Sybaritic Diversions

Goodness me!  Is June ending already?!  Golly, I could’ve sworn it had just begun…

Well, seeing how 2005 has reached the midway mark, I’ve decided to take some time out to list down some of the best, yum-worthiest finds I’ve managed to scope out for the first half of the year.

Best Macaroons   Let it be put on record that I won’t eat any other macaroons but Bizu’s macarons de Paris.  Definitely a far cry from the miniature coconut-cupcake things most Filipinos are used to, these elegant confections are made with a heavenly mixture of egg whites, sugar, and ground almonds.  The only thing better would be the legendary macarons at France’s Patisserie Laduree - but I have doubts as to whether I’ll ever be able to go back to Paris one of these days.  When at Bizu, the thing to order should be the rose-flavored macarons - so delicate of flavor and color they can only be tres romantique et aphrodisiaque, oui?

Best All-You-Can-Eat Breakfast Buffet   Hands-down: Macau Restaurant at Eastwood City in Libis.  Value for money and seriously good food.  You can’t go wrong with a beef hofan fix every other day.  (You may as well throw in the phoenix claws and binagoongang baboy - yum-worthy, indeed.)

Best Artisanal Chocolates   It’s a toss-up between Max Brenner’s in Makati and Bizu.  When at Max’s one must order the truffle assortment, as mentioned in a previous SybDive entry, and specifically ask for the little cubes filled with lavender ganache or cinnamon chocolate cream.  One other thing: never take no for an answer!  At Bizu, the dark chocolate mendiants (solid chocolate disks topped with dried figs, raisins, walnuts, and almonds as shown on the left) and the fruit-and-nut-studded mendiant bars in their clear canisters are your best bet whether they’re the standard sort or sugar-free.

Best A’la Carte Breakfast   It would really have to be the Country Breakfast at the UCC Cafe, regardless of which branch you should happen to be in.  What it is: two nice, thick slices of white toast, two eggs done sunny-side-up, hash browns, and a little tub of Président demi-sel (lightly salted) butter. To throw a bit more protein onto your plate, you are given a choice among a truly huge frankfurter prettily scored and grilled, perfectly crisp bacon, Spam Lite, and delectable veal sausages. To round off your meal, you can opt for hot cocoa, orange juice, or UCC Morning City Blend coffee.  And, as mentioned ages ago in my old blog, I insist that you opt for the coffee.  Best way to start the day, after all.

Best Strawberry Shortcake   I have Takafumi-san to thank for this one as it was what he served to the whole kit and kaboodle at JICA on his birthday, but I am seriously kicking myself for failing to get the shop’s address and phone number from him before he went home two weeks ago.  Anyway: it’s pretty much unlike most strawberry shortcakes in the sense that it uses a fluffy chiffon base as opposed to the traditional baking-powder biscuit favored in the American classic.  When paired with lightly sweetened whipped cream and whole berries dripping with syrup, the cake is absolutely ethereal.  (Anyway, some former colleagues told me the shop is in San Lorenzo Village, Makati.  This can only mean one thing: I have some serious shop-hunting to do.)

Best Non-Traditional Pizza   No question about it: California Pizza Kitchen’s Wild Mushroom Pizza gets the thumbs-up for this one.  Think about it: portobellos, shiitake, and enoki and pesto tartufo (truffle pesto) on a foccacia base.  Sheer heaven - especially with a light salad and some raspberry iced tea.

Best Chirashi Zushi   Teriyaki Boy has it down pat with ample helpings of crabstick, ama ebi (sweet prawn), maguro (tuna), and sake (pink salmon - the fresh kind, not the sort in a can) on sushi rice with takuan (sliced pickled daikon radish) and myouga (pickled pick ginger).

(Aww…  Look at poor Caramel-san!  Apparently, someone rent him open and took the stuffing out of him.  Tsk, tsk, tsk…)

Yes, this is an actual bag of Tohato Caramel Corn - just like the one mentioned in a previous entry.  I brought it to the office this morning along with a similarly scarlet box of the new Pocky Decorer in Fraise au Chocolat (chocolate-dipped strawberry for those who don’t understand French).

Sharing the caramel corn and the Pocky made me somewhat misty-eyed and nostaligic for those not-so-long ago days at my old office when mini-packs of Pocky would suddenly appear on people’s desks or a bag of caramel corn curls would be passed around the cluster.  I distinctly remember Mio-san, our project formulation adviser, asking me to stop offering the bag to her.  ("It’s a favorite of mine.  But, please: stop!  I’m trying to lose weight!")

Ah, yes: memories…

Yes, I’ve changed the name and the look of the blog yet again.  This time, I must say I’m pretty satisfied with the way it now looks.  The new name is in sync with the Yahoo group of the same name formed last week.  The basic concept for the group can be seen in the photo on the left; double-click it to be able to read the text.  It’s from Isabel Allende’s Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (again!) and I think it is rather self-explanatory.

SybDive’s rationale is as follows:

A sybarite is defined as a person who loves the finer things in life. He or she is a person who takes time to know more about things in order to increase his or her appreciation and enjoyment.

That said, Sybaritic Diversions is a group dedicated to the enjoyment of such pleasures as good food, great wine, travel, books, sports, and music - along with other great pleasures that have been demeaned and devalued by a hustle-hurry world.

Come and join us, if you wish. But remember: those who enjoy quality must enjoy it responsibly. Salut!

For inquiries regarding the Sybaritic Diversions group, check out the group site on Yahoo or send me an email.

Some time ago, I fell absolutely in love with one of Nigella Lawson’s muffin recipes from How to be a Domestic Goddess.  It was an absolutely decadent mix of peanut butter, Snickers bars, and brown sugar - definitely not something for those contemptible little harridans who are forever watching their weight.  (Gods, how I hate them!  I’d rather kill myself than starve myself to the point of emaciation.  It just isn’t womanly…) 

It is an amazing little indulgence that perks up even on the darkest of days when served with a tall, cold, frosty glass of milk.  Why?  If you’re Filipino, the flavor of these treats is reminiscent of a sweet generations of Pinoy kids have enjoyed: ChocNut.  ChocNut was - and still is - a crumbly confection made with peanuts, cocoa, and sugar.  It’s cheap and rather satisfying after you’ve had about five or six of the little bars.

Anyway, my take on Nigella’s Peanut Butter and Snickers Muffins - as featured in my old blog (Sub)Urbanista - is rather homespun in the sense that I use local peanut butter (the sort where the oil floats on top) as it’s less expensive and, according to some people, it’s supposed to be healthier.

• 250 grams all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• 6 tablespoons brown sugar
• 6 tablespoons natural peanut butter (This is the kind where the oil floats on top. Any good local supermarket brand will do; I used Lily’s Peanut Butter for this.)
• 60 grams salted butter
• 175 mL low-fat milk
• 1 egg, beaten
• 3 60-gram Snickers bars, chopped

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees/Gas Mark 6. Line two 12-cup mini-muffin trays with paper baking cups.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, and brown sugar; set aside. Melt the butter with the milk in your microwave oven; 1 1/2 minutes on HIGH should do the trick. Allow to cool for a few seconds before whisking in the egg to make a thin custard; set aside. Cut the peanut butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in the custard and mix until you have a gooey-textured batter; add the chopped Snickers.

Put half-teaspoonfuls of the mixture into the prepared muffin cups and bake for 10 - 15 minutes. Repeat this step until you’ve used up all the batter.

This recipe makes about 72 (6 dozen) cakelets. You may choose to put a dab of peanut butter on the cupcakes prior to serving (as seen above), but that isn’t really necessary.  For the ultimate peanut butter/chocolate indulgence, you can also choose to frost the cupcakes (like the one on top of this post), roll the sides in a mix of semisweet chocolate morsels and peanut butter chips, and top them with halved peanut butter cups.

Last night, while I was typing away through a batch of solutions for editing, one of my friends from my Sybaritic Diversions Yahoo group sent a call for help.  Seems like all he had in his kitchen at the time was some smoked salmon, a zucchini, a couple of shiitake mushrooms, and some fresh basil.  (The guy grows organic veggies, after all.)  Not a bad set of ingredients; far from it, as a matter of fact.  However, when the beastly heat has all but fried one’s brain, it does pose quite a quandary as what you’re going to fix for supper!

The idea here is to keep things simple.  Overkill simply isn’t an option when you’re working with few ingredients and the simplest recipes always bring out the best qualities of food.  That said, I told him to:

Julienne the zucchini and slice the mushrooms; use the stems, too, seeing how there’s just a couple of them.  Saute the lot in a tablespoon or so of olive oil with chopped basil, couple cloves of crushed garlic, and a bit of coarse salt.  If you have any good bread, make lox (smoked salmon) and veggie sandwiches.  Otherwise, slice the salmon into thinninsh strips and scatter ‘em over the veggies before serving.

Come to think of it, maybe I should’ve told him to mince the mushrooms fine and saute them with garlic, basil,  and a minced onion in olive oil to make duxelles and stuffed it along with the salmon into the zucchini.  Trouble is, that would probably be a bit too much in the way of work.  Oh, well…

(Blogger’s Note: Today, I’ll be taking a break from writing about food and other sybaritic pleasures to pay tribute to a man-of-the-cloth who has done a great deal for the Philippines for more than three decades: His Eminence, Jaime Lachica Cardinal Sin, Archbishop Emeritus of Manila.  His Eminence succumbed to multiple organ failure and passed from this world to the next at 6:15 AM [GMT +8] this morning.)

When you have a brother who has been called to serve a Higher Power from the cradle, the things that happen to the Roman Catholic Church tend to take on a deeper meaning than they usually do for most people.  In fact, they become something of a family affair.  Case in point: the worry we all experienced for the safety of my brother and all the seminarians at the San Carlos Major Seminary in Makati last week when Atty. Samuel Ong ran for cover there after setting off what is now known as "Gloriagate".

This is why I was shocked when I heard Fr. Jun Sescon, personal secretary to Jaime Cardinal Sin, say that His Eminence died at 6:15 this morning.  Fr. Jun was a schoolmate of my brother’s at San Carlos, one of his many kuyas (older brothers) in that institution.  Sure we knew the Cardinal’s health was on the downgrade; as one priest put it in a somber tone, it would just be a matter of time.  Well, that time came soon enough - and, despite prior knowledge that this was going to be the end, it still hit rather hard.

I personally met His Eminence a number of times over the past fifteen years.  To me, he became something more than the empassioned cleric who called his flock to EDSA in February 1986 to throw the Marcoses out of Malacanang or the elderly yet still lucid pastor who got people back into the streets to grind Joseph Estrada’s presidency to a halt back in 2002.

No, much as it does sound that way, the title of today’s post is not the way the Japanese pronounce the line from The Lord’s Prayer.  (Give us this day our daily bread…)  It’s actually the name of the loaf of bread on the left.  It’s so called because of the ingredients used in making it: milk, butter, and half-a-cup of cottage cheese.  (Let me hasten to assure animal rights activists that no cows or calves were hurt in the baking of this loaf.  I don’t live on a farm, you know…) 

The end result is a rather substantial, dense-crumbed bread with a nice, almost cake-like texture.  Strangely, despite the wealth of dairy products used in it, the loaf is rich but is none too cloying on the palate.  It is, however, quite heavy on the belly.  It is so filling that just two slices make for a very good, satisfying breakfast when spread with cream cheese and mango jam and served with freshly brewed coffee.  (Fancy: a mango cheesecake sandwich for breakfast!)

The amazing santos, the Guam-based author of the iconic food blog The Scent of Green Bananas, wrote about dairy bread in a 2004 post.  The loaves of bread she made with a recipe from San Francisco food maven Marion Cunningham were definitely impressive: huge, round, golden-crusted loaves that looked absolutely scrumptious.  As a result, I decided to try it out myself.

However, I had to tweak the recipe somewhat on account of two things.  First: I can’t seem to work properly with active dry yeast.  I can’t be bothered to faff about with soaking it in warm water, feeding it sugar, and getting it to froth in five minutes.  I never got the hang of that ever since I was taught how to bake bread in my freshman Home Ec class in high school.  As a result, I substituted one sachet of instant yeast, the sort you just throw into the bowl along with the flour.  It makes things a lot easier, believe me.

Second, I realized that the recipe featured in santos’s blog made two loaves of bread.  The trouble here is that not everyone in my family eats bread on a regular basis.  In fact, it’s just my parents who have bread for breakfast; all the rest of us are rice junkies.  Thus, just to try the recipe out, I had to halve the recipe.  It wasn’t so bad and it went down rather well.

Dairy Bread

• 1 packet instant yeast
• 1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 cup milk
• 1/2 cup cottage cheese
• 1 tablespoon salted butter
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• approximately 3 cups flour, plus more for kneading and sprinkling.

Sift together the flour, ginger, yeast, salt, and sugar.  Heat the milk and butter in a microwave for about 45 seconds to 1 minute on HIGH.  Make a well in the flour mixture and pour in the butter-milk mixture and the cottage cheese and mix until a dough is formed.  Transfer the dough to a floured surface and knead for about two minutes and allow to rest for ten minutes.  Knead until the dough is smooth and satiny, about ten minutes.  Place dough in a bowl and cover with a dishlcloth.  Let rise for about an hour.  In the meantime, butter a loaf pan.  After an hour, punch down the risen dough and press into the prepared pan.  Cover with a dishcloth again and allow to rise for another 45 minutes.  Preheat oven to 375 degrees/Gas Mark 5.  Sprinkle flour over the loaf before sliding it into the oven; bake for 50 minutes.  Allow to cool before slicing,  Makes 1 loaf.

The art of baking bread has been a passion of mine since I bought a copy of Nigella Lawson’s How to be a Domestic Goddess a couple of years ago.  It all started with a couple pans of chewy, gooey Zimtschnecken (German-style cinnamon rolls) dripping with golden caramel for my father’s birthday.  I guess one thing led to another and baking bread became one of my favorite hobbies.

Over the past couple of years, my bread repertoire has progressed from sweet breads to more savory affairs that were substatial enough to be meals in themselves.  Cinnamon rolls and sweet buns dotted with spice gave way to dinner rolls perfumed by a bouquet of Italian herbs and meat rolls reminiscent of the char siew sou (barbecued pork pies) I ate as a child.

One of my favorites is focaccia, that substantial Italian bread that can be the base for a very good pizza.  I tried Nigella’s recipe for schiacciata with Gorgonzola and pine nuts, but it was a tad too salty for everyone who sampled it.  After about a year of experimenting with the recipe, I chanced upon a happy mix of Italian seasoning, Parmesan cheese, and considerably less salt.  It takes quite a bit of work to make focaccia and the end result is usually gobbled up in one meal.  But let me assure you that it’s all worth it.  Besides, it makes the most fabulous bacon sandwiches you’ll ever taste.  Buon appetito, mi amici!   

Focaccia di Margherita

• 500 grams all-purpose flour, plus more for kneading
• 1 sachet (7 grams) fast-acting yeast
• 1/2 tablespoon Italian seasoning
• 3 tablespoons sunflower seeds
• 1 teaspoon fine salt
• 300mL warm water
• 2 tablespoons olive oil (not extra-virgin)

With all the hustle and bustle I’ve had to go through of late, there hasn’t been any time to have any proper meals.  Breakfast is a haphazard affair.  (Truth be told, I’m not even following my own advice anymore.  There’s just no time for it.)  The lunch hour passes unnoticed and, by the time I realize it’s over, I have no appetite for it.  Dinner?  Please: after a long commute from Quezon City to Muntinlupa, I can’t bring myself to look at even the smallest grain of rice.  Of late, not even the giant chocolate cookies from the cafeteria at my dad’s office appeal to me - and I can usually wolf down those things with abandon.  Work can take a lot out of you, really.

Today, however, was a bit worse than usual.  I managed to shamble off to work but stayed half-asleep throughout the morning.  It was like I was running on auto-pilot!  As a result, I really had to get something into my system come lunch time.  I didn’t really feel like eating a full meal, so I opted to go out and get a bowl of instant noodles and some dumplings.

We Pinoy urbanites are somewhat spoilt for choice when it comes to instant noodle bowls.  While there are fairly nice local noodle cups, nothing beats the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean imports when it comes to taste and to filling one up.  Moreover, the supersized imports cost about a fraction of the price of a full-sized bowl of noodles at one’s local Chinese food dive - and you can find them at the local mini-mart.

Anyway, I picked up a huge UNI-President premium seafood noodle bowl and a pair of chopsticks from the nearest mini-mart along with some fried wontons from another convenience store about a block away.  As instant lunches go, it wasn’t bad.  In fact, it was pretty good.