After that we picked up his new passport at the police station. I stayed on the bench outside to read "Le Petit Prince," and that was when I noticed some leaves had begun to turn brown. The cold spell must have convinced the trees that it's time to shed their leaves once again. After getting a bit of sun just in time for the last laps of the Tour de France, days of uninterrupted rain doused us back into the realization that autumn has come early. Too bad for Paris Plages.
When H came out he sheepishly showed me his passport which, try as I might, I couldn't help but snicker at. Backstory: The scanner at the passport office was broken on the day of his appointment so they didn't want to take H's 2x2 picture, they wanted to take a picture of him and use that instead. The problem was, he was supposed to go to the gym after so he didn't take a shower, he didn't even bother checking what his hair looked like; plus he hadn't shaved for days and he stayed up til 4 am finishing a new video game the night before. In other words, mukha siyang pusakal... Which is going to go great with the border agents in China.
I came home to the smell of pancit canton, and at first I wondered where it was coming from - it's been almost a week since I made noodles. As it turns out, it was the limp stalk of celery desolately dangling from a jar in the kitchen. How predictably pavlovian am I? And why am I always hungry?
To stop myself from cooking noodles, noodles that I might end up eating, I drew them instead. Enjoyment factor was not the same, though.
By the way, maybe I haven't told you about pancit canton... allow me to rectify that mistake.
Pancit canton is a traditional noodle dish we Filipinos equate with special occasions.
When I was younger and Sampaguita and LVN movies were an afternoon staple on channel 9, the poor lead characters would often celebrate a good day of selling flowers/pickpocketing by bringing home pancit to their starving siblings and sickly mothers or ungrateful drunkard dads. You eat it on your birthday for long life. You eat it with a glass of dalandan juice. You eat it sandwiched between slices of "tasty bread." Sometimes having pancit alone is an occasion in itself.
So here's how you make pancit canton:
- you need shredded morcels of pork, shrimp, chicken or sausage - one or in combination; "the more the many-er," like we love to say on the islands
- fry this with garlic and onion and the rest of the "sahog" listed, some people add cabbage leaves but I don't like the smell of cabbage
- set all this aside and then boil chicken broth with a few teaspoons of soy sauce, oyster sauce, and some salt and pepper; some people add cornstarch to make the sauce thicker... I'm not opposed to that if your sauce turns out watery
- set the sauce aside then boil blanched egg noodles for a few minutes until slightly soft
- take the water out and replace with the sauce
- then put back all of the "sahog"
- add sesame seed oil and/or sesame seeds and serve
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