Archive for the ‘food trip’ Category
Filed under food trip, travel
My former colleagues took me to this restaurant that is said to be one of the best in Lexington one Friday night. We were discussing where to have dinner for a sort of farewell for me, and I told them I wanted to try something new. They brought me to Marikka’s, a German restaurant that serves authentic German cuisine.
It was the perfect choice, first, because I hadn’t eaten there. I eat out a lot whenever I am in Lexington (thanks to Jen who started that tradition for me) but I hadn’t gone there before. I also hadn’t tried any German food other than pretzels, which is pathetic because I realize now that German food is so good.
When we got to Marikka’s, I couldn’t read the food in the menu because they were all written in longish German names that were hard to pronounce, but I got some help from a colleague who had eaten there a lot of times. This was what I got:
That’s breaded turkey on my plate, plus mashed potatoes and a vegetable I forgot the name of grüne bohnen, or green vegetables. It was my first time to try turkey, and I loved it! It tasted like chicken, actually, but it’s a lot better.
Because I was so curious about German palate, my colleagues allowed me to try the food on their plates. The red thing you see above is rotkraut or sour red cabbage (yes, red cabbage!). It looks like corned beef, no?
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Filed under food trip, human interest, travel
Okay, this is not really a food “trip,” but a list of foods that caught my fancy in this land far, far away.
The day after I came in, someone in class passed around a plate full of what I thought were red twisted candles. LOL. My newfound friend, Sarah (who has a palmtop that I envy, I kept looking at it), explained that it is strawberry-flavored licorice candy. I tried it, and I liked it. It’s really long, like a candle; I just twisted it to look like a loop, as you see in the photo.
I haven’t seen this candy in our candy stores. Or am I just not exposed enough to sweets?
And here’s an oddly-shaped squash (to me, anyway) that I saw in another friend’s house, where we ate dinner last night. I thought this was some kind of American vegetable unheard of in Asia, and then he told me it was squash. The only squash I’ve seen before are the pumpkin-like ones we have back home.
Here’s another kind of squash I found in his backyard. (The man grows vegetables in his backyard and makes his beer at home!)
He said it is yellow squash. I thought it was yellow eggplant.
Afterwards, we had a sumptous dinner of grilled vegetables (which included the yellow squash in the photo), grilled beans, grilled corn, spicy chicken, and rice (yipee!) out in his patio. The vegetables were cut into slices,wrapped in foil, and then grilled. You rub some kind of Japanese paste to the corn and then grill it. Yummy!
It was my first real meal since Friday. As much as I appreciate expensive airline food, and as much as I like burgers, nothing beats having rice for a meal. Thanks a lot, Santa! 
Filed under food trip
I’m ashamed to admit that I lived in Manila for more than four years and never heard of dampas.
A dampa, I just learned, is a wet market where you can buy fresh seafood. Near it is a string of restaurants. The catch is that, you buy seafood from the market, and then choose from among the restaurants nearby to cook the seafood for you. You decide how the food would be cooked, of course. Much like the Sutukil in Cebu, but dampas are bigger.
My friend’s friend brought us to this dampa near the Mall of Asia the other day. It was past dinnertime and I was starving, but I enjoyed checking out the large array of crabs and fishes. The fishes were so big,and some were alive. I learned that there is a gay crab, and it is supposed to be the best to buy, because it is the meatiest.
The cooking charge is quite expensive, though. Prices range from P300 up. We paid P900 for a meal of Calamares and Sweet and Sour Pork. That excludes the price we paid for buying the fish and the squid outside.
I’m wondering where they got the fresh seafood, considering that Manila is a metropolis and there are no clean water bodies to fish from nearby. They couldn’t have gotten the fishes from as far as Cavite, or am I wrong?
Anyway, pictures! Click the photos to enlarge.
Filed under food trip, human interest, trivia
Am I the last one to know that coffee can be made from animal droppings?
I saw these jars while having lunch at Abaseria Deli and Cafe, a Filipino restaurant that also sells accessories, native houseware, and delicacies that can’t be bought anywhere. I was looking over the shelves when a friend pointed these out to me:
I’m told this coffee was featured on TV. I don’t watch TV so that’s probably why I didn’t know.
I did a quick search on the web, and learned that Philippine civet (also known as alamid) is a cat-like animal that is said to eat only the best coffee cherries, which contain the coffee beans. Producers of the Philippine civet coffee call this natural processing. Right. And the digestive process of the civet is said to add to the rare taste.
This coffee is considered gourmet, and is very expensive. You can check the price on the bottle.
