rice cake confessional

I am so fatchin’ tired. There are about 80 other things I should be doing – cleaning my house, paying my cable bill, ironing some clothes, sleeping since it’s well past midnight – but here we are blogging. Yay for messed up priorities.

I just got back from a few days in the Philippines and unlike most of my trips I got to actually stay in Manila for awhile. My dreams of moving to Manila to work have slipped off the radar since I moved to Singapore but were sorta kinda resurrected by the 3 days I spent exploring and enjoying the city life rather than the usual weekend of hanging out in the bahay kubo all up in the province.

In the middle of what I like to refer to as Meeting Marathon Tuesday (not to be confused with Meeting Fun Times Monday), Lianne and I had time to grab a real lunch at Greenbelt 5.

Lianne let me pick between Travel Cafe Philippines  and another Spanish restaurant whose name escapes me. TCP won because we found it first and because I was not feeling the urge to revisit my people’s colonial oppression. Kidding. I was also wearing 3 inch heels and carrying my stupidly heavy laptop so really finding it first meant sitting down sooner which was the idea overall.

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I treated our party of 10 to lunch at Fortune (Hong Kong) Seafood Restaurant in Malolos, Bulacan during our stay. Located on a business strip right off of the MacArthur Highway it is sandwiched between a couple of larger, flashier chain restaurants. Fortune touts itself as being one of those ‘forreal’ Chinese joints. I’m not Chinese so I can’t tell you how authentic it is, but for what it’s worth the meal was pretty darn good. Instead of pouring over the menu we ordered a family meal that set me back about USD 60.

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I have always found it interesting that the McDonald’s menu changes to cater to local tastes. Different countries, different meals, different tastes, same brand. McDonald’s is lovingly referred to as ‘McDo’ (accent on the Do). The menu includes stuff like the usual BigMac and chicken nuggets but also has Chicken McDo, Burger McDo (sweeter than a regular hamburger, I think it’s made with pork), McSpaghetti, and taro pie.

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You have to hit the Philippines during specific fruit seasons. Otherwise, you miss out on getting unique, tropical fruits that you can’t enjoy stateside. One of my faves is lanzones. They look a little like longan and chicos, if you’re familiar with those. The difference is that I hate longans and chicos. Heh. The rule of thumb when picking out lanzones at the market is to find the ones covered in ants. The ants always get to the sweet ones. Buuuuut, these days sellers have been known to put ants on lanzones just to get folks to think that they’re sweet. Lanzones that aren’t sweet aren’t bland – they’re SOUR so beware.

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Before I left my godparents very generously offered that I stay at their bougie new house in Malolos during my stay. My godmother specifically recommended that I have a breakfast of champorado with tuyo in their bahay kubo. It turned out being my favorite meal of the entire trip.

My godparents’ bahay kubo is situated in a corner of their backyard and beautifully constructed of bamboo. That particular morning was rainy which gave us a nice breeze and we sat there for a good hour reminiscing, laughing, and eating.

I think I love champorado because it makes me feel like I’m five years old. Not just a regular five year old but a five year old with an awesome prize. My Tita Tane made this batch using regular rice and sticky rice. Cook the rice using double the water recommended for regular rice cooking and add cocoa powder and sugar. Use unsweetened cocoa powder so you can control the sweetness yourself. Stir until a porridge consistency and the rice is cooked. Top it all with evaporated milk – we used the PI-staple, Alaska brand.

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There is a Max’s Restaurant in San Francisco but if you ask anybody who is anybody they will tell you that it’s not as good as the original restos in the Philippines. This particular meal came after a mondo shopping expedition to the Mall of Asia in Pasay. Built on reclaimed land, it is the sixth largest mall in the world. Even for the seasoned shopper like myself, it was a bit overwhelming. Anywho, back to the food.

We ordered one of the family meals that is enough for 10 people and costs about P3,000. That’s roughly USD 66 depending on the exchange rate. Not bad at all if you are feeding 10 people. Here’s what you get:

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Welcome home to me!

After a week and a half in India, I finally found myself in our family house in Imus, Cavite, Philippines. My parents were also in town and my Mom wanted to make sure that I got good ol’ home cooking after my travels in India. I’ve featured this meal before so I won’t go into the details but we had fried tilapia and ginisang monggo with rice. Lovely, soft, sticky, Jasmine rice. The tilapia in the Philippines usually comes from fish farms that you can find all over the place (in Tagalog: palaisdahan – did I spell that right?). Usually they are smaller than the gigantor tilapia that you get in the US. Somehow this makes them a lil’ tastier.

Up ahead are a gillion posts about airplane food, Indian food, Filipino food, Singaporean food, snacks, fruits…. the list goes on and on.