Hello, it's me. I was wondering if after all these years...

Wow, it's been more than two years since my last post. Meanwhile, my instagram has been mostly food pics. I wonder if it's possible to cross-post here.

In the meantime, here is a picture of Indonesian "Bangkok" peanuts because why not.

Retaking the Kitchen: Mac and Cheese

It's been about 3 years since I last cooked a meal. For most of the past 3 years we had a helper who was a very good cook but also very OC about the kitchen. She saw the kitchen as kinda her turf, so even if it was in our house we weren't very welcome there. Which was fine with us since she was a very capable cook, and I can't even begin to compete with that cooking. However, she left us a few months ago (May, to be exact) to take care of her bedridden sibling. Her replacement was a less capable cook, but less OC with the kitchen too. So, after a few months of hawing and stewing, I have decided to retake the kitchen. However, after 3 years out of the galley I'm not exactly an Iron Chef (never was), so I began my offensive with a dish so simple my 3-year-old could make it. This mac and cheese is not the classic American mac and cheese made with bechamel; rather, it is a gooey version of the classic Italian cacio e pepe. Way easier to make than the American mac and cheese, and cheesier.

Ingredients:

pasta
cheese, grated (preferably medium hard like Monterey Jack or gouda so they're amenable to melting)
salt
freshly ground pepper (optional)

1. Cook pasta; put some salt in the water for taste.When cooked, drain the water but don't dry it out too much. You want just a little of the steam and hot water to remain with the pasta so it will melt the cheese.

2. Put (lots of) grated cheese on the piping hot pasta. Mix thoroughly. Your pasta will turn into a gooey, cheesy mess. Which is exactly what you want.

Garnish with sauteed mushrooms, crisp bacon bits, or whatever you think goes well with cheese. Season with freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Serve to 3-year-old boy with a voracious appetite who wouldn't share.

Food pics on my phone

Let's heat up this blog with a few pictures. No particular order. All from my phone.

Quite enjoying the ease of posting pictures via mobile blogger. Nice.

Red Buffalo Wings & Pizza

Let me begin with the bottomline: Red Buffalo Wings & Pizza is one of our go-to places for weekend lunch-- child-friendly, relaxed, consistent food, and my son seems to like their stuff (i.e., the fries and spaghetti). I was initially sceptical about the place. I have often been disappointed by American food in this city. But this place didn't disappoint us. After trying the place for the first time we went there for about four straight weekends. We liked it that much.

The restaurant has a New York casual theme-- think Yellow Cab but with a red rather than yellow motif. There's a TV hung up there with its volume thankfully turned down, although I guess it would be turned up if there's a sports event. It is clean and fairly spacious, making it one of the more toddler-friendly places out there. The atmosphere is relaxed and service is impeccable-- very friendly and efficient. Food are served on disposable containers and utensils are of the plastic kind There's also free wifi (password is printed on your receipt), if you need to take food pictures with instagram and post them in real time because the world needs to see what you're eating right now but don't want to pay data charges.

As for the food, it's one of our favourties for two reasons: good quality/serving size and good price. Their iced tea (P55) is made from actual brewed tea rather than that despicable powder, and comes in a big tumbler. The fries (P85) are kinda like those you get at NY Fries and Dip with nice texture and with some skin on, but much more generous. The spaghetti with meatballs is pretty generous-- a good deal at P215-- with a pretty good Italian-style sauce (i.e., on the sour side); better than marinaras in some Italian restaurants, I should say. The mac-and-cheese side (P65) is not so bad too, although I think I can make it at home if I tried.There's a mandatory garden salad (P135) which is similar to those supermarket salads; ok, the vegetables are crisper. They also sell dips that supposedly go with the chicken but they're pretty expensive even at P25 because serving sizes are infinitesimal and they are nothing special, so I say skip them-- there are free Heinz ketchup, French's mustard, and Tabasco hot sauce anyway. And you really don't need dips for the chicken.

Ah the chicken, the glorious chicken. I'm not much of a chicken wings guy, but this managed to convert me. Five pieces of wings-- a piece is defined as either the "drumstick" part with the humerus or the "wing" part with the radius/ulna up to the phalanges-- costs P165; 10 pieces is P320; 20 pieces is 620. Flavours include the original buffalo wings (hot, x-hot, and suicidal), teriyaki, sweet heat BBQ, honey bourbon, and garlic parmesan. The American-style buffalo wings are pretty good and remind me of typical buffalo wings in the US with the spicy and tangy flavour profile. Quite similar to the Hooter's wings, actually (the chicken wings at Hooter's are actually pretty good, and not just because of the, um, ambience). But what we really like are the garlic parmesan wings-- the flavourings don't overpower the chicken, but you still get that good dose of garlic and parmesan cheese, which is partially melted on the chicken because it was sprinkled (tossed?) on just as the chicken left the fryer.

But beyond the flavourings what really sets Red Buffalo apart from other chicken places I've tried is the consistency of their frying. The wings are always juicy and flavourful and almost perfectly fried. Wings are pretty difficult to fry well because the drumstick part can dry out while the wing part can become rubber. But so far the wings here are always done well on each of our many visits.

[I'm dispensing with the scores since they need to be adjusted for inflation and my changing marginal propensity to eat at restaurants. And I'm too lazy to do it now.]

Wow, it's been that long

It has been more than three years since I last reviewed a restaurant. Since then I have returned to that restaurant with my two-year-old son. He also seems to like the bun we refer to as Spanish bread and the ham-and-egg bun.

It has been more than three and a half years since my last review of a restaurant in the Philippines. I wasn't even married yet.

Since then I've moved residences twice and our old regulars are now rarely visited. I've also started a profile at tripadvisor where I occasionally write restaurant and hotel reviews. I figured there'd be more readers there than over here where there is probably only one person who still has this on his RSS feed just because he is too lazy to remove it.

Pretty nice to revisit this (and the other blog) and see a virtual time capsule of my life when I still had the time to blog fairly regularly. Seems almost like ancient history, actually.

If work doesn't get in the way, here's what I hope to review in the next few days, weeks, months, etc. (in no thought-out order): Red Buffalo Wings & Pizza, Nonstop Kebab, Mien San, Pastry Princess, Hanobe Asian Cuisine, New Bombay, Hermanos Taco Shop, Omakase, Barrio Fiesta.

Right.

Treffpunkt

Means "meeting place" in Austrian. It's also an Austrian deli/restaurant along EDSA that I've been seeing since the 1980s as a kid. We used to live in Las Piñas but most of our relatives were in Quezon City so we we'd pass by the place on our way to reunions.

I've always wondered what was there. Good thing they have a very informative website here, which looks like it was designed in the 1990s. Not that I'm complaining since it has everything I needed to know.

Now to actually visit the place.

Mom's Meatloaf Recipe

Yeah, it's been a while since my last (non-)post. It's not as if anyone's reading this blog anyway. Oh well.

Here's my mom's meatloaf recipe, which she began making sometime in the late 1980s, then stopped, then made it again in the mid 1990s. When I was single it was sort of a staple since it's very easy to do and keeps/reheats well. My Dear loves it, and I guess it contributed to how history eventually turned out. Resulting in Lucas. Hehehe.

This recipe is supposed to be a family secret of sorts, but I'm posting it anyway. Given this blog's active readership, I figure it'll remain a secret for some time to come.

Ingredients:

1/2 kilo ground pork or beef (or both)
1 can Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup (Campbell's just tastes better)
2 eggs
about 1 cup bread crumbs (optional)
1 garlic, minced
freshly ground black pepper (to taste)
soy sauce (to taste)
whatever you feel like chucking in (more on this later)

1. Thoroughly mix everything together. By hand. In a big bowl.

2. Aside from the basic ingredients, feel free to chuck in any other spice or minced ingredient you want. For flavourings I've used curry mixes, Old Bay, Cajun spices, and Italian seasoning. Minced ingredients I've used include olives (green and black), onions, chorizos, salami, hotdog, spam, Mexican chiles, and even sweet ham. Just remember to do (1) so everything is a homogeneous slurry.

3. Cook. As a bachelor I actually microwaved this for 35 minutes in a glass dish covered with wax paper-- it came out with gloriously burnt edges. But if you're more comfortable with steaming or baking, go ahead.

Serve with your choice of carb.