3:29 - Chapter I

I imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live, live, live, live!”

That had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.

When I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.   

Losing the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg timer.

While everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The school happily obliged.

When I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a feather. Not a thing.

But I heard music.

Cooking with Dog!

If there's one YouTube channel that I think is mandatory for everybody to see, it is Cooking With Dog. The reason why I'm making such a statement is because this channel has succeeded in doing what other people have failed to do so far: making me want to cook.

Notice the emphasis on cooking. Usually when I watch a cooking show, at the end of it I'll say, "Oh boy, I want to eat that!" but never "Dang, now I want to try it making it myself!".

Cooking with Dog makes easy-to-follow, step-by-step videos that teaches you how to cook homemade Japanese food. Nothing fancy here, no flaming skillet or super knife skills needed. As long as you have taste buds and a kitchen, you can do whatever they do. Oh, having a Japanese or Asian supermarket near your place is an advantage because you'll need at least some basic ingredients such as cooking sake, hon-mirin and bonito dashi. Everything else, be creative! (Of course this is the part where you don't take me too seriously. My creativity in the kitchen has been a subject of ridicule for years due to the extent of which I substitute one ingredient with another, e.g. egg for water)

On each video, they'll post a list of ingredients in English and Japanese. The instruction itself is narrated by Francis, a cute grey French poodle with superb English. The Chef is a sweet, middle-aged Japanese lady whose deft hands can lull me to dream-like state whatever they are doing, be it cutting onions, mixing soy sauce and dashi stock, or simply just stirring a pot. Her movements in the kitchen are precise and efficient, and they will tell you why they do certain things. For example: when dicing onions, the easiest way is to cut along it but take care to leave the root attached. Rotate 90 degrees then make cuts perpendicular to the initial ones. Finally slice the onion from the end cut and voila! Straight away you'll have diced onions.

See? They got me excited about cutting onions.

I have so far tried three of their recipes: Chawanmushi, Pork Shogayaki and donuts. I'm happy to report that all have been a success, and I'm especially happy with the chawanmushi because it tastes better than what I had in some 'Japanese' restaurant. I will share with you the video here:



If you like Japanese home cooking, do yourself a favor. Try this one out! And of course, watch Cooking with Dog!

Oh, one thing. The channel may be in hiatus right now because they reported that the Chef got into a rather serious accident in January. She's currently in rehabilitation. I wish her a speedy recovery and hopefully she will be back all healthy, all pumped up again to cook! Man, I miss her already!

<3

Housewife

Celebrating International Women's Day 2012. I read this article from The Atlantic and was filled with an urge to write. The resulting piece is as follows:

Housewife

I am a housewife, Sari said. I take care of my husband and children. I have three children. Two sons, she added after a pause, smiling.

Sari's husband was an employee of a state-owned oil corporation. They lived in a two-storey, three-bedroom house with a garage that could fit two cars. Their house was located in one of the suburban development projects outside the metropolitan and it was within easy reach of a hypermall and a wet-market. The children’s school was also close by, just fifteen minutes away. 

Look, Sari said, pointing at a photo of her children. This is Arif, the eldest. He’s in the third-grade now. And this is his brother, Arya, second grade. The little one is Alina, she’s only two. I’m enrolling her in a playgroup next year.

The Coop

They were sitting at Bu Ikawati’s roadside kiosk when the light from the single bulb above their heads went out. “Yaaah, there it goes again,” said one of the men. The others only nodded while sipping their black coffee and puffing cigarette smoke, as if saying it was to be expected.

The smell of kretek, tobacco blended with cloves, filled the air. It was a balmy, sweat-filled night that had been denied rain for weeks. Syarief wiped the back of his neck with his hands. The mosquitoes that had previously gathered around the lone bulb were now making him their target. He swatted them away, only to hit Mansyur and caused his coffee to spill. That earned him a glare, and although they were good friends no words were spoken. His tongue was as heavy as the apology that sat on it. He knew it was there but didn’t bother to let it out.

Conversations were often abandoned at a night like this. Nights where they knew with certainty that the next day would be worse. Still no rain. The rice fields were parched. The longer the drought ran, the longer the silence was. Syarief wondered how many weeks had it been since he’d last seen a hint of drizzle. The riverbed was now as dry as the asphalt road. The soil cracked, the carcasses of their livelihood hung, withered and defeated. They all needed to make do without a harvest this season and the men had been working all sorts of jobs just to survive. These jobs, like the rain, didn’t come easily. Many of his friends and neighbors had been forced to go to the capital Jakarta to scrape a living.