Market Manila

Mrs. MM and I dropped in at the Manila International Book Fair at the World Trade Center near Roxas Boulevard a few hours ago. I am always good for an hour or so at this fair, spending a good 75% of it at the Fully Booked booth. But horror of horrors, Fully Booked wasn’t participating this year, and a quick stroll around the fair lasted just 20 minutes and our view was that there was a pretty poor selection of books on offer this year. It was disappointing, in fact. Even the booths of large bookstores had the same old, same old stuff, with a few exceptions. Decent cookbooks were few and far between and while I normally manage to purchase at least half a dozen cookbooks at this fair, today I walked out with a single food magazine, purchased at 20% discount to normal retail price…

Read more…

I was rushing through the Metro Grocery yesterday and was thrilled with two salt finds. The first, and more unusual, are 4 pound boxes of Morton’s Ice Cream Salt at PHP105 a box. Marketed specifically for use with churn-style ice cream makers, (we have a classic white Mountain version that can make up to a gallon of ice cream), the salt helps make the ice melt and help the ice cream chill faster. Don’t ask me the science behind salt and ice but for some reason reactions result in that fantastic treat - ice cream. I have never seen Ice Cream Salt for sale here before and I just used to use regular native rock salt, but since these were on the shelves, I got a few boxes… Frankly, one could argue that salt is salt, so I can’t really tell you if there is any difference between this salt and the salt you get from Batangas but isn’t the packaging attractive? No seriously, salt and ice results in a cooler temperature than ice alone… and presumably the size and consistency of these granules were designed to help that salt/ice chemistry as best it can…

Read more…

THIS FOOD BLOG IS ON A SERIOUS DIET. I just stepped on the scale and was shocked, but I mean SHOCKED to read 189.9 pounds, or nearly 16 pounds heavier than my svelte James Bond post from the beaches of Coron last April or so. It sounds like the address of a bad FM radio station. Good grief, that is nearly a pound a week heavier or 500 extra calories a day since my infamous (and posted for only 12 hours) photograph a la Daniel Craig last April. Assuming I lose it at half the pace I gained it, that will take me well into 2008. How could this have happened? A three week trip to the foodie capital New York City? Followed by a 7,000 calorie day on Boracay’s main beach? Serious cutbacks in weekly workout sessions? A few days scarfing down every form of fried swine in Ilocos? A so far failed quest to perfect a puto recipe? Making nearly a hundred bottles of jam/jelly from scratch? Putting the deep fryer through its paces? Purchasing every sweet delicacy known to man at recent food fairs? Making 63,000 calories worth of desserts for my birthday dinner? Drinking a phenomenal line up of wines in the past 60 days? How? How? :(

Read more…

We took a quick roadtrip last Sunday to Carcar, Cebu, a 40 kilometer and roughly 1 hour drive to the South of the City of Cebu. We went ostensibly for a bit of historical sightseeing, but really we just wanted to load up on the famous chicharon from Carcar… The original site of the town of Carcar was on the Cebu coastline and the settlement dates to pre-Colonial times. Frequently attacked by Muslim pirates, the town, orginally known as Sialo, was renamed Villadolid, but soon moved inland to get away from nasty pirate attacks by sea. The town was then renamed kabkad, after some ferns abundant in the area… then later, a Spanish priest decided to rename the place Carcar, after a town in Northern Spain.

Read more…

You can count this dish as one of my failed experiments, albeit still edible. The objective was to replicate a side order dish that we used to have at a fairly well-known Italian restaurant in New York in the 1980’s called Patsy’s… fried zucchini. What used to arrive at the table was a platter piled high with very thin matchsticks of zucchini, coated in a light batter and fried until crisp, but still blond (not too golden). It was sprinkled with generous amounts of salt and given a last minute spritz of freshly squeezed lemon just before eating it. It seemed an oxymoron to achieve a crisp outcome considering the high water content of a typical zucchini, but somehow they got it right most of the time. It was like eating healthy french fries; or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I had a strange hankering for this dish last week so I attempted to make my own version…

Read more…

These photos were taken just minutes ago. Since most folks in Luzon can’t see the full lunar eclipse this evening due to cloud cover, I am posting these photos from less cloudy Cebu. Taken from the top of a 24 storey building with a standard point and shoot canon camera, they are unaltered, unphotoshopped and colored as the camera captured the moon. I have been looking up at the sky for the past few hours but couldn’t find the moon, until about 25 minutes ago…

Read more…

Okay, this is the last of the tarts for a while. Since I had so much tart dough left over from the birthday celebrations, I made several dayap/lime curd tarts. And since we had guests over for dinner one evening, I decided to gussy up the tarts a bit with some fresh fruit. Fresh fruit tarts almost always stop me dead in my tracks when perusing the offerings in a good pastry shop. They are visually one of the most appealing desserts to look at. But JUST look at, I always find that eating them can be a royal mess. While a mixed fruit tart is stunning to look at, I actually prefer eating single fruit tarts like say a plum tart or a raspberry tart…

Read more…

Long-time readers of this blog know I absolutely adore our native dayap (limes). Dayap has a fragrance that is so clean, brisk, bracing and freshly citrusy. I purchased several kilos of dayap a while back and still had some in the fridge, so I decided to make some dayap curd and then try a dayap curd tart with the leftover dough from the lemon tarts I made last week. If you want a simple dayap tart, just change the lemon rind and juice in the lemon tart recipe to dayap zest and juice instead. Alternatively, you could try an even easier Dayap Pie a la Marketman that I featured a year or more ago…

Read more…