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.

In Defence of English Cooking

By George Orwell

We have heard a good deal of talk in recent years about the desirability of attracting foreign tourists to this country. It is well known that England’s two worst faults, from a foreign visitor’s point of view, are the gloom of our Sundays and the difficulty of buying a drink.

Both of these are due of fanatical minorities who will need a lot of quelling, including extensive legislation. But there is one point on which public opinion could bring about a rapid change for the better: I mean cooking.

It is commonly said, even by the English themselves, that English cooking is the worst in the world. It is supposed to be not merely incompetent, but also imitative, and I even read quite recently, in a book by a French writer, the remark: "The best English cooking is, of course, simply French cooking."

Now that is simply not true, as anyone who has lived long abroad will know, there is a whole host of delicacies which it is quite impossible to obtain outside the English-speaking countries. No doubt the list could be added to, but here are some of the things that I myself have sought for in foreign countries and failed to find.

First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake (such as you used to get at Buzzard’s before the war), short-bread and saffron buns. Also innumerable kinds of biscuit, which exist, of course, elsewhere, but are generally admitted to be better and crisper in England.

Then there are the various ways of cooking potatoes that are peculiar to our own country. Where else do you see potatoes roasted under the joint, which is far and away the best way of cooking them? Or the delicious potato cakes that you get in the north of England? And it is far better to cook new potatoes in the English way — that is, boiled with mint and then served with a little melted butter or margarine — than to fry them as is done in most countries.

Then there are the various sauces peculiar to England. For instance, bread sauce, horse-radish sauce, mint sauce and apple sauce; not to mention redcurrant jelly, which is excellent with mutton as well as with hare, and various kinds of sweet pickle, which we seem to have in greater profusion than most countries.

What else? Outside these islands I have never seen a haggis, except one that came out of a tin, nor Dublin prawns, nor Oxford marmalade, nor several other kinds of jam (marrow jam and bramble jelly, for instance), nor sausages of quite the same kind as ours.

Then there are the English cheeses. There are not many of them but I fancy Stilton is the best cheese of its type in the world, with Wensleydale not far behind. English apples are also outstandingly good, particularly the Cox’s Orange Pippin.

And finally, I would like to put in a word for English bread. All the bread is good, from the enormous Jewish loaves flavoured with caraway seeds to the Russian rye bread which is the colour of black treacle. Still, if there is anything quite as good as the soft part of the crust from an English cottage loaf (how soon shall we be seeing cottage loaves again?) I do not know of it.

No doubt some of the things I have named above could be obtained in continental Europe, just as it is possible in London to obtain vodka or bird’s nest soup. But they are all native to our shores, and over huge areas they are literally unheard of.
South of, say, Brussels, I do not imagine that you would succeed in getting hold of a suet pudding. In French there is not even a word that exactly translates ‘suet’. The French, also, never use mint in cookery and do not use black currants except as a basis of a drink.

It will be seen that we have no cause to be ashamed of our cookery, so far as originality goes or so far as the ingredients go. And yet it must be admitted that there is a serious snag from the foreign visitor’s point of view. This is, that you practically don’t find good English cooking outside a private house. If you want, say, a good, rich slice of Yorkshire pudding you are more likely to get it in the poorest English home than in a restaurant, which is where the visitor necessarily eats most of his meals.

It is a fact that restaurants which are distinctively English and which also sell good food are very hard to find. Pubs, as a rule, sell no food at all, other than potato crisps and tasteless sandwiches. The expensive restaurants and hotels almost all imitate French cookery and write their menus in French, while if you want a good cheap meal you gravitate naturally towards a Greek, Italian or Chinese restaurant. We are not likely to succeed in attracting tourists while England is thought of as a country of bad food and unintelligible by-laws. At present one cannot do much about it, but sooner or later rationing will come to an end, and then will be the moment for our national cookery to revive. It is not a law of nature that every restaurant in England should be either foreign or bad, and the first step towards an improvement will be a less long-suffering attitude in the British public itself.

1945

[taken from here]

PhD level cooking

The Bourdain recently did a show about learning how to make the simplest stuff-- roast chicken, omelet, spaghetti with tomato sauce-- and asked renowned chefs like Thomas Keller to give lessons.

The "simplest" things are actually the most difficult to do well. Like making hardboiled eggs. Usually people will say that someone is so bad at cooking that all he can do is boil an egg. But doing it properly-- i.e., the yolk and white are hardboiled, but there is no trace of grey on the outside of the yolk-- requires tremendous precision.

Truly PhD level stuff. In which case I'm stuck repeating 5th grade.