Coffee Prince

     Loved it to bits!  I should never have waited five years to see this tv series.  Then again, I've been feeling a little blue lately, and this gem of a show popped up just in time and helped to cheer me up.

     Back in 2007, when Coffee Prince was all the rage amongst rabid koreanovella fans, I chose to miss the entire run of the show altogether because I thought there was something wrong with the lead actor's face (i.e. a face like a Picasso portrait; mismatched eyes and so on), and the lead actress looked far too much like a boy.  How was anyone supposed to feel all fluttery watching a hero with irregular features go after a heroine who looks like she really does have junk under her jockey briefs?  So I ignored the rave reviews for years, paid no heed to what I thought was hype, and opted for other dramas.  Spring Waltz.  Seducing Mr. Perfect.  The Classic.  200 Pounds Beauty.  He's Beautiful.  Full House.  49 Days.  Hana Yori Dango.  Hana Kimi.  Secret Garden.  Personal Taste.  Nobuta wo Produce.  Proposal Daisakusen.  Boys Before Flowers (eek)!  And most recently, Rooftop Prince, which I thought was the best tv series I had ever seen.  

     Now let me join, however belatedly, the millions of women, young and old, who enjoyed Coffee Prince from episodes 1 through 17, and thoroughly appreciated the behind-the-scenes special.  Never have I encountered, before I finally saw this show, a group of actors so perfectly cast there was never a single one in the Coffee Prince ensemble who ever spoilt the brew at any one time.  The coffee shop team was the perfect starting six: Dashing Manager Han Kyul, hard-working Eun Chan, Min Yeop the big, dumb, sensitive galoot, aloof and mysterious Waffle Sun Ki, harmlessly oily Ha Rim, and Manager Hong with his oft-revolting personal habits.  Individually they're already entertaining, but together they perk you right up like a cup of good, strong coffee. 

     Gong Yoo (Han Kyul)'s features may lack the symmetry usually required of a matinee idol, but the longer you watch him, the handsomer he gets.  I know it's not possible that his face physically transformed itself over 17 episodes, but by the time I finished the show my opinion on his looks had undergone a profound change.  Even an actor with a face like a Picasso portrait can charm the pants off you if he can slip right into the role of a handsome, charming, gender-confused coffeehouse manager and make you believe he is exactly that.  Of course it helps that he's gorgeously tall and always spiffily dressed.  Have I mentioned that he has such a wonderfully expressive face and hair you'd like to run your hands through?  

     Yoon Eun Hye (Eun Chan) has a face that can change genders depending on her hairdo.  Seeing her  don a wig in one of the early episodes, I was surprised to find (along with character Choi Han Seung) that she could actually be very pretty.  Of all the Coffee Prince actors, she was the one on whom rested the greater part of the load of carrying the show right through to the end, and she did it wonderfully.  She wasn't just an actress trying to play the part of a tomboyish girl; she practically transformed herself into a boy to get the job done.  She nailed the walk, the talk, the gauche mannerisms of adolescent males, and convinced us all that she couldn't possibly be really female.  But that's only until she falls miserably in love with the clueless Han Kyul, and then we begin to see the girl slowly shining through.  

     Excellent show.  The Coffee Prince has my royal seal of approval.  

Marby's Shrimp Lumpia

     When I finally arrived home from a long vacation in Australia, there was nothing in my refrigerator except water, two slices of bread, half a package of phyllo pastry and some fishballs frozen solid since May.  I made do with the dodgy fishballs and some soba noodles on the first day, but come the second day I knew I needed to get myself to the nearest supermarket or I'd have to settle for a phyllo sandwich.  

     I live alone and do everything by myself; the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the dishes, the grocery shopping.  When you haven't got a lot of free time on your hands, you like things to be done in a jiffy, and most of the time, that also applies to what I eat.  I prefer to make meals I can whip up in a few minutes, so I can save the extra time for other chores.  I had been away from home for a whole month, and so there was a month's worth of cleaning, laundry, bills and work waiting to be sorted out.  When I went to the grocery store to restock my refrigerator, I was looking for easy meals to make.  Fried chicken.  Stir-fried pork.  Ham and mushroom pasta.  Steamed dory fillets.  Then as I was walking past the frozen food section, I spied a package of ready-made lumpia.  Ooh, I thought.  Should take me under 10 minutes to fry up those suckers and have a nice, quick, satisfying meal.  

     Wrong.  Not about the 10-minute cooking time, but on this shrimp lumpia making a nice, satisfying meal.  How do I begin to describe the horror that it was?  How it contaminated my perfectly savory rice (Dona Maria Miponica!), and tainted the purity of my white dinner plate?  The package came with a packet of red-orange sauce which I thought was sweet-sour sauce, but it tasted nothing like it.  An accurate description?  Try 'suspicious glop made of unidentifiable ingredients suspended in red-orange liquid most likely to be food coloring and water.'  As for the lumpia itself, I could taste no shrimp in it at all.  What I could taste was wet cardboard seasoned in salt and someone's armpit sweat.  

     I would've had eaten better if I had just sauteed a wet newspaper in a saucepan.  I should've known that ₱29 for a package of spring rolls meant a bad deal.  For that cheap, they can't possibly even have the equivalent of one shrimp in the bag.  Or half a shrimp, even.  But I'll bet my suspicions about flavored cardboard being in the mix was right on the money.  

     So, what became of the rest of the lumpia pictured above?  I brought them to my mother's house last Sunday and asked Manang Aida to cook them and feed them to Georgie and Charm.  The dogs.  I have yet to find out next Sunday whether the substandard spring rolls have been successfully fried and fed to the pets.  But I've got a feeling Georgie and Charm just turned up their noses, and went to sniff in the garbage.