bambina writes

This Spontaneous Life

Sometimes the best things are the least planned.  Like doing cartwheels in the park or someone telling you out of the blue that you've got gorgeous legs.  Or an impromptu lunch in the middle of the week.

Yesterday afternoon, we were mulling over where to go for lunch today.  We ticked off the usual suspects, pasta here, sushi there, steak and salad over there.  Then we hemmed and hawed about traffic, school pick-ups, poor service, the frightening lunchtime crowd of surgically preserved women.  So I said I'd make lunch. 

When the weather is warm and sunny, I like to serve light, Asian-inspired food.  Easy to cook, but rather a pain to prepare.  So I decided on the menu early this morning, and after dropping my kids off at school, did the food shopping.  At 1 pm, my guests arrived, and at 1:30 we sat down with a chilled bottle of Lambrusco and enjoyed Fresh Vietnamese Spring Rolls, Kingklip with Ginger and Lemongrass Cream Sauce, with Tenderstem Broccoli and Minced Chinese Mushrooms on the side.  For dessert, I served Mango Jubilee.

A meal can be as elaborate as you want it to be, but the ingredients for a lovely, spur-of-the-moment lunch remain simple: good food, great company, flowing conversation and a wine that gives you a slight buzz.

By popular demand, here's the recipe for the Vietnamese Spring Rolls and Mango Jubilee.  I'm notorious about not being too precise about measuring ingredients when I cook, but I always make sure to use the freshest ingredients.

FRESH VIETNAMESE SPRING ROLLS

12 sheets Banh Trang (rice paper rounds)
Chinese black mushrooms, soaked in boiling water for 30 mins
Bean thread noodles, soaked in boiling water for 5 mins
asparagus spears, blanched and sliced thinly
carrot sticks, sliced thinly
cucumber sticks, sliced thinly with seeds scooped out
chives
bamboo shoots, sliced thinly
crushed roasted peanuts
fresh mint leaves, torn

Drain the mushrooms, separate caps from stems and chop caps into small pieces.  Drain the noodles and cut into smaller bunches.

Have a deep round plate ready.  Pour some water into it and place one rice sheet in to soften.  Lift the sheet out, and place on a flat dish or board.  In the center of the sheet, place a mound of noodles, followed by the mushrooms, asparagus, carrots, cucumber, bamboo shoots, peanuts.  Top with chives and mint leaves.  Fold one end of the sheet over the filling and roll once, then fold the sides towards the center and roll again to seal.

Repeat the procedure with each fresh sheet.

Serve the rolls with ketjap manis and a spicy dipping sauce made of
1/4 c  fish sauce
1/4 c  lime juice
1 tbsp rice vinegar
1 tbsp sugar
2 cloves garlic, crushed
red and green Thai chillies, chopped and de-seeded

MANGO JUBILEE

mango pulp, skinned and diced
sugar
butter
brandy
vanilla ice cream

Melt some butter in a pan, add sugar and stir until the sugar dissolves and mixture thickens and bubbles.  Add mangoes and cook until warmed and coated with the liquid.  Add some brandy and flambe, if desired.   Pour over a scoop of vanilla ice cream and serve.

I think Philippine mangoes are the best in the world, with just the right balance of tart and sweet, fleshy and juicy.  Today I had to make do with South African mangoes, to my mind - and I'm sure many will agree with me - far too fibrous and inferior to our own.   Still, it was a lovely ending to a spontaneous whim that became a divine summer lunch.

Eat Pray Felipe

"Omigod, he could be your Felipe!"

The fact that I've been hearing this from friends lately isn't as much a reflection of the state of my personal life as it is proof of the enduring universal resonance of Eat Pray Love.

Not too long ago we were the Sex and the City generation.  We defined ourselves as Carries, Samanthas, Charlottes or Mirandas.  If you were Carrie and someone asked you who was your Big, you knew exactly what that meant.

Today we've become the Eat Pray Love generation of thirty- to fortysomethings, all captivated with Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir of her year in Italy, India and Indonesia as a woman searching for everything.  Which really means searching for that elusive combination of earthiness and spirituality that will keep our lives in balance.

And when your girlfriends ask you:

Is he your Felipe?

You know exactly what they mean.

My friend Amanda had been telling me to read the book for months, and when it finally arrived in Hijack City in the middle of last year, I snapped up a copy.  I stayed up all night and even read by candlelight because there was a power cut, to finish it.  The next day I hyped the book to every woman I knew, from my yoga instructor to my therapist, and ended up giving my copy away to a friend.  It wasn't that the book was all that well-written, but it was heartfelt, humble and candid, the way the author was unafraid to bare her despair, share her hope and laugh at her own silliness. 

There were a few questions that nagged at me after I'd put the book down.  Why her marriage really ended (and Jezebel agrees), for one.  The other thing that creeped me out was that she admitted getting off on Bill Clinton from time to time.  I mean, hello?

"You're so Eat Pray Love!"

The thing is, finding my own Felipe was the last thing that came to my mind upon reading Eat Pray Love.  My own version anyway would have been pitched as Eat Pray Love meets Betty Mahmoudy, as in Eat Pray and Get Us Out of Here!  Seriously, what stuck in my head was that my own personal convictions were echoed by Elizabeth Gilbert's experience:  that no matter what happens, all will be fine, we are blessed and we are loved.  I swear.

"So is he your Felipe?"

Who?

I Got a New Drug

Ok, Latino hour is over.  What was I thinking?  There's only so much Santana one can take.  As for Gloria Estefan, I switched to Abriendo Puertas for a couple of days before deciding I'd had enough.  I did find a fantastic music clip of her and Marc Anthony singing Mi Tierra.  For once he didn't look like the night stalker.  I could sort of understand why Jennifer Lopez chose him to have babies with, if those were the moves he used.

Anyway, I'm so into Adele right now, whom I discovered through Perez Hilton, when she did a cover of a Strokes song.  One link led to another and on her myspace site, I found this amazing song, Chasing Pavements.

It's like a drug.  I LOVE this song.  The video is a bit morbid yet fanciful, kind of Magritte meets Guy Bourdin meets American Beauty.  But the song is mesmerizing, even haunting.  And her voice!  The pathos, the longing, the soulful wryness...  I'm sure this song is on its way to becoming a gay anthem, but it totally appeals to the drama queen in me!

 

Being Bi

A friend of mine once said that mixed breed children are the harbingers of world peace, or something like that. Especially children like ours, who are not merely bi-racial but multi-racial, really a little bit of this and a little bit of that. To them, being mixed isn't anything exotic; it's completely normal. They carry two, three passports, feel at home in different countries without necessarily pledging allegiance to any one flag. Heritage Day always presents a multiple choice option at school: Should I talk about being Filipino today, or Spanish or British or Greek or a toenail German and Scottish?

So while my children are rather blasé about the multi-racial parts that make them whole, the novelist Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist - to my mind it could have been titled I'm Not There - as well as the more recent My Revolutions, says in an interview with Nerve, that people are still grappling with the implications of bi-racialism, even if there's a certain trendiness to being bi-racial these days in certain quarters:

People are authenticity freaks, and if you're mixed you're not 100% anything. And I agree with you, there's been a real shift where people now celebrate the mixed-upness — everyone's a different color and holding hands and everyone's sort of funky and cool and you'd like to sleep with them. That's very prominent in a certain urban metropolitan mindset, but if you go out of the cities there's a lot of fear and resentment toward this mixed-up globalized thing. People are nostalgic for a time that may not have actually existed, when a community was fixed and stable and everyone came from the same place.

But the real reason for people's discomfort doesn't stem so much from wondering whether Tiger Woods, for instance, considers himself more Thai or African-American, or whether Halle Berry considers herself more white or black. According to Kunzru, himself born of a white mother and an Indian father, it's a bit more prurient than that: it's the notion that interracial copulation once took place, and the bi-racial child is the curious fruit of those mixed loins.

And that's what it really comes down to. If someone sees a mixed race person, in their mind is: who had sex to make you? When people ask me, where are you from? They don't care where I grew up. What they really want to know is, cards on the table, what combination of fucking produced someone who looks like you?

It's all about sex at the end of the day.

Forget world peace. My kids are in for years of therapy.

Tribute

This is one of the nicest tributes to Heath Ledger that I've come across, from Slate:

I'm Not There, the 2006 addiction drama Candy, and the tantalizingly creepy trailer for this summer's The Dark Knight all suggest that Ledger was learning to choose roles that took advantage of that peculiar quality he had of seeming at once larger than life and inwardly focused. In the years to come, I'm sure there'll be movies that make audiences think, damn, Heath Ledger could have nailed that role. So I won't opine on how sad it is that a gifted young man, someone's father and someone's son, lost his life at the threshold of a great career. I'll just say that the movies themselves will miss Heath Ledger.

I'm sure there's going to be a run on Brokeback Mountain this weekend at the video rental store. I think I'll try for 10 Things I Hate About You or A Knight's Tale.

Ciao, Valentino

Another goodbye, but this time a less lugubrious one.

After 45 years in fashion, Valentino took his final bow at his swan song couture show in Paris yesterday.

According to WWD,

Valentino said goodbye to fashion with relative discretion at a stellar show at the Musée Rodin. "We are very serene, very happy," he had said on Monday. And, indeed, when he took that last walk down the runway after a 45-year run at fashion's highest reaches, he maintained his composure as his audience jumped to its collective feet in wild appreciation.

He did elegant, he did glamorous, he did romantic, he did chic. And he ended with sublime, sending a parade of models swathed in identical silk column dresses, all in his signature red.

Talk about going out in a blaze of glory!

When I worked as fashion editor at a now-defunct Hong Kong glossy, I attended the Paris fashion shows for a couple of seasons, wide-eyed, bewildered, but enthralled and completely unmindful of being ushered into the 10th row or so with the rest of the Asian fashion press, way behind the US and European editors and a row or two behind the Japanese, but ahead of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis. I wasn't just a small fish in a vast ocean, I was a sardine thrilled to be tightly packed into a glittering tin. To my regret, I never attended a Valentino show. I believe in those days he was still showing couture in Rome, and prêt-a-porter in Milan.

Already then, in 1990, Valentino was a legend in fashion, and was celebrating 30 years in the industry. The Valentino press office had sent me a book, Valentino: Thirty Years of Magic, commemorating the event.

The Gerry Dryansky quote at the frontispiece of the book sums up the magic of Valentino beautifully:

"And a work of beauty stands firm as a work of beauty, no matter which way the wind is blowing."

As gorgeous as Valentino's clothes are, they always struck me as being for grown-ups, the sort I'd wear when I was more adult, more established, more tai-tai. My mother wore a navy and cream linen Valentino suit to my brother's wedding in 1986 - and she was 45 then, an age I'm fast approaching. Yet somehow, even after two children and a pretty awesome, multifaceted career, I feel I still don't merit a Valentino suit. The Chanel suits are a different story; I had to be dressed in them when I worked there eight years ago.

But I have to admit, I do feel grown-up enough to slink into a room wearing nothing but a silky red Valentino gown...

(Photo lifted from Jezebel)

Full House

The whole Britney saga is so nauseatingly inane, boring and white trash to the core that when I see anything about her on Perez Hilton or wherever, I don't even bother to give the news item a cursory glance. But this, from Moorish Girl, the blog of Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami, made me laugh:

I heard that Britney Spears wants to convert to Islam. There comes a point in every lunatic celebrity's career when this happens (See: Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, etc.) And all I can say is: Our nut house is full, Britney. Please take up another religion, we have enough crazies of our own.

Yup, there ain't no room at this inn!

PS I'm still mourning Heath Ledger. So sad. Clearly NOT one of the crazies.

River Heath

Another brilliant but troubled actor dead, at 28.

The last movie I saw Heath Ledger in was Candy, with Abby Cornish. He gave a harrowing performance as a heroin addict consumed by love for his equally addicted wife, yet utterly ensnared and ultimately destroyed by heroin.

Turns out the actor was battling demons just as dark and persistent in his own life. Kind of like River Phoenix. Poor Heath.

Why is it that the intensely talented meet such tragic ends while the intensely stupid lead the paparazzi on a joy ride every night through the streets of LA?

In an interview with the New York Times last November, he said:

“People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. That’s fine. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.”

Somehow prescient and somehow apt. Now of course those stories will remain untold, and that one flat note, elegiac.

(Photo still from the movie Candy)

Missed Call

Seal sang about dreaming in metaphors, and Heidi Klum is not only living the metaphor but clearly enjoying the package.

So speaking of a life lived metaphorically, the metaphor for my life this week is a missed call.

Aaaaarrrrrgggggghhhhh!

Why here, why now and how could I have missed it?

After mentally torturing myself for hours, I remembered my own adage, that over-analysis is over-rated and figured, hey, it's the caller's loss, missing me, not mine! I'm not a Leo for nothing!

Yet, as much as I treasure my solitude, there are just some nights when I wish I had a man's arms (or his whole body) wrapped around me. Those are what I call my Edna St Vincent Millay nights, when I think:

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It may well be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.

(From Collected Poems by Edna St Vincent Millay)

As for the arms...
Exes need not apply.
Well, maybe one.
But not the one I was married to.

Damn the seduction of memory!

Trump Card

Because mine is a family that laughs through its tears and smiles away its fears, my daughters have figured out that my Baywatch moment is now the mother's ultimate trump card.

The whole you-know-I-carried-you-in-my-tummy-for-9-months simply pales beside the I-braved-the-scary-seas-just-to-save-you refrain. To be used judiciously, of course.

That’s for my older daughter.

For my younger one, it’s I-swam-back-and-stayed-alive-just-for-you.

Of course we concocted these in jest – we even have our own save-me-I’m-drowning-it’s-Supermom-to-the-rescue dance. Yet we knew there was an underlying, um, current of relief and reassurance.

As I’d said to friends in an Eat Pray Love moment, may we enter 2008 knowing that no matter what happens, all will be fine - we are blessed and we are loved.

And just to illustrate, look what my kids surprised me with today when they got back from school after spending the night with Dex - they traced "I ♥ U MOM" on the cake I'd made for dessert!

I used Claudia's foolproof and fantastic recipe. First time I'd used Lindt 85% dark chocolate instead of 70%, and I increased the quantity of sugar to make the chocolate less bitter. I used to make a similar flourless chocolate cake, but my recipe called for 8 eggs, then beating the egg yolks separately from the whites, then blending them all together with the melted butter and chocolate. Too much work, too many bowls. Claudia, as always, simplifies things to their essence: chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and a tablespoon of flour.

Yum! Thanks, C!