pate and paella

Nikki and I celebrated our anniversary at the best kept secret resto in the city - Terry Selection over at The Podium in the Ortigas Center. A massive floor area divided between Spanish resto, Euro deli and wine cellar, Terry Selection is simply fantastic.

We had one of the pates (from acorn-fed Iberian piggies) which was surprising in both its flavor and volume, moved to the house paella (with shrimp, squid, pork and my new favorite Chorizo Salamanca plus a garlic sauce) and almost didn't have room for dessert - their sumptuous creme brulee. And since they own the wine cellar, you can just select which you want and enjoy the bottle with your food sans corkage (unlike majority of restos that charge exhorbitant fees per bottle).

For our 9th year, Nikki surprised me with Michael Chabon's new anthology McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories - a collection I hope will be just as good or better than the previous Thrilling Tales (the introduction of which, by Chabon of course, pissed off almost every editor in the scifi community).

I got her Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel , whose hefty size and intriguing title had finally succeeded in its attempt to beguile. And since I was at Ink & Stone anyway, I got Gardner Dozois The Year's Best Science Fiction Twenty-first Annual Collection - because I actually enjoyed quite a few from his edition last year and I'm a sucker for nice thick anthologies - as a reward for finishing Salamanca (the novel AND the chorizo).

One of the things we enjoy the most about our relationship is our mutual love for reading, and how, even in the midst of celebrating love and life, one of our concerns was "Do we have something to read?". Because unlike other couples, we do not feel the need to fill the spaces of natural silence with words for the sake of noise. We love to converse but sometimes it's better to read next to each other, completely at ease and comfortable with the familiarity of quietude.