The Pinoy Food Photo Blog combines my family's love for eating and amateur photography.
Photography is also a hobby which I enjoy but am still learning. read more?
Several years ago, I attended the Center of Culinary Arts’ Kitchen Discovery Class, where I got an inside view of the kitchen and had a fine lunch at Cravings. I haven’t been back to Cravings since then, but last night I got to attend the grand launch of a Filipino restaurant from the same group. C2 Classic Cuisine on Missouri Street, North Greenhills used to be an events place, but they decided to include a restaurant that serves classic Filipino dishes with a contemporary twist.
C2 Classic Cuisine made me enjoy certain Filipino foods I’m normally not too crazy about. For instance, there’s lumpiang hubad – I rarely ever eat it because there’s too much vegetables and too little meat. But the semi-sweet garlic sauce was too good to resist, and I ended up wolfing down my greens and slowly picking at it after the meal was done. The fried lumpia wrapper chips also adds texture and a touch of unhealthiness to the dish, and gets delightfully mooshy when you leave it in the sauce for too long.
My nephew (the son of my late brother, Oscar) graduated tonight with a degree of AB Political Science from Ateneo de Manila. Good thing his mom got a vacation leave from her work as a Special Education Teacher in the US. It is a cause for celebration not only for my nephew’s graduation but for his mom as well. Being a single mom for the past 10 years, she deserves a hearty congratulations for bringing up a wonderful son. I did her a great favor by choosing Adarna Food & culture, knowing my sister-in-law missed Filipino cuisine. For a minimum order of 5,000 pesos, we were entitled to a private function room that held memorabilia of old Filipino movie actors and actresses.
Adarna Food & Culture reminds me of our past Filipino heritage. It was conceived by partners Beth Angsioco and Chef Giney Villar who desired to show Filipino antiques and different Filipino flavors around the Philippines. The restaurant is like a replica Beth Angsioco’s Adarna house and the first restaurant for AHA-graduate Chef Giney Villar. The food and ambiance inspires me to appreciate Filipino cuisine of the past.
The midsummer heat can be cruel and oppressive, often causing headaches and just plain old discomfort. There are three ways to find relief from the heat: you can either take a shower, stay in an air-conditioned room, or have an ice-cold dessert. Typically Filipinos have a dessert called halo-halo in the afternoon, where the heat is at its worst. Halo-halo is a combination of different preserved fruits and jellies mixed with crushed ice and milk. You can find halo-halo pretty much at any restaurant, but the Travel Cafe Philippines at Greenbelt 5 puts an interesting twist to this popular summer snack. Their buko pandan halo is a sweet combination of the party favorite buko pandan salad and halo-halo. Made up of pandan-flavored jelly, shredded young coconut, milk, and crushed ice, this refreshing dessert will definitely lower the temperature and make you forget the summer heat, at least for a while.
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Banana cue is a classic Filipino merienda you can usually buy from street vendors in the early afternoon. It is made out of fat bananas called saba, which is covered in brown sugar before being placed into a deep fryer. Once fried, the banana gets skewered onto a stick. The heat softens the banana while caramelizing the sugar, giving the banana a delicious, gooey texture within the crunchy coat of caramel. A stick of banana costs around ten pesos. Be careful when you bite into a banana cue fresh off the fryer – the hot banana may scorch your tongue! And watch out for the sharp end of the banana cue stick while you’re walking.
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Merienda is a snack that Filipinos usually take around mid- to late afternoon. Cold, rainy afternoons are perfect for food that’s piping hot, and beef mami (beef noodle soup) is the ideal merienda for days with cloudy skies. Large chunks of beef swim in this salty broth together with curly egg noodles, cabbage, carrot slices, spring onions, and slices of boiled egg. Beef mami can be found virtually everywhere, but the best-tasting ones are in carinderias and hole-in-the-wall eateries. (Perhaps it’s all that MSG?) The bowl of beef mami above was bought at the food court of the 168 shopping mall in Divisoria.
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