Food Coma Adventures

Blogging can be hard work. It's one thing to actually write out the content of your entry; it's another to even think of a topic.

Not wanting to stagnate in terms of food blogging, I've decided to create a series called "Foodie Friday". This could consist of a restaurant or dish review, or a how-to of something I've made.

Today's post will be about risotto, which is one of my favorite dishes, and also one of the most time consuming to prepare. Take note that I didn't follow a recipe, and that I basically YOLO'd the entire dish. I don't have exact measurements, but this is because with risotto, you can continuously adjust and season as the cooking process continues.

So here we go!

I began by preparing a stock, which is essential to any risotto. You can use leftover stock from a previously prepared dish (sometimes we store the leftover stock from other dishes, like Hainanese Chicken), boil cubes (like Knorr Cubes), or use store-bought stock. Most people use chicken or beef stock, but you can also use vegetarian stock, if you prefer.


In another pan, I sautéed garlic and onions in olive oil. You can add white wine to it, at this point, if you like.


Here are the ingredients I initially worked with. Not included here is parmesan cheese, which I added eventually, because I wanted to make it a three-cheese risotto. The two kinds you see here are ricotta and truffle cheese.

Now this is where you will need a lot of patience. As the rice grains are mixed with the sautéed garlic and onions (and wine, if you chose to add it), you will need to slowly infuse the rice with the broth. Little by little, you will add broth into the pan with a ladle, and stir the rice until the broth is absorbed. Repeat the process again and again, and expect to keep doing this for at least 20 minutes, depending on how much rice you're cooking. By the way, I kept the heat at medium.

Towards the end, when you can see that the rice is almost fully cooked, you can start to add your chosen ingredients. In my case, the three kinds of cheese, which I incorporated bit by bit. You can choose to add mushrooms, chicken, sausage, and any other ingredient you can think of, really. You can even add cream or butter, depending on the consistency and flavor that you want.

If there are two things people associate me with, at least food-wise, they are definitely truffle and pasta. In fact, one of the Creative Directors in my office calls me "Pasta Girl".

Needless to say, I am always on the lookout for good pasta restaurants, especially if truffle is involved. So when I found out that a restaurant close to my office was up and running, I was excited to try it out.

Take note that as of this writing, the restaurant is still in its soft opening stage, so its management team may still be ironing out many details or processes.


I was curious to see how long it would take for the orders to be brought in (considering everything will be cooked from scratch, and customized according to the customers' individual preferences), but I was surprised to see that the dishes started trickling in in under 15 minutes.

In the meantime, my mango juice, sweetened with a freshly pressed sugar cane, arrived first. I quite like how it tasted.


My officemates and I (we were a table of four) got two kinds of dishes, with slight variations per dish: two went for the Gambas (with different kinds of noodles), and two of us went for the Trufa (with the same noodles but different alegrias).

My art director colleague ordered the same dish, with tagliatelle noodles, and also commented on its lack of flavor.

As these two truffle dishes were placed on our table, I could immediately smell the truffle aroma emanating from the plates. However, after the first bite, I could barely taste the truffle; its mushroom flavor overpowered any hint of truffle that may have been there. I had to ask the server to add more truffle flavor to both dishes, which only improved the truffle flavor by a bit, since the truffle oil was just drizzled over the pasta as opposed to being integrated into the sauce.

It was creamy, yes, and I liked the cook on the noodles, but I couldn't really taste anything "truffley" on it, unfortunately. And I was really expecting a lot from this dish given the following:

• Its restaurant name (trufa is Spanish for truffle);
• I have tried so many pasta restaurants in Metro Manila and out of town, so I have reasonable expectations;
• I have cooked truffle cream pasta several times, so I know what flavors to look for.

Just yesterday, I blogged about the latest pizza craze, Project Pie. Little did I know that hours after having written that, I would experience yet another DIY kind of restaurant.

After Italian cuisine, I would have to say that Japanese cuisine is my second favorite. And these past two or so years, I've increasingly become a fan of ramen. Maybe because there are noodles involved (my all-time favorite source of carbs!).

Or maybe — if I were to attempt to articulate why people love ramen in a nutshell — because of that delicate balance of soft handmade noodles, its rich and flavorful broth, and those melt-in-your mouth pork belly strips.

So when the opportunity came to try Ramen Nagi (the latest ramen restaurant to set foot in Manila), I was one of the first to jump for joy.

Everything can be pretty much hacked or DIY'd to death these days. The more customized or personalized, the better. This applies to things you can do at home to burger restaurants grilling all over the metro.

It wouldn't be long, therefore, before DIY-ing pizza would be the next big thing.

Enter: Project Pie, an American franchise that was next to hit our shores.

I first heard about Project Pie late last year, when people would post pictures of their customized pizzas on social media. Initially, I wanted to try eating there (its first branch in the Philippines was located along Shaw Boulevard) just because it was a pizza place; customization wasn't even a factor for me.

But people would tell me about the long lines and the longer wait, so I didn't even bother trying.

Fast forward to 2014.