Skip to content

Tag: kubo riches

The Magic of Home Cooking

Ingredients to Beef Bourguignon.

**WARNING: Plenty of food pictures at the bottom of the page. Don’t look unless you want to get hungry.**

I was roughly 8 years old when I finally made my dad teach me how to cook. Before then, I spent a lot of time in our kitchen watching him as he prepared our meals. In fact, most of the time, I stood right by him beside our gas powered stove as he mixed the pot or the pan full of ingredients. The whole process was incredible. He took these things called vegetables that were largely grown from the Earth’s nutritious soil and from the free energy of the Sun. He took some piece of meat that was raised by the people at the province and butchered by some butcher at the butcher shop. He would combine them in a pot or in a pan (depending on what dish he was making) with some spices and other natural flavorings. He would put them over the hot stove, mix them every once in a while, taste them so that the flavoring could be corrected, and after an hour or so of tending them the result was always this delicious home cooked meal for our family to enjoy. It was magic.

Luck and Action

My favorite spot in Paris. The owner was extremely nice to us. He even made me iced tea (not on the menu).

When I was in my early 20s I believed in many things that were not true. I thought the amount of money someone earned was in proportion to how hard they worked. And since earning a good income is associated with having a pretty comfortable life, I thought the people who were struggling just weren’t working hard enough. I also believed, at the time, that we reward the most money to people in careers that gave back to society the most. It seemed that the engineering and the medical fields gave the highest salaries to people. Thus any other endeavor (like the arts, the pure sciences, or the public services) was ipso facto suspect, unless it had just enough graphs or maths that the average person found difficult to comprehend, like statistics or physics. I also thought we all had the same opportunities in life. So if you were not making at least $50,000 a year past your 20s then it must have been your fault. You simply did something wrong. The result was that I believed the good comfortable life I had achieved thus far was simply due to my own actions. But I realized that this is simply not true.

A Kubo Rich Christmas

When I was a child living in the Philippines the Christmas season was my favorite time of the year. As you know by now, I was born in the Philippines and my family and I immigrated to America when I was 11 years old. To this day, I still speak Tagalog fluently and I still crave Filipino food regularly. However, at this point in my life, I consider myself as culturally American. In other words, my point-of-view on how things should work has been greatly influenced and shaped by American culture, its thinking, and its traditions. However, there is one thing that the Philippines does the best (in my opinion), and it’s something I truly miss every year around this time ever since my family moved here — the Filipino Christmas season. Frankly, the Filipino Christmas season completely dwarfs the American one in its festivities.

The Midpoint; or, Student Debt Progress Report

My current student debt balance.

As I’ve mentioned in my first article I amassed around $35,000 of student debt to pay for my college education. Fortunately, I was able to start an engineering job with a $71,000 salary two months after I left the university in the same city, which has a lower-than-average cost of living. And within the first month of being employed Kubo Queen and I received a windfall of $10,000 (before taxes), which we put all to use towards my student debt. From there, I elected to pay my student loans, whenever possible, $3,000 per month.