New show on E News Channel-Asia!

July 3, 2014 by feyma

New show on E News Channel-Asia!

I was just surfing through our TV in search for a good show. I stopped on one channel; 608 on our sky box, It’s the E News Asia. On screen the teaser of their upcoming line-up for there month of June shows. I saw one of the famous families here in the Philippines. That Pinoy family will have a show on E News-Asia. That really surprised me that they’re going big in Asia. I just thought that there just big in the Philippines only. I guess I was wrong on that. LOL. Well, I think Filipinos will be proud of them being famous in Asia. The show called “It Takes Gutz To Be a Gutierrez“.

It Takes Gutz cast

It takes Gutz to be a Gutierrez geared up similar towards “Keeping Up with The Kardashians” in the USA. That show’s been going for its 9th season. My understanding from the one of the Gutierrez they will copy the Kardashians being family oriented people like they will be all together as family through ups and downs. But I don’t think the Gutierrez will copy the way the Kardashians dress up and behave in public like going to some events just wearing almost nothing. Few stars did that and they were criticized badly. I think Filipinos are still not so open yet to wearing almost nothing in public. Thank God for that. Luckily few girls on the Gutierrez clan compared to the Kardashian clan. I guess the viewers can compare the Asian reality TV family life to the West reality TV family life. It’s really similar because the matriarch woman, she’s a momager to her husband and her kids and other famous stars here in the Philippines.

One of the big thing that came out on the first pilot of the It Takes Gutz, one of the main guy there ( he’s a big actor here in the Philippines), he announced that he and his girlfriend already had a love child that they keep from the public for over a year. We’ll see what the people think of that, him being so famous with the girls, would they still follow him? Are they going to be criticized having a child out of wedlock? We’ll see in a few months I guess on that.

Honestly, it’s so common nowadays to have kids without marriage. Even the momager she wants that her son should just live-in together for awhile first with his girlfriend before getting married. I can see her points on that since it’s hard to get an annulment here in the Philippines. It took forever for her oldest daughter to get one from her Turkish husband. Geez, now you guys are confused who these people that I’m talking about. Ha ha ha… I do encouraged you to watch the show “IT TAKES GUTZ TO BE A GUTIERREZ” every Sunday 9:30 pm. I saw part of the first episode and it’s a bit slow, I think because it’s new to them. Give them time to adjust to having people follow them around. My daughter and nieces keeping up with that and they will just tell me what’s going on.

I hardly watch local TV shows, I’m not a soap opera fanatic. I just know that there’s new soap because I saw on my news feed o my FB wall. At first I don’t know what my friends were talking about until I asked my niece or my daughter. Ha ha ha. They know better than me. If it’s cooking shows or building shows I’m in for it. LOL. You know what I mean. I like the cooking show mostly in US (Top Chef) & Australia (My Kitchen Rules/MKR) when it comes to cooking competition. Any cooking shows that interest me , I’m going to watch it. Then I’m so into the new show from Australia “House Rules”. I also like decorations and renovation shows like “Treehouse Master”, “Flipping Out” and others.

Have fun watching your show. Cheers!

June 19, 2014 by feyma

My homemade “Pita Bread”!

I am writing about a simple recipe that I thought before was harder to make. I was wrong on that though.

Bob got a recipe and immediately me and Jean tackle it.

I try to buy a good active yeast and put the rest in a sealed container and store in the refrigerator, but I often find that the yeast here in the Philippines is already dead, or just not working very well.

We used to buy Pita Bread at our local SM Mall, but they have been “out of stock” for a long time, so Bob asked me to make some to satisfy his craving!

Pita bread can be eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Anyway here’s the recipe for the pita bread.

Pita Bread Recipe:

A few homemade Pita Breads

Ingredients:

1 cup water ( make it warm not boiling, on my water I just put in the microwave for 30-35 seconds)
2 teaspoon active dry yeast (hard to find good yeast in the Philippines that last longer in the fridge, so I put 3 teaspoon)
2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour ( the other 1/2 cup use it when kneading the flour)
1 – 2 teaspoons of salt
2 teaspoons olive oil

Procedure:

Put the 3 teaspoon yeast to a mixing bowl, put the warm water with the yeast. Let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes until you see the yeast dissolved. Add the flour, together with the salt and the olive oil. Mix it together until it formed into a dough.
Sprinkle the clean surface of your counter with the flour and put your dough. Knead the dough for about 5 minutes until the dough become smooth. While kneading you might have to add more flour for the dough not to stick with your hands and the counter.
Put some olive oil to the mixing bowl, the one you used to mix all the ingredients. Put the kneaded dough there, put some oil on top of the dough. Cover it with clean cloth or cling wrap. I used cling wrap. Let the dough rise until its almost doubled when you originally put in the bowl. Approximately an hour to 2 hours.
After the dough was rising, gently deflate the dough and divide the though into 8 equal parts. Put all the dough again on the floured surface.
Use a floured rolling pin, roll one of the pieces into a circle like 8 inches to 9 inches wide about almost quarter of inches in thickness. Keep turning and lifting dough as you roll the dough. Make sure the dough is not sticking on the counter. Sprinkle flour if its sticking.
When cooking the dough, I put like a tablespoon of oil in the skillet in medium heat. Lower the heat if necessary. When it’s hot, drop the rolled dough and turn the dough every 3 to 5 seconds. Keep doing it until the dough is done. Keep an eye it gets burn easy. Just eyeball the pita if its done cooking or to your liking.
Let it coll in a plate and cut it in half with scissors. Open the inside of the pita and you can put anything you like. For us we like to put salad inside or some meatballs or some ham.

Sandwich on Pita

***I just used a small amount from the dough, so I just got one or 2 like an almost the size of tennis ball and keep the rest in the fridge. If you don’t use all the dough, wrap the one that you are not using in a cling wrap and put it in an air tight container. Put it on the fridge until the next time you use it. Pita can be in the fridge for one week.***

Good luck everyone and have fun cooking!

June 12, 2014 by feyma

Putting a dog to sleep in the PI!

I’m writing today about some stuff that’s not really so common to be done here in the Philippines. One of them is putting your pets (any pet) to sleep. Well a few weeks ago we had our dog put sleep. She’s been with us for over 9 years. It was a difficult decision for all of us in the family, but at the end we had to do it so Fluffy would not suffer more and much longer. Not one of the kids wants to take her there. We definitely shed tears for her. We gathered our kids and nieces and have their say on what to do with her. We all agreed to let Fluffy sleep without pain.

Fluffy in her better days

A few months ago I noticed Fluffy had some rashes, and I saw her itch it. So we thought it’s just from the fleas. So I bought different shampoo for her. I really thought it got better, but I was wrong. So we decided to bring her to the Vet. The vet gave her some medicine and we bought some shampoo there. It just didn’t get better though. Last month I could see that the skin rashes got worse. It even covered up her eyelids. I’m really heart broken just watching her daily as she kept on scratching.

Bob also saw Fluffy out in our front yard scratching so much. So we talked and we told our niece to bring Fluffy to the vet and see what does the vet think? To ask the doctor also if it would be better for Fluffy to be put down or have medication? When our niece came back the doctor gave us 2 choices. If we want Fluffy be treated it might take a few months and she’s not sure if she would really heal because of her age. It will cost us over 5k a month for that. And taking her age into consideration she might not last long too. If we chose to put Fluffy down it will cost us 2k (including the medicine to use). They will bury her too.

You have to sign a waver that it was our choice to do that. Just to avoid lawsuit against the vet. You can even watch the process if you want to when they put your pet to sleep. So that evening all of us the family gathered to talk about it and what’s the best options for Fluffy. We all decided to put her down so she would be out of her misery. That’s the best thing for her. We did it for our love for Fluffy. The next day my brother-in-law Jhun brought Fluffy to the vet. Thank God Jhun was here at the house to work on our organic garden.

Some of Fluffy’s Puppies

I’m not going to let someone kill her for them to eat her. You know that’s what the typical drunkards do here. They will kill that dog and make it there appetizer (hors d’oeuvres, pulutan, sumsuman) while drinking. Sounds yucky, but that’s the reality here. We had neighbors in GenSan before that they really enjoyed eating dog meat than other meat. They almost had party every weekend. How do we know it’s dog? Because it shows when they’re roasting, the whole dog on the bamboo rod. It really grossed me out but can’t tell them what to eat. Sometimes they offered some when we pass by, I just smile. It’s really disgusting but it’s not my place to tell them.

Just to show how rare it is here to have a dog or other pet put to sleep, just after we had Fluffy put down, my cousin visited with her family I told her that we had to have Fluffy put to sleep. She said “Oh, really?” After a few minutes she asked, “Where is Fluffy?” I reminded her that Fluffy had been put to sleep, but she said “where is she now?” She had no idea that what I meant was that the vet had euthanized Fluffy, due to her health. It is just not a well known thing here in the Philippines.

We had a good years with Fluffy. She gave us few pups. Some of our friends have her puppies. The puppies turned out to be good for them too. While writing this post, we got a new pup for the kids. It’s a black pup. We named him Pepper. I will post some pictures here later and on FB. We also have a dog named Chichi.

The price for putting down a pet might vary from one place to the other. Not sure how much the cost in the other cities here in the Philippines. I was just quoting the price of Davao City. Just like when we had our cats spayed the first one it cost 3,500, we are not happy with the result. Our cat still in heat which is annoying because she’s so loud and you felt sorry for her. Our second one it cost 5k but we are really happy with the result. We will be going to have our third one (Blue) pretty soon. We already had a quote from our vet. It will be 3,500 if the weight below 5 kilos. So we are trying that Blue’s weight will not exceed 5 kilos.

June 5, 2014 by feyma

My grade school classmates: Where are they now?

I was toying with this topic since it’s the beginning of another school year here. Our kids are all geared up for the first day of school. I was trying to remember the days when I was in grade school. It’s way too different now than during my time. And something caught my eyes on the FB feed: Go figure. LOL

A few days ago a former neighbor of ours when I was young posted a picture on her profile. It intrigued me because it was an old photo. When I looked at it closely I saw that half of the people on the pictures were my classmates, some were my cousins. The other half I remembered them as the brother of my classmate and others just a plain neighbor of ours. It was really good to reminisce the past. If I remember correctly there’s just like 50 of us students graduated from our grade school in our small town. A few of us went to GenSan to continue on for high school, most of my classmates stayed in the public high school near our town in Sarangani Province. To be honest I really wanted to stay there too because all my BFF studied there. But my parents had some other school in mind. Since my other siblings already studied in Notre Dame in Lagao for Girls in GenSan, I was sent there too. At first I really resented it co’z I don’t know anyone in that new school. But I made friends quickly and not regretted being sent there. Thank God.

Feymas Family and Friends from her school days

A few of my classmates in grade school were my cousins. Really, since it was a small town, I’ve known the family of almost all my classmates. One of my classmate, he is a successful teacher and became principal in that school we graduated from. Later he became head (supervisor to a few school) near our town in Sarangani Province. He was the one asked me to be a guest speaker during one of the grade school graduation. He asked me to encourage the students since I just arrived from America at that time. I did talk to the students and encouraged them to work hard and to let them know that even being a product of the small town school if a person strives hard, they can become somebody someday. He just wanted me to encourage his students that working hard really pays off. As you know a lot of the students in the small town, they get married at the young age.

Most of my classmates I heard became OFW (overseas Filipino worker). Some in the Middle East, Hong Kong, Singapore and many other places. Some are in Manila right now too. It was really shocking to hear from them sometimes. I enjoyed connecting with them. Some of them they’re shocked that I am corresponding with them. They’re thinking I won’t talk to them. My God there’s no reason for me not to communicate with them. No need to be an airhead. I guess they’ve seen enough ladies who are married to foreigners and the ladies they think they are better than anybody. That’s far from who I am anyway.

I think a few of them were also pastors. A lot of them became teachers. I’m really proud of them for that. I know for sure that, that’s not my calling. I’m not really a good teacher. LOL. Some of my classmates after our grade school graduation didn’t go to school because the parents just couldn’t afford for them to continue on to high school. So because of that they got married early. So the cycle begins again, they had baby at the young age and the baby had baby. It goes on and on. But we can’t change the world. We just had to try I guess.

To my classmates: Thank you for the friendship and so nice seeing you on the web.

Have a great day everyone!

May 29, 2014 by feyma

The people close to my heart in the States: Part 1!

I was just looking at my FB feeds when I came across the headline in-front of me that read:

“So many things to look forward to this month! With all the birthdays, my bachelorette party in Vegas, getting married and honeymoon in greece, I can’t contain my excitement!”

I had to read it again and double check. My goodness the kid that used to be toddler when I first arrived in the States, that person that wrote the message on top, she turned 2 at that time. My gosh now she’s getting married. Her name is Shaina. A beautiful girl. I asked Bob right away if he saw the news feed of Shaina that she’s getting married? He told me no. I immediately told Bob that we are getting old already. I said look at Shaina, she’s one of the kids that we knew there and when we left she’s just a tween, now she’s getting married. Big sigh, its depressing, it just shows we are already over the hill now. LOL

Close to my heart

When I met the mom of Shaina I was just on my few months living in the States. Bob knew her dad Steve, but didn’t know that he was married to a Filipina. When I went to work with Bob and helped out, that’s how I met Steve. He asked me if I’m a Filipina or a Chinese? Ha ha ha, he can’t figure it out. I told him I’m a Filipina, and told him that Bob is my husband. He was shocked. He told Bob that “Oh, I didn’t know that your wife is from the Philippines. My wife Sylvia is from the Philippines too”. He then told us to come to there house that weekend, which we did. I was so happy seeing and knowing Sylvia. Sylvia’s husband Steve, he is an engineer, and a retired worker from Boeing. Sylvia was really like a big sister to me there. She’s the one person I can really be proud to have known in the US. I’ve never had any issues with her. Sylvia and I used to get together fairly often twice or more a month. More often during summer time with family. We had a few parties with our Fil-Am friends during summer and Christmas party during winter time. Few places for venues; either our house or at Sylvia’s or at one of our dear friend Connie from Oregon.

Shaina has a little brother name Patrick. He’s just a few months older than Chris. That’s one reason that Sylvia and I met up almost every week for the kids to have playtime together. Shaina was really a good big sister to Patrick and to Chris too. Very talkative, playful and funny. She’s also close to my mother-in-law. She’s just like a grand daughter to Mom. Sylvia and family including Shaina are still close to my mother-in-law. They visit mom when they have time.

I also met Sylvia’s sister Bebe when she first came to the States. Bebe was engaged to a guy from Oregon. Mom was the god-mother during her wedding. We all became close and more when Bebe became a mother of 2 kids. So we all get together at Sylvia’s house almost during weekends so that the kids will bond and play together. I saw them (Sylvia and Bebe and Bebe’s kids) when they came here to the Philippines for a visit. They’re from Cebu, so I flew there to see them. It was really nice bonding with them again. I really told Aaron to see Sylvia & Steve when he goes to the States.

To Sylvia and family, I really miss you guys. I will never forget you Sylvia no matter what. To Shaina & Michael (husband t0 be of Shaina): Congratulations to the 2 of you. Wishing you both the happiness in the world. I’m so happy for you Shane. Have fun on your honeymoon in Greece. I hope to see you all again someday.

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