To test the consistency of the new and simple barbecue recipe I invented recently, I warmed up the grill – and of course, the moka pot! Ever since the discovery of espresso in barbecue, I doubt if any barbecue I sizzle will taste and smell as good without it.
By virtue of a friend and ideal kitchen mate who asked for a description and eventually the recipe earlier today, I shall try to do both here. But be wary, dear friend, you know I tend to get carried away with descriptions. ;-)
¤ ¤ ¤
A bright Sunday morning and Tango Fugata followed by Bach, and more Bach on the stereo sets one of the best moods for kitchen improvisations or inventions.
The snap of the knob and the little combustion of the stove kindled the kitchen to life. Before that particular snap, Lavazza coffee beans were reduced to a fine terra-cotta powder, and water was poured into the moka pot’s lower chamber, then I satiated the pot’s provocative waist with the ground beans, sealed it, and placed it on the stove just as the flames began dancing beneath it.
As the magical transformation of water and ground beans into aromatic liquid transpired inside the six-cupper moka pot, I thinly diced approximately five tablespoons of ginger and toasted them in a pan with two tablespoons butter until the ginger metamorphosed into a hundred tiny golden nuggets.
In a stainless steel container lazed five slices of properly defrosted pork steak, with just about a circumference of five inches each. Pepper was sprinkled on their two sides, and as the moka pot hissed its seductive hiss and furnished the entire house with its perfume, I poured the coffee on the lazy slices of pork as their pinkish flesh turned pale under the liquid’s heat. Marinating in the wonderful brown liquid, I set the meat aside to concoct the barbecue sauce.
Into a small pan was poured four tablespoons of oil, followed by a dump of four tablespoons brown sugar, an abundant squirt containing two tablespoons of mustard, then I seasoned the mixture with one teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce and half a teaspoon of salt. I kept stirring the ingredients together until they were amalgamated into one substance of a honey-like viscosity. Heating the pan for about a minute smoothened the mixture even more.
The momentary mock rustle of an ignited matchstick is a griller’s accomplice, and once it enters the cook’s consciousness, it is then that the real cooking temperature rises. After brushing the grill with oil, I sprinkled it with a bit of the left-over ground coffee and a pinch of salt to render additional grilling drama. (haha) The grill seethed as it prepared to stamp the steaks with its signature polylinear staves and the steaks reacted with a violent steamy sizzle, until they subjected themselves with a quiver… and later on, a weaker sizzle and quiver as they were turned over. (Yikes, I think I’ll get in trouble with PETA for this. Don’t worry PETA, I went vegetarian for weeks before this recipe!)
I turned the steaks over every four minutes and brushed each side with the barbecue sauce every time until they were shimmering and ready for presentation, but making sure to reserve a tablespoon of the sauce for varnishing the plated steaks. I opted for individual plating and since there were five pieces, five plates were decorated with the steaks themselves and on their sides, colourful sprigs of rosemary erected on centres of tablespoon-full mounds of golden ginger. Jalapeño Tabasco made a passionate partner to the steak. You can definitely try this at home, but if it gets too hot, be sure to have Lemongrass juice a la Vinz by your side. *smacks lips*
.
Note for Chef Vinz: Tell me of your new invention, too! But in private. I know you’re very secretive with your recipes. =P
One surrendered in words, to find; the other, to dispossess. One read to fulfil the heart’s proddings; the other to abnegate it. One turned pages to nourish the mind; the other lost it. One bent over a book to partake; the other to withhold. One embraced sentences with an intent; the other, aimlessly. Betwixt the covers one pursued a question; the other, an answer. One discovered the way, the other wandered. Within a book the other is the one, the one is the other. ‘Twas a strange but beautiful sight, when he read – the one with the doppelgänger, with the woman reader, and she too, with her doppelgänger. They read, leaning their backs against each other.
.
But alas! No book was to tell (who became lovers or who remained readers)
the further story of the reading man and woman and their doppelgängers.
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past…”
from Sonnet XXX, by William Shakespeare
.
.
“…and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.” Thus ended Swann’s Way. If a whispered and awe-inspired “wow” would suffice, that is all this entry would ever contain, but one must say more – and yet remain deficient in claiming how resplendent Marcel Proust’s words are.
Time, memory, and music, this triumvirate, course through Swann’s Way fluidly as if all three were one entity, and that is what draws me most into this first volume of Remembrance of Things Past / In Search of Lost Time / À la recherche du temps perdu, the pièce de résistance of Proust’s life. In harmony with Thomas Mann, he has astonishingly fused together with philosophy two loves of mine; music and literature. (However, Proust’s airy and ethereal touch even when dealing with dark, melancholy, or disappointing motifs is a stark contrast to Mann’s abysmal approach which can perhaps be compared to 20th century French and German classical music in general.) While I adore them equally and cannot favour one above the other, I have to suffer saying that if reading pleasure is concerned, Proust prevails.
I could not, it is true, lay down the novel of his which I was reading… Then I observed the rare, almost archaic expressions he liked to employ at certain moments, in which a hidden stream of harmony, an inner prelude, would heighten his style; and it was at such points as these, too, that he would begin to speak of the “vain dream of life,” of the “inexhaustible torrent of fair forms,” of the “sterile and exquisite torment of understanding and loving…” that he would express a whole system of philosophy, new to me, by the use of marvellous images that one felt must be the inspiration for the harp-song which then arose and to which they provided a sublime accompaniment. One of these passages… filled me with a joy… a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a deeper, vaster, more integral part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions seemed to have been swept away. For what happened was that, while I recognized in this passage the same taste for uncommon phrases, the same musical outpouring, the same idealist philosophy which had been present in the earlier passages without my having recognised them as being the source of my pleasure…
And so I would read, or rather sing his sentences in my mind, with rather more dolce, rather more lento than he himself had perhaps intended, and his simplest phrase would strike my ears with something peculiarly gentle and loving in its intonation. These are Proust’s own words, the narrator’s sentiments towards Bergotte, his favourite author… and yet, it is precisely the same feelings that arise in me when reading Proust. Had my senses remained muddled, I would have easily mistook his words for music.
.
Noted in pencil inside my score of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. II is Maestro Valery Gergiev’s advice: “To get deeper into Russian music, read important Russian literature.” I have attached weight to this statement to the length of observing its reversed order by getting deeper into literature by accompanying it with significant music. Since these Frenchmen, Marcel Proust and Maurice Ravel, breathed the same era, imagine what euphoria caressed me when I listened to one of my former lullabies, the second movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, while reading these lines from Swann’s Way:
…the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless… But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils… An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, sine materia. Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend, according to their pitch and volume, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable – did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow… He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had at once suggested to him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire…
Indeed this passion for a phrase of music seemed, for a time, to open up before Swann the possibility of a sort of rejuvenation…
¤ ¤ ¤
The thirst for an unknown delight was awakened in him by the little phrase, but without bringing him any precise gratification to assuage it. With the result that the parts of Swann’s soul in which the little phrase had obliterated all concern for material interests, those human considerations which affect all men alike, were left vacant by it, blank pages on which he was at liberty to inscribe that name of Odette.
¤ ¤ ¤
There was a deep repose, a mysterious refreshment for Swann - whose eyes, although delicate interpreters of painting, whose mind, although an acute observer of manners, must bear for ever the indelible imprint of the barrenness of his life - in feeling himself transformed into a creature estranged from humanity, blinded, dprived of his logical faculty, almost a fantastic unicorn, a chimaera-like creature conscious of the world through his hearing alone. And since he sought in the little phrase for a meaning to which his intelligence could not descend, with what a strange frenzy of intoxication did he strip bare his innermost soul of the whole armour of reason and make it pass unattended through the dark filter of sound! (Forgive my overdoing the citations but when everything’s worth citing, one cannot easily stop.)
.
But of course, Proust could not have written this passage with this particular piece in mind. It is after all the famous musical enigma that Swann related with his beloved. A phrase from a violin and piano sonata… one which nobody, as far as I know, has established whether it is imagined or based on a real composition. How provoking yet wondrous that it should remain a mystery!
Not without the demitasse, she writes
The focus on which reverie and solitude unites
For in it inspiration appears in a form of pensive umber
From which she extracts the essence with pen and paper
And panics when she sees the cup empty
What once was there was lost too quickly
She refills
Re-feels
Pours, exhales, and scribes
Consumes, sighs, and writes
The succession of having and losing
The solidarity of coffee and writing
Each paragraph, each sentence, each word, blurred everything around me – even the manumission of raindrops from their harbouring gigantic greys – they even blurred time. The words were exceptionally lavish that I could not distinguish whether my senses were heightened or anesthetized.
.
I am one hundred pages into the corridors of Swann’s Way, nevertheless six hundred pages, plus six more volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu await me, but already I rest in need of a fermata. I am falling in love with Marcel Proust’s synesthetic recollections and I have to breathe.
As Nabokov was gifted with “colored hearing” not too dissimilar from composers Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsakov’s music-color synesthesias, Proust is unquestionably graced with this extraordinary and prodigious endowment of perception.
I have already rendezvoused with the legendary and anticipated scenes featuring the maternal goodnight kiss and the Madeleine soaked in tea, and the traversed one hundred pages contain evidence of the author’s synesthesia (and I am sure that more proofs remain to be read):“…the old-gold sonorous name…”
“That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallised the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueller to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.”“Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind.”
I think it is not too extraordinary that we have reminiscences triggered by intermingling sensations, but even if Marcel Proust were gifted with a loftier degree of synesthesia, what is even more remarkable is how geniuses like him apply it to art… and right now, I am discovering that synesthesia with art as its aperture is indulging, rousing, and enchanting. . Return to Home Page
Shelving books and putting off reading for a week allowed me to read more of my heart and mind instead. Peering into the depths of my self, and doing solely that, has been a cathartic experience, but I do not deny the literary aphrodisia I feel when I see the unread tomes beckoning from the shelf. Nevertheless, I have survived my retreat from books and the horrors of confronting my inner self.
¤ ¤ ¤
The “summer” that initiated during the latter part of April officially ends today as I return to a less-relaxed schedule. I’m afraid I cannot boast of praiseworthy accomplishments within that short period, but there are several things from those pages in life that I’d like to underline and keep here for bethinking in the course of time:
1. Luke Haydn Go Ong came into this world on May 6. His birth was the most awaited event of the year! Born to my “adopted” brother and sister, Lester and Haidee, Luke is the fruit of waiting patiently in the Lord. He is a blessing to all of us and I know I will love this little tyke as if he were my own son.
2. A few weeks after Luke’s birth, Lester’s dad passed away after three years of withstanding cancer. The greatest comfort is that he was able to return to God and prepare for the inevitable during the last days of his life.
Playing music for him the last time we were in Manila is still fresh in my mind, because I remember being so happy and moved after seeing him genuinely smile to the music despite his pain. Not through monumental performances, but through the ministering to the old, the sick, or the needy do I feel most that my music is being used for God’s glory. The memory is a reminder that I should not turn a deaf ear to opportunities when I can share music, because these circumstances do not repeat themselves.
3. Without being aware of my sensitive state, a friend came along for a visit last Sunday just as I was lamenting the extensive distance between me and my closest friends. Bings, my personal psychologist/coffee mate/sister/friend, is one of the very few people with whom I can share sensible and godly conversations. She left for Dumaguete already and will be leaving the Philippines soon, but the time we spent talking over espresso was refreshing to the soul and will be treasured for years to come. (Insert sentimental music here. Hihi)
4. I convinced my mom to take up reading again since we, her kids, are wholly at fault for keeping her for nearly three decades from doing this former love of hers. I have prepared a reading list for her, and oh, is she having a grand season!
5. Summertime is when the house comes alive with guests and summer students. I will miss this particular summer’s air since the activities here at home brought an atmosphere that reminded me of the house-turned-school that Aunt March bequeathed Jo. Ours is shabbier, but the kids do not leave here without learning anything pianowise, violinwise, guitarwise, artwise, bookwise, photographywise, or even Biblewise. I can’t help asking one thing though… Professor Bhaer, where are you? =P
Haha, alright, I just wanted to end on a brighter note. Surely there have been more fruitful and magnanimous summers, but this one made me grow somehow, and for me that’s enough.
Yes, I finally gave FB a try, but I have liquidated my account after several short cyberweeks. I thought I could dodge this entry and go on with my FaceBookless life, but people keep on asking why I closed this particular “book”.
Before anything else, I would like to make it clear that I do not think FaceBook is inferior in terms of features, nor do I think that I am better than everyone else in there because I have the guts to leave and they do not, nor am I trying to cajole Multiply in rewarding me with a premium account for loyalty (haha). It is not like that.
I who have constantly flirted with the prospect of deleting all social networking accounts (but keep Friendster because of the blog and treasure my little territory at Multiply because of the new family I have discovered there), simply find Facebook useless.
During my first week on FaceBook, I was greeted with a predominant stream of quizzes! It honestly gave me the impression that FB was all about quizzes – and yet it is, for most people. It was only when friends began coaching me in the ways of the cyberworld that I was reminded of being able to upload photos and share links as well. “Oh, right!” I replied. But oh, I won’t be a hypocrite. I indulged in them quizzes, too! Within two weeks, I was told that I am a philosopher, have flawless grammar, an I.Q. of 130, am an unconventional bride, am Kierkegaard, am Starbucks’ Green Tea Latte who “does not look yummy at first but is actually sweet when given a try”, am a passionate kiss if I were a type of kiss (but I did not publish this result publicly *laughs*), and that my taste in music also says that I am philosophical and intellectual to the point of being cerebral, etcetera, etcetera… Given such results, who would not love FaceBook?! Well, after a short while, I could not. Hence the status message stating that after all, we do not need quizzes to deceive us into believing such foolishness.
Then I remembered this, “The latter rain weatherbound my already limited outdoor activities, which in turn left me spare time for answering those silly personality quizzes on the internet. One amusing thing about these self-imposed interrogations is the certainty that no matter who you are, dumb or dumber, smart or smarter, they always come up with flattering facts about yourself. Kinda like the courteous acquaintance one foolish person is prone to call a bestfriend because he only says the good about you, and you go on craving to believe that you are that man’s reflection. Naturally, those who dare to tell you the ugly truths about yourself become the enemy, and naturally, there is no such internet quiz that exists.”
If not for some friends who tried to convince me about FB being the best thing that ever happened to social networking, and if not for the sake of being un-ignoramus on something that everyone already knew about, I would not have signed up. As expected, my interest in FaceBook dwindled especially when it ate up part of my reading time, when people who could not and would not dare hug or poke me in person began hugging and poking me, when I saw that they relied on computer-generated messages to figure out what “God” wanted to tell them, when people who knew my heart to nauseating degrees only got 20% on the “How Well Do You Know Meewa” quiz, and when I realized that I was only wasting precious time in there.
Compared to Multiply and Friendster, it is definitely easier to keep in touch through FaceBook, but if these people who are not already connected to your other cyberhomes really want to keep in touch, wouldn’t they bother making a little extra effort? I mean, no one is exactly asking everyone to send a handwritten letter via snail mail. How difficult is it to send an e-mail?
I only speak for myself when I say, “FaceBook is useless.” So there you have it.
I still envy my friends who have liberated themselves from all forms of social networking. They still retain that certain mystery in them that makes them way “cooler” than anyone technologically au courant.
.
I close this entry with videos to entertain you. =P
With all our differences, this is one sure thing that we have in common – adoring this song, and since I was never able to give my dear cousin Mae a proper birthday gift last May 6, I hope this will suffice no matter how late.
I found the piece late last night so do not mind the mistakes. I’m practically sight-reading, but it could not wait. It cannot wait. Mae knows why. =)
I’ve heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don’t know if I believe that’s true
But I know I’m who I am today
Because I knew you:
Like a comet pulled from orbit
As it passes a sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder
Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better?
But because I knew you
I have been changed for good…
…the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless… But then at a certain moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to grasp the phrase or harmony – he did not know which – that had just been played and that had opened and expanded his soul, as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating one’s nostrils… An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant, is, so to speak, sine materia. Doubtless the notes which we hear at such moments tend, according to their pitch and volume, to spread out before our eyes over surfaces of varying dimensions, to trace arabesques, to give us the sensation of breadth or tenuity, stability or caprice. But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the succeeding or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. And this impression would continue to envelop in its liquidity, its ceaseless overlapping, the motifs which from time to time emerge, barely discernible, to plunge again and disappear and drown, recognised only by the particular kind of pleasure which they instil, impossible to describe, to recollect, to name, ineffable – did not our memory, like a labourer who toils at the laying down of firm foundations beneath the tumult of waves, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and to contrast them with those that follow… He could picture to himself its extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value; he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design, architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled. This time he had distinguished quite clearly a phrase which emerged for a few moments above the waves of sound. It had at once suggested to him a world of inexpressible delights, of whose existence, before hearing it, he had never dreamed, into which he felt that nothing else could initiate him; and he had been filled with love for it, as with a new and strange desire…
Each paragraph, each sentence, each word, blurred everything around me – even the manumission of raindrops from their harbouring gigantic greys – they even blurred time. The words were exceptionally lavish that I could not distinguish whether my senses were heightened or anesthetized.