Recipe | Beef Cotolette

Tonkatsu, Schnitzel... they seem similar, but different, and just last week I learned something new - Cotolette or Cotoletta, the Italian version. Personally, I still haven't tried cooking Schnitzel, but checking the process for this dish, I think it is a fairly easy one to do. Now, the reason why I called this Cotolette instead of Schnitzel or Tonkatsu is because the process I followed was taken from a YouTube video posted by Pina Cucina and the recipe shared to me by my Italian friend.


I won't be giving the recipe with exact measurements because I pretty much just eye-balled the ingredients. For this you will need -

• Thinly sliced beef
• Dry breadcrumbs
• Egg
• 1-2 Cloves of Garlic
• Italian Parsley
• Parmesan Cheese
• Salt and Pepper to taste
• Oil for Frying
• Lemon wedges

What you need to do -

• Pound your beef slices to tenderize it, but don't make it too thin. 
• In a bowl, beat egg, add crushed or finely chopped garlic cloves, a substantial amount of parsley, and enough salt and pepper. Put beef slices in this and coat it with the egg mixture.
• In a separate plate, combine breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese. Coat beef slices with breadcrumbs and shallow fry in a pan until brown, turning once. Serve.

My Italian friend told me they usually sprinkle lemon juice before eating the Cotolette, which I did,  but I personally want mine with a side dip, so I prepared the caper mayo dressing, by combining mayonnaise, chopped capers and onions, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and salt and pepper to taste.


I served the Cotolette with simple salad (a mix of romaine lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, and cucumbers with Caesar dressing), and it was really, really a good combination. This was the first time I added parmesan cheese into breadcrumbs, and it really did give a different flavor. If you have friends coming by and you want to prepare something simple yet delicious, go ahead and try this one. Although, you must choose your beef well, nobody wants to chew hard, rubbery meat. If beef is not your choice of meat, you may also use chicken breast or pork.

Mangiamo!

Tagaytay Mahogany Beef Market and Bulalohan

When I told friends we planned to go to Tagaytay, Eunice and Rexy both told me to go check out the Mahogany market and try their Bulalo. Us three girls just ate Bulalo for the lunch the previous day (at LZM Restaurant), but before traveling home, we decided to eat lunch here and check what the rave is about.


Going there is easy, as there are a lot of jeepneys. If you don't know the directions, you can always ask around or ask the jeepney drivers. You don't have to worry about getting lost because people are very friendly and they will tell you when you reached your destination.


If you come here to eat, the food court style eatery is located at the second floor of the market. During high noon (and dinnertime for sure), be prepared to wait for your turn, because so many tourists come here to eat; it was already past 1PM when we arrived and we had a difficult time looking for a vacant table.

The long stretch of the floor is home to different concessionaires, but they do offer similar dishes, so if this is your first time here, or if you are a part of a very big group and one eatery cannot accommodate you all, it is just fine to try any of the eateries and still eat "the same" food.

For this food trip, we ate at Nanay Deling Special Bulalo and Gotohan, and we ate:


Crispy Tawilis
Tawilis is a kind of fish that is exclusive to Taal Lake. It is for this reason that we wanted to try it out. I am not sure if this and the fish used in making Tuyo (dried fish) are the same, but this Crispy Tawilis is simply delicious! Very crispy, but it didn't taste burned or overcooked. It goes well with vinegar dip, and could be eaten as is or with rice.

PS - Can someone teach me how to make this dish? I know it is "only" fried, but I truly am wondering how they made the fish crispy and dry (no soft meat) without overcooking.


Crispy Crablets
Another crispy dish to go well with our bulalo soup. Nothing really exceptional... but munching on it is quite addicting! Next time we will try the Crispy Shrimps.


Bulalo
My friend Rexy told me the Bulalo here might be a little expensive, but the thing is, this Bulalo was actually cheaper than the one we ate the previous day. It was a little sad that we weren't given the bone with massive amount of marrow, but it was okay, we were given a big chunk of beef meat that made it truly worth it.

Tagaytay is a windy/chilly place, and it was very easy for Bulalo dishes to get cold and for the oil and fat to harden. What I loved about this place is that they served their Bulalo in a food warmer (same to the chaffing dish used in catering), so the Bulalo stays hot while you eat. I also loved that this had a lot of vegetables.

This serving of Bulalo was more than enough for us three to eat, so in the end we decided to just eat the Bulalo and after a few nibbles of Crispy Tawilis and Crispy Crablets, we asked the staff to pack it for us to take home.


Best thing about dining here? Free bananas! Tagaytay is also known for the Senyorita bananas, and every table has this pile of bananas for diners to eat for free. Of course, you can only eat as much as you can while you're there, so even if it's free, it's a common courtesy not to take them home.

If you plan to eat here, others dishes you can try are Crispy Pata, Beef Caldereta, Kare-Kare, Dinuguan, Chopseuy, Chicharong Bulaklak, Pinakbet, Laing, and Sisig. Make it part of your Tagaytay experience and you will not regret it.

Weekend Eating | Healthy Shabu-Shabu (Shangri-La Plaza)

Years ago, I used to talk about Weekend Eating here on my blog - be it a family's food trip or trying a new recipe. I want to get back to that, starting today.

09 January is dad's birth anniversary. If he would be alive, he would be 69 years old today. On that day this year, the girls and I decided to spend a weekend together - going to ACE Water Spa and checking in at a hotel for some staycation.  We chose to stay at Red Planet Hotels in Ortigas, and since Shangri-La Plaza Mall is just a walking distance away, we thought about eating Shabu-Shabu (or Hot Pot) because it was one of daddy's favorite food, and was something we learned about through him.


Healthy Shabu-Shabu is a popular hot pot place, my sister speaks highly of because of their food's quality and value for money. For this food trip, we decided to go for two individual sets because we seriously couldn't eat one set each. Our choice were beef  striploin and prawns.


This is how one set looks like - a plate of thinly sliced beef, a plate with pechay, napa cabbage, shiitake mushroom, a carrot, a wedge of tomato, corn, tofu, crab sticks, mushroom balls, squid balls and two kinds of noodles - glass noodles and egg noodles. Also included in the set were - minced garlic, chopped chilies, chopped spring onions, sate sauce, an egg and a small bowl of brothy sauce.




As usual, we let sister lead the way in preparing the dish - letting the broth boil and placing ingredients one after another, starting with the ingredient that would cook longer. The restaurant gives free broth refill, but because we could only eat one serving, we decided to just jam all the ingredients inside the pot.

As for the sauce, what you need to do is - add half of the garlic and spring onions (plus the amount of chilis you prefer) in the small bowl of sauce, crack the egg and dip the yolk on the hot pot to cook it a little. Once it reached the soft boiled stage, add it to the sauce and mix it together. The other half of what's left, including the egg white, you place in the pot before adding the rest of ingredients.

My sister is allergic to seafood, so she ate more of the beef, mom ate more of the prawns, and I ate more of... balls. Yes, balls. Personally, I prefer the balls in hot pot, so I ordered extra squid balls and mushroom balls and ate them with gusto.

We paid 900+ for both sets. Still a good amount to pay for two hot pot of comfort and joy.

Christmas 2015

For the last few years, us siblings always try to plan our Christmas and New Year's Day menus, and when my brother still lives with us, my sister and I would take care of Christmas Day menu, while brother takes care of our New Year's Day menu. Now that brother has relocated himself south of the country, it's just my sister and I taking care of what food to be served. This year, it was difficult to choose what to serve because our food preferences changed and that personally, I am not much into food as I was years ago, and with no expected visitors, not only was it hard to think what dish to serve, it was also hard to gauge the amount of food to be cooked.


For the Noche Buena, I suggested sister we just prepare some sort of finger food, as it would be midnight and we would be sleeping after two hours or so. With the help of YouTube (my go to site for all things foodish it seems), I was able to see a simple take on making Garlic Parmesan Wings, which immediately made it on our list as it wasn't spicy, a good alternative to Buffalo Chicken Wings, that might upset our tummies given that time of the day. Recipe for this dish will be shared in the days to come.

Sister prepared Nachos, her favorite finger food / appetizer. We did buy a bottled salsa because it was more convenient to go for instead of mixing different spices. The cheese sauce, she personally cooked, based on my suggestion. A bottle of cheese sauce I found expensive, and the powdered kind sold at a popular nachos snack cart I didn't find appetizing, and even if I was ready to make the cheese sauce using my own muscle power, my sister took over for me as she has made this for school project in college. A simple food to share with the family, but my gosh, we loved it so much!

The Fruity Macaroni Salad was given by our next door neighbor (and very awesome friend), and we were very thankful for it because our mom loves macaroni salad, but we were skeptic to prepare one as it would be tricky to gauge the amount of ingredients needed for a small serving.

For the cake, we first thought about baking Crema de Fruta, but my sister's friend gave us this Choco-Chip Pound Cake from S&R, so this cake saved us energy and time. The Crema de Fruta we will just prepare for New Year's Day.


For Christmas Day lunch, it became a minced meat themed one, something I never really planned initially. I did want to cook Cabbage Rolls as I wanted to try if I can recreate the dish served to us by dad's aunt one Christmas season long ago. I was happy to have created something I was happy about. The sauce I found a wee bit sour, but my mom and my sister both loved it, so I guess I did good with it.  Recipe for this, like the one for the Garlic-Parm Wings will be shared in the next days.

The pasta. We knew we wanted to serve pasta, but the thing was, we forgot to set a decision! Come Christmas morning, sister just asked me to cook the typical Pinoy Spaghetti, but while cooking the Cabbage Rolls, I realized both would use minced meat and tomato sauce, so I decided to just go for carbonara-ish like sauce, but like I said, we never had a concrete decision for this, so we didn't have bacon or ham, only minced meat! Well, in the end, we did enjoy the lunch, and adding the leftover cheese sauce from last night's Nachos, it made our Creamy Cheesy Spaghetti a lot more satisfying.

For our dessert / pastry, we just served a box of brownies given to mom by one of her friends.



Happy holidays from us!

Maxine's by the Sea (Hundred Islands - Alaminos, Pangasinan)

When we made the decision to travel to Hundred Islands, we listed Maxine's by the Sea as one of the choices for us to stay at because my sister wanted to stay near the beach (or the water) so we could also enjoy the view. However, off-peak season meant low prices on some accommodations, and in the end we decided to choose a transient home instead. Still, we told ourselves we would eat our lunch at Maxine's by the Sea before we travel back to Manila, and that was what we did.


Maxine's by the Sea has two dining area - this, on the ground floor and another bigger one upstairs. When we got there, it was still early (around 11:30am), so we were escorted to the ground floor dining area. Though smaller than the other area, we just loved the refreshing wind that helped eased the high noon heat.

They offer a lot of choices, but because we have been eating a lot of fish the past few days, we decided to go for these dishes instead:

Balajadia Restaurant (Baguio City)

Though I travel to Baguio City at least once a year since my father passed away in 2007 (Baguio is our usual place to do side trips, as it is near to our place in La Union), I admit I still haven't fully explored the city as far as food is concerned. Call it a habit, but there were times that even if I am miles away from Metro Manila, my choice of food would often be those from fast food chains or those that I have already tried from previous food trips.

For our After Summer Group Getaway organized by Azalea Residences Baguio, I had no idea where we will eat for lunch. I heard someone said "Slaughter House," and some crazy thoughts run through my head, but when I saw the rows of eateries, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.



Of the many eateries in the area, the Balajadia Restaurant seemed to be the most popular. People seem to check this place first before checking the other eateries. From what I gather, this area is used to be where the Slaughter House of Baguio City is located, hence the name of the place.

{More after the jump...}

Krazy Garlik Kraaazy Grubs

I am one of those people who just love garlic, not minding its strong flavor and smell. At home, garlic is an ingredient that we buy in regularly as I just love adding it in many dishes and dips. Among the many restaurants in The Bistro Group, Krazy Garlik was probably the one that caught my attention and have longed wanted to try out their dishes, but its location seem to always hinder me from eating here.

Two days before Christmas, my sister had to do a lot of errands in preparation for our upcoming Cagayan de Oro trip, so for our late lunch / snacks, we decided to try out Krazy Garlik's offering.


It was nearly 3pm when we got there (after a salon appointment at Browhaus), so there were only a few diners, allowing me to take a mandatory interior restaurant picture. Checking their menu, my sister and I were surprised at how much garlic infused dishes they offer. At that time, my sister wanted to try their pizza, but for sure we won't be able to eat it, so we just went for something we could handle.

Newest offering at the Krazy Garlik is the Kraaazy Grubs, a selection of Mexican inspired dishes. We had:

Village Tavern Celebrates 1st Year Anniversary with New Menu Offerings

Since I am from the north, I am really not familiar with the many food places from the south. So, when I received an invitation to celebrate Village Tavern's first year anniversary, I saw it as a way to have new dining experiences.



I loved the ambiance so much! At the middle of the restaurant are tables closely spaced to one another (without really invading the diners' privacy), and surrounding it are tables with couches that feels as if you're dining inside a luxury train.


It was also a great sight to see the chefs prepare each order. I personally love restaurants letting diners have a peek into their kitchen because it ensures that all the food are prepared well.


Complimentary Nachos.
I shared the table with Dencio and Cha (Jonel joined us later in the evening), and because we were one of the few early birds, we were served this while waiting for the others. The chips were typical... but the salsa was amazing!


Crispy Clams with Spicy Lemon Dip.
This was the first appetizer served to us, and I was glad to have tasted a new way of cooking clams. I usually just eat clams cooked in water and ginger, and nibbling on these babies was just a joy to do. Each clam meat was coated with battered and fried to a crisp, and even if the nibblers were good to eat as is, dipping it in the Spicy Lemon Dip gave it more personality. Since it was quite difficult to eat the clams per piece, what I did was get some of the greens, scooped a tablespoon of the clams added a little of the sauce and mixed it together. Instant salad!


Fully Loaded Romaine Heart.
The romaine lettuce is my favorite among the lettuce I have tasted. Presentation of the salad was really good - it was like Kimchi - the whole romaine heart was cut in half (lengthwise) and each of the leaf layers were drizzled with dressing. Topped with tomatoes, red onions, bacon bits and bleu cheese, it has got to be one of the best salads I have tasted. The bleu cheese is an acquired taste, and although at first I didn't like the taste of eating chunks of bleu cheese, I learned how to like it as I eat my salad.


Roasted Bone Marrow.
Yes, the Pinoys have the Bulalo...but have you eaten bone marrow like this? When this was served to us, not only did our eyes go wide, we also exclaimed some oohs and ahhs... and some wow, too! Chef Josh Boutwood - the corporate chef of the Bistro Group personally came to our table to show us how this should be eaten. First, scoop enough amount of marrow from the bone, spread in on the slice of sourdough bread, then drizzle some apple cider vinegar, sprinkle some sea salt and topped it with herbs. This has got to be one of the most interesting dishes I have tried, though I am not sure I am going to try it again because my cholesterol level is quite high.


Cod Fish.
On the plate was pan seared Atlantic cod cooked with Spanish chorizo and garlic, served on a bed of salt roasted potato. This (I think) was the first time I ate cod fish (bakalaw in Filipino), and I found it's meat firmer compared to the other white fish I have tried. The fish was lightly seasoned, and is best eaten along with the other components in the dish.


Tomahawk 35oz.
Before we were served dinner, we already got to see a picture of this in the printed flip cards on the table. We were sharing some chit-chats hoping we get served this steak, and imagine our surprise when we got to see it personally.

I don't like my meat bloody (I don't eat raw / rare meat), but this kind of steak I love. I don't really care if it's still pinkish inside as long as there's no traces of blood oozing out. I prefer steak cooked like this because the outer layer is firm yet the inside part is still tender. The steak itself tasted good. No need for dips and seasonings, but it tasted great when eaten with the side salad greens.


Lamb Rack.
After eating a slightly bland fish and rightly seasoned steak, I found this a bit on the salty side. The lamb was cooked in the same doneness as the steak, and because it was a little salty for my taste, eating it with the creamy mashed potatoes balanced the flavors. It had the typical lamb aftertaste, so I didn't eat a lot of it.


Frozen Lime Souffle.
Ending the wonderful celebration was this dessert. This wasn't love at first taste, but it gets better and better as I ate it. At the bottom of the dish was a layer of frozen lime flavored souffle, which had the slight tang that cleansed the palate. On top of it was the airy lime infused souffle, which was so light that the whole dessert was perfect to eat during summertime. What caught my attention was the candied lime... it didn't have the usual lime zest flavor and it went well with the rest of the dish.



We were given our own choice of drinks. My choice was the V Tea. I just wanted something cold and refreshing, and this was the first one I saw. I didn't bother reading the description on the menu so I was surprised when I tasted alcohol in it. The first sip was a bit strong (but it was refreshingly good), and as I let the ice cubes melt, it became better for my liking.

Cha ordered a bottle of Hoegaarden beer, as per friends' suggestion. I still loved the Cerveza Negra better than this one, but tasting a foreign beer brand was a welcomed experience.

Before we left, we all asked for a cup of tea. They don't prepare the tea, by the way... we were served our own cups and little pot of hot water and a saucer of tea and lemon wedge. I don't like the flower infused tea flavor (we were served jasmine and chamomile among the mix), so I went for the English Breakfast Tea, which tasted really good. It wasn't too strong, but not really mild either.

All of the dishes served (except the drinks and the nachos) were new to Village Tavern's menu. As they welcome a new year, they also incorporated new dishes to satisfy both new and regular diners, although they still retained some of the bestsellers. My favorite dish that night was the Tomahawk 35oz and the Fully Loaded Romaine Heart.

By the way, every Wednesdays, Village Tavern offers 50% off on wines by the glass, cocktails, and liquors, so if you fancy some wine and cocktails as part of your dining experience, do drop by during Wednesdays. Happy anniversary, Village Tavern!

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Village Tavern
2nd level, Bonifacio High Street Central
7th Ave. corner 29th Street - Bonifacio Global City, Taguig
+63 (02) 621-3245