The set menu for that day was:

Freshly baked bread with butter. Nothing can go wrong with bread and butter.

Beef Goulash Soup Horseradish Potato Gnocchi. It appeared oily (look at the sides of the dish) and came from a can. The beef cubes were tender, the soup was ok despite its appearance.

Chilled Asparagus, Air-dried Ham, and Spiced Pear Chutney. I am not hot about vegetables, but this dish is good. Asparagus tastes like kamote (that’s just me), the ham was thin (heck, I first thought it was a vegetable, like a pink-colored cabbage), and the pear was sweet (tasted like sweetened white beans). I liked this dish.

Grilled and Poached Breast of Chicken on Lemon and Thyme Fondant Potatoes Spinach and Mushroom Cream Jus. The grilled chicken was heaven, and combined with the mushroom sauce, it was marvelous. It was not dry and quite tasty. If you are not a fan of spinach (it looked ugly), better eat it together with the chicken.

For the vegetarian, there was Pave of Salmon with Braised Baby Gem Lettuce, Five Spice Lentils and Bacon Sauce. Haven’t tried it; obviously you can’t have both.

Dessert is flourless chocolate cake with citrus Anglaise. As I had to go, haven’t tasted this.

If you can afford it, you should consider Renaissance Hotel. And no, this is not a sponsored post.

Ingredients:

• 1/2 kilo pork (preferably with skin), cubed
• 1 garlic, chopped
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 to 3 red bell peppers, julienned
• 2 tbsp (or more) paprika powder
• juice of 1 lemon
• cooking oil (preferably olive)
• water (or white wine, if you have some extra)
• salt, to taste
• 1 tsp dried chili flakes
• olives and ginger powder (optional)

1. Heat oil in a pan or wok over high heat (better to use a thick-walled wok for even heating). Use enough oil so that you can saute the vegetables and brown the pork. When the oil is hot throw in the chili flakes (I used a leftover packet of chili from Yellow Cab). You can also used coarsely ground black pepper.

2. Saute the onion and garlic until they start to soften. Add the bell peppers and continue sauteing for around two or three minutes, or until you get the temperature in the wok back up.

3. Add the pork and stir everything around. Continue cooking over high heat until the pork is lightly brown. Stir from time to time for even cooking.

4. After the pork browns add the salt, paprika powder, and lemon juice. Stir. This is also the time to add the ginger powder and olives. Mix well so that the spices are evenly distributed and the pork is coated.

5. Add enough water to cover everything and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to medium and let the pork braise for about an hour, or until the water reduces to a sauce. Stir occasionally (like during commercial breaks).

As it is, this sweet-spicy stew can be served with steamed rice and some greens. Serves three to four.

This dish, however, is best served after the flavours strengthen overnight in the ref. Place enough pork, vegetables, and sauce in a deep oven-safe dish and broil on high. When the top part browns and the sauce sizzles stir the pork around for even browning. Finally, chuck in a raw egg during the last few minutes of heating and continue broiling until the egg becomes opaque. The bland egg will complement the strongly-flavoured sauce.

I run what could be described as a typical bachelor (or bachelorette) kitchen. This would be the kitchen of a single-person household, the occupant mostly cooking for himself plus the occasional visitor. ”Home” cooking (if any) is reserved for weekends, while weekday cooking mainly consists of frying, reheating, or opening packages.  Space is of a premium, so most equipment will have be stowable (thus, a galley), and a lot of the items would be hand-me-downs from family or friends. Here’s a rundown of my gear:

1. convection oven (Imarflex Turbo Broiler, c. early 80’s)
2. microwave oven (Chefmaster, 1988)
3. rice cooker (3D, c. early 90’s)
4. electric stove (Asahi, 2004)

That’s it. As you can see, my equipment is very limited and most are more than 15 years old. It’s true what they say though– the older models are sturdier. Even my electric stove is old school: all metal with three coils that turn red (one for each setting).  With these simple equipment I’ve cooked quite a few dishes, some more edible than others, but all of them satisfying.  Dishes that are a home-made break from the bachelor staples of fried cured meats (and eggs), canned goods, instant dinners, and takeaways.

All the stuff I make is bachelor friendly, sticking to dishes that can be made quickly, are amenable to storing and reheating, and don’t require a culinary arts diploma.  I already have a bunch of recipes in my other blog– 10 at last count– all of which can be made using my simple gear.  I’ll be posting similar recipes here, along with the occasional review and trivia.  Recipes to use when Spanish sardines, spam and eggs, and frozen sisig don’t quite cut it anymore.

My theory is that rice is a versatile food. Heck, just add anything to eat and it is already eatable. Let me count the things you can do with it. We’ll concentrate on leftover rice, as most bachelors are prone to have leftovers (if they could cook at all; well, they could buy cooked rice at the corner carinderia).

Of course, there’s the stir-fry rice, which most of us eat in the mornings. It is the best way to deal with leftover rice from last night. My mom cooks rice with the mornings in mind - she makes sure there is enough leftover to stir fry the next morning.

Stir-fry rice is in itself a versatile meal. So versatile in fact that it led to a cottage industry - those tapsilog place of yore. Anyway, in its simplest form (or the base form), you have rice stir fried in oil, with garlic and salt. You will want to have at least a fried egg or hotdog to go with it. Or, you can experiment and add stuff to it; heck, you can make a complete meal of out the base form by just adding food stuff. One simple way of doing this is adding what’s on the ref. My dad usually adds hotdogs, scrambled eggs, and ham. First he fries the chopped hotdogs, then the scrambled egg (which is chopped into cubes later), and the ham (chopped into cubes also). Then he proceeds to the rice: garlic first in the wok, then the rice, some stirring, salt, more stirring, the hotdogs-egg-ham, some more stirring, and voila.

That is actually a variation of the so-called yang chow fried rice. You can make a variation out of it by adding more ingredients to it, like peas, corned beef, onions, longanisa, tapa, leftover fried pork chop, anything. Instead of using cooking oil, you can use butter or margarine. My uncle used to fry rice using Star margarine, obviously inspired by that Star Rice commercial of theirs.

If you have leftover paksiw na pata, here’s a suggestion: bring it to a simmer until it dries. Get the meat and the fat out of the bones, cut them into strips or cubes, then add it to your fried rice. Yummy. You can also do this with leftover adobo.

I used to add liquid seasoning or oyster sauce while frying rice, but this led to the rice sticking to the pan. So what you should do is to add this later, when you have turned off the stove.

Enough of fried rice and let’s proceed to what I call poor man’s rice. There are several variations to this, but there are two that I had already tried. One is adding a little cooking oil and soy sauce to the rice, then mixed thoroughly. That in itself is a variation of rice and salt that poor people eat in very hard times. (It is good to try it to get a sense of how poor people subsist on minimum wage.) There’s my kuya’s favorite: adding condensed milk to rice. Add a generous amount, and then mix. Meal and dessert all in one!

If you have cooked longanisa or tocino, you can do what my other brother does: he mashes rice into the pan where longanisa or tocino was cooked. Sweet and salty and oily, but he likes it.

That’s just for starters. There’s a lot of things you can do with rice. Do you have any quick-and-easy rice recipe? Share them in the comments.

What is the perfect rainy day snack?

Leave your answer at the comments.

• Stuff from McDonald’s;
• Intriguing stuff passed off as dim sum at the a’la carte “flea market” behind St. Francis Square;
• Ingestables from the office pantry;
• Whatever I fancy at a Happy Balls or Waffle Time at an MRT station;
• Cigarettes (yes, it’s food if it fills your stomach).

I can pass myself off as an alcoholic. A few weeks ago during a team gathering activity at Metrowalk (read: drinking session), I ended up making “absinthe” out of a cold glass of San Miguel Super Dry and a blue Vodka Cruiser. Tasted pretty damn good. Add to that a dozen more bottles of beer and some hard cocktails, and you have a recipe for disaster. Drunk? Like heck I was: I actually asked the taxi driver to stop somewhere near Vasra on my way home just so that I could vomit.

Shows you what kind of a “food blogger” - and a person - I am.

When you need to get work done, there’s always caffeine. I’m a Baguio boy, so I should be extremely familiar with hot coffee. The only problem is that when you live in a place as hot as Manila, you want everything with ice in it. So I ended up making the old reliable Wake-Up Juice back in the days of my thesis. It’s so easy to make, too:

• A can of Coke. Regular, not Light, not Coke Zero, and definitely not Pepsi.
• A pack of C4 Energy Powder Drink. Twice the caffeine. Tastes like cola.

Procedure: mix together in a glass or tumbler. Quaff.

Any general-practice physician, gastroenterologist, or psychiatrist will tell you that this is 330 milliliters and four grams of caffeinated, carbonated suicide. Which is the whole point.

Corporate emo at its finest.

The world’s just waiting for someone to write a book explaining how Thai food is really, the perfect health food because there don’t seem to be many obese or even pot-bellied people in Thailand, and yet they eat out a lot. I’ve written, too, on how we could learn a thing or two from the Thais about standardizing our food and making it appealing to tourists, but that’s another story.

For cheap Thai eats, there’s Som’s in Makati which is superior to Som’s on Tomas Morato, but both have the unfortunate tendency to be uneven and keep erring on the side of putting too much sugar in their curries (perhaps this has been noticed by others, hence the debate on authenticity), though I tend to like their green curry. The prices are delightfully low, but the portions also tend to me at times, microscopic (this is particularly irritating when it comes to the catfish and green mango salad).

So about two weeks back we ate ate at Silk, the Thai restaurant in Serendra (what is it with these disease-sounding Ayala Malls lately? Serendra sounds like it’s something you get from deranged howler monkeys while TriNoMa sounds like something that requires a barium enema to cure). It’s one of the prettier restaurants, the staff are efficient, the prices mmmkay…

Tom Yum avoided the sin of being sugary, and the shrimp wasn’t tough. This was a superior Tom Yum.

Soft shell crab, deep fried, with a tamarind and mango sauce, if I recall correctly. Absolutely and unqualifiedly delicious! That was a happy bunch of molting crabs, I can tell ya. This dish alone made the restaurant visit worth it.

The cholesterol special was some sort of tamarind-infused pork rib thing. This is what inihaw, which normally leaves me cold, should aspire to. This pig must have been a happy camper, too. I generally dislike inihaw because it tends to leave the meat or fish or whatever tasting like it was incinerated on coals and I end up wondering if consuming so much charcoal will lead to colon cancer one day. But these ribs were, to start with, fatty, flavorful, tender, not too charcoal-infused, and with a delicate tamarind flavor that was quite charming.

Alas, the green curry was… uninspired.

This is a place with promise, I think it requires a second visit before a permanent verdict can be rendered. I’m not sold on the idea of Thai food being suitable for a date place (too many accidents waiting to happen) but it seemed to me the most romantic-looking restaurant in Serendra.

.

How do you deal with garlic breath after eating?

But there is a little Imelda in all of us. There are times we just want to eat, and eat well.

There has to be a place which serves premium meat and which uses the best available ingredients, but which charges as reasonably as possible. For some time now, I’ve considered that place to be Arya Persian Restaurant in Greenhills. In its early days, the restaurant was a bit over the top -the waitstaff called customers “Your Majesty”- but having abandoned its “every-customer-a-Shah” gimmick, it settled down to being a nice place to eat. See E. Xsaltire’s Site for a more scientific review of the place. Until quite recently, the only thing wrong with the place was that it had a rather confusing menu, but since I usually ordered the same thing, that wasn’t much of a problem.

They serve really delicious free peanuts, the slightly-but-not-too greasy kind, and slightly spicy. You gotta love a place that starts you off with free spicy peanuts.

And after years of only knowing the rather anemic Hummus of Behrouz, it was a delight to discover the Hummus at Arya (their Moutabal is the best, too: slightly garlicky) which I still think is the best Hummus around. I’d eaten most of the Hummus before I remembered to take this photo, so sorry. The gloop in the dish is an onion concoction called Khask Badenjan which is normally quite tasty, but more on this anon.

But my main addiction has been their lamb shish kebab, which I usually had with fluffy rice. The waitstaff offer to take your tomatoes and mash them for you, which pleases some customers.

Aside from their lamb shish kebab being of high quality lamb, it’s the garlic sauce of the place that really got me hooked. When it comes to some sauces my inner Imelda comes out and moderation is not my idea of consumption. Arya’s lamb shish kebab, cut up into little cubes, doused with garlic sauce, then doused again so they absorb as much sauce as possible, and then periodically re-doused as you eat it with the by-now-mashed roasted tomatoes, is heaven!

And seriously, you have to adore a cuisine that puts dollops of butter on its rice. Everyone should put butter on their rice. If it’s Basmati rice.

And the other speciality that I like very much is Mahiche Polo, which is a lamb shank in some sort of spicy gloop, normally quite tasty (the yellow Basmati rice above is the partner of this dish; the Basmati you get with the shish kebab is the white kind but also with a lovely dollop of butter). Returning to the issue I hinted at with the Khask Badenjan photo, on the night we dined at Arya, most of the food went wrong.

Terribly, awfully, wrong. Shockingly so. The Khask Badenjan was off in terms of its flavor, resembling, for some reason, a packet of Lipton Onion Soup mix moistened with a little water; my kebab was a pale color and, I was horrified to observe, tasted more like Caldereta than a kebab (quite edible anyway which is why I consumed it; put enough lovely garlic sauce on anything, I guess…), and the Mahiche Polo’s gloop was hardly gloopy, indeed, rather soupy, and lacking in flavor.

My companions were quite disgruntled and my loyalty to the restaurant at issue, when the owner strolled by we buttonholed him and he proceeded to debate us on our critique, admitting the Khask Badenjian was, to put it mildly, inferior, yet highly defensive about the Mahiche Polo, whose unsatisfactory condition he couldn’t blame on the kitchen as he prepares it himself. He was frankly skeptical of my complaint about the lamb kebab and in the end, he said we’d have to come back and see if the standards had really deteriorated.

He did send us a plate of watermelon by way of thanks for the input, though.

I haven’t been back since, but in the meantime, my offended companions brought me to Cyma Estiatorio (both the one in Greenbelt and at TriNoMa) where I kept having a Malu Fernandez Moment whenever the waiters all got together and bellowed “OOOOOO-H-PAAAAH!!!!!” to commemorate the serving of some signature dish.

The appetizer platter (Pikilia it’s called?) is a crowd-pleaser. Hummus! Cheese with a pepper! Cucumber and yogurt! Mashed eggplant with diced tomatoes! And a radioactively pink fish roe thingy! How could you go wrong? With lots of whole wheat pita bread!

And here, ladies and germs, is what a lamb shish kebab ought to look like. Compare its color with the color of the unfortunate lamb shish kebab I last had at Arya. This is consistently good, I’ve had it seven times already and it’s been good each time and in either branch.

No one has been able to tell me an antidote for the unfortunate garlic breath both restaurants inspires, though.

(This is my first post here, and I thank Arbet for granting me the honor although, technically, I’m not a bachelor anymore. Comic credit:

Of course, of prime consideration is budget. It might occur to him to scrimp on cooking stuff because he’d probably use the stuff only half the time (eating out and, well, microwaving stuff on the other half). But he only needs to remind himself that a.) he’s playing with fire and b.) he’s dealing with stuff he puts in his mouth to realize that being cheap with kitchen stuff isn’t worth the risk.

Of course I learned part of this lesson the hard way.

The only stuff I didn’t scrimp on was the stove. While I didn’t get an expensive La Germania, I took a Nikon dual-burner for 750 pesos and a 400+ peso gas regulator. Fire is something I really didn’t even want to entertain — but I didn’t want to get an electric stove either (curse you Meralco!). I also got a model with automatic ignition — didn’t want to bother with lighters, lighter fluid, and matches anyway.

The pots and pans were a different story. I found these cheap China-made pans in SM Hypermarket that sold for 275 pesos. That’s for 20″, 24″, and 28″ frying pans. I also got a stainless steel pot, a nylon turner/spatula (the one you use for frying), a steel can opener and a steel ladle. I got the cheapest ones I could find. I’m all set.

First sign of trouble came with the can opener. It just wasn’t… sharp enough. It cut through the can on the first “bite” came through fine, but when you turned the handle it just went up the can cover and made a shallow dent.

Crap. I borrowed a can opener from a neighbor just to be able to eat breakfast.

A few weeks later and it was evident just how cheap the pans and the turner were. Plastic flakes was coming off of the turner’s edge, and the non-stick coating on the small and medium pans were mottling after just a few days use. The worst story was the large 28″ pan. The moment I picked it up filled with food, the pan handle just gave. And that was the first time that pan was used.

Crap! Good thing the food did not spill.

When the non-stick material on the cheap pans just whittled away after a few weeks, I finally gave them up and decided to get real pans. Good thing some branded, Teflon coated pans were on sale in SM. Got thicker pans with real Teflon on them for half the price. Great. All of the cheap China pans were retired.

But there’s no such thing as a coincidence, and one of the Teflon pans revealed its reason to come into my kitchen a few weeks later.

I woke up a little earlier than usual, and decided to have the longganisa that I requested that had come from Pangasinan. I got a Teflon pan, put water in it, brought the water to a boil, put in the longganisa. Then, for some reason, I put down the nylon turner ON the pan’s edge, and sat down, waiting.

And fell asleep.

Shit happens when you mix cooking and sleep, of course.

I woke up with the loud sizzling on the pan and the stench of burning plastic. SHIT. I stood up and hurried to the stove to find the nylon turner melted three fourths of its way through the pan’s edge. SHIT! I turned the fire off, picked pan and turner, hurried to the sink and turned on the water.

It was too late. Sticky, molten plastic had trickled down both the inner and outer surface of the pan, with small particles dribbling within the oil that was supposed to cook my breakfast/baon. The turner was beyond repair, and I had lost 8 pieces of absolutely delicious but carcinogen-coated longganisa. Worse, a thick blob of plastic stuck itself on a 500 peso frying pan!

Frustrated, I threw the turner and longganisa in the trash, and poured dishwashing liquid on the pan. Hoping against hope, I scrubbed on the cooking surface of the pan — and just like that, the blob of hardened plastic detached itself from the cooking surface. I was surprised, but then it occurred to me: Teflon was supposed to do this, that is, keep stuff from sticking to it permanently. And that’s why it’s that expensive.

Unfortunately the plastic that dried on the outer surface of the pan won’t come off as easily. It continues to cling to the pan as a reminder of that whole disaster.

I now use a stainless steel turner, making sure I do not scrape the Teflon surface too hard.