Serving The Engine #2: Pancit

Okay, here's an interesting one. One of my visits indicated this search:

Search Engine : search.yahoo.com
Search Words : putting up a panciteria in the philippines

So I guess someone needed help putting up a panciteria (in the Philipines specifically). I've never been in the pancit business. If someone came up to me and asked what would one need to put up a panciteria, I would probably say 'pancit?'. I guess the two most important things is a good location and good pancit. I can't help with the location, but let's talk about all things pancit. Oh yeah, in case you're wondering, I'm into this because mom just called and asked me to bring pancit for our New Year's Eve dinner. Have a Happy New Year everyone!

Pancit (pansit) actually has a Wikipedia entry. Listed there are the following kinds of pancit:

- Pancit Bíhon
- Pancit Cantón
- Pancit estacion
- Pancit Habhab
- Pancit Luglog (or Palabok)
- Pancit Malabón
- Pancit Mólo
- Pancit Míki
- Pancit Moròng
- Pancit Sotanghòn

You can click on each pancit style to get a recipe. So many, I don't think this is a complete list. Benetton should launch a new marketing campaign locally, "United Pancit Noodles of Benetton"(baduy!). Benetton, call me, we'll talk.

Did you know that Pancit Malabon has its own festival? You can go here for some information on the event and its activities.

Here is an excerpt from a PCIJ article, Pancit Republic:

Pancit, borrowed from the Chinese, then innovated and adopted into our cuisine, connects us to our Asian roots. But more importantly, it is a veritable Pinoy comfort food — easier to cook than rice, and more versatile and food combination-friendly. It is the faster fast food. In fact, “pancit” is derived from the Hokkien “pian i sit,” which means “something conveniently cooked fast.” (link to full article)

Here's a link to a Pancit Chart also from PCIJ. It has a list of Pancit noodles by:

- how they are cooked
- thickness
- make
- region

Let's top everything off with a cute blog post from rockersworld.com:

pancit, in terms of a romantic relationship, means that a certain party is under. It’s either the other party is the law while the other party is under the law. A statement from someone like, “Hindi ako pancit, ako ang batas!” would definitely mean that the person is indeed a pancit in denial especially if the person consumes enough alcohol to give him/her hallucinations that he/she is indeed the law. (link to full post)

Pancit is a regular part of my diet. Particularly pancit palabok from Jollibee, instant pancit canton (spicy) from Lucky Me, instant pancit palabok from Quickchow. But of course, my favorite of them all, which I rarely ever get, is my sister-in-law's pancit palabok cause she makes a lot of sauce and I can drown the noodles in them. (Update: Pictured right, me with the sister-in-law's pancit palabok, yum!!)

You know what, there's so many things pancit out there that I just gave up. If you guys have anything pancit to add, leave a comment.

Update (1/2/2008) more things pancit:

Following is a Sine Totoo Documentary on the different pancit in the Philippines. The first one deals with places in the south:

- Pancit Masyang ng San Pedro, Laguna
- Pancit Lukban ng Quezon
- Pancit ng Bato ng Camarines Sur



The second part of the documentary deals with areas north of the Philippines:

- Pancit Batil-Patong ng Tuguegarao
- Pancit Cabagan ng Isabela
- Pancit Luglog ng Orani, Bataan



Here's a video on how to make pancit canton. This one is by a group of Fil-Ams which seem to be a school project for their Filipino class. It must be, their Tagalog is so terrible I can't think of another reason why else they would be speaking in Filipino. It's both intentionally and unintentionally funny:



Here's a short film from Jim Libiran entitled "Pancit Canton". This short film was a predecessor to his full length feature entitled "Tribu", winner of the 2007 Cinemalaya Best Film and composed of a cast of real life Tondo gang members. Here's a link to an interview he did for that feature.

Serving the Engine

So, it's really been awhile since I wrote a full blog post. This is the longest dry spell yet. It feels like the last couple of months just blurred by me. *puff* Two months.

This blog is turning out to be like the journals that I used to have. If you flipped through it, you would see in the first few page that I had entries once a week, then it would drop to once a month, then there would be gaps of years between entries. The only difference is that it's harder to misplace this blog. Of course, I'm also more discrete in the things I choose to write. Before the missus and I were married, I once caught her secretly reading my journal. The first thing she did was flip through it and look for entries I wrote about her. It's a good thing that I did write about her. Also a good thing that they leaned towards the positive side. Otherwise, we might never have been married. I might have ended up with Angelina Jolie and that would have been unfortunate. I don't think I could have handled the glitz and glamour. What? Well yeah, I'm probably more likely to get adopted than married by her. But that's the good thing about hypotheticals, reality is an adjustable parameter.

Back on track, serving the engine. What is it about, well, it an effort to get myself to post more often. It's a source for ideas. The search engine. I noticed that this blog is getting hits from people looking for stuff completely unrelated to anything I have written. By the way, if you ever want to be given credibility in any professional field, never use the word "stuff". Anyway, I digress. For example, can you guess what's the top search term for this blog? I get hits from Google and Yahoo everyday from this search results. It's "I love you like a fat kid loves cake".

Weird. I used it as a post title once on this entry. But I don't think people were looking for posts about pastries. So this is what Serving the Engine is about. Let's see if we can give these guys what they're looking for. Here's a link to the first in the series:

Serving The Engine #1: I Love You Like A Fat Kid Loves Cake

This is the second series that I'm putting into this blog. The first one was Cerebral Flatulence. This will be random stuff. Sometimes weird things pop into my head, brain farts, if you will. Don't worry, there are no voices there telling me to kill everyone. Just weird senseless mundane stuff. Sometimes they become full on blog posts, but most of the time I can't make anything of them. So the Cerebral Flatulence will be quickies. Postings a couple of sentences long. Just an outlet for me to "release" that mind gas. Hopefully these things will create more frequent postings. Bring on the rain.

Serving The Engine #1: I Love You Like A Fat Kid Loves Cake

What is Serving the Engine?

Okay, so you're here and you're looking for "I love you like a fat kid loves cake" or something like that. Well you're not alone. As of today, more than 60% of you who come through from Google to this blog was searching for that term. It's due to this post that you're getting here and it probably has nothing to do with what you're looking for. Well, just so that you would not have wasted your time coming to this blog, I'm going to try and help you out.

Okay, so what ARE you looking for? My first guess is that you heard it somewhere and you're wondering where it came from. That was at least the case for myself. I thought it was funny. I first heard it from Fiddy's "21 Questions". Here's an excerpt of the song:

How deep is our bond if that's all it takes for you to be gone?
And always remember girl we make mistakes, to make it up I do whatever it take
I love you like a fat kid love cake
You know my style I say anything to make you smile
(link to full lyrics)

You can check out the video on YouTube at this link. But the next question is, did he come up with it? The term has an entry in the Urban Dictionary. It cites "21 Questions" as a song having the phrase and also says that it is 'popular in the Chicago area to say to someone you adore'. I don't know how true that is, as the Urban Dictionary is probably even less reliable than Wikipedia. But let's assume it is true; The entry is none specific on whether or not it's popular in the Chicago area because of Fiddy's song or if he picked it up there. It's probably worth mentioning that Fiddy isn't from Chicago, he's from New York. My searches didn't turn up anything else on who coined the phrase or where it came from, so not much help there.

Now some searches are more specific. Like "picture of fat kid loves cake". Well, let's try to help these people too. I just hope that this isn't some kind of twisted fetish. Well, first there is this T-shirt at crazydogtshirts.com. The shirt has a kid, a cake, the phrase, but a little lean on the fat. So here's an image I picked up from Stroller Derby accompanied by an article entitled Kids Gain Weight Over Summer Vacation. It's got the healthy kid, a cake, but not much eating. To make up for the eating, here's is a picture of several women devouring cake. And just for good measure, I threw in a picture of a kid post cake disaster. So, that's that. We have served the engine and hopefully helped some people.

If you have something to add or correct, please leave a comment. I'll credit you and update this post.