Don’t ask me how much we paid for dinner.
J'aime la France: qu'ils mangent du foie gras
J'aime la France: la recherche du goût
If there was a Popeye’s chicken, would I eat there? For sure. But we steered clear of fast-food (we checked the menu of Burger King and Maccas if there was a local entry, something like a foie gras burger with truffle shavings but there wasn’t any so..) as well as ridiculous items such as $NZ 50 burger and fries. We know there’s inflation, but that’s fancy hotel inflation.
So now we know (which Google didn’t tell us) that if you find yourself in any of those hotels on that narrow strip of white-sand beach, food is $$$$$.
I don’t mind pricy food- if that $50 burger had real truffle shavings on it or was served with a tablespoon of caviar on the side, I would’ve tried it out once.
J'aime la France: jour deux
We woke up early to watch the Apple Developer’s Conference where they announced new MacBook Airs. terribly expensive and unnecessarily powerful Mac Pros and my next terribly expensive purchase, Vision Pros. This means that I do need to get used to using contact lenses, because if I don’t, I would have to buy terribly expensive extras in the form of Zeiss made prescription lens inserts in order to see through the damned things.
The conference made us hungry and depressed ($$$$) so off we went for buffet breakfast and it was spectacular. There was a pastry station with petite almond madeleines so freshly made, they felt like a dog’s tongue on your skin, warm and sticky. There was the usual hot-food station with spicy breakfast chipolatas, scrambled eggs, bacon, hashbrowns and a food server who did crepes made to order. There was the cereal-granola-fresh fruit-yogurt (TWELVE kinds including genuine Swedish langfil) station which I’ve always ignored; the pastry station with 10 kinds of croissants, danishes and specialist breads. And there was even an ‘Asian’ station where you could create either noodles or congee with different toppings.
The morning feed was good because on our walk exploring the eastern side of the city, restaurant food was ridiculously expensive. We ordered a galette to share only because we didn’t know how big it was and it was the first time I had one that had curry and rice as a filling.
But coffee was a disappointment- I thought this was a culture that was big on coffee?
We found another superarket and decided to do DIY dinner- a baguette, a good bar of butter, a pate and a rillette and a block of cheese.
J'aime la France
Today’s expenses:
1270 F for macarons
680 F for cappucino
chips and water ? F
250 F (2) cannelle
First we went to the beach. In the distance, we could see an ever shifting curtain of rain. It could come or it won’t, but we did bring our umbrellas. There was a long narrow wharf and midway, Sam got anxious. It wasn’t rickety but it was gappy. The water below was really clear and blue.
I couldn’t tell when the buildings were made. The Hilton looked like the buildings in Muriel’s Wedding and a quick Google search showed that the movie was made in the 90s, so there you go. But the streets all over the city were in a state of repair and we had to walk our way through a maze of orange cones. Doing pedestrian crossings felt like Russian roulette and finally, we found a supermarket.
We were stumped. We wanted cheese, butter, ice-cream and sorbet. but it was at least 45 minutes walking back to the hotel, so…..
Everyone literally had a baguette under their arm. The bread section held different sorts and we wanted to just stand there and smell it. We figured, we needed a car and then we’d go crazy shopping. So we’ll be back.
Darkness fell fast just like as it was back home. The restaurants were half-empty and we were all Frenched out asking questions so we just went back to the hotel.
We opened the courtesy bottle of brut champagne (an Armand de Brignac) and had it with bags of Lay’s potato chips. That was dinner done.
Tapioca pudding
Can’t remember if we were kids or actually a bit older, but one day, our mother made tapioca pudding. We absolutely loved it, and she never made it again.
So it was that singular event that made us- me at least- look for it ever since. And who knew that it was just really tapioca (I believe she used a boxed one from the States). Funny thing is to this day, she only half-remembers it, but then she wasn’t really into cooking when we were growing up. I saw a pack at the Asian store, and said to myself, let’s make it and I did and it was exactly as I remembered it. Funny that.
Online articles say it’s a bitch to cook, but not really. Watch over it as much as you could (boil a cup of the tapioca in about 4-5 cups of water) letting it simmer just until the whiteness in the middle of the pearls fades to the point of becoming invisible.
Turn off the heat and let it cook in the heat a bit before putting into the fridge after it’s cooled. I did a mixture of cream and condensed milk. It will be wanting for more sweetness but up to you if you want to add more sweetener.
You can put any fruit in it and I remember the version my mom made used pineapple chunks so that’s what I did, as well as mango.
Cheat Sisig
I mentioned in our family group chat that Matt’s birthday was coming up and that his usual request in lieu of a gift was tons of sisig. No problem- you could buy pig heads online now for like $6. However, I wasn’t happy with the one I made last year; it just didn’t taste right (Matt was fine with it though).
Don’t get me wrong- I’m a sisig connoisseur. I’ve had every kind of sisig you can imagine (even a horrible one with heaps of ginger in it). My favorite one still remains this version that is basically boiled to almost the consistency of jelly and then cooked on a hot plate with a sauce made entirely of pig’s brain and mayo (the joys of fat).
And I could make it with my eyes closed too, but then perhaps, something gets lost when you’re making it en masse. Anyhow, will see how it goes this time.
All the sisig talk made me suddenly crave for sisig and I just remembered that 1) I had a pack of pork mince in the freezer and 2) I watched this video on a Filipina foodie’s TikTok account where she made ‘cheat sisig’ using- you guessed it- pork mince.
I didn’t have instant sisig mix which is good by the way, so I just used a mixture of lemon juice, cane vinegar, mayo and Kikkoman.
You need to put the mince under a really hot grill first to get the water out of it. Drain it and get your skillet or hot plate hot. Fry garlic and scallions, add butter and then mince. Don’t move it around too much so that it gets a good sear. Add the sour juices, mayo and soy sauce. Egg on top is optional.
Mince wouldn’t really have a lot of visible fat so it could taste a bit dry, but with hot rice, it’s good enough to be the real thing. Almost- but it doesn't matter because I’m making the real thing next week.
Anzac Sunday (2023)
Eats
Food made with love
It’s always comforting to go to a place you’ve never been (this little town called Te Aroha) and find food and cooking that’s new and heartfelt. People who serve good food are people you could trust I think. There’s a kinship there even if all you’ll ever exchange with each other is the hello you utter when you walk in, and the smile you leave when you’ve paid the bill.
Flavours
I don’t like eating just for quantity. Which is why I hate carb-laden meals; you keep chasing a flavour, but you never quite catch it. Things like pizza, pasta, potato salad, and noodles. When I was a child, the only time I ate a lot of rice was when we had something like fried pork chops, and I basted my rice with the fat that was rendered from the pork and seasoned it with fish sauce. Salty and umami locked together, the silky feel of the fat in your mouth, you wanted it again and again and again.
Sad to say, I have never again dared to eat this as an adult -scared for my heart and and my veins - after my mother’s horror stories of people she knew collapsing right after eating such meals. But I’ve also learned a very adult skill- self-regulation. For how can you continue to enjoy dishes like salty adobo, pork binagoongan, curry, Filipino fried-chicken, kare-kare, bopis if you omitted the rice? But I’m more focused now on the flavour and to eat slowly. Now, I never eat more than a cup of rice with these dishes and I’m still satisfied afterwards. When faced with lechon or pork-belly, I can omit the rice altogether as long as there’s a vegetable side-dish.
The weight of a big meal is, well, heavy. The kids and I had Korean BBQ night at home on a Monday and you realise afterwards that you duped yourself into thinking that a lot of little things- pork belly, wagyu strips, kimchi, vermicelli- amounted to a little thing. But this is the effect of a buffet- you just carry on cooking and eating and cooking and eating.I was literally still burping the next day.
But today for dinner, I assembled one of my favourite easy meals- freshly cooked rice, kimchi, one duck egg and two normal eggs- yolks still runny- showered with spicy furikake. It’s a lot of little things, but it all amounts to flavours- the tangy bite of the kimchi, the velvety yolk with a hint of sesame and the sharp, cheddar-cheese like saltiness of the duck-egg.
Sunday's Kahuku style shrimps
I must say I’ve been craving shrimps for the longest time and I’ve tried a number of products, none of which were satisfying until I found farm-raised Ecuadorian shrimps. SHRIMP ALL THE WAY FROM ECUADOR!
But a quick Google search reveals something surprising: Ecuador is the world’s 2nd largest producer of (sustainable) shrimp, so there.
Since these were raw and still in their shell, I thought that the perfect style of cooking them was Kahuku style- a favorite local dish in the Hawaiian island of Oahu, popularized by a string of shrimp trucks (or stands) found in and around Oahu's Kahuku community. We had this when we were in Hawaii and have been replicating it ever since.
There’s a million recipes of it and this is how I made it:
The wondrous beauty of a deboned whole chicken
For deep frying, I buy supermarket chicken. If it still has skin on, it’s cheaper so this is what I get and mostly boneless thighs. Sometimes the bone-in chicken thighs are even cheaper so I get that instead. I’ve learned how to roughly take out the bone from a thigh using kitchen shears which is way faster and safer than a knife.
I discovered a whole- size 13 (around 1 to 1.1kilos, $26.99)- deboned chicken from the neatmeatstore and it has sat in our freezer for a bit and I’ve only taken it out yesterday. Frankly, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Stupidly, I was somewhat expecting it to be whole, as if the bones had magically dissolved underneath and leaving behind a kind of ‘chicken dress’.
But you can see that it isn’t so, and different really from like say, a chicken deboned for when you make a chicken galantine, at least the way we make it back in the Philippines. The galantine chicken is pretty much whole and the wings are left intact on the sides along with the drumsticks.
But this one has the leg and wing bones expertly snipped out. I guess one can technically sew it back together to hold the filling if you wanted to make a galantine, but that would be for another day.
It’s on my To-Try-And-Master list: deboning a chicken.
The chicken is free-range and ethically sourced, and while I can’t tell the difference between a free-range egg from a barn or cage raised one, I can tell with the chicken. It tastes cleaner, tastier and when you poach it, which is my preferred cooking method for this kind of chicken, there is hardly ever any scum in the broth.
This chicken gives me three meals (everyone here is dieting).
How much of your daily life is really yours?
It’s beginning to dawn on me, that Saturday is the only day that I get full possession of my life.
I wake up anytime I want and have ditched setting alarms. If I wake up at noon, then so be it (I never do). I do a quick check of the phone charging overnight on my bedside table. If it’s nothing urgent, I just leave it there. I avoid reacting to the news. If a comet had crashed into the earth in the middle of the night, there’s nothing we could have done. We’ll get painlessly pulverised in our sleep hopefully, and be mercifully eternally bound in whatever dreams we’re in.
Coffee. Then another coffee. A great bowel movement. Shower. I put on my face- serum, moisturiser, sunscreen if we needed to go out somewhere. Unlike weekdays where I don’t eat any breakfast, we either eat out or have some old favourites like Spam and rice, pancakes, a well-buttered toast.
Then it’s chores. The week’s laundry in batches; coloreds, whites and delicates. There is some sort of weird comfort in the washing cycle- wash, soak, rinse, spin. I love doing laundry because it echoes life. I’m perpetually organising my clothes, my shoes. I think of the week ahead and mentally put together outfits. I feel that I have too much. I also feel that I never seem to have enough.
I think about dinner because more than likely, there is something that I’d like to eat, something I’d like to cook that I’ve been planning for the whole week.
For this Saturday, it’s a simple roast chicken but done the way this restaurant in Paris does it. They only use a small portion of the breast and serve it with a hefty shaving of black truffles and bearnaise sauce.
I won’t be putting shaved truffles on it, but I was thinking of making bearnaise sauce (you can check out a YouTube video of how Le Clarence makes its roast chicken here).
But by midday, I’d changed my mind about the bearnaise sauce; we had gone to the Asian store, but I had completely forgotten to get white wine vinegar and shallots. Maybe some other time then.
The only thing unusual with the way the restaurant roasts its chicken is that it’s placed inside a dutch casserole and then placed in the oven; it’s then taken out at regular intervals where it’s basted with its own juices. Towards the end when it has browned, you put in butter, garlic cloves and fresh rosemary, basting it again over and over until it’s done.
This forces me to always check the clock.
The done part was about 45 minutes more than the usual way I roast chicken. I make a salad out of leftover romaine lettuce. I’ve taken out buns from the freezer and defrosted them. I make a normal gravy with chicken cubes and buttered roux. We start to eat at 6:15 pm, later than usual, but in the middle of summer, it feels more like noon.
The chicken is much more noticeable moist than usual though. It’s delicious actually though I detect a hint of bitterness from the rosemary; perhaps I put too much.
What next? I feel like doing something and automatically, I try to look for the time. It’s always, do I have enough time??
I stop myself and make a drink (gin and tonic, which I don’t normally do) instead.
There was actually more eating in January...
Japanese curry
I can’t remember how I discovered it. It might have been at a Japanese mart or an Asian store.
I like the thickness of it, the beef stew-like sauce but without all the effort of making an actual beef stew. Come to think of it, I might try making a beef one which I’ve never done. The protein here is chicken breasts (ugh, it always turns out to be tough- how do you make tender chicken breast pieces??).
Not all barbecues are made equal
Right off the bat, I went for the brisket and while it was good, we’ve had better (the brisket at Blue Ox Babe is superior).
And this is the thing with food places that focus on barbecued and grilled stuff; more often than not, you really go there for the heft and the quantity.
Nothing fills you up like really good protein. The sides are there just to serve as a palate bridge between meats. The ribs were good; the bacon-wrapped peppers filled with cream cheese were a revelation; the jalapeno-spiked Kransky sausages were a bit tough; the chicken wings had a nice tangy and sweet glaze; and the salmon we brought home nearly intact in a doggie bag. It felt like the odd man out in the group.
Matt was right; after a while, you were wanting for some rice!
MooMoo Smokehouse gets a 7 out of 10.
Tortang talonggggg
As a child, I probably wouldn’t have liked eggplant had it come in the form of something other than a torta (omelet). It would be adulthood when the eggplant, grilled until charred on the stove-top, mashed and dressed in nothing but vinegar, salt and pepper, became something sublime- a perfect foil to the salty, fatty richness of duck eggs (a combo that you can have with fish or pork or even chicken).
But as a child, anything fried was good, and to have meat, was even better. So the tortang talong was both, and it was also a vegetable, albeit one that didn’t have anything by way of substantial nutrients.
And when we grew up and could cook our own meals, being able to make the ‘perfect’ torta was a sign that the ‘baton had been passed down’ to you; that you passed the test that separated the so-so cooks from the capable ones. Our nanny was taught by my dad, but ironically, we had to learn it ourselves, and I did it by trial and error.
The requirement is simple- the eggplant has to hold the fillings in place (using the beaten eggs) and be in an acceptably regular shape. You get bonus points if the eggplant stem is intact and you can use it to transfer the omelet from the serving plate to your plate, without it breaking off. But I’m not fussed with this as the only reason why I keep it is for aesthetics; I like a lot of fillings so my tortas tend to be heavy and fat.
If you’re looking for a good recipe, try this one.
I’ve used shrimps as my filling, spiced up with Korean gochu jang. I also used FOUR EGGS (I’m currently dieting) which explains the round shape; the pan was literally filled up. I used the American eggplant as it’s currently cheaper. I wasn’t completely convinced that it would work, but it does; the flesh is more watery, but other than that, it’s virtually the same as the Chinese or Japanese variety that we’re familiar with.
The Weekend (eats) in images
Christmas treats from Pōhutukawa Pantry
#Cravings
Cotto
We had dinner out last Saturday for a friend’s birthday and when they said it was Italian (Cotto on Road), I was uhm like, carbs. And this is really by habit even if in truth, the Italian restaurants I’ve been to the last couple of years had a menu where you had heaps of non-pasta options.
And these were not after-thoughts either. Amano’s Hawkes Bay-sourced lamb shoulder is my go-to and is always excellent in whatever iteration. The prawns at posh local Andiamo prepared with a simple salsa verde and a confit potato side makes me want to ask the chef if they’ve been sourced fresh nearby because that’s how they taste (I haven’t though).
And of course at Cotto like most modern Italian restaurants, you don’t get a big bowl of spaghetti (though I wouldn’t mind one to be honest), but smaller, tasting plates.
