My college classmate, Angela, introduced me to Marmite, and I thought it was the most awful thing I ever tasted. She laughed at my reaction and relished her toast topped with this brown mash that didn’t even smell good.
Poon Choi, or the Big Bowl Feast, is a celebratory dish linked closely to the spring festival or the Chinese New Year.
On a recent trip to Baguio City, my friends and I had, for our first meal, a dish of wild rice. With its variety of textures and flavors, the dish was not only a real palate tickler, it also became a conversation piece.
There was a time, believe it or not, when the xiao long bao was fairly unknown outside China, and the few who tried to replicate it ended up with a forlorn, limp sac of dough bunched up around a meatball. The difference between that and this Shanghainese delicacy in all its glory is the subtle, cunning art of enclosing a mouthful of stock along with the minced pork in a wrapper that is thin yet elastic, so that it all bursts when bitten in a glorious draught of molten flavor.
My biggest problem when dining in any restaurant for the first time is scanning the menu and wanting to try most of the dishes on it. I go over each item, go back to those that could answer my craving for that moment, then ask what the specialties of the place are. This works for me.
AHA Chef Instructor Philip Golding shows how to prepare and cook Navarattan Pulao.
It’s difficult to say which is more worthy of opprobrium, pretentiousness and acting more sophisticated than one really is, or pretending to be more naïve than one actually is.
While in some countries fruit salads are made with fresh fruits, we Filipinos love making ours with canned fruit cocktail. Could it be because of our colonial heritage?
This diner visited two restaurants, each with a different ambiance, but was pleased that both offer food worthy of a second or even third visit. One is in Tagaytay amid old trees and shrubs that evoke a tapestry for an almost “Gone with the Wind” feel, while the other is located in the very busy Greenbelt 5 in Makati, always teeming with apparently hungry men and women, of various ages and calling.
The question will not make sense to someone who hasn’t been to Roberto’s (JM Basa Street) in Iloilo but the answer is awaited by those who have. This particular siopao is celebrated in this city. It’s the biggest of its kind in the restaurant (that includes the regular, jumbo and the King). As in chess, the Queen is the most prized because there isn’t a logical time for it to be there according to its fans. Contained within its dough that took years to perfect are boiled egg, Chinese sausage, bacon, chicken and pork adobo.
The latest in global fashion, beauty, and culture through a contemporary Filipino perspective.
