Wala. Wiz.

I am almost always very prepared for anything. Dirty hands? I’ve got alcohol or hand sanitizer in my bag. Chapped lips? I’ve got lip balm. Loose change? I’ve got some in my coin purse. Need a light? I’ve got a lighter in my bag…even if I don’t smoke. But today, I failed as a food blogger…

All because I have no photos to capture another zipper bursting evening filled food: from perfectly charred grilled pork sausages and creamy Belgian mashed potatoes with bright, sweet carrot bits called stoemp to glasses of fruity Belgian beer to day-old French pastries from a 24-hour bakery. Drat.

I know I should use my words to let you imagine what I ate and where we went. But I’d like to point blame on the amount of food consumed and on the sandstorm, which blew away my writing endurance for today. Just for today.

Oh, note to self: ALWAYS bring my bag to prevent unphotographed food adventures.

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

When caught in sandstorm...just keep cleaning!

This is one of those rare normal two-day weekends that The Husband with the wonky work schedule enjoys. We usually go out for a nice brunch / dinner out, but instead, we found ourselves cooped up in our wee home due to an uncontrollable force of nature, namely: a sandstorm.

It’s not my first sandstorm because I experienced a few already. But this has been the longest (I can still hear the wind!) and the strongest I’ve ever had in my five months here. Our sliding windows were banging against the wall and the wind was howling like a lonely puppy locked out of the house…all night long. I woke up tired from the racket the sandstorm caused. It wasn’t a good night’s sleep. So I stood up from bed and decided to take a peep to see if there has been any damage to our poor clothes drying rack, which was left outside our balcony. As my bare feet touched our tiled floor, I could feel the sand. I felt so much sand with every step I took.

Ugh.

The winds were so strong that sand was everywhere in our wee home: on the floor, on our bedsheets, on our drawers, on the tables, and even in my hair! The aftermath of a sandstorm meant emergency cleaning. It also meant no cooking, unless I wanted a meal peppered with sand. Good thing that we still had leftovers ready for reheating. Whew!

After sweeping the floor and trying to prevent more sand from entering our wee home (It seems that the sand infiltrated through the teeny nooks and crannies), I decided to take a peep at the blog and do spring cleaning as well. I know that I just uploaded the spanking new theme, but I still felt that there was more organizing and troubleshooting to do. Maybe that’s just the OCD in me. And I was right because I fixed my categories and discovered that no text appeared in the drop-down banners. See?

I need to get these fixed...

After hours of strategizing and navigating my way through the theme, I think it is almost perfect. But before I finally conclude there is no more cleaning up to do, do you think there are areas that still need more organizing on this blog?

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

P.S. It’s 230AM and the wind is still howling. Yes, there is still sand on the floor. Sadly, more cleaning to do this weekend. Argh!

I still find these goggles super handy...

When I was into competitive swimming eons ago, I couldn’t bare swimming without goggles. Swimming with bare naked eyes would mean chlorine soaked, blood-shot eyes, which sounds painful because it is painful, especially if you’ve been in the water for at least two hours (the average time spent in a single training session).

Now that I’m out of the competitive swimming world, I still can’t seem to part with my goggles. Do I still swim with them?

Uhm, yes…in the very rare occasions that I hit the pool on the roof deck of our apartment building. But I do have an alternative use for this sporty eyewear. I actually use them in the kitchen. You’ve read it right. In the K-I-T-C-H-E-N. I use goggles in the kitchen with no shame at all. It’s my kitchen and I’ll do what I want to.

This is the most effective way I can stop myself from crying, while chopping onions. Yessiree! I don’t care if I look like a dork. At least I don’t have teary, blood-shot eyes! And by the way, The Husband agrees that it is a good way to keep those onion tears at bay. So there!

How do you keep yourself from crying while chopping those onions?

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

Now this is HOME.

I miss home a lot, especially the food that my mama (or helper, Ate Joan, who knows all the family recipes by heart) prepares for us. Now that I am “on my own” with no mama or helper to cook our food, I have no choice, but to try and recreate some of those dishes from here.

Again, because I am a beginner level cook, I will start with the easiest dishes of the lot. Today, I cooked one of my most favorite comfort food of all time (part of my Project 30) is our family’s version of arroz ala cobana…

Unlike the other versions of arroz ala cobana, this recipe is very simple, highlighting the beefiness of the beef. The beef is stripped it bare of the usual trimmings like teeny potato cubes, carrots and raisins, seasoned only with onion, garlic, salt, & pepper and accompanied by fried bananas, a sunny side up egg and a cup of rice (of course). Yes, you can find all the food groups in a single plate!

It’s presented neatly in the picture above, but in reality, it is just one crazy mess of a plate, where everything is mixed with so much gusto. I adore it for its mix of salty, sweet, creamy and starchy in a single mouthful.

One big yummy mess!

Ingredients (One recipe serves 6 hungry people):

• 1-kilo ground / minced beef
• 1 large onion, minced
• 1 large head of garlic, peeled and minced
• 6-sunny side up eggs
• 12-saba (sweet plantain / cardaba) bananas
• 2-tablespoons sugar, preferably brown
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Cooking oil
• 6-cups of steamed white rice

Step-by-step:

For the Beef:

1. Saute onions and garlic until onions become translucent
2. Add in minced beef, season with salt and pepper, and cook until beef is cooked through with an almost crispy texture.
   

   Beef is cooked through but not yet done...

3. Set aside minced beef when cooked.

Beef should look like this.

For the Bananas:

Gooey caramelized bananas

1. Peel bananas and slice in half, lengthwise.
2. Roll the banana halves in sugar then pan-fry until golden.
3. Set aside.

Assembling the dish:

1. In one plate, place a cup of steamed white rice, 4-banana halves, a cup of minced beef topped with a sunny side up egg.
2. OPTIONAL: Add a splash of Tabasco hot sauce for some kick of heat.
3. Then mix everything up!

Make sure that you have all the components of the dish in one spoonful: rice, minced beef, egg and banana. Let me know if you enjoy our family’s version of arroz ala cobana

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

Too sweet for my taste buds...

The Husband and I woke up to another normal day in un-Valentine’s Day like fashion. We kissed each other “Good morning!”, then I started my day with prayers and meditation. It seemed to be a normal day until The Husband reminded me that I actually was looking forward to making breakfast. Oh yes, I saved some tummy space the night before because I was dying to have a hearty grilled cheese and creamy scrambled eggs meal. How sweet of him to remember! After that filling meal, I honestly couldn’t eat anything else. I skipped lunch.

Then some friends invited me for a Valentine’s Day dinner at the newly opened Belgian Beer Cafe at Madinat Jumeira. I told The Husband about the dinner invitation, of course. He told me I could go, but he only offered to pay for one bottle of his favorite beer, Fruli, and not a full-blown dinner meal. Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately, I still was feeling quite full from the grilled cheese and creamy scrambled eggs breakfast. I wasn’t in the mood for a heavy meal nor a nice cold bottle of fruit beer. So I declined the Valentine’s Day dinner invite. But how sweet of The Husband to actually even allow me to go AND offer to pay for a bottle of beer.

That same set of friends then invited me for a post-dinner nightcap at Tim Horton’s in Jumeirah Beach Road. The tummy couldn’t deal with a meal, but could certainly handle something warm or maybe sweet. It is Valentine’s Day after all.

I ended up ordering a strawberry banana smoothie, but to my dismay, it was too saccharine for my taste. I was utterly disappointed and regretted that I should have maybe ordered a cup of coffee or hot chocolate instead, even if I still had the caffeine buzz from my daily dose of extra-large chai tea.

Was it really the commercial Tim Horton’s smoothie mix that made it too sweet for my taste? Or did I just hit the sugar wall because of the extra-dose of little sweet things from The Husband? Whatever it is, it really has been an extra-sweet un-Valentine’s Day for me.

How was your Valentine’s Day like?

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

This blog deserved a whole lot of loving!

I’m not a big fan of Valentine’s Day.

Well, I used to be one, but when I got together with The Husband almost 10 years ago, he brainwashed me into believing that Valentine’s Day is just another of them “capitalist holidays”. It is partly true. The men are suddenly compelled (maybe pressured) to express their love through grandiose deeds: bouquets of flowers magically appearing on your office desk, a box of chocolates or candies delivered to your home, or an expensive surprise dinner at a swanky restaurant or hotel…

Yes, these are nice gestures, no doubt about it. What girl wouldn’t want to be treated like a princess or a goddess worshipped and put on a pedestal at least once every year? But cliche as it seems, I hold on dearly to my belief that you can express and see true love through the smallest and simplest of everyday gestures. So each and every day should be a Valentine’s Day, an opportunity to express and see love bloom to its most beautiful: radiant, unconditional and pure.

But for today, I will deviate from my mantra of no grandiose gestures for Valentine’s Day. I prepared and am doing something big today, because every once in a while, not necessarily on Valentine’s Day (It just happened to be Valentine’s Day today ), you just want to do something extra special for the ones that you love.

I’m sure you have pretty much noticed it when your browser has completed loading my blog. Your eyes do not fool you, the blog is sporting a new look!

Just like any grandiose expression of love, I thought long and hard about this blog makeover before today’s big reveal. I spent a many restless nights mulling over the minute details like:

• Should Mr. Carrot be cut out from the picture? Or should he stay? OR
• Should I use a pattered background or a plain background to make the content “pop” out?

I also spent some time, days which felt like a week, thinking about the blog from a serious strategic point of view like:

• Will people take me seriously as a writer with such a playful, childlike design? OR
• Do I really need to maintain my Google + account (I’ve read that Google and Social Engine Optimization)? OR
• Is this the tagline that captures the essence of this blog?

But, as in any amorous declarations, I took a chance, a risk, with no knowledge if I’d get an esteemed, equally impassioned response from someone, anyone out there. This is me, wanting to share a big part of me and my life that I never even knew I had…until recently. All of these, ultimately, for the love of food and the written word.

Welcome to my spruced up happy place and sanctuary, a chronicle of my daydreams of an eating and writing life. I love it to bits and I do hope that you love it too. Do you?

Happy Valentine’s Day one and all!

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

P.S. A love-filled shout out to the one, who made my vision come to life: Patricia of Fancy Girl Designs. Thank you so much! *virtual hugs*

P.P.S. Do you have any feedback about the new design? I would love to hear from you, so feel free to just drop me a line

My pork pochero mise en place!

Housewives like me deal with a lot of time management. Each second, minute, and hour must be used ever so wisely to be able to finish a lot of our housechores, work (if any) and personal projects. Using my time well means that I get to enjoy quality time with The Husband, which means just snuggling together while watching movies or back-to-back-to-back episodes from our choice TV series of the moment (lately it’s been Mad Men) after his office hours. So even with cooking, I have to find ways to use my time more efficiently and effectively. There are a lot of kitchen gadgets such as the food processor, blender or whatnot that do help. BUT I do not have any of those in our wee kitchen, unfortunately, and so I make do with a well set-up mise en place.

Mise en place is simply getting all your ingredients ready before starting the cooking process. So you chop, cut, grate, peel, mash, marinade, scramble, mince and so on and so forth before cooking on a hot pan or in a hot pot or pre-heated oven. I know it’s a professional chef thing, but what’s stopping us normal people from doing it?

Earlier this afternoon, I cooked Pork Pochero (pork cubes with sweet tomato soup), which required a whole slew of ingredients: pork cubes, saba bananas (cavendish bananas), string beans. chinese cabbage, garlic, tomato, onions, and a can of baked beans (Guess which ingredient made the soup sweet?). I was just so proud of how the mise en place helped me work faster without compromising the flavor of the dish. I got a “VS” (very satisfactory) rating from my extremely-hard-to-please customer, The Husband, plus an entire afternoon of snuggle time Now that is the beauty of a mise en place!

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

Do you know which one to order?!? Ordering Indian food can be quite daunting...

I must admit I am going through an Indian phase right now. Yes, almost anything and everything Indian fascinates me with an eager beaver like gusto, especially if food and culture related. I’ve watched some movies like 3 Idiots, apparently the highest grossing Bollywood film in the history of India, and The Mistress of Spices, a movie adaptation (not sure if it is a Hollywood or UK produced movie. Can anyone tell which?) of the book of the same title. I am now in the middle of reading Delirious Delhi, a story of a New York expat’s experience in India’s crazy capital. I’ve been in touch with a number of Indian food bloggers based in Dubai and learned a lot of about their cuisine through their posts. But somehow I’ve never found the brazen courage or the opportunity to go beyond the usual orders of Biryani and Chicken Tikka Masala.

And a few days ago, I was so blessed to have been given chance to partake in an educational Indian food outing around Dubai’s Little India, Meena Bazaar in Bur Dubai. I found myself on a fierce quest to push my Indian cuisine limits and take a deeper dive into the culture, which has bewitched me for quite some time now.

We were a strange gaggle of food lovers that night: a Filipino girl (That’s me!), two English ladies (Sally of My Custard Pie and her sister), a Sri Lankan woman (Farwin from Love & Other Spices), and two Indian foodies (Vineet and Raji of Vegetarian Tastebuds) led by our bubbly, tireless, impassioned leader Arva from I Live in a Frying Pan and her kind-hearted nutritionist mother, Nafeesa. Yes, I believe that this food outing was nutritionist certified We hopped through a total of seven (7) restaurants, filling our curious tummies with North Indian treats. No plate was left ignored as I managed to eat everything that was set in front of me with much gusto, taking seconds or thirds or as much as my expanding stomach could permit.

And here are some of my favorite Indian treats of the night:

L to R: Chole, Dahi Puri, Aloo Kulcha

Aloo Kulcha Chole

This carb-filled, ghee-shined crispy, flaky tandoor oven baked treat is definitely not for people on a diet (FYI I reserved my carb allowance for the day specifically for this food outing). It honestly reminded me of the freshly baked parmesan bread from Italianni’s, an Italian food chain back home, because of the grated parmesan cheese-like effect given by the glossy finishing of chaat masala and ghee. This potato filled bread (carb-on-carb action going on here!) is best downed with a rich chole, chick pea curry dipping sauce, onion pickles (surely to be eaten with caution if on a date), and a tall-glass of thick lassi (yogurt drink) with a hint of rose water.

Dahi Puri

A popular Indian streetfood, dahi puri is literally a mouthful. Meant to be eaten whole with a single “O” of your mouth, this crispy flour sphere, lightly poked to form a hole, filled with spiced potato bits and peas, spicy water and tamarind sauce, then topped with cold yoghurt, crispy noodles and a sprinkle of coriander leaves, will leave fireworks on your palate. Taste creamy yoghurt followed by savory crunch of the puri (round flour shells), then the spice explosions from potato, peas and the peppery water, to be mellowed down by the sweetness of the tamarind sauce. Each mouthful will leave you wanting for more. I would’ve finished a second or even a third or fourth dahi puri if there weren’t five restaurants ahead of us.

Clockwise: Dhokla, Saffron Kulfi, Smoked Chaas

Dhokla

This snack reminded me of a variation of the ubiquitous Filipino treat, the puto (rice cake). But don’t be deceived by it’s looks because, unlike it’s Filipino lookalike, this is a filling block of savory carbohydrates topped with crispy noodle bits, a spicy sweet tamarind sauce and a sprinkle of fresh coriander leaves.

Smoked chaas

This drink almost stole the entire show that night. Preparing this savory dairy (thinned yoghurt / buttermilk) digestive, which worked wonders to our almost full food tanks, was a magic show filled the pizzaz of rainbow colored spices: golden liquified ghee, pink salt, mustard garlic ginger paste, brown toasted ground cumin (plus another spice which slipped my memory), bright green chilies, coriander leaves and crushed mint leaves, and the rise of aromatic mystical smoke from burnt herbs and spices that enveloped the cold stainless steel glass with flavor. It was a performance that will forever be etched in my food memory.

Kulfi

I’ve eaten Kulfi (Indian ice cream) back in the Philippines, but I’ve never had the chance to enjoy one in an earthen pot! I think cooking the Kulfi in that wee pot properly seals in the flavors of saffron, cashew, pistachios and milk. Plus, it is a great way to present a frozen treat, don’t you agree?

Those breathtaking (I could barely breathe from all the food that we ate) Indian treats left me wanting to learn even more. Take note, we only conquered North India that night, so a South Indian food outing is very much in order. Can you just imagine how I am so looking forward to it?

Namaste Arva and her nutritionist mum Nafeesa and Raji for taking us through the path of North Indian food enlightenment! Namaste also to brave food companions: Sally, Anna, Farwin, and Vineet!

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

P.S. I do not claim to be a North Indian food expert, so please feel free to correct me in my food descriptions. Don’t worry because I am a very eager student of world cuisine, at least Indian cuisine as of the moment

A gorgeous mess of garlic cloves ready for chopping

My favorite part of my busy housewife day is when I get the chance to cook. But, one thing I absolutely enjoy doing in the entire cooking process is chopping garlic. Why?

I do love plucking off each clove out of that compact bulb, how silky the translucent skin slides on my fingertips.

I do love how easily you can peel off the skin by giving the clove a nice whack under the knife, a good way to let out some of the aggression.

Whapak!

I do love the rhythmic swishing, squishing sound of the steel knife cutting through the naked clove.

I do love how the garlic aroma penetrates through the crevices of my child-like fingers.

I do love how it gets me to focus in the moment and feel that everything is moving in beautiful slow-motion.

Who would have thought that this can be a strangely spiritual experience for me? How I wish I need garlic in every dish I cook, just to get some of my natural garlic high. I could seriously chop garlic for two hours straight (maybe even more) and love every second of it.

Do you also share the same feelings about chopping garlic? Probably not. I am just so weird.

Delirious about delicious,

Didi

You looking at me? Oi.

See that cat? That’s me. That’s how I feel right now: all bloated and shapely (round is a shape) from all the food I’ve been salivating over and eating the past days. And so what happened to that diet I was talking about?

Uhhhhhh…I’ve been faithful to it. To be fair enough. I only eat one serving of carbs a day (rice, noodles, bread) and allow myself 1x cheat day a week. But my curiosity about the many food cultures here in Dubai always gets the better of me.

I like to look down from high places (Let’s just that special high place: my laptop) and just observe those never-before-seen-and-tasted food items. I like sniffing around in hard to reach food corners, even if they cost me a 45-minute train ride from home. I like stretching out my chubby little paws to snatch a morsel from plates full of exotic treats. Maybe even come back for seconds and thirdsies. I like to relish each spoonful ever so slowly because that moment may not come again anytime soon. To cap it all off, I like to lie down and sleep the day away (if I can).

Exercise? I found a way to exercise, which actually even involves food. Oi. *insert face palm here*

Too much to exotic new food to eat, therefore, too much weight gained. So really, damn this insatiable curiosity of mine.

Delirious about delicious,

Didi