I've Been Busy Running

Sorry for the long silence! I've been running again and that has somehow taken away my interest in blogging :/  Anyhoo, I'm happy to report that I completed my first half marathon last Sunday, September 16, 2012, at the Unilabl Run United 3!!! :) The route was Bonifacio Global City to Mall of Asia. The official results are out and my time was 2 hours, 40 minutes and 51 seconds!!! :) Not bad for a first PR and considering the heavy rains and soaked clothes and shoes! I grabbed a random photo from pinoyfitness.com's Facebook page so you would have an idea of how wet the race was :) I really had a blast!!!

 

I've been checking the race calendars online and there are a few more half marathons lined up this year. Can't wait to sign up for some of them! :)

Gorgeous Storage Bins

My kids and I have been doing a lot of weekend baking recently. Though it has been really enjoyable, the least fun part of the baking process is having to scoop out flour and sugar from my tacky floral plastic jars which are kept hidden in the pantry. Though they're hermetically sealed with vacuum suction covers which is really important, the jars have smallish mouths which makes scooping an unpleasant and messy task. For quite some time now, I have been on the hunt for wide-mouthed bins which I can store and display baking ingredients in. I've been eyeing those vintage glass jars in Ina Garten's kitchen as seen in the right corner of the photo up top. So clean, classic and beautiful! Similar ones are being sold by Anchor Hocking at a good price. They're called Heritage Hill Jars:

2-gallon Heritage Hill jar costs US$21.92 on Amazon.

I found a couple of these at Rustan's Makati but they were way too big at two gallons and the glass lids did not have rubber seals so they were not a practical choice. If I remember right, they cost Php900+ apiece which is close to the Amazon price. I have thus switched my preference to Anchor Hocking's Montana Jars. Granted, they don't have the charming vintage look of the Heritage Hill Jars but at least the brushed steel lids have silicone seals:

US$14.27 on Amazon for a 1.5-gallon jar.

I'm not too keen on making an online purchase as the Montana Jars might break in transit. If any of my Philippine-based readers have seen this for sale in stores in Manila, do let me know!! :)  (Kahit sa probinsya pa, baka patulan ko!)

Since we're in the topic of storage bins, check out this beauty:

Those square thingies with handles are pourable storage bins for baking ingredients and those round ones are spice bottle lids! :) Adorable!  I want one!!! They look like these when pulled out (sorry for the distorted photo, which I'm unable to fix):

Here's a gorgeous one in red:

These are made in U.K. by Ella's Kitchen Company, Ltd. The price? A whopping 555 pounds (Php35,969.55 or US$856.53). GULP. Sige na nga, Montana Jars na lang!  :)

Happy weekend everybody!

South Beach Diet = No Blog Entries

Hellooooo? Anybody home??? :) Sorry for the loooong silence folks.

Summer was fun and busy, start of school was just plain busy! I have lots of posts in mind but I have not gotten around to writing them. Let me tell you one other reason why I've kept quiet. I've been on a South Beach Diet since March 2012 as I just got so fed up with the post-natal weight gain that I never lost. (Okay I'm flattering myself. My youngest child is four years old so my weight gain doesn't count as post-natal anymore, no?) Anyway, my ambitious plan was to get back to my wedding weight of 125 pounds by my 37th birthday in June. To do that, I had to lose 15 pounds total. I lost 8 pounds by my birthday and have lost 10 pounds to date. Five more stubborn pounds to go!!!

I am sharing all of this because I am quite happy with my diet progress and also to justify my blog silence. DIETING IS NO FUN and since I was deprived of carb-laden food, I lost all desire to blog. It makes sense because most of my blog entries are about food, the home and other happy things. Well, life is not happy without good food so no food = no blog entries. I'm now on Phase 2 of the diet, which I've fudged here and there, so my diet is not as bad anymore :) I also get to run again, which was impossible to do during carb-free Phase 1.

I am quite recharged and I may actually be able to eke out a post or two every week :) I'm keeping my fingers crossed!!!

P.S. If you are interested to know what I ate during Phase 1, leave a comment and I will dedicate a post on that :)

My Son's Birthday Party

My son turned four a few weekends back and we hosted an afternoon merienda for his neighborhood playmates and their parents. My son is into Avengers now but I couldn't find an Avengers birthday banner at the stores so we settled for Justice League :)

Daydreaming

I dream of owning a vacation home in the more quiet parts of Tagaytay with a huge kitchen that looks like this:

Baguio Memories

As promised, here are some of my old Baguio photos of summers past. The photo up top was taken in May 1977 at the family summer home in Philam Compound, Baguio City. I was two years old. We vacationed in that house almost every summer.

Summer's Here!

Boo! I'm still here, but still unable to post anything new :-( I have a lot of blog material in the back burner but hardly any time to do a decent post. Here's a sneak preview of what I intend to post next. It's a little tribute to Baguio, STILL the Philippines' summer capital as far as I'm concerned. There's a reason why I feel that way. We used to have a family summer home in Philam Baguio where we cooled off during the summers. That's a two-year old me in the photo, doing a mumu pose with ghostly white powder on my face and with a lovely vintage Baguio background. More sentimental rambling and photos in my next post folks :-)

Local Blackberries!!!

I stand corrected everyone! Blackberries do grow here in the Philippines after all. And I'm not talking about the colder parts either. The photo you see up top is a that of a blackberry bush in a friend's garden in sweltering Metro Manila! :-) Yup,  you better believe it.

Berry Love

At La Boqueria in Barcelona.

Berries don't grow well here in the tropics so they are a rare commodity. We do grow seasonal strawberries and tiny blueberries in the mountain regions, but we don't have local currants, raspberries, blackberries, cherries (are cherries berries??), etc. Imported ones are sold in upscale supermarkets but the retail prices are so exorbitant (e.g. cherries cost around Php1,000.00 a kilo or approximately US$23.00) that I usually walk away from the tempting but sparse displays. 

Farm to Table

Here's a quick post guys, before I bury myself in work again. I know I'm supposed to feature other stuff like my daughter's 7th birthday party and the pound cake that I baked with the kids, but that will require a lot of uploading so I will just file those topics away first.