It’s a nice day out here today so I hope to get a lot of customers.

So last night (Sunday) I tried those fried sweet potatoes (you thought I forget, didn’t you?).  I will have to say that I definitely have been missing something by not eating these before.  I have been basing all my sweet potato expectations on the candid yams that I tried in Texas and that was just wrong.  These fried sweet potatoes were better than the regular fried potatoes.  I still do not like the boiled version of sweet potatoes (or candid yams), but the fried version is excellent.  Lita says that there is about a 50% savings from the regular to the sweet potato, so we will be buying less regular now.  I will still need them for stews though.  The only other thing that I don’t like about the sweet potatoes is that they are so hard to cut.  Some of them are almost like cutting through a rock.  It was worth it though.  I didn’t even need to bread to eat them, which cuts down on the starch.  I just cut them thin, made them well done and used the ketchup.  I did try the sandwich of course, but usually I was almost finished eating the first batch by the time the second batch was cooked.

Cathy borrowed the camera today to take pictures at Crystal & Khan’s Christmas parties at school. (I’ve already put a couple of those pictures on this blog in the previous 2 posts I believe).  I hope she is able to get the pictures printed and off my memory card faster than she normally does.

Define Boring.  Boring is when your day is so slow that you don’t even have anything to write about while sitting in LolyKat.

Since I liked those sweet potatoes so much yesterday, I have decided to try another vegetable that I never eat.  The next one will be ‘eggplant‘.  I decided on eggplant mostly because it was setting on the table in the kitchen.  So I got the eggplant, peeled it, cut it up, dipped it in egg and fried it.  Notice I forgot to season it, oops!  It wasn’t so terrible, but I decided to try one more.  I did the same, except this time I over salted it.  Since I had already had another sweet potato recently, plus these 2 eggplants, I was full.  I’ll have to wait to try to improve on that eggplant cooking at another time.  I may even try the Kasaba (sp).  They are one of the ones that we serve here that we coat with a brown sugar sauce.  I suppose I will try that one first.  If it is covered in brown sugar, it can’t be all that bad.

It’s raining again, but the Blue Team is here anyway.  They normally pay their credit on Saturday, but they got paid late, so they will be settling their bill today.  They are some of the few we let have credit because they have never messed it up.  Their bill payment will give Lita enough money to go to the market in the morning.

Well the foreman for the Blue Team came to pay the bill, but all he had was a P1000 note.  The bill is only P400 and we don’t have the change.  We tried to get it changed at other close by sari-sari stores, but they wouldn’t or couldn’t.  He just left the money here because he had to go back to work.  He will stop by after work to see if we figured it out.  And we did.  Vicky ended up buying some flour and oil to use to cook and the store where she bought it had to give her change for the P1000.

Lita left me out here in the store while she went to buy some chicken.  I wonder if the kids will be out singing tonight also.  No sooner did I write that, when some showed up.  I have Jay and Ado running interference for me though and is telling them something that is making them leave.  I problem mentioned this already, but it really gets to be a nuisance after awhile with all the singing.  If you give them the .25 coin they don’t want it, if you give them a peso, they want more (because the American has a lot of money is what they say).  Right now it is relatively peaceful as long as Ado and/or Jay is there to run them off.  Jay also informs me that they will be coming around singing up to and through Christmas Eve.  I don’t remember all this singing last year.  But it may be because I wasn’t out in the store much last year.  If I have my way, there won’t even be a sari-sari store here next year.  I’m not going to sabotage it on purpose, but I hope to transform the store into another business.  That is under wraps for now though.  I haven’t said anything to Lita because I don’t know if I can pull it off yet.  I have a helper that is checking into things for me.  That person shall remain anonymous for now.  I think that when/if the time comes to tell Lita, it will be easy to convince her.  That’s not normally true, but I think it will be in this case.

Ado is out there filling the tank of the multi-cab with the contents of a Pepsi bottle.  I’m going to leave it at that and if y’all don’t know what I’m talking about and want to know, then you should ask via the comment section.  Especially any of you people out there that have never sent a comment, please do so.

Oh great!  Now there is a group of young adults out here singing, not children.  There are 4 of them and they have a guitar.  It actually sounds pretty good, but I’m so Christmas songed out, that I don’t think I can stand much more.  When Lita gets home, I’m going in the house and leave her here.  She has no problem getting the children to leave.  Wow!  Speaking of Lita, like magic, she’s here.

Well shoot!  She’s here, but she said she’s going to cook some chicken adobo.  Since it’s one of my favorite chicken dishes, I think I’ll let her.  I just sit out here a little long and dodge mga bata (all the children).

I tried one of those so called candies here called Snow Bear  (I can’t believe there is a Facebook for this).  It tastes just like a Halls cough drop.  I was then informed that they are used mainly by smokers.  I guess they think it helps there breath or something.  I’d use it if my throat was stuffy.

I told Lita that if we had a lot of money, I’d sit out here giving out pesos to the kids that come by here to sing, but then I decided that would probably just create more problems, if I gave out too much.  I guess if I’m going to do it, I need to limit it to about 100 pesos per season.

Well that’s the end of Monday and this post.  I will now insert some pictures and something below this.  Not sure what that below thing will be at this time, but it will be something.  Does anyone miss the Philippine History?

Salamat, Paalam

Anyone who fell behind, complained, had a souvenir taken from a fallen Japanese soldier, or even looked at one of the Japanese wrong was bayoneted or shot. Some prisoners were shot for stopping to fill their canteens at a road-side ditch.

Rifle-butt beatings were common, for offenses such as helping a faltering comrade. Many prisoners were bayoneted for no apparent reason or for fun. Filipino civilians along the path who offered food or water to the prisoners were also summarily killed by the Japanese.

In total, some 18,000 – 20,000 of the POWs died on the Bataan Death March, which ended up taking one week. Some simply collapsed and died of illness or starvation, but most were murdered.  A large but unknown number of the POWs died shortly thereafter in the internment camps as well, from the after-effects of their forced march.

In 1945, the Japanese commander in charge of Bataan, General Homma, was put on trial for atrocities including the Bataan Death March. He stated that he had been unaware of the high death toll from the march until some time later. Nonetheless, he was convicted. General Homma was executed in the Philippines on April 3, 1946.

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/asianhistoryfaqs/f/BataanGlos.htm