Makes you wonder what kind of bowl it’ll be served in. Taken in a housewares store in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Three of my friends are getting married this year. I guess this means I have to watch out for a fourth wedding!

Could it be true? Has Archie finally decided to take the plunge and propose to one of comics’ favorite girls? It sure looks that way! Earlier this year readers got a chance to relive “Freshman Year” with the famous teens of Riverdale High. Now make way for this special story that takes a look at Archie and his friends after they graduate college! What careers will they seek? Will the friends stay in Riverdale or disperse? What would lead Archie to have marriage on his mind? And who would he choose Veronica or Betty? How will Betty react? How will Veronica react? Can Archie shake off his klutzy past and hold down a steady job… for more than a month? One thing is certain: this will be the biggest Archie Comics story ever! 

Who’s your pick? I’m going with Veronica, because everyone seems to like Betty more, and I like rooting for the underdog. Hehe.

More details here and here.

So, they apparently sell frosting, icing and ganache in TUBS at Costco (a warehouse-type store in the US). They’re unrefrigerated, by the way. What sort of things are in it to keep it edible? This brings out the haughty baker in me! I’m sorry, but I will make my own frosting myself, thank you! Real sugar, real butter, real milk! Hmph!

…to bring you the world’s funniest mom.

J: So, what did you do today?

Mama: Your brother took me to a movie! It was nice.

J: Really? Which one?

Mama: Dungeons and Dragons.

J: Oh, so you saw it at home? Like on the sci-fi channel?

Mama: No, in the theater. Tom Hanks has a weird hairdo in it.

J: Tom Hanks? Did you mean Angels & Demons?

Mama: Oh! (Guffaws.) Hahahahahahaha. Yes. They sound alike, don’t they?

J: Uhm, mother, NO.

LOL. I love my mom.

Shown below from R to L: The Girl With A Curl before her curls took over her head, The World’s Funniest Mother and The Brother Who Took Her To “Dungeons & Dragons!”

Isn’t this Mother’s Day spread just scrumptious? Before you think I did all of this, let me just say right now that I was nowhere in the kitchen when this magical culinary chaos happened. This is all my friend Simeen’s doing. And why am I blogging about it? Because I’m so proud of her!

See, when people saw the food she’d bring to work for lunch, they’d ask, “Did you make that?” And she would say dramatically, “Phst, please people, NO. I’m not J.!” But then, last week, she mentioned she was in placed in charge of Mother’s Day activities for her family. And instead of making reservations…she made dinner! And lovingly so!

The feast you see above included a colorful Cajun Corn Salad, a tangy-savory Salad Olivier (her mom’s awesome recipe), juicy steaks cooked with salt, pepper and garlic and comforting, home-y pasta. That is a Herculean effort, even for me. I heard she started cooking the night before. Proud as she was, she made sure to take pictures to show me. (Don’t you just love the one of her nephew with his face in a cupcake? And those smiles from her beautiful family?)

She said she thought about me the whole time she was cooking. Hearing that made me want to do cartwheels (except I can’t, so I just squealed and hugged her instead.) I just never thought that my own cooking could encourage other people to try it themselves. I don’t consider myself the best cook in the world—that distinction is reserved for my Grandma. I used to think instead of being the best, I was just the bravest cook. But after this weekend, I’m passing the wooden spoon on to Simeen. Her bravery now inspires me.

Despite the recent scarcity of posts on this blog, I’ve actually done a whole lot of cooking. Ask the right person, and you’ll confirm the crazy pace at which I’ve stewed, sautéed, casseroled, gratin-ed, mashed, souped, fried, baked, sugared, simmered and sauced my way through breakfast, lunch and dinner these past few weeks. And it’s something I don’t mind at all, of course. Cooking, as far-fetched as this may seem, gives me time to pause. In the kitchen, under a cloud of flour or behind the steady hiss of pots and pans, I have a chance to breathe. That’s why, no matter how tired or busy I am, I will always try to cook. Even if it means just scrambling an egg, I remain faithful to cooking as much as I can because of the fulfillment it gives. (A perfectly scrambled, fluffy egg the cheery color of sunshine is a beautiful thing!)

This past weekend, though, I found myself with a different kind of culinary faithfulness: I was in a Jewish kitchen, helping to make kosher Passover desserts. Now, that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!

I can’t tell you much about the intricacies of keeping kosher for Passover. I was baptized Protestant and schooled Catholic, and though the exposure to two religions primed me for learning about a third one, I didn’t think I could wrap my curly brain around what the holiday meant, how it started and the symbols and rituals associated with it.

So, I asked the one question that made sense to me: What can be cooked? And the answer was: anything without wheat and leavening. In my effort to understand this, because I’ve never baked with anything else but flour in all its wheat-y glory, I found out about the culinary possibilities of matzos (a cracker-like flatbread), matzo meal (matzos ground into powder), potato starch (a substitute for white flour) and kosher chocolate chips!

Putting theory into practice, I was tasked to help make the Carmel Chocolate Matzo Crunch.

It involved lining a cookie sheet with matzos…

…cooking brown sugar and butter into toffee on the stove…

…pouring the sweet mixture and spreading it over the matzos (note to self: Do not use a cheap rubber spatula while doing this. No matter how much you convince it not to, the spatula WILL melt!)…

…baking the layered treat in the oven until the toffee bubbled…

…sprinkling the top with chocolate chips while hot…

…and spreading the chocolate over the whole thing in fun swirls once it melted.

The result was this divine toffeecrunchychocolatey dream that was broken into pieces once cool. I couldn’t eat just one. It was so good that it was ironically sinful.

With a plate full of toffee, fudge-iced brownies made with potato starch, macaroons and fruit, I remembered my own sweet memories of food eaten during Holy Week back home in the Philippines. My friend Ross had a Ilokana grandmother named Lola (Grandma) Rose who would make binanlay, which were rice cakes cooked in banana leaves and topped with thick panucha (a brown sugar syrup that tasted much like the one that topped the matzos) and latik (fried coconut milk bits). Getting those sticky things out of the steamed leaves was tricky and took forever (you had to peel the leaves away almost fiber by fiber!), which I always thought was so apt for all the suffering one’s supposed to do during Lent—you had to go through so much to get to the divine sweet stuff!

So now, I can say I’ve kind of cooked kosher. I never thought that I would in my life in the kitchen. But the fact that I can now write about it makes me appreciate the way food brings people together, and how despite all our religious differences, we all believe…in toffee.

Thank you to Jason for being especially helpful and patient with all my questions, and for thinking I’m only a little bit strange for wanting to snap pictures during the entire thing. Congratulations again on your new sweet little bundle of joy. Mazel tov!

Watch this space tomorrow for some exciting news.

See you in 24 hours!

Stay curly in the meantime.

We decided to give Häagen-Dazs FIVE ice cream line a shot this weekend. The new series of seven flavors (mint, ginger, coffee, vanilla bean, brown sugar, passion fruit and milk chocolate) is described as a return to old-fashioned ice cream basics because it’s made with only five ingredients: sugar, milk, cream, eggs and whichever flavor a specific variant is. It’s a purist’s dream.

I fell in love with the brown sugar version because it tastes just like frozen leche flan. That comforting flavor of brown sugar reminds me of the syrup that bathes one of my favorite childhood desserts. And the vanilla bean version was nothing to sneeze at either: The flavors were pure, whole and clean.

Häagen-Dazs says this of the newest addition to their family of frozen treats:

All-natural ice cream crafted with only five ingredients for incredibly pure, balanced flavor… and surprisingly less fat!

There was something utterly yummy about knowing that a spoonful of the FIVE was nothing but unadulterated ice cream bliss. Even my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor (and even the ones similar to those in the FIVE line like vanilla bean) has stuff called Guar Gum and Carageenan in it. The fact that those sound like characters from Star Wars rather than things I should be ingesting is a tad bit scary.

I was all set to declare undying love for the new Häagen-Dazs line. I wanted to hunt down all the flavors, even if it meant going to every grocery store in the city. Gimme ginger! Make room for mint! Whoa, passionfruit!

But then.

After perusing the Häagen-Dazs website I discovered something. Comparing labels and nutritional info for the FIVE variants and the original Häagen-Dazs flavors, I found out that for at least two of the flavors, it wasn’t ALL that different in terms of ingredients.

Original Coffee

Five Coffee

Original Chocolate

Five Chocolate

What gives? An evil marketing plot? Granted, there IS a difference in the fat content of each, but their claim of the FIVE line being new isn’t entirely truthful! Hmmmm.

Oh well. I’m now undecided about declaring undying love for FIVE. While I ruminate on these facts and try to come to a conclusion I can live with, let me take a scoop (or two) of the brown sugar FIVE ice cream, set it on top of a warm brownie, surround it with warm mango cubes cooked in syrup jubilee-style, and dig into it like it was going out of style. Yum! (Hee.)

I sort of had this good day with my craft corner—I had gotten all the stuff on it just SO which, really, is a rare occurrence for a crafter. It’s usually controlled chaos, with pieces of fabric in unidentifiable piles, balls of yarn afoot rolling this way and that and spools of thread threatening mutiny. So on that one day when I had time to tidy up and finally set up a corkboard as I’d been planning for months, I had to step back to admire my handiwork and take some snapshots.

I wish I had this massive corkboard for ideas and inspiration, one that would read like a story (or several novellas!) of all the crafty things that I knock around in my head. It would have souvenirs and sketches, swatches and samples, artwork and fashion torn out of magazines. But looking at my humble little corkboard now, I think I rather love it, just the way it is.

You’ll spy my Star Wars Convention pass (if you snicker, I swear I’ll use the Force to smite you!), artwork from the awesome Daniel Lim (who makes those ethereal Fawn Fruits illustrations), a logo from a fashion project, a recent sketch of a wool felt purse with silhouette cutouts and leather handles that I’m dreaming to make and Gillian Murphy of ABT in all her balletic grace. There are also hangtags from my favorite purses (George Gina & Lucy / Hayden-Harnett), a cheery new dress design from Marni, Keira Knightley in green plaid, and a pretend-shaman drawing for protection against things that go bump in the night from my brother. (I’m a total coward and get spooked by the littlest things, so he drew me a sort of anting-anting that’s supposed to guard me from ghosts and ghouls. And because I’m gullible, I believe him and have kept the thing for ages. Haha!) There are other bits and bobs, too: a princess place card, a Chinese ox carving for good luck from my friend Jen, my Instructables.com sticker for winning with the Vampie, an Etsy button, lovely notes and a dragonfly pushpin here and there.

My odd one-eyed pal to the right of the corkboard was designed by Creature Cobbler E. I hope to turn One-Eye into a felt monster someday. I’ll post pics as soon as I make it/him.

And to the right of my trusty Singer are some of my favorite craft mags: back issues of the now out-of-print Blueprint magazines, some Japanese ones called Cotton & Paint that I scored on eBay, an edition of Vogue Japan, FRUITS, Craft, a Martha Stewart, a Donna Hay and a dog-eared, particularly inspiring issue of US Vogue.

What’s YOUR crafty corner like, and what stories does your corkboard tell?

With how well my brother (and fellow curly head), W., paints and how close we are, you’d think we’d be cut from the same cloth and I’d be good with a paintbrush on canvas, just like him. Well, I’m not. At all!

First case in point: the painting at the beginning of this post. I call this man Mr. Pibbs. That’s really not his name, but he looks like a Mr. Pibbs, don’t you think? Compare Mr. Pibbs to…my painting of a monkey.

What you see above is an extrapolation from one of my finest art pieces, the full glory of which you see below.

I’d asked W., as I have ever since we were kids, if I could play with his paints, and to challenge me to draw something. He asked me to paint a monkey, and I, well, tried. Haha.

Next exhibit up for consideration: Val. That, again, is not his name, but I like giving random names to W.’s portrait projects. Please consider Val…

…right alongside my attempt…at an elephant.

But you know, crafting comes in many forms. I’m unabashedly proud of the fact that W. paints light years better than I do. I quite welcome the fact that he’s so much better at it than I am! I’ll stick to frosting on a cupcake, or stitches on fabric!

I plan to post more of W.’s work as he churns them out. They continue to inspire me to work on my own brand of crafting. I hope they inspire you, too. My brother is proof that if you choose a craft that you truly love, it will love you back.