Eating a meme.

Screw the conventions of meme-related tagging: I was reading Burnt Lumpia this morning, and seeing the guy behind the blog help in perpetuating this meme activated my ‘Hey, me too!’ gland. That kinda sounds obscene. Anyway. If you want to do this too, hey, be my guest.

What were you cooking/baking ten years ago?
-- In college, I hardly ever cooked, let alone baked. I was so loserish that I couldn’t even do a decent sunny-side up. I only became an apostate of the ‘just add water’ culinary cult when Sandra and I started cooking together early this year.

What were you cooking/baking one year ago?
-- I sometimes brewed my own coffee. Yeeha.

Five snacks you enjoy:
-- Stinky cheese, especially Camembert.
-- Good onion rings; the ones they sell at Brother’s Burger is OK, but not great.
-- McDonald’s fries.
-- I really like Stik-O wafer sticks.
-- Fish balls, squid balls, kwek-kwek, and isaw at U.P.

Five recipes you know by heart:
-- My own version of ratatouille niçoise, a microadaptation of Sandra’s recipe.
-- Something moronically simple: cheese, tomato, and basil omelette.
-- Two variants of tomato-based pasta sauce—one bacon-intensive, the other tuna-heavy.
-- (Since I’m still trying to find my kitchen legs, I don’t really know too many recipes yet.)

Five culinary luxuries you would indulge in if you were a millionaire:
-- After reading Peter Kaminsky’s ‘Pig Perfect,’ I fantasized about having a house close to a Spanish dehesa and being sort of involved in raising pigs that will be turned into ibérico hams.
-- Less fantastic: unlimited supply of good bread, good cheese, and good butter. Rawr.
-- Twice-yearly eating trips abroad.
-- My own wine cellar!
-- A fully equipped kitchen.

Five foods you love to cook/bake:
-- (See ‘Five recipes you know by heart.’)
-- I love helping Sandra cook laksa.

Five foods you cannot/will not eat:
-- The only thing that comes to mind, or at least right now: deep-fried day-old chicks.

Five favorite culinary toys:
-- The Bodum French press Sandra gave me last Christmas.
-- I’m planning to get a good nonstick pan for my parents’ kitchen.
-- (I’m still a kitchen rookie, so I don’t have cool kitchen toys in my possession.)

Five dishes on your ‘last meal’ menu:
-- Sandra’s laksa.
-- Lamb chops, maybe vindaloo style.
-- Fresh lumpia.
-- Really good coffee; Gevalia Kaffe’s Arabica coffee from Popayán, Colombia, is wonderful.
-- Crème glacée from La Maison du Chocolat. I’m thinking of pouring hot coffee over the ice cream to make my own weird version of granita affogato. Then I could die.

Five happy food memories:
-- Cooking and eating tinapa-and-Guinness risotto with Sandra, June 2007. (Our anniversary! Yeh.)
-- Dinner at Le Pré Catelan, somewhere in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris, Spring 2006. The perfectly grilled lamb chops; the pea-foam soup; the endless supply of pinot noir and Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and some champagne variant from Moët et Chandon. I miss eating there because it’s highly likely it won’t happen again.
-- Drinking Singha beer on the sidewalk, Rajdamri Road, Bangkok, January 2005. After ten in the evening food vendors set up chairs and tables to serve beer and whatevs to locals and tourists. I was with an ABS-CBN Bicol producer and a U.P. student, drinking and talking. We were drunk, and we were sort of bitching about not having seen an elephant up close in our weeklong stay in the city. Then a baby elephant walked by, its trunk brushing against my shoulder. We were stunned.
-- Dinner with Sandra at the long-gone Gene’s Bistro on Mother Ignacia Street, Quezon City, sometime in 2000. I had paella; she had some puttanesca-like pasta dish, with lots of capers.
-- The very first time I had Beach House pork barbecue, June 1995. I was a freshman, and I was with my block mates. Good times, those.

The Official Takaw Mata Dining Room

This post is for Gina, who asked for it. Sort of.

This is where it all happens. Every month or so, we gather around a massive table that can accommodate nearly thirty diners. Draped with antique linen, the table is littered with silver candelabras that have gone without candles for more than two hundred years. The cutlery and china are kept on display in an André Charles Boulle–style étagère, made of black wood and gilded in bronze. The ceiling, painted by Eugène Appert, features a pale blue sky almost completely covered by gray and white clouds. Hanging over the table are huge chandeliers that look like crystal approximations of star systems, or maybe like painfully glowing clusters of myoma.

Then an army of French maids arrives, serving us grand cru wine, anally prepared and complexly presented meat and vegetable dishes, bowls containing permutations of the sauces mères, and desserts that are as delicious as they are beautiful: gastronomic and architectural wonders on tiny plates.

In between bites we talk about our colonies and the difficulty of ruling over savages, as well as our friends who lost their heads, literally, thanks to the guillotine.


In photo is the grand dining room of the Napoleon III apartments at the Musée du Louvre. Using a flash has made the photo look like crap.

origins of this eating club, plus notes on korean night

I picked up Claude Tayag’s book Food Tour last May, and found myself feeling hungry every time I read it. The man’s delight in and passion for food resonate in the anecdotes and descriptions he delivers with self-deprecating humor. For instance:

The next day, still heady from the previous day’s feast, we once again went foraging for our daily sustenance. Tough, but it’s a man’s job, I had to convince myself.

This time we headed to Otokor, the wet market just across Chatuchak. Here there was a lot of cooked dishes for takeout (everything from appetizers to desserts), mainly for locals with no time to cook dinner after work, and plenty of fruits sold at their local market prices. . .

Even though durians were not in season, they weren’t in short supply – there was plenty of the sweet, creamy variety available. There was also a lot of sweet, fleshy tamarinds being sold at P170 a kilo. . .

Most memorable were the barbecued chicken, sausages filled with sticky rice, fish cakes, steamed alimasag and grilled ulang, both oozing with fat, grilled scallops and fried catfish in a sweet syrupy sauce. For dessert, we had a pumpkin custard, some assorted mock miniature fruits and bean-filled crescents. . .

If most travellers come home with excess baggage, we came back with a slight limp due to the excess pounds and a couple of extra inches on our girths. I now have great difficulty stretching my hands open because of all the good (or bad) food we had. But I have no regrets.

(from "Street Sin in Bangkok," p.149)

No regrets. Attaboy! Flout the gout and seize the day, right along with the durian, the barbecued chicken, the sausages filled with sticky rice. Mmmm . . . getting hungry now. . .

Somewhere in the book he mentions meeting with his Thursday Eating Club. A bell rang in my brain: ting!ting!ting!ting! An eating club! Why not? It would be a great excuse to, well, eat. Also, my taste buds have been wanting an education. Most of us say we love to eat, and very often this means we like to gorge ourselves to groaning point. I told Mr. Scott this over text; he had revealed that he knew how to cook, was, in fact, preparing a Thai dinner for some friends the following evening; I had broached the idea of his giving me a cooking lesson, and that evolved into asking for a lesson in eating as well:

ME: I want to learn to savor and really taste the food.

MR. SCOTT: Oh – wow – very good! You mean you have gone so far without this talent and appreciation? :):)

ME: (determined to be genuine) Well, mostly I have a talent for greed at the dinner table. Or lunch table. Breakfast table. . .

Because Mr. Scott and I were, at that point, getting to know each other before our first eyeball, I started to worry about being too genuine too soon, particularly when his response to that confession took rather longer than to previous texts.

ME: (attempting damage control) You know, Filipinos are kind of a gluttonous people . . . you know . . .

In fact, it was taking a good amount of willpower on my part not to invite myself to that dinner he was preparing the following evening.

Mr. Scott was a perfect gentleman, and our eyeball pushed through. But I felt certain he had at least an MA in Taste Buds Living Their Purpose for Being; I did not ask him to the Eating Club.

Who would I invite to learn to eat with me?

I saw Sairo at the Ateneo one day. In my brain, I was thinking Don’t ask Sairo, don’t ask Sairo, she’s vegetarian. What would she eat at an Eating Club? The next second, I said, “Hey, I’m forming an Eating Club. Like to join?” And because Sairo loves life – see, she wants the animals to stay alive – she said yes. Three seconds – Don’t ask-Like to join?-Yes! So here we are.

Like Claude, I have no regrets.

I imagine I’ll need to log in more time on the Stairmaster.

Which is why I came half an hour after the appointed time on Korean night. It’s December, Christmas is coming, this goose might just get fat(ter). Please put in an hour on the stationary bike. Then proceed to Woorijib on Kalayaan Avenue, where they serve a heap of side dishes with every order – mildly spicy soybean sprouts, fermented wet kimchi (yum!), cubes of tofu in sweetish sauce, cucumber in chili sauce (hot cucumbers!).

Sairo is our authority on Korean food, and she and Paul pick the dishes for the evening. Sometime towards the end of the meal, I thought of asking for the menu again so I could look at the names of the food we ate, but I forgot. What I do remember: texture took centerstage this evening.

The One That Sairo Calls The Monk’s Soup

was salty -- Exie observed, salty in a bagoong-salty sort of way -- with an underlying mild bitterness. Wow, layers. If this soup were a television character, it would be . . . Can’t think of anyone off the top of my head, but Betty White comes to mind. Probably because she has played sweet, clueless ladies who turn out to be dangerous. Also, a salty person who is also bitter might not be an appealing character (but has got me thinking! This would be one complicated dude/dudette!) – in the Monk’s Soup, though, it made for pleasant discovery. As she ordered it, Sairo had explained it to us as being sort of a miso soup, although what it mainly had in common with miso was the tofu. This soup contained zucchini, beans (sitaw-like but thin, purplish), small green pepper, little fish (silver, eye open – I got a whole one), chili (I’m guessing here, but good chance of it since ‘most everything we ate featured the little red dots). [Can you tell I’m winging my education here.]

The One with the Fried Egg On Top

was the dish that Sairo and Paul most wanted to order, having tasted it before and loved it. The soybean sprouts and the rice tutong gave it a pleasing crunchiness mixed in with the sticky rice, the smooth purplish beans, the soft tofu cubes and fried egg, and the other veggies. We agreed that we enjoyed this dish the best.

The One with the Fresh Squid on Top

came with a bowl of two kinds of rice mixed together, white rice and purple rice, sticky and reminiscent of biko. The fresh squid sat on a mound of strips and shreds of carrot, lettuce, pears, singkamas, other vegetables, and can be described as a salad mixed with rice (well, we mixed the rice in). The veggies gave it crunch, the raw squid made it chewy, the sticky rice served as the bonding agent (tastier than Epoxy). (No, I have not tasted Epoxy.) Texture and freshness. We ate this last; I feel we could have eaten it first, though Sairo says the freshness of the dish would help to wash down all the chili, sesame and salt we had in the first twelve dishes (I counted 10 side dishes).

The One with All the Pictures

is Woorijib’s menu, and I am thankful for that. Next time I go there for more authentic Korean, I will look and squint, attempt recall and point to The One With A Fried Egg On Top.



It is four hours later. I feel the gases bloating my stomach. I think I know where they came from: Korean night of texture, strong flavors and spices, and the easy, lively company of friends.

No regrets, Claude.

restaurant wish list

so we--boss exie, gina, paul and moi--finally got together at muang thai to do what we do best--stuff our faces over marginally intelligent conversation. we then moved to the much-missed and ever reliable chocolate kiss at up's bahay ng alumni for some caffeine and sans rival and more talking. then paul and i walked in the rain for fifteen seconds then hailed a cab home.

can't wait to do that again, in other settings and with different food. some ideas:

1. korean food at woorijib on kalayaan ave, qc
2. indian food at assad grocery on u.n. ave, manila
3. french food with nuns and bongos at l'eau vive in asia, guanzon ave, paco
4. italian food at cosa nostra in malate
5. japanese food at any place in little tokyo, makati
6. chinese food somewhere in chinatown
7. that garden place in tagaytay
8. floral-scented turkish coffee at new jerusalem in manila
9. ghazal on mabini for halal food
10. vietnamese food (no idea where except the viet village in palawan, hahahaaa)

any more suggestions?