The Color Purple

/ LivE

Whew. Getting back on the boat after falling into the water can be difficult, especially if the waves have pushed you farther and farther away from the shore. Or more specifically, it’s quite a challenge to get back on the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenges when Real Life’s duties and demands have taken one away from one’s computer long enough to make one fall back by about 7 challenges. Yikes!

But there’s only one thing to do when one falls off a boat, and that’s to swim like heck and try to get back on.

So this is me, trying to get back on, and promising that I’m going to row through all the challenges I’ve missed too! (Tie me to the chair and insist on it if I don’t!)

For this week, the challenge was truly challenging with Purple as its theme. First of all, I don’t really like the color purple (the color itself, not the movie). No offense meant to those who do love it; in fact, it happens to be the favorite color of my mother-in-law whom I hold very dear to my heart. Personally, I prefer the more “boring” shades of white, browns, and blues. But I digress…

Luckily, just yesterday, a few hours before I sat down by my computer and checked out this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge, I happened to pass by a Filipino restaurant and couldn’t resist buying Guinataan, which is a Filipino dish whose name comes from the word gata, which is Filipino for coconut milk. (I love anything that has coconut milk!).

Guinataan is a dessert made with fruits (large bananas and jackfruit are musts), glutinous rice flour, sago or tapioca pearls, root crops (gabi or taro, kamote or sweet potatoes, ube or purple yam—add loads of it and you get the purple color), all mixed in with sugar and that heavenly coconut milk. Served hot on a rainy day, it’s the perfect comfort food (perfectly fattening too, I fear).

Voila! Comfort food, and purple one at that, left me with no further excuse for not getting back on track with the challenges.

And so, here we go:

{ Click on the image for a larger view }

Do you know how difficult it is to find a song that isn’t Purple Rain? 😆 But I did find one! From the original soundtrack of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik, here’s The Song of Purple Summer:

With lyrics that go:

A summer’s day
a mother sings
a song of purple summer
through the heart of everything
and heaven waits
so close it seems
to show her child the wonders
of a world beyond her dreams…

I do think the message of hope and wonder is beautiful, and that makes the completion of this Purple challenge a joy for me. 🙂

Have a purple-summer-wonder-filled day, my dear friends! I’ll see you soon! 🙂

29 thoughts on “The Color Purple”

    • thank you jessie! i’m glad to be back too, and just as glad to have the time to hop over and visit your blog too – i loved your “inside” photo and thought your letter to your baby girl was just precious. 🙂 see you around! 🙂

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  4. That looks delicious (sarap!). Most of the guinataan for sale around our area has the coconut milk color….the purple from the ube makes it so bright. Thank you for visiting my blog, too! I like the photo of the boys playing on your blog header as well.

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    • thank you very much, lola jane! 🙂 the ube flavor makes the guinataan so much richer than the usual milky-colored one. 🙂 thank you for visiting; i look forward to visiting your blog again! 🙂

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    • thank you, angelia! i enjoyed your under-the-pier photos and your purple flowers too! i highly recommend coconut milk – it adds a really great flavor to food 🙂 hope to have you visit again 🙂

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