Shanghai: Expo

I was fortunate enough to visit Shanghai just in time for the World Expo. To be honest, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a World Expo. I mean, the whole concept of countries coming together for an event to showcase their wares seems too 1800s-1900s for me. But all that changed when I stepped into the first pavilion we were able to enter (South Korea’s). They even had this parade in the afternoon, which made the whole experience a lot like a day in Disneyland, haha! My friend and I probably walked upwards of 10km or more.

So after a day of this:

There were 500,000 expo visitors that day!

A whole cup of rice along with these was called for (and I don’t eat that much rice!):

Three-cup chicken

Hot prawn salad

Mapo Tofu with cashews

Capped off with the heaviest tub of froyo I’ve had.

To think that I already had six pieces of six-inch satay skewers for lunch.

Shanghai ceramics

I like ceramics. Well, at least not vases or figurines -yet. I like teapots and teacups. They are absolutely adorable! I think the concept of afternoon tea is really darling, so I guess that explains that.

I took a picture of a tea set and mocha set I saw in MoMA:

Understated elegance.

When I was in Shanghai I warned my friend about my fascination with ceramics. Which meant that I would literally stop at each display when we visited the Shanghai Museum. I mean when it comes to ceramics, who would have a better collection than the Chinese, right?

Some really cute teapots:

Funky teacups:

Copper teapots:

And a whole dining set!

Bacon bouquet

I’ve seen all sorts of edible arrangements: candy bouquets, fresh fruit bouquets, cake ball (cake formed into balls then dipped in chocolate) bouquets… but nothing beats this one. Nicked off ThisIsWhyYoureFat.com:

The bacon bouquet

It’s such a beauty! My fatty heart is racing just by looking at it. Mmmm bacon.

Source: http://www.thisiswhyyourefat.com/?p=477127230

Spicy taho?

Thai food is spicy, and when you’re in Bangkok, there’s no escape. Rice meals are spicy. That plate of glistening noodles is spicy. Those chunks of cucumber served on the side aren’t just garnish; you have to eat that to cool off your scorching tongue.

It’s no surprise that even some of their dessert items are spicy. Well, not all. Mango and sticky rice is a favorite, even though it’s actually just what we have locally as suman and mango. Their iced desserts, which is very similar to our halo-halo, are also spared from chili.

Hot ginger soup with tofu
One thing that isn’t spared is their local version of taho: Hot ginger soup with tofu. No chilis were included in the making of this dessert. I think it’s just the large amounts of ginger that went into the sugar-based broth that makes it spicy. Plus, since it’s served warm it adds more “heat” to the dessert. ever the masters in balancing flavors and textures, silken tofu and crunchy “bread” toppings are added to the soup.

Food emporiums

I absolutely love going to the food emporium part of department stores whenever I get the chance to go abroad. It is amazing: x-meters of prime retail space dedicated to food! And usually a wide variety at that.

Siam Paragon’s Gourmet Market is touted to be as large as a standard football/soccer field. The variety of food they sell here is amazing. As much as I love Manila, sometimes it’s hard to try out certain recipes because it’s hard to find certain key ingredients locally. Siam Paragon even sells freshly-grated wasabi and wasabi powder. I don’t think we have that kind of variety here. 😦

A chandelier made up of cups

Funky looking fruit

Cute cakes -everything’s edible!

Mochi heaven!

Chocolate with almonds mochi

Pretty cupcakes

Even the Dunkin Donuts makes pretty and yummy donuts!

I think this was Cappuccino-flavored donut. Very creamy.

Jatujak munchies

Bangkok, for me, is the BEST place to go shopping in South East Asia. They have a great mix of high-end stores (Siam Paragon has Gucci, Chloe, Marc Jacobs, Hermes, etc.) and bargain pieces (found in several street markets). Plus the VAT refund for Tourists is easy to get. The procedure is a breeze!

If you only have a few days to spare for a quick jaunt in Bangkok, book a flight on a weekend because if you love shopping, you must Must MUST go to Jatujak Weekend Market.

Jatujak market is different from other street markets because local artists sell their cute, good quality wares here. If you want cheap, generic stuff you can go to Pratunam Market or any other street market anywhere. But if you want nicer stuff, you can scour through endless stalls in Jatujak markets and find everything from trinkets to vintage clothes, furniture and artworks. I think there’s even a section where they sell live animals. Plus all the clothes are really trendy; it’s like a cheaper, better alternative to shopping in Forever21, actually.

On this trip, I was on a self-imposed shopping ban. (Though I did emerge with a few items. Couldn’t help it. Heehee.) So what I did instead was eat! There are a lot of interesting food items sold in Jatujak.

Creamy coconut ice cream!
It can get really hot inside the narrow alleys of Jatujak market. It was a good thing that we saw some guys selling coconut ice cream. In a hollowed out coconut shell! I loved the presentation. Plus, it came with free iced coconut water.

The coconut ice cream was so creamy and sweet. Peanuts were sprinkled on top, so it had a nice salty-sweet kick to it. Thais are so good at balancing flavors in food.

If you want something more substantial, there are some food stalls that serve noodles and rice meals. It’s usually served in aluminum trays. Some items have gone cold since the trays have been sitting there for a while now, while some trays are often warmed over a flame.

One of our favorite Thai dish is their noodles served with curry. You can even get it from street food carts who serve it to use fresh from the wok. This one is 20Baht. The lady gives you a free hand in putting in your own vegetables and sauces.

Noodles in curry sauce
The noodles can get a bit spicy, so it’s best if you put in a lot of cucumber slices. Alternating bites of cucumber and noodles cools you off, big time.

If you want noodles with broth, there’s a nice chicken noodle soup stand along one of the major alleys in Jatujak.

Basil Chicken noodle soup
Slow-cooked chicken stew makes for the best broth. We didn’t dare tarnish this one with the slew of sauces provided on each table. This is probably the best thing to eat if you’re nursing a cold. The soup is so soothing, weird as it may seem.

You must try the fruits in Bangkok.
There are also a lot of ladies selling fruit in Jatujak market. Don’t forget to stop and order any of the chilled fruits in season. Fruits in Bangkok, for some reason, are the best: really sweet and perfect-looking. The lady in the picture was selling slices of papaya, pineapple, cantaloupe, watermelon and santol. I got a santol, but not without a warning from her that it wasn’t that sweet yet. I took the chance, since it was going to be served with chili-sugar anyway. The funny thing about it was the santol turned out to be really sweet, at least for me! Now I wonder how sweet a santol she’d classify as “sweet” would be. Do note that as with almost everything in Thai cuisine, fruits in Bangkok are sometimes served with chili-sugar, chili-salt or just chili.

You can take the BTS train to Mo Chit station. From Mo Chit station, follow the signs which will lead you to a flight of stairs. Go down the stairs on the left and follow the crowd to Jatujak Market.

New York: Magnolia Bakery

Today was so gloomy and dreary, that I just felt like posting about cupcakes. I’m so happy that Magnolia Bakery finally opened a branch inside Grand Central Terminal. The line at their original branch on Bleecker St. is not reasonable.

Grand Central cupcake ($3.25)
Chocolate marble cupcake with buttercream. Magnolia Bakery often releases “theme” cupcakes. The Grand Central branch sells this Grand Central Terminal cupcake, and when Sex and the City 2 came out, they sold a pretty “Carrie” cupcake. I think it was a vanilla cupcake topped with light pink buttercream with a daisy design.

Red Velvet ($3.25) With whipped vanilla icing
Now this is how a red velvet cupcake should be. Airy, chocolatey cupcake topped with the lightest whipped vanilla icing.

Caramel ($3.25) topped with meringue buttercream and caramel drizzle
This is by far the richest cupcake I’ve ever eaten. It is sickeningly sweet. If a butterscotch candy suddenly woke up as a cupcake, it would be this.

Carrot cupcake ($3.25)
Love, love their cream cheese frosting.

Vanilla ($2.75)
A classic done right. Plus the frosting is not grainy at all.

I really like cupcakes because it’s like a small cake made just for you! You don’t have to share it, and you get a sick satisfaction of having a cake all to your self. Plus, cupcakes are always so pretty and dainty. I don’t think I’ve seen an ugly cupcake, ever. Cupcakes never fail to make me smile. 🙂

New York: DBGB

I only came to realize what kind of a hotshot chef Daniel Boulud was when I saw his ads on the Asian Food Channel, and when Dessert Comes First’s Lori Baltazar wrote about how much she wanted to eat in his restaurant someday. Before that, all I knew was that was where one of my cousins interned. Yeah, some food blogger I am. I know.

So when my cousin mentioned that Daniel Boulud opened a low-end restaurant Downtown, I just had to go. It’s probably the only one in his slew of restaurants which I can afford. Plus, their Prix Fixe menu is a sweet deal at $24.

While the other Daniel Boulud restaurants offer the finest french fare, DBGB focused more on sausages and craft beer. But even if you’re just scarfing down burgers and sausages, the finesse in the preparation and quality ingredients still show. DBGB’s price points are also pretty reasonable, with almost everything under USD30. It’s just like eating at restaurant chains like Fridays or Olive Garden.

Sneaked a quick photo of the bar part. Hence, the blurry photo.

The dining area has pretty dark interiors, with dimly-lit booths and dark wood chairs and tables. There’s an open kitchen where you can see the crew milling around, creating simple fare with such technique. There are shelves around the perimeter of the dining area, stocked with cans and boxes of ingredients such as tomato sauce and noodles. A cute feature are the copper pots and pans. Apparently Daniel Boulud asked his famous chef friends for their favorite and treasured copper pots and pans so that he could put them on display in the restaurant. Of course, the obliged. Here are some of them:

Oh Momofoku, I will come back for you!

I got the Prix Fixe menu, which was three courses at USD24.07. It was such a good deal, because ordering the items ala carte would cost upwards of USD30.

A blurry photo, so I typed up the menu:

Butter Lettuce and Chive
garlic-mustard dressing

OR

White Asparagus Veloute
green asparagus royale, crispy duck confit

OR

Pate Campagnard
country style pate with pork and chicken liver

——————

Mussels “espagnole”
chorizo, green olives, scallions, garlic croutons

OR

Housemade Tagliolini Pasta
Marky Ramones “drunk-punk” brooklyn tomato sauce, sheep’s milk ricotta, olives

——————

Peanut butter and jelly chocolate cake

OR

Raspberry fromage blanc sundae

I ordered the white asparagus veloute, which is basically soup.

I had a hard time choosing between the pasta and the mussels. My cousin told me that the seafood they procure is really fresh, so I opted for the mussels. It was literally a MOUND of mussels on a plate, each bite bursting with the flavors of the sea (not in a gross way), spiked with the rich, bold flavor of the chorizo. The croutons were so crunchy that I had to soak them in the broth so I could eat them.

I ordered the Peanut butter and jelly chocolate cake, which in itself is a testament to pastry chefs. I love it when desserts are made with such precision and care. Like this one. Although I think I should have gotten the sundae, but I just wasn’t in the mood for ice cream that day.

We also got the Pate Campagnard, also amazing.

And since my cousin knew the chefs, they hooked us up reaaaal good. Hats off!

Burgers! So good, but I pledge allegiance to Shake Shack. But they got the perfect balance of meat-bread-seasonings. It looks really bloody, but it doesn’t taste gross at all. I think this is how burgers should be served, salmonella and e coli be damned.

They make their own sausages, like this one. This was one of three sausages in the table. Not pictured is their famous cheese sausage, which oozes with so much cheese.

We also had Rhubarb Tarte Tatin with rhubarb ice cream on the side. I never knew that rhubarbs were tart.

Definitely worth coming back for. When friends ask me what to check out in NY, I usually blurt out Shake Shack first, before launching into my “tips”. I guess DBGB will be part of that repertoire from now on.

http://www.danielnyc.com

Cane Twist: Fresh sugarcane juice

One of my friends commented that all my posts are about food in New York, Vietnam or some other country. That’s one of my fears about this blog: that I sound too hoity-toity or worse, like a douche. I mean, blogging about food seems shallow enough, but to combine food and travel? It borders on vacuous. So yeah, in an attempt to make the posts hit a bit closer to home, I’m going to post about a cute stall I found in SM Megamall and SM North Annex.

Cane Twist

It’s cute that the juice is actually made to order.

I’m all about fresh ingredients now, so I got really curious when I saw the real sugar canes on display. Who knew that this concept would work in such a “sanitized” setting? The last time I saw fresh sugarcane juice was in the streets of Vietnam. I badly wanted to try it, but my dad was warning me about getting cholera from street food.

At P25 for a small cup, it’s a great, natural way to quench your thirst. I tried the Natural Twist, which is plain sugarcane juice. I’m guessing the Pandan twist would taste really good, too. Fresh sugarcane extract, ice and some water -sometimes all it takes are simple, raw ingredients.