Trying New Things

Shoot
Originally uploaded by xadrian.

Last Friday Tiger Lily and I were invited to a party at Cebuana Filipino Store in south Austin. They were playing host to a shoot for a pilot that will be seen (hopefully) on the Cooking Channel. (Which, I'm not really sure about the Cooking Channel. I think it's a spin off of the Food Network.)

Friends of ours visit the store regularly and are friends of the owners. They regularly go shop and eat there and sing karaoke. Cebuana is a market, street restaurant, video rental store and karaoke bar. It's also about the size of my dining and TV room. So having it beset by about 100 people was pretty intense.

The food that was there to eat was mostly rice and coconut recipes but it was all outstanding. The rice, chicken and ginger soup was amazing. And do yourself a favor and find some pork siopao right away.

The TV crew was three hours late. They were apparently filming at several places and were just behind schedule. The market had put out a really impressive spread of Filipino food but it was all gone by the time the crew got there. What was left was some tinikling (bamboo stick dance) and candle dancing. After that it was the balut eating contest. Our friend was in the contest, being the only girl involved.

By the way, balut is a delicacy but it's a delicacy that sounds like it's from Indiana Jones. Balut is 15-20 day germinated duck eggs that are boiled. Yes I ate one. They taste like hard boiled eggs, which I don't like anyway. But it wasn't that it tasted bad, it was quite good. If you like hardboiled eggs, you'd love belut.

So our friend had to eat as many of these large hard boiled embryonic duck eggs in three minutes as possible. She ate 11. She beat two other guys and tied one other. She one some gift money to the store (which she promised to use to take us all out) and a shirt. The host of the show tried one too and then made everyone else who'd never had one to try it.

By then it was near midnight. We'd arrived at 7:45 thinking we'd be late. The film crew was off again to film yet another bit at a Moroccan restaurant. While we were eating cake we noticed they left a camera behind and had we not run after them as their cars were pulling away they'd have left without it. Our indie zombie movie was almost made that night.

All in all it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of standing around feeling obnoxiously in the way, but we acclimated and truly enjoyed the experience. I even sang karaoke.

Carry on.