We found Dimsum Break, which served Chinese fastfood, nestled in one of the nooks and crannies of the busy Fuente area in downtown Cebu. If appearances were to have any consequence, I wouldn't have eaten here. It's no secret that I hate fastfood and franchises--let alone of Asian food, and the last thing I want to ingest is something churned out by the precise movements of an unfeeling machine that emphasizes standardization rather than creativity and whimsy. Dimsum Break did attract a large crowd way past lunch hour, and the crowd--comprised mainly of office professionals out on what needed to be a hurried lunch--seemed pretty excited about the food. Admittedly, the food was good. So maybe you can make something decent out of fastfood provided it doesn't reach the span of McDonald's, and if it does, that hopefully it goes into the able hands of someone who respects good food more than a good profit. But I digress.

The good thing about Dimsum Break's fastfood is that they seem to be cooked fresh. There's no see-through glass container that gives you a pale view of overcooked dimsum that plague many Chinese fastfood these days. In fact, the salesperson behind the counter was even apologetic about not being able to serve everything immediately as the food was to be prepared on request. Which was a good thing for me. So even if it took a while for orders to come in, it was well worth the wait.

Dimsum Break served typical Chinese dimsum: 04 05 02 | 06 01

And rice toppings:



My only gripe about the rice toppings is that they weren't big enough. I couldn't exactly complain about it since these were modestly priced. Maybe it would have been better to offer different sizes next time (i.e. regular and large serving portions). Nevertheless, Dimsum Break is still worth the visit.

The first thing one notices coming out of the Cebu airport are the festive jeepneys that look like banderitas criss-crossing the street. Cebu is saturated with color, and its spaces filled with the vibrancy of perhaps the same spirit that possesses the Sinulog. It is this sort of spirit that makes me wonder what becomes of new installations such as a massive Ayala mall (miniscule still compared to the monstrous malls we have in Manila but nonetheless frightening) or 24-hour call center offices in the IT center nearby and their consequent effect on Cebu's eating habits. Familiar names from Pan de Manila to Yellow Cab are starting to populate the city. I am no fan of restaurant chains and franchises, I hate the thought of food from assembly lines, and I despise pretentious restaurants that charge anything above a hundred pesos for stuff coming out of a can. I would still like notions of communal eating instilled, of community panaderias and local kainans that struggle to make the most of local ingredients, their artistry shining through the successful twists they make in order to push familiar dishes into something special and memorable.


Luckily, Cebu has not fallen in the negative practices of modern city life that has plagued much of Manila's restaurants. At least not yet. The signs are there, but there are still a number of places that struggle with the thought of what restaurants should be and hopefully Cebu would be able to find a balance between tradition and change. Nothing could be more traditional than Cebu's sinugbo, and our visit to the Golden Cowrie displayed the delicate balance between traditional inihaw cooking in a series of restaurant chains appearing throughout Cebu.

The food is good, but it also almost becoming ordinary as the simpler details tend to be ignored. For instance, the blue marlin was well seasoned but overcooked and dry.


And these baked clams were left to drown in cheese, not leaving enough room for the protein to sing. It would have also helped to put in some parsley or chives on top and a drop of citrus.


This kinilaw needed coriander. It was still lovely, and would put to shame any ceviche served in fancy Western restaurants.


I liked the adobong kangkong. You can never put too much garlic in anything adobo.


And also their crispy hipon. I am not sure if their crispy hipon is good since I am biased. My benchmark comes from Malolos, Bulacan and is made by the poet and lawyer Jing Panganiban-Mendoza's mother. Nothing simply compares to that one.


One of the real stars in this feast is the blue crab. This was served with melted butter as dipping sauce. It really didn't need any sauce but if they were to insist, perhaps a citrus-based sauce would be more sensible.


The other star for me was the grilled pusit, which was tender, moist and fresh.


Like this blog, Cebu has been a long time coming. It's been a while, but life just got in the way but the love for food has been constantly nourished and hopefully the next few posts will keep me at it.

Found this video on YouTube by comic book writer and artist Gerry Alanguilan who I know is famed for once inking Wolverine. Each family and each region insists on a particular kind of ingredient from what vinegar to use to that secret vegetable or herb that will enhance the flavor of this beloved dish. For Alanguilan, it must be Ajinomoto's Ginisa Seasoning Mix, I don't know why but I guess I have to try it one day.

Bought an apartment in Manila a few years ago that was supposed to be my first home. It's a modest place. Too modest that I couldn't afford to paint and install a kitchen sink to move in. The plan was to save a little more to afford the paint, tiles and the basic fixtures I wanted, move in, survive a few years with hand-me-downs, phase them out slowly buying big and little things a paycheck at a time. Then Melbourne happened, not by choice. I didn't want to study at all but somehow the higher-ups keep saying that I will not forge ahead with my career if I don't so here I am, abandoning momentarily my ultimate D-I-Y project. Every now and then I slip into D-I-Y mode and I look at things. Small things. Useless even. When I'm bored or agitated, I go to home furniture stores and hardware stores or surf the web to imagine  life owning such things. And right now, there's nothing I covet more than these jars from Gneiss Spice:

I imagine a wall full of spices. They will even etch out the labels on the tin for you.


Although I'm not exactly sure if it's any help at all since these labels will be stuck to the magnet and you have no way to see whether what you're getting is paprika or chili powder unless you lift them up to check. Hmmm.

It's funny how modern solutions beget responses that reek of laziness.

After that horrible analogy, we segue into fresh spring rolls! I have always had a soft spot for fresh spring rolls and the contention is who invented it? Thais claim to have invented it, and so do the Vietnamese. Filipinos have their version of the lumpiang sariwa and the lumpiang hubad, and the Chinese have a lot of spring rolls--fried, fresh, steamed and even baked. The nice thing about this contest for the ownership of the spring rolls is that the more people who claim it, the more expansive the flavor arena is. I have enjoyed fresh spring rolls with a nice array of vegetables, I have enjoyed it with succulent meats. I have tried fresh spring rolls with an assortment of fish flakes, I have tried it with an earthy rich thick sauce made of shiitake mushroom broth. I have dipped it in nuoc nam and in curry. I have had it with egg, with beans, with finely sliced breaded chicken, with seaweed and tuna sushi. So as more and more cultures claim the spring roll, the more expansive and flexible the spring roll gets.

First, make the dipping sauce. With fresh spring rolls, the sauce has to be made first so when you've finished making the actual rolls, you are ready to serve them.

For the Nuoc Nam (Vietnamese-style sauce), simply combine the following in a bowl:

2 tbsp white sugar dissolved in 1/2 cup hot water
3 tbsp vinegar
3 tbsp fish sauce
chopped garlic and chili
juice from 1/2 a lime

For the spring rolls:

60g dried rice vermicelli noodles cooked as per package instructions
8 rice wrappers (22cm diameter)
8 large cooked prawns - peeled, deveined and cut in half
8 lettuce leaves
12 leaves fresh Thai basil, chopped
12 fresh mint leaves, chopped
3 sprigs fresh coriander, chopped
2 leaves lettuce, chopped
1 chili, finely chopped
1 tbsp of peanuts, coarsely chopped

Prep all of the ingredients and make a nice and efficient layout on your space. The thing with fresh spring rolls utilizing rice paper is that you have to work fast. So let's start with the basics: rice paper, dipped in hot water. There's no specific time to follow, the faster you take it out, the better so as soon as the rice paper is completely covered in water, you're good to go. Lay the rice paper flat. Place the lettuce leaf on the rice paper. Place the vermicelli noodles on a nice row across the center, followed by the chopped herbs and prawns, and roll. You can roll it sandwich style, by folding two opposite edges inward before you start rolling or you could just roll and leave the two edges open.

Experiment. Instead of prawns, try shiitake mushrooms, tinapang bangus or shredded roasted chicken.

My introduction to Australian food happens through television. It has to as I can barely afford to eat out. When I first got here, the first season of Masterchef just ended and everyone who had a TV raved about it especially after finding out I was doing a thesis on the sociology of food. I watched My Kitchen Rules religiously and was somehow disappointed with the aggrandizement of French cooking techniques as the show seemed to ingrain the idea that to be of a culinary pedigree, one has to cook in terms of the rhetoric and flourishes of French food. In the end, they gave the title to a couple with Lebanese roots whose traditional Lebanese dessert had to be deconstructed French-style so as to appear beautiful on a plate. The second season of Masterchef Australia has begun and for the life of me I cannot get over how all the crying is ruining the cooking moments. It’s a cooking competition and every elimination and win is met by some form of crying that the show just has to milk out just so they can fill in the quota of having to churn out six episodes a week. If you can muster all the crying, you can sit through a lot of creativity and Masterchef, more than My Kitchen Rules, is a bit more instructive. So far, they gave good tips for almost everything from the Aussie/Kiwi/British (everyone in the Commonwealth seems to claim ownership of it) Pavlova to the Vietnamese Nuoc Nam sauce. My favorite idea though didn’t come from these so-called masterclasses (they love the word here), but from a freak opportunity that stemmed from a misprint in a menu.

The Masterchefs were divided into two teams and they were to run two Italian restaurants separately with the one earning the most cash winning thus forcing someone from the losing team to get eliminated. The team that would eventually win misprinted their menu and wrote down a fresh rocket in their pizza section. Instead of allowing the servers the awkward task of having to tell customers that it was a misprint, Marion, in charge of the pizzas, made a fresh rocket and parmesan pizza and it looked so yummy that I had to try it myself. And here’s what it looked like:


It’s the perfect summer pizza only winter has dawned where I am.

I cheated a lot on this pizza. I have no time to make the dough myself so I just buy Indian roti or Lebanese flat bread and use them as pizza bases. Maybe you can use store-bought pizza crusts but they all taste like cardboard to me. Besides, making use of these flat breads give the pizza a crunchy and flakey texture that just adds a rustic touch to it.

Preheat the oven to a 160 degrees Celsius. On a baking sheet, place the crust and rub crushed garlic to it, drizzle with about a tablespoon of olive oil, a pinch of salt and pepper, a pinch of chili flakes if you like it spicy like I do and about a tablespoon of finely grated parmesan cheese. Bake in the oven for about ten minutes. If you want meat, it would be nice to top this with prosciutto. If you do, bake it for about 12-15 minutes at 150 degrees. If you have pine nuts, consider putting a small handful on the side of the baking sheet to use as toppings for the pizza after.

After ten minutes, take it out and immediately top with fresh rocket leaves, shaved parmesan cheese and the pine nuts. Parmesan would do, but since I had some leftover goat’s cheese whose flavor I love with rocket, I put it in anyway. Drizzle with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Make big slices. This rocket leaves are a bit messy and needs to be folded within the crust as you take a big bite. Enjoy!

While I find Perfect Italiano's cheeses not exactly perfect, their newest ads are semi-perfectly hilarious:



Sometimes when I cook, I weep. How I wish I can say the same thing.