Living in the UK for so long, and in a rural English village for the past five years, has caused me to forget about a lot of the food I grew up with, because it's so uncommon.

Whenever I visit the US, I try to go to an (East) Asian supermarket just so I can have a happy trip down memory lane, and also get some tasty food to eat. The closest one to my parents' house is Vietnamese.


Me with a guava-flavoured soda.

Guava is such a common flavour in Hawai'i, as are the fruits themselves. I guess they don't export well from the tropics. Whenever I have it, I'm reminded of how much I miss it. I used to eat them fresh every day from the tree in our garden.

( More food )

This is a scanned photo of my mom and dad with their arms around one another at Waimea Canyon in Kauai, Hawai'i. I love this photo partly because they both look happy, and partly because this is how they always appear in my mind. I know they have white hair and stooped shoulders now, but my brain fails to see that unless they're right in front of me, which doesn't happen very often since they live so far away.

This is a scanned snapshot of me, aged about one, in my grandmother’s arms. We are at Kalalau Lookout in the Na Pali Coast State Park on Kauai in Hawai’i. When I was very small, my parents had a condo on Kauai and we went there for our holidays (from Honolulu). It was wonderful. I have vivid memories of the hike down the cliffs to the fine white sand of the deserted beach below the condo, and of playing for hours in the crystal clear water. My parents always found this surprising as I was, at the time they sold it, only about four years old.

Above, my (only white) cousin, aka Big Keiki, aged about five, spoon-feeds me, aged a few months, in the weird black leather and metal contraption that functioned as my high chair. The chair looks as though it were designed for more sinister or deviant purposes. It was the 70's in Hawai'i, so who knows. Anyway, I like how his mouth is wide open and mine is not.

I grew up in Honolulu. I was one of the youngest of a large group of cousins, most of whom are male and Filipino, apart from my mom’s sister’s son, who is white. We spent a lot of time together since we all lived pretty close, and my Filipino grandfather (and, until three days before I was born, grandmother) owned a large house that always seemed to have at least two or three aunties and hence vast quantities of delicious food in it (chicken malunggai! pancit! lumpia! suman!) .

I haven’t seen these cousins very frequently since we all became adults. Two of them were in the military for many years. They came to visit us in Monterey on our recent trip to the USA. So before I share the photos from the meals we ate together (because of course there was food, lots of food), here are the photos my parents brought of us as children. Most of these were taken at Waimea Falls on the north shore of Oahu.


I’m on the left. The two cousins in the middle came to Monterey over Labour Day weekend. On the far right, holding the camera to his eyes, is the cousin I shall refer to as Big Keiki, because Little Keiki is named after him. Please note matching bowl cuts. Niiice.

( +5 )

My mom brought this book for me on her recent visit. It's just a little spiral-bound thing - "Souvenir Edition: Filipino 75th Anniversary Commemoration", compiled and edited by the Filipino Women's League.

I have a new project: Attempt to make every recipe in it by the end of a year's time. Here is the Table of Contents:

( Table of Contents )

Now, making a lot of these is going to be a logistical challenge, given the ingredients required. Especially the one that requires fresh tropical flowers. I may have to come up with some manner of substitute. I have plenty of nasturtiums in the garden. :P

But by far my favourite in terms of the advance planning that's going to be necessary is "Lechon de Leche", which is a contender the most delicious food in the world unless you're vegetarian or vegan, in which case I apologise for the amount of salivating over meaty meatness that I'm doing as I type, and you may possibly want to skip the contents under the cut below.

Here is the first sentence of the recipe, which serves 75 people. Ask your butcher to dress a suckling pig, 25-50 lbs.( It just gets better after that. )

Who wants to come over and help eat roast pig, then, eh?

As promised, I present a selection of the colour photos of infant me that my parents brought with them at Christmas.

Me & my pixie-ish mum.


( ++++++ )

The End.